I was wondering why someone would feel this way until I got to that line! Why would you follow thousands of people if "noise" bothers you? I think most people like their social media a bit more curated than that to start with, could be wrong though.
I follow a couple thousand people on Twitter. It's a mix of infosec folks, developers, startup friends, comic book artists, news people, comedians, a variety.
It's less I'm trying to follow individual people and more that I'm trying to find interesting thoughts or articles or art that they're creating or sharing.
Even so, there is still "noise" in that you'll see the same article surface multiple times or the same news story be bandied about (for the last 24 hours it's been pretty Sam Nunberg).
How is it humanly possible to ingest the daily feeds from a couple of thousand of people?
I know a few hundred people in real life but I don't feel a need to call them all up every single day. Ditto for Twitter. I can follow a wide range of people and dip in and out of it, enjoy the variety, and move on. I'd want to read everyone's every tweet as little as I'd want to know every one of my acquaintance's thoughts every day..
but... but you get choose who you call, so you only make one call. But you can't unread tweets to find the one you want to read. So are these just snapshots of a moment in time you look at? Which is nothing like calling someone on the phone.
I follow about 8,000+ people, because I follow just about anyone who has a relatively active account and who may be affiliated in my professional and academic networks. Partly I do this as passive networking, much easier to reach out to people on a cold call when we follow each other. And partly because I like reading tweets from people who I've never met or really known.
The trick is that I don't treat Twitter as a newscast but as a stream of interesting thoughts to sample from when I have free time. I do keep a secret list of people who use Twitter to put out original work that I'll check from time to time but mostly I find that my general timeline has most of the interesting tweets in it anyway, because of how Twitter curates the top of it -- with the What-You-Might-Have-Missed, even if you have your timeline in chrono order.
I've personally never felt the need to mute words or people on Twitter or any other social network. I follow 540 accounts on Twitter right now and disagree with most of the political perspectives espoused therein. Yet I don't mind seeing any of this sort of thing on my social media timelines for a couple reasons.
For one, if I were to mute opinions that I disagreed with, I feel like I would be in effect turning a blind eye to the fact that people have these opinions. I don't see any value in this; people all over the world have all sorts of different opinions, and deluding myself into believing that people who disagree with me effectively don't exist seems... wrong, morally, at least to me. I specifically follow individuals (both public figures and not) whose opinions (political and otherwise) don't align with my own. I _want_ to see thoughts that aren't just identical to the ones already floating around in my head!
Also, I personally believe that associating emotions with words and phrases in the minds of the populace so strongly as to cause one to either react with outrage or reach for a digital mute/hide button, is one of the strongest weapons of social destruction today. This is a means of socially engineering people's reactions to specific ideas, conditioning them on a mass scale to be unable to use logic and reason as their emotions short-circuit any such thinking. Since mid-2016 I have gone to great lengths to refrain from becoming "outraged" by outrage-bait news and social media posts, and I've found that it's increased my personal happiness and outlook on life considerably, especially as the mass and social media ramp up their production of nigh-constant outrage fuel, and everyone seems to want to make _everything_ political.
Who said anything about disagreements, much less outrage, though? The context was cutting out noise, and muting is a more effective version of skipping your eyes past it. Some topics just get spent and become boring.
The article was basically about this ("So I began to take note each time I experienced a little hit of outrage or condescension or envy during a Twitter session. What I found was that nearly every time I felt one of these negative emotions, it was triggered by a retweet."), and in my experience this is largely how the "mute" functionality is used: literally to protect yourself from experiencing the learned emotional trigger associated with seeing specific keywords or phrases.
Fair enough, but this subthread had diverged to a discussion of the logistics of reading a large number of feeds, and the mute functionality was suggested in that context.
I mean, you get 300-400 items a day? Do you read it all? I think the best method is just to not read it all. Just scan for a few minutes until you're bored then stop.
Do you read every HN post? Much less should you feel the need to read every tweet.
> Even so, there is still "noise" in that you'll see the same article surface multiple times
For a while that was my benchmark for what was worth reading if I saw an article surface more than once it was possible of interest to multiple circles of interests rather than one, and likely worth the time to read. Of course, that was the time before sites like Buzzfeed/Upworthy and the general expansion of a culture of writing articles specifically for reshare virality.
> For a while that was my benchmark for what was worth reading if I saw an article surface more than once it was possible of interest to multiple circles of interests rather than one, and likely worth the time to read.
There was a clever RSS reader that worked on this principle. Sadly, it is no longer being developed.
> When they disappeared, my feed had less punch-the-button outrage. Fewer mean screenshots of somebody saying precisely the wrong thing. Less repetition of big, big news. Fewer memes I’d already seen a hundred times.
I follow ~500 people, but I'm very selective by only following people who know better than to re/tweet wrong, irrelevant, or obvious stuff. This way, Twitter works great for me as first-hand news, rather than the usual spin cyclone.
(I also use Twitter for Mac, so no promoted tweets, random order, etc).
> Some people just seem to treat it as a bigger like button.
But isn't that exactly what it is? The line between retweet and like is pretty blurry with the algorithmic timeline. I often see tweets that were merely liked by someone I follow.
I wonder if this is a key part of the problem, or whether it's a separate problem of its own making. I know sometimes I struggle with the decision of whether to 'like' or 'retweet'. I wonder what it would be like if there was only a 'like' button, but individuals can choose to broadcast their likes or not, and followers can choose whether to display (notifications of) likes or not.
I'm guilty of 90% retweets or so, but have a general low output rate including them. So I made a policy of retweet only things, that people who follow me wouldn't see anyway. Like 10+ people overlap. For me it's distinctively different from a like button. The most annoying thing is having other peoples liked pushed into the timeline and the same 3 ads all over again.
I think they're just trying to apply the wrong tool for the job.
What they're probably interested in is getting news/thoughts about a handful of topics, which would be akin to following a few subreddits or forums.
But the way Twitter and Facebook are set-up is that you follow people, not topics. And people tend to talk about all sorts of topics on a given day, thus the "noise."
Technorati and Twingly used to provide such services but Technorati seems to have been bought and decommissioned and Twingly has pivoted into something else.
I wrote a script to split up the people I follow into lists according to a few different categories (based on keywords in their names/handles/bios sprinkled with a touch of manual massaging). It really helps to sort through the noise.
I ended up with the following lists that I can now browse separately for several disparate interests of mine:
Founders / CEOs
Game Dev
Apple
AR / VR
Iowa (local people I follow from where I'm from)
This is one functionality I wish Twitter included! I’d love for it to use some machine learning or whatnot to naturally group all the people I follow into several distinct lists.
This is the main thing I love(d) in Google+ (yeah, yeah...)
Whenever I'd add someone, I picked which group or groups they fell into. I could create as many or as few groups as I wanted and then I could view posts and threads based on which "circle" they were in.
I'd be more inclined to use Twitter or any service that made this kind of sorting this flexible and useful.
I was trying to provide constructive criticism. As written, the comment is nearly incomprehensible. If someone is going to take the time to post, he or she should take the time to do a minimum of proofreading his or her writing so that others are able to understand the point of the post.
100% - I don't think this article responsibly differentiated between the ideas of boundary-setting and control. The author (I think) actually means to say that we should try and make kids anti-fragile by letting them make choices and exploring the consequences, within healthy & safe boundaries. But anyway thanks academia for turning this ancient parenting wisdom into a whole book we can overanalyze
That's a pretty dramatic take. Social media use in general probably declines with age, and although I'm not sure how you'd quantify it, I bet that using social media primarily as a form of social proofing declines even quicker with age. All young people "perform" because their self-awareness is on extra high alert and their personalities are half-baked. This has been true since the dawn of high schools.
I know middle aged people who do the same thing, their "performances" are appropriate for their age. Pictures of expensive vacations, manicured gardens and so on. Same phenomenon.
This job sounds shitty but have you ever spoken to someone in a domestic role? A postal employee? A trucker? A janitor at your office building? Kitchen staff at a restaurant who do not even have time to take a piss without dropping the ball, let alone timed pee breaks? Lots of jobs are hard. Extremely hard. And often, jobs that are very very hard pay hardly anything. There is a two-way transaction happening here, though - you pick a job that you are qualified for, and you work at it in exchange for money. And if it's not worth the money to you, you find a different job that you're qualified for. As long as people are willing to do this job for this amount of money, it will probably not get better unfortunately. And as companies get bigger, they always morally regress to the mean. Instead of going after companies (playing whack-a-mole), I think empowering people to learn employable skills is a better investment.
Also I'm going to remember the fuss about Amazon when their warehouses are 100% robotic, and everyone is mad that it's not creating enough jobs.
This kind of logic lets you justify any behavior as long as there's a market involved somehow.
You're trying to give free agency to people who are very likely choosing between the only job they can find and starvation. That's not a free market, it's wage slavery. Low end employers can do anything they want as long as the alternative for enough of their candidates is starvation.
Should we go back to the days of mandated government work programs? What is your actual recommendation here?
At some point we have to accept that people should be able to make free choices, and will typically make sub-optimal choices. We can increase the burden on employers but then that means less overall jobs - which then leads to that starvation outcome you mention.
Regardless of the market, there's very little actual functional value exchanged in simply following rote labor processes that don't inherently require skilled decision making or craftsmanship. The value tends to come from the design of the labor process itself; the rest is fungible.
Obviously we don't want the societal cost of unhealthy labor exploitation, but it is an incredibly difficult minefield to create mandates which imbalance individual value exchanges. One long tail of this is the loss of labor markets (physical labor as well as mental labor) in favor of automation even at the limited levels of AI we're currently at. Offshoring is another.
> It is not difficult to avoid abusing power imbalances in your favor,
I think that's being naively idealistic, looking at everything both currently and throughout history. The Stanford Prison Experiment has a lot to say about this, too.
> nor is it difficult to set fair wages and labor practices.
Theoretically, yes. But one issue with the USA in particular is its sheer size and variety. A fair wage in New York City and a fair wage in Podunk are not the same thing. Nor are manual labor practices equivalent across varying climates and population densities. The federal level of governance is wildly disconnected from the populace in both distance and levels of hierarchy. They deal with passing laws most of which arise from local issues that 99% of people (and even lawmakers) don't have a connection to, yet end up affecting everybody. Even at the state level, Californians and New Yorkers are still burdened by laws that tend to originate from the high density centers that might not make any sense outside there.
It's relatively easy to look at a single instance of a job and consider what's fair practice and fair pay in that specific environment, but to do so as a legally enforceable blanket policy is not.
> moral authority ... individuals devaluing everyone ...
There isn't a "devaluation" happening; there's little real value exchanged in the actual work to begin with. This has nothing to do with any notion of "moral authority", which themselves manifest in externalities added to work environments for societal benefit. But the ratio of expense between those externalities and the work itself can get overwhelming for low-end labor, hence automation and offshoring.
If you don't know what I'm saying, then that's a pretty prejudiced assumption on your part to instantly jump to effectively an accusation of trolling. This is a complex issue where "it's bad for no reason and should be easy to fix!" doesn't suffice.
If the government were to offer PTO for employees below a certain income threshold to learn new work-related skills, would that help lift people out of these situations?
Or would such a system be 1. too invasive and 2. abused, either by companies or the employees.
That's a weird way to do it, and would tend to subsidize employers for questionable benefits. Tax incentives for employer tuition reimbursement makes more sense.
Instead there should be programs to pay people minimum wage + tuition to attend community college for in-demand-career related degrees.
>Instead there should be programs to pay people minimum wage + tuition to attend community college for in-demand-career related degrees.
Amazon has a program like that. Unfortunately, it's only for AAS, and they only pay partial tuition.
What Amazon doesn't seem to have is a program to help people grow within Amazon, beyond FC work. There are tons of in-house resources, video tutorials, etc for training that employees simply can never access because they don't have the time.
> As long as people are willing to do this job for this amount of money, it will probably not get better unfortunately.
child labor didn't stop because parents stopped being willing to sentence their kids to labor, it stopped because of laws. The free market does nothing to guarantee that working conditions are livable or humane. Any suggestion to the contrary is at best naive, at worst malicious.
> I think empowering people to learn employable skills is a better investment.
That's nice, but where does a single parent working wage labor have the time to learn new skills? Who is paying a livable wage for people to learn new skills?
> child labor didn't stop because parents stopped being willing to sentence their kids to labor...
No it did not, it just moved overseas. It is hard to beat the free market -- it just finds the most economical way to get things done, it does not care about human plight.
A law without a budget to support enforcement does not do much. It again comes down to economics - the balance of risks vs returns. This is of course obvious. What provokes me to mention the obvious is the count of politicians/governments who grandstand on issues, pass laws but do not back it with a budget. These are mostly PR exercises.
Unfortunately people are really bad at assessing scale, so they forget that there are always going to be people who "have to" do this kind of job. Always. The goal should be to give people the choices to not end up this way. It is extremely harsh. But life is harsh. We should do what we can as a people to push equality of opportunity, but if we look for equality of outcome, we're just burying our heads in the sand re: the harshness of the world.
Oh please. We don't live in the forest, we don't scrape the dirt for nuts and berries, we live in modern industrialized societies with extreme concentrations of wealth. Life is not innately harsh due to uncontrollable circumstance; modern life is harsh because of the greed of corporations like Amazon and the indifference of comments like yours. In a modern industrialized society, there is no legitimate reason for laborers to work torturous 60 hour weeks. Scores of countries have banned these sorts of working conditions but we turn a blind eye to it because at the end of the day the software industry is utterly indifferent to the harm that it is doing to the rest of the population. We've seen labor riots and civil unrest going back hundreds of years to protest these sorts of labor conditions. These aren't random, unavoidable forces of nature: these are the cruel practices of an industry that treats humans like nothing more than numbers to be optimized.
why? You're not going to be convinced no matter what I say, because the challenged as posed is a pure trick. Both "better system" and "strong economy" are multivariant. So long as I say "in [place] that has laws mandating [some labor condition], they have [some value higher] in [some dimension]", and you will say "but in [some other dimension] they are [worse]". No matter what case is presented, you will refute it by any means that suit your argument to keep your own already-held conclusion that the profits of the few justify the subjugation of the many. So I could click around to various labor laws and economics statistics and say things like "Denmark's Working Environment Act dictates a standard work week of 37 hours and more than 48 hours a week and they have a higher GDP per capita and their national debt is 39% of GDP compared to the uk's 89% of gdp and they report higher levels of happiness" and you might say something like "yes but their taxes are higher and their life expectancy is shorter and also open-faced sandwiches are bad". There's no one metric to define "better system" or "stronger economy", so the challenge as posed has no merit. So long as you are looking to justify the stance you already have to yourself, you will.
Really, I cannot convince you of this point based on evidence alone. I can only tell you this: I am literally disgusted by your stance and I would never want to work with you or for you, and I think that society as a whole will start to see the software industry as a force of evil, moreso and moreso with each passing day, so long as your stance is the norm.
You are right about the laws influencing child labor, however they are not a sufficient condition. There also needs to be a corresponding increase in returns to child education over and above returns from labor in order for child labor to vanish. For example: India has very strong laws, however child labor still exists.
not really..come on either you want to take a risk and make something and sell it to get higher income or take no risk and go for that low paying warehouse job. Tell us all what risk did any one take in getting a warehouse job?
> you want to take a risk and make something and sell it to get higher income
no, almost nobody does that. People who work in an Amazon warehouse have no option to take a risk to make something, they are selling their labor because it is the only way to feed themselves. Almost nobody has the ability to "take a risk and make something". Your comment shows a complete ignorance of how the vast majority of people experience the world. The vast, vast majority of people in the world do not control the means of production or have the ability to do so, they sell their labor because they have no other choice.
This attitude, that everyone being exploited is doing so because they made a choice is endemic to our industry and it is the literally reason that our industry is increasingly seen negatively by those outside of our industry. People who work in Amazon warehouses did not one day decide or not decide to take a risk: the vast majority of them are working any job they can get to avoid going hungry.
If you make something and sell it, you are in control of the means of production; you are not selling your labor, you are selling a product. People who work in an Amazon warehouse are not selling a product, they are selling their labor. The vast, vast majority of people on Earth sell their labor.
you are defending inhumane working conditions. You are defending subjugation in the name of business interest.
This attitude and people like you make me sick of the software industry. I am disgusted by how common the attitude of utter indifference is in our industry.
If there is risk involved, then there are quite a few people guaranteed to lost - and worst off then those warehouse workers. Otherwise it would not be risk, right? Are you even sure that expected payoff is worth it in agreggate? (E.g. if we don't end up with much worst overall economic situation if people would follow your advice)
You talk about "taking risk" is if it would be solution to social problems. It is not.
> As long as people are willing to do this job for this amount of money, it will probably not get better unfortunately.
There is an inherent falsehood to this statement: it reads as if there is no alternative to a laissez faire market. Regulation serves to prevent exactly these situations. Universal limits to how many hours you can force someone to work; regulated standards to how much rest you need to give your workers; rules for how much you must pay them.
Unfortunately regulation has failed to do these things. Pieces like this are helpful to remind us of this and to push our governments to do better.
I don't think if you ask anyone that they like that their products are all made, packed, and shipped using wage slavery. Don't you want a world where we all have a little less thanks to efficiency losses but know that everyone is being treated with a minimum level of decency?
A friend of mine was sick of her job and planning to quit. She's a journalist with a college degree. Her plan was to get a job at Starbucks until she could figure out what to do next.
As I see it, this is the LAST thing you should do in a situation like that. Though it's counterintuitive, service jobs can be very difficult to attain, because almost anyone is qualified to do it. IE, she thought that working at Starbucks would be easy. I'd argue the opposite: it's hard, because so many people are competing for low-end jobs.
My recommendation to her was to figure out how to do something where the demand is high and the supply is low.
My first job paid $3.35/hr, and some of the hardest jobs I've ever had paid minimum wage.
It's not about being willing, people literally have no choice. It's either starve and be homeless or work this really shitty job. We should regulate the industry so our economy doesn't have to run on brutal human misery. If that means Amazon can't deliver your package in 8 hours, but rather in 2 days, then so be it. Human life comes before profits.
From a public policy standpoint, I'd rather provide some assistance to people working part-time or for low wages than to provide 100% assistance to someone who is entirely unemployed.
Unfortunately many attempts to regulate the workplace result in fewer jobs and thus more people who need 100% support. One example of this is the effort to raise the minimum wage which, not surprising at all, has resulted in more incentive to eliminate or automate low-end jobs. Advocates for a $15 minimum in the fast food industry, for example, should be prepared for a net reduction in jobs in that industry as automation is rolled out or business models are modified to adjust to the higher labor costs.
I'm not saying that all labor regulations are bad but I am saying that the second-order effects of many regulations can make the overall labor situation worse.
The evidence does not support your view (at least in the UK). http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/CP217.pdf Even if it did, there are other policies like Basic Income that solve some of these problems in a sensible way.
Yes, my first thought was that Kickstarter needed to get to the doctor and make some awkward phone calls. Really, really unfortunate logo and name combination.
TL;DR: Unlike other types of leaders (eg. Presidents), good CEOs consistently set destinations, and align new people towards those destinations, but don't micromanage the means by which their team gets there. Except for some times, when they have to.
This was horribly written. Succinctness is a virtue.
That's not an accurate summary at all. The message of the article is that good CEOs set a direction and then act as an immutable rudder with the aim of ensuring that the organisation stays pointed in that direction.
People have extremely naive perceptions of how taxes are used. It shocks me. The "throw tax money at it" attitude towards problems, especially in cities where people are reasonably wealthy, is very lazy.
