
Fan-In - panic
https://codahale.com/fan-in/
======
wwalser
Not a response to the actual ideas presented, but I felt this to be one of the
most well constructed 'discussion of non-technical problem directed at
technical people' pieces that I've read in a long while. I loved how well the
intro of a technical interview question lead into a discussion of a very human
problem. I didn't know much of Coda before now but I suppose he can count me
among the people glad to see him writing again.

As for the ideas themselves, I find it harder to respond. I've never been on
the receiving end of 'Twitter scale' attention but I've always assumed that it
was basically an emotional net negative for those who are. Even if the vast
majority of said attention were positive, I feel like it would be hard to
ignore the background noise generated by those who have found the most
effective method to get attention is to cause distress for others.

------
atemerev
This is the "15 minutes of fame for everyone" long envisioned. Only now the
tech enabled this very possibility.

While it can be negative experience first few times it happens, the other
dangerous side is that it's instantaneously addictive (we people crave
attention). And addiction is what everyone in sales and marketing wants, as
long as it's still legal. An addict is an ideal consumer.

I terminated my Twitter account about 2 years ago, after I found out that I
spent huge amounts of time and psychical energy there. I generated two random
UUIDs, used the first one to create one of those one-time emails, and the
second to be the new password. I changed my Twitter password and email, and
promptly rebooted my computer without storing these UUIDs anywhere.

It worked. Going cold turkey was incredibly hard. I wrote to Twitter support a
few times so they could restore my account, but they couldn't establish my
identity (just as planned!) Then, after a few months, cravings started to
diminish.

Now, instead of being Twitter addict, I became Facebook and HN addict. Sigh. I
can repeat my trick, but now I lack the willpower to do that. RescueTime tells
me that I spend 3-4 hours every day on Facebook and HN.

Time to generate more UUIDs.

~~~
pimterry
I too get find myself getting totally distracted like this, compulsively and
frustratingly, and it's very annoying seeing these apps steal my time.
Fundamentally it's because they're designed to be addictive: randomly giving
you rewards in just the right way to train your brain to want to go again,
automatically. It's totally in Twitter/Facebook/HN's interest to keep you
uncontrollably craving their hit.

I'm trying to fix this myself at the moment: I've built an app using exactly
the same techniques (training your brain with quick feedback and random
rewards), but flipped around, to try and addict you to concentrating and
getting work done instead.

Without being too spammy, you sound like my perfect target user. Want to try
out the alpha? Details at [http://www.buildfocus.io](http://www.buildfocus.io)

Let me know if you sign up, and I'll make sure you get in on the next batch of
invites I put out. Chrome-only for now, but there's Firefox/Safari/Android/iOS
coming in the works eventually too (in approximately that order).

~~~
lumpypua
Dude, beautiful site. HN can be a rough place—and I just wanna say your site's
really nice.

------
barrkel
I expect the unnatural assymetry of fan-in is also what will increasingly
drive wealth and income inequality in the future. The more hyperconnected
everything is, the more production of goods - information goods in particular
- turn into sudden lottery wins when they reach criticality.

It's always interested me that the more globally connected our media are,
fewer interesting stories overall end up rising to our attention. When the
sort function is global, global media all narrow in on a small handful of
stories; whereas when the sort function is local, each region has its own
distinct handful. This is a different kind of fan-in; the network structure
supresses the feeding of stories into the fan-in from way down in the roots
based on what's already upstream, and you end up with less information.

This is distinct from the problem of attention flow on social networks;
hyperconnection changes all sorts of flows, and they may not all be for the
better. I think it encourages a degree of monoculture, for one thing.

------
sgentle
I think part of the issue is that our exposure to other people (and other
people's opinions) has increased, but our perception of their importance
hasn't decreased.

Pre-massive-interconnectedness, if you do something good, 9 people say nice
things, 1 person says mean things. That gives you a good signal that you're
doing something right. These days it's 90/10 or 9000/1000\. The signal is
still the same, it's only the scale that's different.

But we don't – maybe can't – feel that way. 1000 people calling you names
feels terrible even if that's a tiny proportion of the whole. To feel
otherwise would mean scaling the value of each individual opinion, each
person, down to an insignificant level.

Numbers like upvote counts are pretty good for that, it's hard to picture the
human life behind each click when all you see is (+200). But messages, even
short ones, leave a lot of the human in there.

Of course, even if we could consistently eliminate the human importance of
messages we receive, I'm not sure that would leave us better off. It's hard to
believe that what internet discourse needs is less humanity.

Maybe a way to do it would be to representatively sample the messages. So you
turn the 9000/1000 back into 9/1 by merely deleting 99.9% of messages as they
come in. That feels a bit unjust, like your message is arbitrarily thrown away
as soon as you write it, but in a de facto way that's probably similar to how
messages get filtered now.

Another alternative would be to summarise each kind of message with a number
attached to it indicating how many people said a similar thing. It would be
possible, though not easy, to do that automatically if you designed your whole
system around it. Reddit kinda sorta works this way, and I know political
types use a similar process to manage constituents' opinions.

One thing seems obvious to me, though: we want massive connectedness and
scale, we want everyone to feel like their individual voice is heard, and we
want to not be crushed by impossibly massive waves of human noise.

I don't think we can have all three.

------
reality_czech
tl;dr: it turns out, all those search, filtering, and threading functions that
usenet had were actually useful. Twitter is just a broken version of usenet
and the brokenness stresses people out.

------
grandalf
This is why Twitter fails as a discussion platform, in comparison to something
like HN or Reddit: A sub-thread is in effect a social contract that somewhat
limits scope to the shared understanding created by the parent comment(s).
This constrains the speech a bit, but also offers the speaker a different
persona to speak from... more of a small group persona than the public persona
who issues each tweet.

Virality on Twitter relies upon a tweets lingering in the space where the
social contract of a constrained discussion is highly unstable.

Coda is pointing out the phenomenon by which that unstable contract results in
a laser of scrutiny from a horde of people who lack any kind of thoughtful
context but who are now able to comment on equal footing with those who have
context.

The simple phenomenon of ranking comments vertically by vote count (used by
HN, Reddit) solves this problem when the goal is focused discussion.

But when the goal is to create a fray in which self-promoters can flourish in
that space of deliberate misunderstanding, the normal dynamic of respect and
meritorious vote-ranked commenting goes away, and the next self-promoter has
an incentive to misunderstand and offer an embellished take that furthers
his/her agenda (self-promotion).

So while Twitter fails as a discussion medium, it succeeds brilliantly as a
broadcast medium, and Twitter's product team has created something quite
clever with the semantics of mentions, stars, retweets, etc. The "what's been
going on on Twitter" feature is a pure algorithmic feed which is likely a nod
to the effectiveness of Facebook's algorithmic feed approach for user
engagement and targeted ad placement.

I can't wait to see how all this evolves in terms of Twitter's product
decisions.

------
prawn
Regarding the first bit of the article, is there an outline anywhere showing a
smart way of handling the Twitter example given?

~~~
optimusclimb
Definitely NOT the answer you're looking for, but I think the point of the
question lies in the thought process/discussion of possible solutions, more so
than there being one definitively "smart" solution.

In fact, the smart way to handle it likely depends on the needs/business
constraints at the time it was implemented. For instance - If I'm following
Bieber on 9/15/2015 @ 3:00 PM EST, and he tweets, must it be a permanently
held "fact" that I saw this in my feed? If I stop following him 6 months
later, but sit there in my phone app (or web app, whatever) and scroll back
far enough, should the tweet show? And when that tweet happened, was it
potentially true that all of his followers should potentially have gotten in-
app notifications (or at least, the possibility of this exists, depending on
some algorithm so that people's phones aren't getting a never ending stream of
notifications, but something can decide which tweets are important enough, or
have been paid, to cross a threshold that says "notify"?)

"Edge"ish case: He tweets, we use a pub/sub or information bus type system to
publish this fact. I'm following at 3:00 PST on the dot, precisely when he
made the tweet, but I happened to unfollow 20 seconds later. Some async job is
processing the "deliveries" through 30 million followers, and by wall clock
time is faced with this decision after I've unfollowed to put this in my inbox
or not. What happens?

Anyway, long winded way of saying I think it's more fun to explore options
than to search for a textbook answer.

~~~
lumpypua
A personal favorite good answer:

"I just started my twitter clone yesterday. I built a prototype in rails last
night after chugging red bull! Each tweet is just database row with a giant
many-to-many relationship. We're at 30 users already! I told my mom about it
and she got a bunch of her coworkers to sign up.

We should probably cache or precompute some feeds, but we're fine for another
2,000 users."

------
swah
IMO that only happens to people with more than N followers, most of us
actually would like to engage more and have someone available to discuss about
random subjects...

------
morgante
News flash: being a public figure attracts attention and some of that
attention is negative.

I just don't see what the problem is. If you don't want negative attention,
don't be a public figure. I can say random stuff on Twitter because I have
~300 followers—even if every single one of them tweeted at me, it wouldn't
matter.

Obviously the reason that Mallory got a bunch of repetitive responses to her
tweet is because she has 64k followers.

People in the public eye have been dealing with attention for decades. If you
don't want attention, get out of the public eye—being a part of the Twitter
universe is not a requirement of being alive.

~~~
snowwolf
> I can say random stuff on Twitter because I have ~300 followers—even if
> every single one of them tweeted at me, it wouldn't matter.

Until someone with 100K followers retweets one of your tweets that is maybe
contentious. And then it gets retweeted 5000 more times. The network effects
become exponential.

Relevant: [https://medium.com/the-lighthouse/is-that-a-
threat-1f073e51d...](https://medium.com/the-lighthouse/is-that-a-
threat-1f073e51d84f)

~~~
morgante
> Relevant: [https://medium.com/the-lighthouse/is-that-a-
> threat-1f073e51d...](https://medium.com/the-lighthouse/is-that-a-
> threat-1f073e51d..).

I don't see how that's relevant. The author of that article has nearly 10,000
of her own Twitter followers. She's a public figure and, unfortunately, that
comes with negative reactions.

In the piece, she mentions that "if I wanted to avoid them I had to just log
off Twitter all together" as though that's some terrible sacrifice. If you
don't want to be famous, just stop being famous (unless your narcism depends
on having thousands of people listen to your every word).

~~~
snowwolf
From the article: "Somewhere along the way an account with a large and
conservative following retweeted it, an action that flooded my notifications
page"

The point being that even if you are trying to use twitter as a social network
to connect with friends and only have 300 followers (or 10000) it only takes
one account with a vocal following to take your innocent tweet (that they
could of found through twitter search) and put a negative spin on it through a
retweet. Which then unleashes the masses on you.

~~~
morgante
Yes, I did in fact read the article.

But if you're trying to use Twitter as a social network to connect with
friends, you don't have 10,000 followers. The author is clearly a public
figure: she's a comic and writer, not someone just networking with friends.

If she didn't have thousands of followers, the likelihood of the conservative
finding her tweet would have been exponentially lower.

