_Exactly_ this. Rather than understanding their users as real humans, having unique insights about them, and building something that meets their real needs, everything has been about maximizing hollow engagement metrics. And guess what? That's good for short term revenue but not long term trust. If you're running a startup and the main way you learn about your users is through statistical tracking and A/B testing, you're missing an important opportunity to get to know them properly. They will lead the way and although you can't simply ask them what they want, if you understand them deeply you'll know what to do.
I'm excited about the next wave of platforms, which are tapping into enormous unmet needs. It's early days, and I can't stand the "web 3" label, but there's definitely going to be a sea change.
Optimizing for something as abstruse as "engagement" seems like a great way to completely ignore everything that actually makes social networks compelling.
Or anything else, for that matter. The most shocking part of Android Pie release[0] was the repetition of the "drive engagement" mantra (in the post as well as surrounding articles). Fundamentally, phones are tools; how good is any tool to me when it's purposely designed to make me use it more? A tool should make me more efficient, hence, for the same task, make me use it less! Everything about this is spiralling to artificially inflate dubious metrics such as eyeball time or number of interactions.
[0]: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/08/introducin...
Example: I'm on 2 dating app. I want notification on so I can make sure to receive messages from actual people but I get one notification every day from each app "You should check for new matches today!" Nether app has a way to turn off that notification.
Google Maps now does something like this too where they are trying to get me to add reviews and photos so Google Maps starts notifying me "Add a review of that place I think you just visited?" I think Google Maps at least had a way to turn it off though not 100% sure.
In general though the more some service bugs me with anything the less I want to do business with that service. That includes mailing lists. Hate them! Don't add me. I didn't opt-in! Etc...
It makes sense when you consider Android phones as a set of tools used by advertisers to reach consumers. The more eyeballs the more efficient the tool becomes.
Does Android have something like Siri suggestions with P? Because that seems intended to do the exact opposite of what you’re saying. It is the feature that suggests your notes app if you often use your notes app in the grocery store location. It would be a good use for Android instead of the constant asking to review the store.
Though I suppose in this stretched analogy those are not great positions to be in.
I never wanted it to become the way I talk to my folks, I wanted to talk to that cute girl in my class or some guy in Russia that happened to like the Smashing Pumpkins too. Maybe I'm not using it right, but it seems more difficult to find new people while wading through ads and political posts from peripheral friends.
Are you satisfied?
[yes] [no] https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...
But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics. Snapchat and the like have thrown enormous money at understanding humans and have the best people in their fields to get this right.
I think what worked 10 years ago no longer flies now. How we socialize on the web has changed, and we're turned off by the traditional mechanics to keep us viewing. There are many alternatives to the service Facebook offers, but I'd like to people aren't 'showing off' as much anymore and are having more 1-to-1 or small friend-group experiences. The larger community is almost always toxic.
Look at cord-cutting: For the longest time we just ignored commercials, until we didn't.
From:https://genius.com/Frank-zappa-drooling-midrange-accountants...
Once upon a time, a record company had A&R people in it who would take a chance, make a decision, use their gut reaction, sign a group, and see what they could do with it. Okay? That was, whoa, a long time ago. It's not that way anymore. All decisions about who get signed and what happens to the record are made by these drooling little midrange accountants. And everything is based on the numbers games in there. And the taste of the accountants is what is ruling the mass media."
Continues at link.
This attitude is like trying to predict the weather tomorrow by just guessing it'll be the same as today. You're right most of the time...
I hope you mean the current world of VC and the greater finance world can't do that. Because as individuals and small companies we can absolutely invest in anything we want whether there's a metric or not. Granted, you can't organize a mega corporation or a hypergrowth startup around vague values because you're so far past Dunbar's number that any kind of shared understanding of anything more complex than simple metrics is tenuous at best.
However it's worth recognizing that there's a real thirst in the world for authenticity in a world driven by global brands and corporate behemoths. There's plenty of room for other approaches, it's just not what interests the financial world whose interest is directly proportional to the number of zeros involved.
Sure you can. It's how Jobs turned Apple around. By all accounts, nobody had metrics saying consumers wanted less choice. No metrics suggested that a music player with "no wireless [and] less space than a nomad" would be a market leader. No metrics, as far as I'm aware, showed that there was a huge demand for Unix-like stability and command line tools but without the need for tinkering just to get a great UI and commercial software support.
It's difficult, certainly, and requires a nearly pathological drive to make your product as good and polished as possible - a drive that most people don't have today, including Tim Cook. But it can be done.
Not everyone can, but great products often have a bit of genius or perfect timing in their creation. Snapchat - disappearing picture messages! - wouldn't have been arrived at by analytics alone.
Quantifiable metrics can amplify good instincts, but it can't replace them, and most of Facebook post-newsfeed, or Snapchat post-stories, has been just the metrics-driven iteration part.
It's about control over what you get to watch, when. No more waiting around for a particular time, no forgetting to set the DVR. This has always been a nuisance.
There's evidence that this has been an evolution rather than a revolution.
Yep, my condo just cut a deal with our collective internet+cable provider that includes a Tivo for everyone.
Having metrics is important, but thinking that metrics - any set of metrics - capture the whole of reality is delusional. And anyway, in the end you can always quantify your ROI in terms of money.
WARNING: Mild spoilers if you've not seen the Matrix films
The analytics led social media platforms are evolving towards the early versions of the Matrix created solely by the Architect and ultimately rejected by the humans within:
"The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equalled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being.
Thus, I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure.
I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche.
If I am the father of the Matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother." Architect - The Matrix Reloaded (via Wikiquote)
As an industry (and engineers) we have a tendency towards being led by logic and there has been a cultural focus (e.g. DevOps) on being led by metrics...we can sometimes miss or downplay the squishy yet equally important emotive side of systems ;)
Easily the scummiest design decision I have ever whitnessed.
Actively manipulating the structural representation of time in a communication platform is begging for chaos. Yes, of course I know the time stamps are still presented. That is not my point. Communication is sensitive; very sensitive. Adding barriers in reverse like that signals to me these companies do not have a clue. The issues with this sort of thing will not be measurable or even observable.
Our lives and society are impacted in mass proportions by events we as individuals will never perceive, or have the capacity to. And this is precisely what thinking is for; we theorize, organize, and make sense of things. This is the basis for all of our potential, and that potential is all we have.
But this is not rocket science. It’s a sorted list. that everyone uses. And now it’s unsorted. for And what?
Algorithmic ranking is not evil. A tiny minority of people rail against algorithmic ranking, but the vast majority, as demonstrated by their engagement, prefer the algorithmic model. Should we let this tiny vocal minority dictate policy, data be damned?
I was listening to the Next Billion Seconds podcast the other day. They made the point that in social media 'engagement' is a polite euphemism for 'addictiveness'.
I've rephrased your post to show why I find it unsettling:
> Algorithmic ranking is not evil. A tiny minority of people rail against algorithmic ranking, but the vast majority find the algorithmic model to be more addictive. Should we let a tiny vocal minority dictate policy, data be damned?
For example, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t enjoy checking my email. But I still compulsively check it dozens of times a day. I think it’s fair to say that I’m an addict.
Do you enjoy checking Facebook? Ask your friends. I know what mine said.
That’s not addiction, that’s a healthy habit. If you were truly addicted to working out, you’d be late for work because you wanted that last mile. Or miss your kids birthday party to hang out at the CrossFit gym. It would consume your time and attention to the detriment of other needs and the needs of others.
That’s the spirit the parent comment is using the term in. As something that demands more of your attention than it deserves.
> Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences.
I'd like to see mostly what my friends are up to. Instead of that, on Facebook at least, I mostly see viral videos from whatever groups I happen to be in. It is true that a lot of the time, those suck me into watching them. Technically that counts as "time spend in the app", but I also see that I'm wasting a lot of my time on crappy pointless videos and because of that I've actually not opened the app at all from time to time. In general, my attitude towards it has also changed - it used to be "ooh, exciting, let's see what's happened", now it's more like "meh, maybe this time there is something interesting, let's check, although probably not". Jaded is probably the correct description.
I think ultimately what you need to optimize for is much harder to measure. I think for most senarios it is "value a user can recieve for a given amount of time". When measuring this, time spent in the application is acutally detrimental unless you are increasing the value a user is getting from the application by a substantial amount.
Being addictive is not a net positive!
I also am quite free to have the opinion that a lot of content is simply a waste of time. I also propose the question of how much actual enjoyment it produces and the quality of said enjoyment. You are free to think otherwise :)
This is a very deep question you’re asking, and I don’t know the answer. But, this boat only goes in one direction so let’s make the best of it.
But seriously, sure other sorting methods are useful. I would like to have many options, but I can’t think of a better default for this use case. Can you?
> ...as demonstrated by their engagement, prefer the algorithmic model.
You just don’t understand my point. Maybe read it again. I dunno. But ...
As demonstrated by their engagement, people prefer doing whatever their boss tells them to do.
As demonstrated by their engagement, people don’t actually like sex very much at all.
Machines can't do that, silly. They can only promote hate speech with 100 comments and lolcat pictures with 100 likes. The only option is for them to take a back seat and present an ordering that is semantically meaningful to the human computer operating the tool -- the only one qualified to perform any kind of filtering and sorting.
"Relevance ranking" in social networks is a result of engineers having zero clue what applications they're working on, but that's just typical IT people divorced from reality for you. As you said, they find it acceptable because it's written in Angular v7 and uses ML and A/B testing revealed a 3.2% increase in clicks. The idea of the software industry helping real relationships is in general hilariously contradictory (but of course there are exceptions!)
Engagement means people are engaging more with non-chronological feeds than with chronological ones. This isn't just about blindly accepting what you are given, it's also about caring more for pertinence than order.
If you give no other option than algorithmic ranking that is not designed to maximize my utility but your revenue, that is as close to evil as you can get in my books.
(Edit: as close to evil in the context of social media content sorting. There obviously are more evil things than that...)
On the other hand, non-chronological timelines are celebrated in communities like Scuttlebutt, but it's because we have control and you can choose the UX that works best for you without sacrificing connectivity.
Diagnosis: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm... First round of treatment: https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-interne...
Add to that a perverse incentive (money from ads and 'engagement') for the company designing the algorithm. How can that not lead to evil?
Because one is essentially a feed of data, and the other is obviously/openly being manipulated based on things that I did not choose. The fact remains that removing that option is problematic. They switched the default - fine, makes sense. To remove the basic time ordered feed just shows they aren't interested in allowing users real choice.
I largely mothballed my facebook use years ago - so I'm not a user they should optimise for. But probably have bailed at that anyway.
All engagement measures is time spent on the site. Or how much people are prepared to tolerate.
What, Web 3.0 will come with booze?
While I am entertained by social media, I can't remember the last time I actually interacted with anyone in a substantive way. I'd much rather hit the bar and admit to myself that social media isn't very social.
Off topic but, you know what, maybe it eventually will. Just like in the movie Ready Player One, nothing says it couldn't be done.
Maybe the reduce of physical interaction between people are not caused by social medias, maybe just because people don't want to spend time and energy (or, lazy) on those physical interactions.
If meet with friends face to face cost 2 bars of power, and interact with them on social media cost 1 bar, I think many people will rather to save 1 bar, so they can do more tings (like, take a nap).
> Web 2.0 lets groups create and express ideas
> Web 3.0 lets societies create and express ideas
It's blockchain. Blockchain is what gets us from web 2.0 to web 3.0. The technology is almost here, and after another few years of basic R&D the stuff we're going to be able to start building is going to transform society in ways that are barely even imaginable today.
For example, I want to release a tool that can mod old ROMs. I cannot legally sell this. This is a new idea, I'd like to make a living with it, but I can't. And why not? Because the concept of IP has turned us into servants.
Meanwhile you have youtube series like Freeman's Mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SQhfkpX9bc making a killing, and I'm preeeetty sure he didn't ask Valve for permission. Nintendo is possibly the most litigious game company in history, and will aggressively shut down anything remotely connected to any of their characters. The whole situation is completely fucked for artists, and decentralization can solve it.
Unfortunately it looks like I'm born a couple generations too early to benefit, but at least my kids might.
Even in a complete wild west, some people are going to do the right thing. Maybe even most people. Probably is far more a cultural issue than a legal or technical one. Still, I'm not arguing that 100% deregulation is a good idea, just that I don't really think this is a convincing argument.
It doesn't matter if you would, it matters if the general public would. And all you have to do is look to China, where more cracked copies of windows are sold every day than legitimate copies. The only reason that doesn't exist here is because it's almost impossible for the average consumer to buy a cracked copy. If they were available at every corner store the average person would make that choice 9 times out of 10. And if they'll take that risk on the entire OS, they won't bat an eye at a rom.
Then it all goes to heck because innovation just grinds to a halt.
To be precise, the argument goes like this: Star Fox 64 is not currently generating any economic benefit for Nintendo. It doesn't harm Nintendo for someone to make a derivative work of it. In fact, I'd be more than happy to cut a deal with Nintendo and just give them most of the money. The problem is that no one tries to do this, and we all lose what could have been made.
[1] https://bitcoinist.com/leonardo-da-vinci-mona-lisa-blockchai...
"And now you, dear filmmaker, want to come along and want to make your own version of Star Wars: A New Hope? For shame! That's like stealing food right out of George Lucas' mouth."
You can remix themes and ideas all you want. Just don't call it Darth Vader and profit off other people's investment in that specific expression of the space opera.
For instance, I love the harry potter universe. I just happen to think that JK Rowling is a terrible writer. I would pay hundreds of dollars for quality fan fiction, ideally licensed or legal. There’s really no mechanism for any human on the planet to tell a story in this universe and widely distribute it legally.
Arguably this is more of an issue with copyright and trademark, but I think there’s a lot of room for art to fluorish if there’s a market not beholden to IP law.
Always refer to copyright laws as "copyright laws", trademark laws as "trademark laws", and so on.
I have read and particularly recommend Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Many other works set in the HP universe exist.
Would you argue that Shakespeare was not creative? Or is it possible that stories are based on the culture of a society, and the culture of a society is based on the stories told -- meaning that any story can be argued to be a copy of another person's idea.
Of course modding is not the same as Shakespeare. My point was that stories like those of Shakespeare would not have been possible with our modern notions of copyright. I do agree that many (but not all) examples of such work are just simply rip-offs of other people's work. On the other hand, does it make sense for any work to be untouchable for an essentially unlimited period of time?
So while you might argue that mods are all shameless copies of another person's work, I direct you to 'The Stanley Parable'[1] which was a mod of Half-Life 2. I think most people would argue that it is a creative work that is unique despite the fact that it re-uses assets from a copyrighted work. There are many counter-examples to the idea that the only way to have creative value in a game is to "draw your own monsters". Jim Sterling ran a contest where people were to come up with original works based on an overused Unity asset, and the winning entry was a game made entirely out of textures based on that asset[2]. Is that not a creative work?
I think that ultimately it's a disservice to argue that all such works should not be allowed because many examples of people building on previous work is lazy or a transparent rip-off. That the requirement for a creative work be a strict sense of originality (not to mention that you need to decide how do you define sufficient originality -- is "Harry Potter Told Using Pokemon" an original work?).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stanley_Parable [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTL6NlPF0Lw
But should The Stanley Parable be able to profit and set up a free enterprise on the tireless work of Valve engineers? Well, I wasn't really arguing that either.
All I was saying is that, as an artist, if you consider yourself "fucked" because you can't profit off of releasing a commercial game "Harry Potter with Pokemon" that sits on the shelves of GameStop alongside the originals- even though you would be quite good and creative artist in my mind, hell I would play the shit out of that game- you are not realizing that respecting copyright law and abiding by those rules, as "unfair" as they may be, is the only thing that protects companies from being ruthlessly shared on uTorrent for free, and that if you were truly creative and trying to form a business, why not respect this law, and take additional effort to create something "new" and "original", which I understand is total hyperbole, but within our confines of law is simply a matter of "reskinning" so yes Shakespeare could be regarding on the level of reskinning someone else's Angry Birds, but clearly he put his creative spin on it enough to be different or else he wouldn't have made his mark.
In conclusion, nothing is completely "original", and fanfiction is still creative, but artists should strive to not self-identify with other creative entities, if they wish to form a business, out of respect for the law that protects from 100% bad actors which do not wish to creatively enhance, but to sell or distribute identical copies of original creative work.
I see we're very far apart and probably won't find some common ground, but the way I feel about the situation is that as automation removes the rest of manual labor jobs, people will need to specialize. And modding old ideas is one of the few ways people could specialize and make a living for themselves. You're free to disagree here, but the future is coming, and one day we'll both be gone. The best ideas, however, will be around. And it's hard to imagine that the best idea is not to let anyone else use anything you've thought of for your entire life plus ninety years.
Copyright law is not meant to protect companies. From a historical perspective, it has always meant to temporarily protect authors' rights to their inventions so that society can get more works from those authors. Citing the US constitution (other countries have different justifications, but I assume that you are in the US):
> [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
This matches the purpose of the copyright system defined in 1710 under Statute of Anne (which inspired this clause in the constitution). The copyright system that pre-dated the Statute of Anne was a system of censorship by the publishing houses (that were members of the Printers' Guild), and the public rebelled against their censorship and Queen Anne strove to come up with a system that was far more fair and was meant to inspire authors to produce more work (rather than restrict what they can write so publishers can make more money).
Having a copyright system that protects publishers (which is what we currently have) and lasts for 70 years after the death of the author does not "promote the Progress" of anything (in fact it actively stifles it). I would argue current copyright law is unconstitutional in the US, but I don't have enough money to fight that fight (and the only people that do benefit from copyright law's overreach).
Unfortunately, in our modern age, the true purpose of copyright has been forgotten. People (like yourself) think that the purpose is to protect companies profits -- this could not be further from the truth. Such companies benefit from this misinformation, and regularly lobby the US Congress to add laws which further expand copyright laws (both in breadth as well as length) that result in even more profits for large companies without any more works made as a result. The true hypocrisy is that many of these companies would not have been able to make their works at all without the public domain, and without liberal copyright laws. The first cartoon Mickey Mouse appeared in (Steamboat Willie) made use of things from previous movies (Steamboat Bill Jr -- which was released 50 years earlier).
> out of respect for the law that protects from 100% bad actors which do not wish to creatively enhance, but to sell or distribute identical copies of original creative work.
Even if we ignore that these copyright laws are written by these same corporations (that themselves used public domain, and even infringed on copyrighted works from smaller publishers, to make their products), as I said above this is missing the purpose of copyright law.
The best publications pay people to write for them, not the other way around.
If the forumtokens fluctuate wildly in value it would probably kill the forum too, particularly if the only way to get them was through the market. I can't think of any way to algorithmically deal out tokens to posters that doesn't reward at least one of: multiple accounts, spamming, or writing outrage bait.
I agree completely - why would paid posting do anything but create a chilling effect on anyone but the wealthy?
This isn't THAT different than a bunch of startups calling things web 2.0 five to ten years ago.
so just roll with it.
The Ethereum project's javascript library is literally called web3.js
So at the software developer level of the stack, what we get are new tools for managing reputation, identity, authentication, transparency, accountability, etc.
If you think of people as a graph of nodes, these tools enable novel patterns of trust and collaboration between individuals that aren't possible today. What this means is that every institution will ultimately have to reimagine itself so as to be cost competitive in the new paradigm, HT Carlota Perez.
To give a more concrete example, think of the 2008 real estate collapse. The reason the market failed isn't because people didn't have the data, it's because no one one going to read through a 3,000 page paper print out to figure out what was actually in whatever debt tranche they happened to buy. But when you can just run a simple Python script to analyze the contents of all that debt and get updates on payments in real time, suddenly those types of systematic market failures can no longer happen. And because a big portion of the lemon market problem is ameliorated, that creates new ways to finance big capital investments that would be completely impossible today.
Think about why we weren't able to have large corporations before double entry was invented/popularized in Florence in the late 1400s, because there was no way to really know if you were making or losing money once you got beyond a certain scale. Because blockchain reduces the costs of double entry accounting by 10,000x, we can (and will) restructure all aspects of society in ways that just aren't possible currently, everything from supply chains to social networks. I think it stands to reason that blockchain is going to be the most financially important technology of the last 500 years, since imho it's the biggest innovation since double entry accounting.
It makes sense as a store of value. But a realtime database that requires rapid, possibly millisecond-accurate entries? It just hasn't happened yet. Not on a scale that works in practice, anyway.
Example: I tried to use Namecoin a couple days ago. I got bored and quit after a few hours of "Synchronizing network". It seems to have consumed several GB. I just wanted to register a .bit domain. I didn't even get to "How do I acquire namecoin?" because (a) there is no clear "go here and pay this dude" service, and (b) you have to have GBs of free space just to try it. Such experiences are typical of blockchain, and this seems to murder consumer adoption.
The main reason for decentralization is to prevent collusion. But the risk of collusion decreases very quickly even with relatively limited amounts of decentralization. E.g. a consortium of even 10 independent banks would be much less likely to steal your money than Wells Fargo alone. So while there will always be some use cases where power users will want to validate the entire chain, in practice I think we can get 99% of the benefits of decentralization with even a handful of nodes. Bitcoin wouldn't be trustworthy under this model since anyone can jump in and mine, but it's possible to create networks that are trustworthy in this way.
In terms of scalability, the three main contenders right now to be the next generation general purpose blockchain are Hashgraph, DFINITY, and RChain, with a couple dozen other dark horse contenders as well (protocol labs, eos, tezos, etc.) We don't know if any of them actually work yet, in the same way we didn't know whether or not Bitcoin was actually secure in 2010. But there is a bunch of stuff that will be launching in the next couple years and then slowly battle tested over the next decade while we figure out what really works.
Most consumer apps are still going to be driven just by Postgres or whatever, with data only validated on the chain when it actually needs to be. E.g. if you're buying a house, it's probably fine to take Zillow's word on the transaction history if you're just casually browsing, but then if you're getting serious about buying you can always hit the button to go directly to the chain explorer or whatever.
The corollary is that I'm most interested in services that are focusing on decentralization, not merely trying to be a general purpose blockchain. One of the most important unsolved problems seems to be "I want to put this file up on the internet, but I don't want it to be taken down," plus "I want to request this file, but I don't want it to be traceable back to me," plus "I want to distribute this file, but I don't want it traceable back to me." Tor solves some of these concerns, but it remains a specialized niche. I can't just do it for any old file at any time; might as well use Dropbox for that. And why? There's no reason. It should all just be decentralized. After all, I'm online most of the time, and I'd happily upload the file to whoever wants it.
This all sounds quite shady, but the motives here are mostly pure: I'd like to distribute old ROMs and anime. Such things will get you kicked offline just as quickly as the more nefarious stuff. But this seems like a net negative for society. Society is at its healthiest when you're free to remix other people's ideas.
(More specifically, I want to write a service that lets you play whatever old ROM you want, whenever you want. There still is no Netflix of this area, and the game companies that could make it happen seem too inept. May as well force their hand with some decentralization. But that requires being able to write the equivalent of <img src="http://foo.com/img.jpg">, but for distributed binaries keyed by sha256. Blockchain could help here, but I look at this and go "Y'know, this is a perfect decentralization problem. Why aren't blockchains solving it already?")
Wanna collab? Shoot me an email and we can work it out. I'm really interested in getting this concept running. If only IPFS were low latency and easy for average gamers to upload files to, that seems a perfect fit.
I was hoping that as users play games, they would also upload the games to other people who want to play. That way there's no scarcity of server resources. You could fit ~40 n64 games into 1GB, so it's not a lot of bandwidth.
It's already been ported to the web. https://medium.com/webmr/n64-vr-with-javascript-e188de42ced5
The trouble is performance. N64 emulation is all software rasterization based, but it can be rewritten to use WebGL. It's just a lot of work that no one's done yet. RetroArch runs at 40fps because it can use SSE ops, which is beyond what browsers can do currently.
I think it would be possible to ship an Electron app with a local build of Retroarch, modified to export the rom's game data and selectively replace the draw calls with other ones. That way you can basically swap out starfox with mario, if you wanted. If any of this sounds interesting, shoot me an email (see profile).
Wat.
There is no aspect of double entry bookkeeping that would lead to a cost reduction when combined with blockchains, even less a reduction of an order of magnitude (or four!).
That is a logical fallacy. Every new dna mutation is 'novel' and some mutations are even solutions to real problems, but not every novel solution is the most competitive. Just because blockchain gives you new tools that solve problems doesn't mean it is the best way to solve that problem. (EDIT: To defend your statement you have the burden of proof to show that your paradigm is significantly more competitive than current paradigms. I suspect time will prove me correct.)
> when you can just run a simple Python script to analyze the contents of all that debt and get updates on payments in real time, suddenly those types of systematic market failures can no longer happen
There are many, many factors that went into The Great Rescission. Repackaging subprime mortgages was bad for investors. Maybe python could have helped that by giving investors better insight into what they were buying. The housing market declined, fundamentally, because many families were unable to pay their mortgages. Python wouldn't have helped people be able to pay their mortgage.
Debt was fraudulently misrated, so you'd have junk bonds rated as AAA or whatever. But the primary data was all there, so you could actually go visit all of the properties and talk to the owners like they did in The Big Short, it's just that no one did. The people who approved the mortgages also weren't verifying people's incomes, and in some cases were even encouraging them to lie about their incomes. But the primary data was all there, the reason no one audited the primary data was that it was too expensive relative to the payoff. Blockchains can fix this. (The residential real estate market is pretty fragmented so it's unlikely to be one of the first industries to get transformed, it's just an easy to understand example.)
> Currently, blockchains have very high energy usage.
This is really only true for Bitcoin and things modeled after it, where the integrity of the chain is secured by wasting an amount of electricity that's directly proportional to the expected future price. This clearly isn't sustainable so BTC will have to change their POW if they want to be successful. But it's also not an inherent property of blockchains, there are many other blockchains that are already secured differently or are working on novel security mechanisms, but as I said they just need to be proven out over the next few years.
I'll wait.
Companies like Facebook endlessly proliferate they are all about “connecting people”, but what’s the point of even having people run it when “connecting people” really means just using algorithms to spoon feed bullshit to people so the company can count it as “engagement time” and report it back to their board on the quarterly conference call.
Digital social interaction isn’t a free public good centered around people as long as it’s privitized for the purpose of profit, and it’s also something the government can’t be trusted with providing either.
Honestly, I don’t think we have figured out a good solution or channel for social communication yet. I’m not trying to be a tinfoil hat wearer alluding to blockchain or p2p as the answer because who’s to say it is the answer. We can only use our current frustrations to push us to keep innovating further towards a solution that’s more natural and compelling to use.
Sometimes I long back to the days of AIM, because while it seems pretty feature poor compared to services today, it did the job that I needed it to do, which was provide an easy avenue to stay in touch with current friends and easily start conversations with new people. Simplicity is taken for granted in the world today, and even though we are in the “Web 3” age we shouldn’t just throw experiences and social channels from earlier days of the internet out the window for the sake of illusionary progress. Shit, I even meet people who are still passionate about Usenet, despite it being older than me. That’s damn powerful to see people care about the communities they were/are a part of and remember stories of building friendships and social interactions on the internet some decades later. These are things that seem lost today in a landscape focused on striving towards hitting target numbers.
Actual messages would get pushed down because a new story from an acquantaince popped up. Even with no ads it was bad UI.
Are we destined to see this same cycle with social media? Profit motive slowly degrades the platform privacy and feed quality till a new player can enter simply by offering something closer to the original product Facebook offered?
This need is something I've never really understood and indeed is the root of all these problems. Zuck wouldn't be mister billionaire if he'd kept FB V1, but the world would have been better for it.
In the Facebook example, if Zuckerberg didn't want to grow Facebook, but wanted to still capitalize on it, he could have found a buyer and sold. The buyer would have been interested in growing it, and committed resources to doing so. Growing or Selling were the only two real options that would deliver Zuckerberg any gain. Once he decided not to sell, his only option was to deliver investors growth, so they would be willing to place their money in Facebook.
Another example would be an iOS app. There are plenty of apps in the app store where the developer built it, put it out there, charged $0.99 and that was it. If the app meets a need, this can work for a while, but eventually either demand will change or competitors will arise and the developer would either need to update/grow their app to maintain their revenue stream.
Growth is a fundamental piece of the financial system and eventually everyone decides to either grow, sell, or undercapitalize their asset.
I'm not saying I could necessarily resist the temptation of becoming a millionaire at the cost of turning my great idea in to a shitty one, but I sure wouldn't feel good about it.
Perhaps I'm just a bit naive about these things.
>Zuck wouldn't be mister billionaire if he'd kept FB V1
Are you sure you don't understand it?
While I agree with your overall outline that „something“ is lost from current social media, I would argue that analytics or more specifically analtical mindset in general should not be blamed for this. Analytics is simply a tool that can be used for good and for bad. The real problem are bad overall societal incentives and ideals (i.e., focus on profits and other narrow/short term metrics) which lead to missuse of these powerful and potentially highly useful/benefical tools.
So I don‘t think we necessarily need to resort to an complete change of the tech stack (i.e., web 3), but should simply try to support projects focused on better incentieves and ideals (e.g., Mastodon over Facebook/Twitter) no matter the technology stack. Nevertheless, I agree that web 3 may enable more idealistic/well aligned business models in the long run.
Another thing to push for may be more end user friendly legislation such as GDPR. While it may stiffle innovation by small companies in the short run, having long term standardization around good practices will hopefully create better and enable easier scale up of organizations in the future. Hope some researchers are coming up with good designs to investigate the effects of such legislation on the internet landscape. (On that note, can someone tell me again why impact evaluation of laws is not a standard practice, yet?! How much grieve could be spared if we decided to use evidence and facts to ground legislation...)
People want to communicate with as little friction as possible - then some smarty pants thinks why don't I insert myself in the middle and be the creepy overlord.
It'd be novel and compelling if people thought beyond themselves for one second and wondered what they'd actually like to spend their life on. That'd be novel and compelling. It's been novel and compelling since the beginning of time, because it happens so rarely. I don't expect that to change. Sorry, carry on :)
Maybe the opportunities for developing new ways to exploit human attention are simply drying up. Between streaming video, games, social media, podcasts, and just plain old traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers) how much more room is there to grow?
If I'm right this could be the signal of the current tech bubble finally bursting.
The whole reason companies like the web is because it provides high profit margins since compared to physical things, the web is incredibly cheap. Communites allow companies to make money off of feelings and comradre that their users build for them. Twitter doesn't have sense of community so people are quick to leave, but even if pewdiepie left YouTube, the platform would be fine because it has so many other niches that people would stay for.
But... If other mediums are a guide, the messages don't get more artisanal over time. They can get more mass produced, "click-baity' and sacrine...TV=>reality TV ; Ne spaoers => tabloids.
These mediums aren't purely crap. We get Westworld and GOt too, but the thick part of the pyramid is low cost, replicable-by-hacks, low brow "content."
The online version of that is the algorithmic bias confirmation version of flame wars and cat pictures.
Specifically on online social media... History shows these have lifecycles. Digg, Reddit, stumbleupon... these were different in year one. Novelty wears off, low hanging fruit gets eaten and mature games take over.
Anecdotally, I know several people who say groups are the only thing keeping them on the network.
Interestingly, the groups also dovetail well into the continued growth of their ad platform; they tend to be interest based, so they help with ad targeting.
It's just that their share prices will take a hit and shareholders will be disgruntled. Fuck those guys though.
It doesn't mean the web became a lonely place for me - Github, HN, some music apps, Instagram, Duo, e-mail etc. What I have left behind is pictures of newborns, awkard 'friends', news and shallow exchanges - which I am not fond of also in real.
Few years back there was a similar company called Zynga. Analytics was its secret of success as well as demise. Snap or FB is on the same course but with an evidently longer life span.
Can you elaborate on this? What do you mean by Web 3, what are examples? What is just getting started?
Edit: Moving things out of silos, re-focusing on the content and its value to people, instead of what's relevant to advertisers – as have been mentioned throughout this thread.
What's happened is that most of the major social networks only hire and promote people who make decisions primarily based on analytics. As a result these sites no longer have any real communities or organic content, and have been completely hollowed out by math-friendly refrigerator magnet junkfood. Even though everyone can recognize that most users no longer find these experiences to be compelling, they're all stuck in a one-way spiral.
Web 3 is just getting started though, and with new technologies are going to come novel and compelling forms of social interaction.