"Getting screamed at and insulted by people who disagree with you doesn’t take you out of your filter bubble — it makes you retreat back inside your bubble and reject the ideas of whoever is screaming at you."
Ha! I'm on Bluesky where I get insulted by people who agree with me!
This is your occasional reminder that Metcalfe's law is wrong: the value of a communications network grows less quickly than the square of the number of users, because not all users are equally valuable and some are actually net negative (spammers, trolls, etc.). In practice, the value tends to scale as n*log(n) rather than n^2 (where n is the number of users).
Funny enough, this is what I hoped would happen, that social media as we remember it from the 2010s would get so filled with ads, slop, and suggested crap that people would get frustrated and leave. And the age of unrest we lived through would be gone with it.
Pouring myself a shot right now. Cheers to a new era.
This is interesting to see an upside in the move from the text-based social media of Facebook and Twitter to the short-format-video social media of TikTok and Reels and whatever. The text-based social media has already been moving in the fragmented direction, as the algorithms get better at sorting and recommending, and since Facebook has by default been friends-only for almost 15 years now. But I guess short format video is easier to target even more tightly, because you get lots and lots of feedback on what people are actually watching (much more than Twitter does about what you're actually reading). Also, because video is a little bit more exposing, a lot fewer people actually create short format video, so it can be more passive for most users (though it's always been hard to tell how many lurkers there have always been on Reddit and Facebook and Twitter).
An observation .... it appears that every new form of communication goes through a cycle....
1) introduction 2) ramping/great power...seemingly unstoppable 3) calibration... people figure out how to deal with it 3) sunset (only the old guys are impacted)
Historically....
Newspapers ==> Yellow Journalism
Radio ==> fireside chats
TV ==> the JFK moment
Internet ==> your article
It seems that the social platforms are getting normalized and the general population has built their filters/defense mechanisms.
I am sure there is a new technology in the horizon... where we will repeat this cycle.
"Getting screamed at and insulted by people who disagree with you doesn’t take you out of your filter bubble — it makes you retreat back inside your bubble and reject the ideas of whoever is screaming at you."
Ha! I'm on Bluesky where I get insulted by people who agree with me!
I feel like the "Cozyweb and private gardens vs Dark Forest" analogy could be of some use here https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2024/04/16/the-dark-forest-anthology-of-the-internet/
Nice.. Venket is a good guy
I feel like 10% of load-bearing mental frameworks in my subjective universe originate from Venket
John,
I know what you mean .... though I have to brace myself before reading some of his articles.. did I get enough rest ? am I awake enough ?
LOL... I am joking a bit, but he does think very deeply about topics....which I like.
/Rahul
This is your occasional reminder that Metcalfe's law is wrong: the value of a communications network grows less quickly than the square of the number of users, because not all users are equally valuable and some are actually net negative (spammers, trolls, etc.). In practice, the value tends to scale as n*log(n) rather than n^2 (where n is the number of users).
Funny enough, this is what I hoped would happen, that social media as we remember it from the 2010s would get so filled with ads, slop, and suggested crap that people would get frustrated and leave. And the age of unrest we lived through would be gone with it.
Pouring myself a shot right now. Cheers to a new era.
"...but so did Saturday morning cartoons in the 1980s, and we 80s kids turned out fine."
That's how I was raised, and I turned out TV.
90s Saturday morning cartoons were way better than 80s ones!
This is interesting to see an upside in the move from the text-based social media of Facebook and Twitter to the short-format-video social media of TikTok and Reels and whatever. The text-based social media has already been moving in the fragmented direction, as the algorithms get better at sorting and recommending, and since Facebook has by default been friends-only for almost 15 years now. But I guess short format video is easier to target even more tightly, because you get lots and lots of feedback on what people are actually watching (much more than Twitter does about what you're actually reading). Also, because video is a little bit more exposing, a lot fewer people actually create short format video, so it can be more passive for most users (though it's always been hard to tell how many lurkers there have always been on Reddit and Facebook and Twitter).
An observation .... it appears that every new form of communication goes through a cycle....
1) introduction 2) ramping/great power...seemingly unstoppable 3) calibration... people figure out how to deal with it 3) sunset (only the old guys are impacted)
Historically....
Newspapers ==> Yellow Journalism
Radio ==> fireside chats
TV ==> the JFK moment
Internet ==> your article
It seems that the social platforms are getting normalized and the general population has built their filters/defense mechanisms.
I am sure there is a new technology in the horizon... where we will repeat this cycle.