On those terms, I would reword or refocus my criticism towards Twitter's failure to help you tell who are the people worth following. I think there are two aspects: (1) Twitter doesn't care about wasting out time, and (2) The reduction to single-dimensional metrics, while convenient for lazy programmers, makes it difficult to assess "correct" in any meaningful sense.
Confused me for a minute there, but thank you [bradley13] for calling that (moderated) interesting comment to my attention, even if an AC wrote it. At first I thought you were talking to me, but I couldn't remember anything about a pub.
Mostly I agree with you (and even with the AC), but I definitely think the dynamics of Twitter do not mesh well with how a pub works. If you say something stupid or crazy in a pub, a couple of people, probably drunk people, hear it and then it goes away. Worst case is someone might get punched in the mouth.
Twitter can be more like the town drunk chiseling his idiocy in stone and sending copies to every corner of the world. There is only a tiny bit of overlap in certain cases, as when a unscripted video from a pub goes viral. People have lost their careers or been elected to high offices based on Twitter idiocy. (Twidiocy?)
Let me be clear that I'm not advocating censorship, except perhaps for a form of self-censorship. I'd prefer to describe it as accountability. If you repeatedly say stupid or false things, especially in public, it should become part of your reputation that you say those things, and your visibility should go down. I'd even argue it should be your default visibility, but I'd still gladly accept an opt-in approach to get the fools and trolls out of my sight and keep them from wasting my time.
Just addressing a partial solution approach to one part of it: What if karma and moderation were both reported on a logarithmic (and symmetric) basis? In the case of your comment, Insightful level 3 would represent more than e^3 (= ~20) and less than e^4 (= ~54) favorable moderations.
(Also presumes mod points would be much more plentiful and without the cancellation for participating in the discussion. I think that possibility of impartiality should be handled differently, or rather to say that the premise of impartiality is misleading.)
I do think you could tackle your question by associating the tweet with the tweeter, and making the relationship reflexive. Easiest to illustrate with an example of network analysis? It could obviously be applied to that most prominent tweeter-in-chief, ol' #PresidentTweety hisself (though I don't need to go there for the example).
I'm going to assume symmetric MEPR is being used, with MEPR-C for the Comments and MEPR-I for the Identities. If someone tweets a lie with bad grammar and spelling, then that tweet should earn negative reputation on the dimensions of true and clear (among others), and some of that negative MEPR-C would reflect back on the MEPR-A of the author, reducing the visibility of future tweets from that source.
The balance point would be in the time, which means the reason the solution fails within the dynamics of Twitter is because wasting your time is just as valuable from Twitter's perspective as not wasting it. Rather like Facebook, eh?
I concur with the interesting mod, though I see insight underneath.
I would suggest that positive moderation should be made easy to encourage positive behavior, and though negative moderation should be more difficult (to offset the higher motivation of angry people), there should also be real penalties (in terms of reduced visibility) associated with earning negative feedback.
In the larger context of my theoretical solution of MEPR, the voting should also be symmetric. Positive (or negative) evaluations should affect both the comment and the person who made the comment, and the other ratings should even affect the reputation of each rater.
Sometimes it bothers me that Slashdot discussions are so transient. In contrast to the dynamics of Twitter, where transience may be the only approach to a virtue.
I really can't decide if your reply merits any response, though I do see several analytic approaches. Is it possible we could have an interesting discussion? Seems so unlikely in these trollish times...
My new subject is based on the more conventional economic approach. If you can answer that question in a meaningful way, then we can look at the larger context of those alleged earnings.
However, I would favor an ekronomic approach considering the value of time. From that perspective you would be hard-pressed to convince me that Twitter fits into essential or investment categories and I would classify it as recreation of the most harmful sort. Perhaps even rising tot he level of anti-investment (if we bring the externalities back into the discussion).
On its surface, your comment is simply defending the insanity of the modern stock market. To make an appeal to the historical value of shares, I think you'd have to argue that Twitter is like a new kind of railroad or telegraph, but rather that requiring massive resources and investments, it "wins" its game based on some sort of first-mover monopolistic advantage.
P.S. The other comment about R&D expense is interesting, however. It would only make sense as part of a desperate search for a cure for the harms of Twitter.
P.P.S. Next I'll scan the entire discussion in search of answers to my original question about the dynamics of Twitter. I'm not optimistic about finding many enlightening ideas. I think your [iSayWeOnlyToBePolite's] response is basically at the level of a computer program "deciding" that the Twitter shares can be sold to a bigger sucker quickly enough to generate a "profit".
Just read a funny story that sort of fits in right here... We know that dictatorship could happen in Russia, both before and after the Soviets. However this related story is about Godel, back when he became an American citizen.
Godel, being a serious guy, studied quite seriously for the citizenship examination, including the Constitution. One of the guys helping him was a famous economist named Morgenstern. (The other "helper" was Einstein. Yes, THAT Einstein.) Godel decided the Constitution included logical flaws that would make it possible for a dictator to take over the country, but Morgenstern told him that was a crazy thing to worry about and they would never ask him about anything like that.
So at the actual examination, with his friends sitting next to him, they ask him about where he is from and about the government of his native land, so Godel says he's from Austria and it was a republic, but it became a dictatorship because of flaws in the Austrian constitution. The examiner responds that this is terrible, but it could never happen in America, to which Godel replies, "Oh, yes, I can prove it."
Having proven the Incompleteness Theorems, this could have been a serious problem. Morgenstern and Einstein were horrified, but the examiner just decided to change the subject.
I'm going to watch this discussion to see if anyone can provide a sane definition of what the "dynamics of Twitter" are supposed to be. Near as I can tell, it is a peculiar form of insanity driven by some sort of theory that if you can get enough eyeballs looking in the same direction, you must have created some value there. I'm not seeing the value.
Part and parcel of the insane worship of corporate cancers? Of course if stock prices become completely detached from reality, then the only question is which company can do the best "job" of creating an illusion of shareholder value, eh? I'd still bet on the Chinese, whose stock market has risen 30% recently for no reasons I can detect.
By the way, the original idea of extremely short messages was really dumb. Twice times dumb is still dumb. I used to believe the expression that "Brevity is the soul of wit" until I saw Twitter in action.
I wish it were so easy, but I think the timing is against you (and me). The worst liars are just playing games with the timing. Of course the truth will ultimately come out, but they don't care as long as they cashed in their chips (or equities) before the lie collapsed. Another phrasing is "He who dies with the most toys wins", though I beg to differ.
I think a better approach involves discrediting the liars in advance. I don't want to go into all the details of MEPR (Mutlidimensional Earned Public Reputation) again (at least not just now or maybe if you're that interested), but the short summary is that "identities" that lie should be recognized as liars and ignored. (Using one easily understood dimension as an example.) There are too many liars exploiting the "good will" we politely accord to strangers, so I think strangers should be offset on the low side. That would make them relatively less visible until they earn positive reputation, whereas acting in negative ways (for example by lying) would render them less and less visible.
Another way to think of it is from the time perspective, as in mine (and yours) is limited. Therefore I want to use the time to see more posts from good people and fewer comments from people who don't deserve my time.
Of the 13 comments currently moderated as insightful, I think yours [fourtythirteen's] is probably the highest concentration. I feel like your underlying analysis is probably similar to mine as of several days ago, and you led me to a new thought:
Why doesn't Assange use a Trumpish defense? Either "I was only joking when I suggested Manning commit a crime" or "I was just telling Manning what some other people say about how to hack passwords".
My real objective is to find comments offering a better analysis than my comment on a related poll a few days ago. I'd like to think that should be easy, especially since that was a kind of snap opinion (too weak to be regarded as a judgment), but so far...
In short summary form, I concluded that Assange is a bad journalist, stupid to the point of being dangerous, but basically innocent by "reason" of stupidity compounded by insanity. Or shoudl it be the other way round? Which came first, the insanity or the stupidity? https://slashdot.org/comments....
Slashdot Mirror
Z^-26
Z^-25
On those terms, I would reword or refocus my criticism towards Twitter's failure to help you tell who are the people worth following. I think there are two aspects: (1) Twitter doesn't care about wasting out time, and (2) The reduction to single-dimensional metrics, while convenient for lazy programmers, makes it difficult to assess "correct" in any meaningful sense.
Z^-24
Z^-23
Confused me for a minute there, but thank you [bradley13] for calling that (moderated) interesting comment to my attention, even if an AC wrote it. At first I thought you were talking to me, but I couldn't remember anything about a pub.
Mostly I agree with you (and even with the AC), but I definitely think the dynamics of Twitter do not mesh well with how a pub works. If you say something stupid or crazy in a pub, a couple of people, probably drunk people, hear it and then it goes away. Worst case is someone might get punched in the mouth.
Twitter can be more like the town drunk chiseling his idiocy in stone and sending copies to every corner of the world. There is only a tiny bit of overlap in certain cases, as when a unscripted video from a pub goes viral. People have lost their careers or been elected to high offices based on Twitter idiocy. (Twidiocy?)
Let me be clear that I'm not advocating censorship, except perhaps for a form of self-censorship. I'd prefer to describe it as accountability. If you repeatedly say stupid or false things, especially in public, it should become part of your reputation that you say those things, and your visibility should go down. I'd even argue it should be your default visibility, but I'd still gladly accept an opt-in approach to get the fools and trolls out of my sight and keep them from wasting my time.
Z-^22
Z^-21
Interesting and insightful comment.
Just addressing a partial solution approach to one part of it: What if karma and moderation were both reported on a logarithmic (and symmetric) basis? In the case of your comment, Insightful level 3 would represent more than e^3 (= ~20) and less than e^4 (= ~54) favorable moderations.
(Also presumes mod points would be much more plentiful and without the cancellation for participating in the discussion. I think that possibility of impartiality should be handled differently, or rather to say that the premise of impartiality is misleading.)
I do think you could tackle your question by associating the tweet with the tweeter, and making the relationship reflexive. Easiest to illustrate with an example of network analysis? It could obviously be applied to that most prominent tweeter-in-chief, ol' #PresidentTweety hisself (though I don't need to go there for the example).
I'm going to assume symmetric MEPR is being used, with MEPR-C for the Comments and MEPR-I for the Identities. If someone tweets a lie with bad grammar and spelling, then that tweet should earn negative reputation on the dimensions of true and clear (among others), and some of that negative MEPR-C would reflect back on the MEPR-A of the author, reducing the visibility of future tweets from that source.
The balance point would be in the time, which means the reason the solution fails within the dynamics of Twitter is because wasting your time is just as valuable from Twitter's perspective as not wasting it. Rather like Facebook, eh?
I concur with the interesting mod, though I see insight underneath.
I would suggest that positive moderation should be made easy to encourage positive behavior, and though negative moderation should be more difficult (to offset the higher motivation of angry people), there should also be real penalties (in terms of reduced visibility) associated with earning negative feedback.
In the larger context of my theoretical solution of MEPR, the voting should also be symmetric. Positive (or negative) evaluations should affect both the comment and the person who made the comment, and the other ratings should even affect the reputation of each rater.
Sometimes it bothers me that Slashdot discussions are so transient. In contrast to the dynamics of Twitter, where transience may be the only approach to a virtue.
I really can't decide if your reply merits any response, though I do see several analytic approaches. Is it possible we could have an interesting discussion? Seems so unlikely in these trollish times...
My new subject is based on the more conventional economic approach. If you can answer that question in a meaningful way, then we can look at the larger context of those alleged earnings.
However, I would favor an ekronomic approach considering the value of time. From that perspective you would be hard-pressed to convince me that Twitter fits into essential or investment categories and I would classify it as recreation of the most harmful sort. Perhaps even rising tot he level of anti-investment (if we bring the externalities back into the discussion).
On its surface, your comment is simply defending the insanity of the modern stock market. To make an appeal to the historical value of shares, I think you'd have to argue that Twitter is like a new kind of railroad or telegraph, but rather that requiring massive resources and investments, it "wins" its game based on some sort of first-mover monopolistic advantage.
P.S. The other comment about R&D expense is interesting, however. It would only make sense as part of a desperate search for a cure for the harms of Twitter.
P.P.S. Next I'll scan the entire discussion in search of answers to my original question about the dynamics of Twitter. I'm not optimistic about finding many enlightening ideas. I think your [iSayWeOnlyToBePolite's] response is basically at the level of a computer program "deciding" that the Twitter shares can be sold to a bigger sucker quickly enough to generate a "profit".
Z^-20
Just read a funny story that sort of fits in right here... We know that dictatorship could happen in Russia, both before and after the Soviets. However this related story is about Godel, back when he became an American citizen.
Godel, being a serious guy, studied quite seriously for the citizenship examination, including the Constitution. One of the guys helping him was a famous economist named Morgenstern. (The other "helper" was Einstein. Yes, THAT Einstein.) Godel decided the Constitution included logical flaws that would make it possible for a dictator to take over the country, but Morgenstern told him that was a crazy thing to worry about and they would never ask him about anything like that.
So at the actual examination, with his friends sitting next to him, they ask him about where he is from and about the government of his native land, so Godel says he's from Austria and it was a republic, but it became a dictatorship because of flaws in the Austrian constitution. The examiner responds that this is terrible, but it could never happen in America, to which Godel replies, "Oh, yes, I can prove it."
Having proven the Incompleteness Theorems, this could have been a serious problem. Morgenstern and Einstein were horrified, but the examiner just decided to change the subject.
Z^-19
Z^-18
I'm going to watch this discussion to see if anyone can provide a sane definition of what the "dynamics of Twitter" are supposed to be. Near as I can tell, it is a peculiar form of insanity driven by some sort of theory that if you can get enough eyeballs looking in the same direction, you must have created some value there. I'm not seeing the value.
Part and parcel of the insane worship of corporate cancers? Of course if stock prices become completely detached from reality, then the only question is which company can do the best "job" of creating an illusion of shareholder value, eh? I'd still bet on the Chinese, whose stock market has risen 30% recently for no reasons I can detect.
By the way, the original idea of extremely short messages was really dumb. Twice times dumb is still dumb. I used to believe the expression that "Brevity is the soul of wit" until I saw Twitter in action.
Z^-17
Z^-16
Z^-15
Z^-14
I wish it were so easy, but I think the timing is against you (and me). The worst liars are just playing games with the timing. Of course the truth will ultimately come out, but they don't care as long as they cashed in their chips (or equities) before the lie collapsed. Another phrasing is "He who dies with the most toys wins", though I beg to differ.
I think a better approach involves discrediting the liars in advance. I don't want to go into all the details of MEPR (Mutlidimensional Earned Public Reputation) again (at least not just now or maybe if you're that interested), but the short summary is that "identities" that lie should be recognized as liars and ignored. (Using one easily understood dimension as an example.) There are too many liars exploiting the "good will" we politely accord to strangers, so I think strangers should be offset on the low side. That would make them relatively less visible until they earn positive reputation, whereas acting in negative ways (for example by lying) would render them less and less visible.
Another way to think of it is from the time perspective, as in mine (and yours) is limited. Therefore I want to use the time to see more posts from good people and fewer comments from people who don't deserve my time.
Z^-13
I could attempt to clarify the chronology, but not for an AC (who was only revealed by the tab).
Of the 13 comments currently moderated as insightful, I think yours [fourtythirteen's] is probably the highest concentration. I feel like your underlying analysis is probably similar to mine as of several days ago, and you led me to a new thought:
Why doesn't Assange use a Trumpish defense? Either "I was only joking when I suggested Manning commit a crime" or "I was just telling Manning what some other people say about how to hack passwords".
My real objective is to find comments offering a better analysis than my comment on a related poll a few days ago. I'd like to think that should be easy, especially since that was a kind of snap opinion (too weak to be regarded as a judgment), but so far...
In short summary form, I concluded that Assange is a bad journalist, stupid to the point of being dangerous, but basically innocent by "reason" of stupidity compounded by insanity. Or shoudl it be the other way round? Which came first, the insanity or the stupidity? https://slashdot.org/comments....