
Facebook and the Silent Bob Effect (2019) - djsumdog
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-effect/
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cmroanirgo
This same effect is in use through our email system. If you send heaps of
email to each and every big provider (100 per day to even be registered by
Microsoft's Outlook servers) then you can do something about no longer being
sent to the spam folder automatically.

However if you're like Silent Bob and send out very few emails from your own
self hosted server, you always get treated as though you're the next source of
a major spam attack, despite having the same server and same email send rate
for a decade.

As a dev I understand how this happens: it's all too easy to filter out the
statistically insignificant. But we shouldn't.

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furyofantares
> In normal social interactions, when a person doesn’t talk much, more weight
> is often given to their words when they do.

I haven't found this to be true at all. Talking too little means your words
don't get much weight in my experience.

This is not true for Silent Bob and the example band director because they
have roles that command some amount of attention to begin with -- you're
paying some attention to them when they're not talking.

In normal social interactions, in my experience, if you're very quiet then
people just don't pay a lot of attention to you, and when you speak up it's
not actually that jarring or novel. You haven't earned extra attention by not
participating as a peer, you've earned less.

And if what you have to say is not something they already agree with they can
easily go back to not spending their attention on you as soon as you stop
talking.

~~~
Juliate
My experience is that the too-talkative person is either discrediting more and
more oneself ("leaving no doubt" about it) or it bores people away completely
from the subject/platform/conversation at hand.

It's like, at some point, you leave your noisy/opinionated uncle speak in his
corner at the family gathering. You don't mind him anymore.

Facebook went that route to me: what started to show up more and more from
family and friends bored me away more and more, to the point I left. I prefer
to pay the price to have no noisy-news and lose some "relatives" to only get
the meaningful stuff when it matters. Left 2 years ago. No regret.

Twitter went the same route, about the time when the platform gained more
public interest around 2015. Removed from my phone. Barely checking it now.

I tried Instagram alternatively. It's a pure marketing platform. Vaguely
interesting as a pinterest-like journal.

It gets me back to blogs. Things that take more time (to setup/write, but also
to find and read), bear more fruit.

~~~
dawg-
I have discovered that Facebook can be manageable only if you are extremely
diligent about unfollowing people whose posts you don't care about. You can
unfollow while still remaining "friends". I have been really good about it and
there are now at most 15-20 people whose posts actually end up in my news
feed. Sometimes nothing new will show up in my news feed for several days,
which is really nice. I think joining good, high quality groups of a not-too-
big size is also a way to make Facebook a valuable experience. I was 100% off
of facebook for a long time and even though I denied it for a long time, my
social life suffered for it. I now see it as a necessary evil that can be not
so bad with some effort.

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jimkleiber
I've dreamed of a social network where I could sort and filter the feed—where
I control what I see, not the network.

Anyone want to build it with me?

~~~
solarkraft
You don't need to build a new network - one called the Fediverse (mostly made
up of Mastodon and Pleroma and powered by the W3C standard ActivityPub)
already exists and lots of cool people are on there. It is however sorely
lacking a way to give silent Bobs more attention - who posts more just gets
more attention. Luckily it doesn't have a business model that would prevent
one from building something cool on top of it.

I think it'd be pretty cool to have a curation algorithm that the user can
control.

~~~
dredmorbius
Lists work fairly well. I keep a set of three, by priority. "Top" is about 20
people I care to hear from, who post either rarely or very high quality.
"Medium" is much less selective, and "Voluable" are overactive. I usually have
the first two visible, frequently with "Home" (all followed profiles) as the
3rd stream.

I add, move, & remove frequently.

Another interesting dynamic on services permitting blocking is that, over
time, the set of variously blocked accounts builds. This can go either way
(submitter blocks follower, vice versa), but tends to result in interesting
graph partitions over time.

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HenryBemis
I remember that for FB there is a "switch" that ends with "/chr" on the URL
and that forces the posts to be displayed in untainted chronological order
(newer on top). I haven't used FB for at least 5 years so that may have
changed. I remember this well though because I had a bookmark on my FF toolbar
with that exact URL so avoid the shitty manipulation of FB.

(I still believe that FB is cancer)(only came to read for Silent Bob!!!)

~~~
Emendo
I just checked and they still have that feature under News Feed (...) -> Most
recent, which appends "?sk=h_chr" behind the FB domain.

Now it would be awesome if FB lets me filter my news Excel Data Filter style.

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PiMaker0
I think the core of the issue is automated curation. There are several
different ways to curate a collection. It isn't feasible to have someone
curate things for you and you don't have time to do it yourself.
Facebook/Twitter/etc has opted for majority curation: for the majority to
define what is relevant to the rest of the users.

There needs to be a revolution in curation of content. Music suffers the same
fate until we find a solution.

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Groxx
Since I'm a fan of these low-volume but high-value things, also of NewsBlur:
[https://blog.newsblur.com/post/168429041705/infrequent-
site-...](https://blog.newsblur.com/post/168429041705/infrequent-site-stories-
is-the-blog-reader-we-need)

NewsBlur has a nice feature called "infrequent site stories" that holds items
like this. It's so much more useful to me than popularity-based measures.

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m-i-l
Surely it isn't any great surprise that the algorithms on advertising funded
sites are optimised to get the consumers to view and/or act upon the greatest
number of adverts, rather than achieve any objectives which would run counter
to this, such as finding a small amount of meaningful content. And from that
premise, surely it isn't a great leap to imagine that the solution is to break
away from the advertising funded model.

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kixiQu
I'm pretty sure FB amplifies the posts of people who it wants to entice to use
it more. It's certainly seemed to for me when I dropped back in after my usage
falling off. Without data, it's just as easy to guess that people don't feel
like interacting with your posts as The Gods Of Social Have Blighted You

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rolandog
I remember Google+ had a way to configure how frequent you would be shown
other's posts, that was a really nice feature.

