The Gentleman's Agreement
fr.anc.is
fr.anc.is
It's not about you! It's about the community.
In real life, I often receive compliments on my gifts because I've actually paid attention to the receiver, over time, and have put some thought and attention into finding something I think they will really enjoy. Not necessarily, or even often, something they have asked for. But something that I have worked out they would like -- not infrequently, an item they were actually unaware of. My perception and attention seems to be as appreciated as the gift itself.
That is being social. Not a bunch of non-questioning "How are you?"s, nor tweeting every personal chuckle.
Paying attention to, and taking care of and for, the other person. Will this really add to their day or well-being?
Bob Carpenter of Alias-I wrote a blog post about a particular NLP task he was working on, and he decided that the correct evaluation measure was to insist on 95% precision (must be awesome), and only then optimize recall (amount of awesome discovered).
In the real world, I have a few friends that don't make recommendations really often. But when they do, I jump. Their recommendations are always solid gold.
The problem with recommendation on the web is that there is no built in notion of economy. Economy in the sense of "frugality in expenditure or consumption". There is an inherent economy on the amount of time I have to consume content. So why shouldn't there be an economy on the amount of things I can endorse? Perhaps that would guide content sharers at large to only share awesome. (And I get more endorsements based upon how much people value my previous endorsements.)
I'm toying with calling this idea "the economy of awesome" or "the economy of cool".
Simply put, you start with a certain number of "cool dollars". You spend them by promoting something. I'm still working out the mechanics so that the market has the desired properties. Maybe you get one dollar a day. Maybe you spend money to agree with someone's endorsement.
Can't we solve this by allowing users to internally rate their friends? Just like you, I only care about the recommendation of some of my friends. So if can somehow rate my friend's recommendation from 1 to 5, then the algorithm could just to only recommend me stuff from the friends I value the most.
You can even use machine learning to do this automatically. Instead of bothering users to rate friends, if I often like the recommendations you give to me, I should get more recommendations from you. If I often ignore your recommendations, I should get less of it.
G+ circles could even be used for further context. I might like your recommendation for food, but not for tech. So the engine could could separate each content with a context (this is a tech blog, or that is a food blog) and relate that to my circles. So I would get tech recommendation from people on my tech circle, but not from people on my food circle.
I think the big picture problem here, is that social networks usually put all 'friends' in the same bucket of equal value. When in the real world we have different values for different friends, and for different contexts. So a solution would be to simply have additional variables for friend rating, then use machine learning to try to automatically match them to each context.
The problem is that people have different semantics for clicking "Like" on something, or giving it five stars. This becomes problematic when giving something five stars means that it's at least "pretty good to you". In that case, you lose the dynamic range of expressing "this is AWESOME. simply AWESOME."
So a machine learning algorithm cannot distinguish between good and AWESOME if the user is lumping them into one category.
Which is why I propose actually creating scarcity around the amount in which you can promote or approve or content, perhaps backed by a currency of cool. I can only click like five times a day, for example. That would limit people's ability to blithely approve of everything, and their ability to collapse the distinction between good and AWESOME.
This approach is much stricter than the optional "gentleman's agreement" proposed in the article, but might also create more desirable properties, and a fun incentive around only sharing AWESOME.
I think Facebook already does that. Notice they put lists in your profile now called "Friends", "Close Friends", "Acquaintances", etc.
The one thing that annoys me about this notion is that those relationships change IRL. What if I suddenly want to have a party and invite only my "Close Friends", which then ends up including some guy I very much hate by now?
One of the biggest problems with social network evaluation schemes is that they always work on the assumption that relationships between people are static. They are, however, dynamic. And the rate of dynamics changes from person to person and changes over time as well. It's not as simple as saying "this guy makes the best content ever". Maybe tomorrow his dog will die and he'll start posting emo poems.
However, perhaps instead of exposing the data, you could expose the search better. Then, specific standard APIs could be defined concerned with what you want to search for: for example you want to find all the neighboring nodes of a specific node, or during christmas find all people who are friends of sport enthusiasts. This would, however, take the control away from the likes of Google and put it in the hands of the content holders, such as Twitter and Facebook.
I don't want to have to scroll/scan to paragraph 8, or to the end of the article (blog post, whatever), to see what you're about.
While you're at it, put the publication date and author at the top. If you don't, experience tells me it's at least 50% likely that you're "hiding" these deliberately.
The "descriptive story" format (I'm sure there's probably a better, more precise and pre-defined term for it) has become prevalent in today's communication, in "official" news as well as e.g. blog posts.
To some extent, it may reflect today's training in writing, and/or the desire of authors to scratch a "creative", "tell a story" itch.
To some extent, it may reflect the desire to retain eyeballs (e.g. in front of ads) and to lead the reader to subsequent page turns for a multi-page article.
In the case of the latter, perhaps my argument would decrease revenue. On the other hand, I'm more likely to return to a site and a writer who effectively communicates. (Meaning, in my case, clearly and concisely, with details, background, documentation, and further argument following as appropriate.)
Others on HN have commented on this, as well. It's an annoying distraction when a non-specific title leads e.g. to year old news that they've already absorbed and dealt with. Combine this with a "story" that withholds this and other pertinent details until e.g. paragraph 12, and such readers begin to get annoyed.
Again, this wasn't addressed to your post, where both author and date are/were "above the fold".
I'll qualify myself, again: I don't typically write copy, and my comments reflect my personal attitude and desire. They may or may not reflect what is currently considered to be desired/successful copywriting, per the Internet du jour.
I get that that's not twitters fault, of thisismyjam even, it's the people I know / follow, but for a while at least it seemed to be throwing out a disproportionate level of stuff I didn't care about.
Monetization not required.
To me, social networks are for being social. The main benefit we derive isn't information or culture - it's building and/or maintaining contact with people whose company we enjoy. As in reality, we all have to walk that line between saying too much and being a wallflower (which a solemn "one post a day" pledge veers on IMO).
I subscribe to "One Story" on Kindle. I read a short story by Caitlin Horrocks. I would never have picked her book up, but because of that short story I bought her book of shorts. It's one of the best books I've read in the past few years. I have no idea if it would have been picked up by your algorithm.
I do know that "Amazon recommends" has got much less useful.
(http://www.caitlinhorrocks.com/prose.htm)
(The story was “Life Among the Terranauts”.)
Think of your Facebook friends. I seldom talk to my "friends" there so it would make sense that the content they produce is usually of very little value. Most times Facebook makes me aware of internet memes and that is about it.
Honestly, how many people would say that finding content is one of their biggest problems today?
It's easy to think all you need is more optimized/better content while what you really need in fact is probably something of the following:
- think about something
- focus your attention
- get to work
- get in touch with other people
Ergo: Filtering at the source only works if the source knows what the countless receivers will like most. It never does, though. That's why sources on any platform need to be verbose. I'd even say this is the law of social networks and what makes them so great:
Verbosity over self-control -- put the control in the hands of others.
If you want to separate the gold from the drivel, you can do it later. But if you constantly keep on removing gold from your cart before you even get it out of the mine, you've already lost at this game.