dibt

Depending on how to define the word potato, one could argue that a community, is a potato.

> Fasting every single day for the rest of your life is not realistic and probably does more harm than good.

What evidence is there for this statement? What is considered "fasting?" I can't see how a 12-hour feeding window would be problematic. I could understand some people might develop "disordered eating" if their approach is unsustainable, but "more harm than good" isn't true for those that can do it.

One reason for fasting is that it improves insulin sensitivity.

From: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-sur...

"Based on this, researchers from the University of Alabama conducted a study with a small group of obese men with prediabetes. They compared a form of intermittent fasting called "early time-restricted feeding," where all meals were fit into an early eight-hour period of the day (7 am to 3 pm), or spread out over 12 hours (between 7 am and 7 pm). Both groups maintained their weight (did not gain or lose) but after five weeks, the eight-hours group had dramatically lower insulin levels and significantly improved insulin sensitivity, as well as significantly lower blood pressure. The best part? The eight-hours group also had significantly decreased appetite. They weren’t starving."

A wire shouldn't take that long, but ACH will take 5 business days. They might be thinking of that.

> I wonder how Tether getting broadly delisted would impact crypto prices.

No reason to think it affects prices at all. The exchange would offer a cash pair or other stablecoin pair. Most centralized exchanges are combining stablecoin pairs anyway to transparently offer one USD pair.

Tether is most often used as a pair on derivatives (ie perpetual futures). An exchange won't delist tether without having an alternative for perps.

The only reason anybody brings up this stuff is because of all the narratives people spin about tether.

I noticed a bunch of different services were acting weird over the past hour. DuckDuckGo for example was showing a blank results page.

Maybe there was hosting provider outage?

> So the argument here is that if you have few followers or loads of followers then the ratio of views to likes don't matter

Ratio between 0.05% - 1% shows good engagement. I rarely see it above 1%. Those are 'viral' tweets. I've never seen 2% or more.

Ratio regularly dropping below 0.05% without lots of replies/retweets is bad. A low ratio could mean high views from bots (e.g. Musk) or other non-follower sources, so replies/retweets help to indicate there is healthy engagement. Cory doesn't have that.

> if you're in the middle with 480k it's very important and shows that you're out of touch if you only get 1%?

The 480k is his _potential_ reach.

You aren't entitled to reaching all 480k of your followers. They follow other people. Their feed has limited space.

Similar to how Youtubers tell people to subscribe AND enable notifications. Doing so shortcuts the algo. You can do the same on Twitter. If the small % of followers that see your tweets don't engage, the feedback loop of getting to more of your followers never kicks off.

This is obvious with well-liked accounts. More obvious when these types of accounts are private because the like/view ratio is a higher signal (ie no fly-by views).

> If only 1% of users at any level are really engaging with the platform then its fair to say the platform has a problem.

Not a problem. It's the nature of the beast. Only a small % engage. The likes create a feedback loop that gets more views, but rarely breaks above 1% likes/views ratio. You see the same limits to conversion rates in other areas (e.g. advertising or eCommerce sales).

> So the argument here is that if you have few followers or loads of followers then the ratio of views to likes don't matter

The ratio does matter. The person above used Elon Musk. The second most followed account on twitter, so it's not a great example, but does stick to the range I expect. I doubt his ratio would get below .05% often.

More (active) followers > more views > higher chance of likes

Twitter uses likes (& replies, rewteets, etc) as a signal to give it more visibility in your follower's feed. More visibility, means more likes. It's a feedback loop.

It makes sense when you consider there's more tweets being produced than time to consume them.

> but if you're in the middle with 480k it's very important and shows that you're out of touch if you only get 1%?

I've noticed the ratio rarely goes above 1% for any account. Someone popular, regardless of follower count, will consistently have between .05% and 1% like-to-views ratio. I've seen viral tweets get above above 1%, but not more than 2%.

Another wrinkle is that followers will turn on notifications for popular accounts, which shortcuts the algo.

If it DOES go below 0.05% frequently, it means they aren't regularly producing engaging tweets. It's more more noteworthy for a 480K follower account because they have so many chances to get views if only they had something worth viewing.

I don't know if you actually use Twitter. The feed isn't meant to be like an RSS feed. You are meant to see what is happening in the moment. It's fine if Cory treats it as an RSS feed, but most of his 480k followers aren't seeing his stuff. The few that do see it, don't think it's worth engaging with it, so it dies there.

Musk's ratio on that tweet is within the ranges I've noticed, but there are many other signals to pay attention to on his tweets that are missing from Cory's.

This ratio is stronger on private accounts, since views aren't diluted with non-followers. I see one with 773k followers frequently get a ratio above 1%.

> If only 1% of users at any level are really engaging with the platform then its fair to say the platform has a problem.

I think this is just the nature of the beast. I hardly ever like a tweet. I suspect the mechanics of the algo are involved. Like it might dampen popularity, or not promote, a tweet if the ratio goes above 1%.

> I'm pretty sure you could pick literally any account...

> All twitter users are like this.

That's the point. Cory isn't like all users. He has 480k followers.

The reality is very few of his followers engage with the tweets. He previously had engagement, he no longer has that engagement, and thinks Twitter is dying. It didn't help that he told his followers to go to mastodon.

I really think he doesn't play to the platform's strengths: succinct commentary. His whole career has been about long-form writing.

You picked the most extreme example of any account. I'd bet Elon gets a lot of hate-follows. They won't like his tweets. You can see many real people replying to his tweets, so you can tell he gets plenty of engagement.

For others without much engagement (retweets/replies), like Cory, all we have to go off of is likes, views, followers. I don't disagree that we can come up with a more accurate formula.

Also, I gave percentages, so it's more like 0.9.

The algo gets on my nerves sometimes. I don't need to see tweets from Jordan Peterson just because someone I follow, follows Peterson.

I like using saved searches to find stuff that has a minimum amount of engagement:

https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Are...

Click the three dots to modify or save the Advanced Search. The saved search stays in your search field for easy access.

You still get some of the good parts of the algo in the 'Top' section of the search results.

Lists are a really nice way to dampen the more noisey accounts. I haven't found a way to specify a list in the search results.

Also, you can follow a lot of relevant people, and then specify 'people you follow' in the search. Then if you search for a current event, you can get info from people you trust more.

I wouldn't trust Cory Doctorow's anecdotal evidence on Twitter usage. His Like/View ratio is very low, and overall engagement for someone with 486k followers is some of the worst I've seen.

Part of the issue is he spams his followers with retweets constantly, all day. People may not know they can turn off retweets for someone. They may just mute them, and continue to follow.

It's very much like Cory to write a long article about this when really what's happening is him and the people he follows are becoming more irrelevant.

23 likes / 8,722 views = 0.26 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1612122825288208387

44 likes / 9,384 views = 0.46 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1611993024879554560

193 likes / 15,400 views = 1.25 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1611976607845224451

44 likes / 29,300 views = 0.15 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1611858168774098945

162 likes / 48,500 views = 0.33 https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1610282255057813504

I had to scroll a long time just to get those 4 because he's constantly tweeting.

1.0 is what you would want. Anything around 0.5 or less is really bad.

He hardly has any replies to his tweets. IMO, replies and quote tweets are what people are using twitter for. He also links off twitter too much.

SocialBlade stats: https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/doctorow/monthly

[citations needed]

In an attempt to make this a more productive comment, can you elaborate on what is an "honest way" to make a living in a way that is not "environmentally destructive?" I assume the "other people with 8 kids" are not Amish people selling produce at a farmer's market. Someone providing for 8 kids would likely have a car (maybe two), and go to a job in a building that uses electricity, right?

What about your leisure time? Xbox/Playstation? TV? PC/smartphone? Or are you somehow posting your comment via smoke signal or semaphore?

A Bitcoin dev has a higher threat profile than the average person. if only because it would be assumed he had many bitcoin in self-custody. Many things we do as a 'nobody' would get us compromised if our threat profile were a littler higher.

He made it worse by being so public, and hosting his own (publicly known) servers.

How do you spend $55/month on a VPS? Isn't that the amount you spend on a reasonably popular application host?

He obvious is more of a software developer than an sysadmin, so maybe it's just a poorly optimized personal app host.

This seems so odd to me. A CEO's politics never factor into deciding to purchase a product.

Would you tolerate a poor product experience if you agreed with the CEO's politics?

You're still in quarantine?

The original comment I was replying to was implying 'two weeks to stop the spread' was a conspiracy.

Nice to see people downvoting me for a reasonable comment, while I can't downvote them. Typical for HN. Feel free to downvote this one.

It doesn't seem like you've said anything backed by facts.

The number of employees in hospitals dropping at the start of the pandemic supports that hospitals were under extra stress.

Also, it's logical to assume that a crowded and understaffed hospital is a bad place to be when there's an airborne disease spreading. Hard to argue against suggesting people do everything can to stay home for two weeks to not get a new under-researched disease in those conditions.

> '2 weeks to slow the spread'

Wasn't that to prevent over-crowding of hospitals? Were hospitals not over-crowded?

Wow... this is neat. Looks like it uses GHArchive. First I'm learning of this too.

This page shows other projects using GHArchive data:

https://www.gharchive.org/#resources

> you built an absurd strawman argument, hung it around my neck

I never replied to you.

> please point where in my post I even came close to suggesting bitcoin should be banned.

please point to where in my post I even came close to suggesting Bitcoin should be NOT be banned? Re-read my comment.

I'm not reading any more of your totally un-hinged reply. Get help.

Unfortunately, Mozilla has become too politicized in the past several years for them to be productive in this area.

They also have a habit of shutting down projects that aren't immediately as successful as Firefox.

Interesting... you made this comment only 4 hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34068318

> The advancements in AI are as incredible as they are overstated. AI is nowhere near making human coders obsolete.

Already grayed out. No replies. Bottom of all comments at the moment.

Abrassive? Rude? Unwarranted? Let me know what was wrong with that one. Or did multiple people disagree with you? Does it make you want to continue offering your comment on a topic? Seems like people can downvote for any reason they like. Well.. they can if HN bestows that honor on them.

This is how echo chambers form.

Surely you disagree with this comment as well, so feel free to take away more of my internet points.

> They are downvoting you because your comment is low quality and overly aggressive.

I don't believe that it is. Certainly not to the point where it would be worthy of depromoting. It was a worthy discussion point. It could have easily just been left alone. My edit was highlighting that it was the typical outcome.

> Downvotes and upvotes on HN should reflect the quality of the comment and not agreement/disagreement.

Keyword: "Should"

You must know that it's often not how it works out. I frequently see thoughtful or otherwise harmless comments downvoted. Yet, rude and vapid, anti-crypto comments remain or are boosted. Downvotes are especially common when it's a reply to an older account with lots of internet points. They rule these threads.

EDIT: I'm not able to reply again because I am disallowed from posting too many times within an unspecified time. Probably also a consequence of not having enough internet points. I've already lost 5 of my precious points so faR!

As the other comment points out, a founder of the site thinks differently than you.

I obviously disagree with you. As PG suggests, I should downvote you to make sure that nobody else has the chance to agree with you. But then HN doesn't allow me to disagree with you, so your comment will remain.

My downvoted comments will also be grayed out to warn others of HN disagreements like a colorful snake that warns against danger. Stay back!

If your position is that digital assets should be banned, you're a little later for that. Digital assets are defined in the US as property by the IRS since about 2014, and a commodity by the CFTC.

Furthermore, giving someone US dollars for something doesn't make that thing a "currency."

> Comparing Bitcoin to free software seems similarly disingenuous.

Bitcoin is literally FOSS.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

> Nobody is proposing banning blockchains. Cryptocurrency, however, is clearly more than just software

The block reward is the incentive for miners/stakers to operate a decentralized network. It is not a separate concept. The actual value of each reward is emergent. It is the result of resources being used to operate the network, and how we value that network. If we don't value the network enough, the value of the block reward will drop below the resources required to maintain it. I don't see why any external party should dictate how we may value that block reward or network.

> the way missile-targeting system is more than ones and zeroes.

This is an irrelevant comparison attempting to moralize software by comparing it to a weapon.

> I do think that cryptocurrency is nonsense and should be banned

You are effectively saying Free and Open Source Software should be banned. If that's you're feeling, I can't imagine why you are on HN.

I'm not allowed to create software, and incentivize many different people to dedicate resources to operate that software creating a decentralized network?

EDIT: Downvoted within 3 min. Disallowing downvotes for everyone means HN allows older more active accounts to dominate these discussions. They push out reasonable replies that happen to not be anti-crypto. It disincentivizes further discussion because I just keep losing more and more precious internet points that dictate my value to HN as a commentator.

Is that any more ridiculous than thinking it's worthless in spite of public markets pricing it greater than $0?

It really depends on which subreddit you ask. I see plenty of support to people in these situations on r/entrepreneur and r/smallbusiness.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur+smallbusiness/search?q...