
The Gentleman's Agreement - c1sc0
http://fr.anc.is/2012/03/14/the-gentlemans-agreement/
======
pasbesoin
I exercise this, in general. Always have tried to. Which is one reason I'm
more than a bit annoyed at e.g. the chronic posters on HN who flood posts on
every conceivable topic, at times adding an empty query string, an anchor, or
whatnot onto/into the URL to bypass the duplicates filtering.

It's not about you! It's about the community.

In real life, I often receive compliments on my gifts because I've actually
paid attention to the receiver, over time, and have put some thought and
attention into finding something I think they will really enjoy. _Not_
necessarily, or even often, something they have asked for. But something that
I have worked out they would like -- not infrequently, an item they were
actually unaware of. My perception and attention seems to be as appreciated as
the gift itself.

 _That_ is being social. Not a bunch of non-questioning "How are you?"s, nor
tweeting every personal chuckle.

Paying attention to, and taking care of and for, the other person. Will this
really add to their day or well-being?

------
bravura
I've thought about this problem a lot, and I think the problem is
recommendation systems (e.g. for feeds) are not optimizing for awesome. They
optimize for having an endless amount of decent.

Bob Carpenter of Alias-I wrote a blog post about a particular NLP task he was
working on, and he decided that the correct evaluation measure was to insist
on 95% precision (must be awesome), and only then optimize recall (amount of
awesome discovered).

In the real world, I have a few friends that don't make recommendations really
often. But when they do, I jump. Their recommendations are always solid gold.

The problem with recommendation on the web is that there is no built in notion
of economy. Economy in the sense of "frugality in expenditure or consumption".
There is an inherent economy on the amount of time I have to consume content.
So why shouldn't there be an economy on the amount of things I can endorse?
Perhaps that would guide content sharers at large to only share awesome. (And
I get more endorsements based upon how much people value my previous
endorsements.)

I'm toying with calling this idea "the economy of awesome" or "the economy of
cool".

~~~
vibrunazo
> In the real world, I have a few friends that don't make recommendations
> really often. But when they do, I jump. Their recommendations are always
> solid gold.

Can't we solve this by allowing users to internally rate their friends? Just
like you, I only care about the recommendation of some of my friends. So if
can somehow rate my friend's recommendation from 1 to 5, then the algorithm
could just to only recommend me stuff from the friends I value the most.

You can even use machine learning to do this automatically. Instead of
bothering users to rate friends, if I often like the recommendations you give
to me, I should get more recommendations from you. If I often ignore your
recommendations, I should get less of it.

G+ circles could even be used for further context. I might like your
recommendation for food, but not for tech. So the engine could could separate
each content with a context (this is a tech blog, or that is a food blog) and
relate that to my circles. So I would get tech recommendation from people on
my tech circle, but not from people on my food circle.

I think the big picture problem here, is that social networks usually put all
'friends' in the same bucket of equal value. When in the real world we have
different values for different friends, and for different contexts. So a
solution would be to simply have additional variables for friend rating, then
use machine learning to try to automatically match them to each context.

~~~
bravura
This is a partial solution, but one that is already implemented.

The problem is that people have different semantics for clicking "Like" on
something, or giving it five stars. This becomes problematic when giving
something five stars means that it's at least "pretty good to you". In that
case, you lose the dynamic range of expressing "this is AWESOME. simply
AWESOME."

So a machine learning algorithm cannot distinguish between good and AWESOME if
the user is lumping them into one category.

Which is why I propose actually creating scarcity around the amount in which
you can promote or approve or content, perhaps backed by a currency of cool. I
can only click like five times a day, for example. That would limit people's
ability to blithely approve of everything, and their ability to collapse the
distinction between good and AWESOME.

This approach is much stricter than the optional "gentleman's agreement"
proposed in the article, but might also create more desirable properties, and
a fun incentive around only sharing AWESOME.

------
pasbesoin
Here's a tip: Write in a "top down", "newspaper" style.

I don't want to have to scroll/scan to paragraph 8, or to the end of the
article (blog post, whatever), to see what you're about.

While you're at it, put the publication date and author at the top. If you
don't, experience tells me it's at least 50% likely that you're "hiding" these
deliberately.

~~~
c1sc0
Good point, I admit this post was more of a flow of thoughts rather than a
carefully crafted post. But guess what? I was prepping another post & it
suffered from the same symptoms, will rewrite it a bit. thx

~~~
pasbesoin
Well, my comment was also meant generally and not overly specifically. Your
post did take a bit to get to the point, but was not that long in total.

The "descriptive story" format (I'm sure there's probably a better, more
precise and pre-defined term for it) has become prevalent in today's
communication, in "official" news as well as e.g. blog posts.

To some extent, it may reflect today's training in writing, and/or the desire
of authors to scratch a "creative", "tell a story" itch.

To some extent, it may reflect the desire to retain eyeballs (e.g. in front of
ads) and to lead the reader to subsequent page turns for a multi-page article.

In the case of the latter, perhaps my argument would decrease revenue. On the
other hand, I'm more likely to return to a site and a writer who effectively
communicates. (Meaning, in my case, clearly and concisely, with details,
background, documentation, and further argument following as appropriate.)

------
lnx
The last paragraph makes me think of <http://www.thisismyjam.com/>, where you
get to recommend a single song for a limited time (7 days). A perfect example
of a place where you think twice before you share and share strictly one item
per {time_period}.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
And yet still my twitter timeline is clogged with stuff I don't care about
from there.

I get that that's not twitters fault, of thisismyjam even, it's the people I
know / follow, but for a while at least it seemed to be throwing out a
disproportionate level of stuff I didn't care about.

~~~
c1sc0
My guess is that a "Gentleman's agreement" to only share your best things will
only work if you also limit your circle of friends who are bound by the
agreement.

------
eriktrautman
Online social networks have gotten a lot more complicated since Facebook was
just a college tool. Now the basic, joyful simplicity of keeping your friends
in one place has developed all the complexity of real life -- you have to make
sure Grandma is separated from Vinny the frat brother at all costs but
everyone still wants to be friends. If we even have to create a "trusted
friends" subset, it feels a lot like we've lost something important that the
whole concept was originally meant to provide.

------
frdie
Over on Google+ Nick Pollard made a great suggestion: "We need bayesian spam
filters for our social networks."

------
read_wharf
Be in regular specific contact with actual friends that you know, either face
to face or email. Use a mail list or a private Google group or similar if you
want a group. Recommend stuff. Ask for stuff.

Monetization not required.

------
saturdaysaint
To what end, really? I don't see why a social network, which seems to be what
he's talking about, _should_ be the source or main distribution point for
great content. A single , dedicated curator (whether for music or political
thought or tech news or new podcasts...) will _always_ blow away my entire
friend list with a quick browse of their webpage. Even better, Google, Amazon
and other tools like Goodreads have made it easier than ever to surface high-
quality long-form content on any given topic.

To me, social networks are for being social. The main benefit we derive isn't
information or culture - it's building and/or maintaining contact with people
whose company we enjoy. As in reality, we all have to walk that line between
saying too much and being a wallflower (which a solemn "one post a day" pledge
veers on IMO).

------
sadlyNess
What we need is algorithms that can recommend like a human who knows you
would. An rapid publish/editing filter engine based on my previous
interactions...

~~~
mjdecour
With the new project I am working on we're attempting to create a content
filtering algorithim that can determine the content a user likes based off of
previous interactions of upvoting and hiding content from their feed. I think
with enough interactions and utilizing a user grouping system, the majority of
irrelevant content could be filtered. Assuming the community is large enough
and provides an adequate amount of feedback.

~~~
c1sc0
What did you use as training data?

~~~
mjdecour
We're still collecting our baseline data at the moment, but we have
implemented the design features into our community that should create more
interactions of upvoting and removing content the user finds relevant.

------
laserDinosaur
I'm convinced this is why geekologie took off like it did. It used to only
update maybe 3 times a day with the most awesome parts of the internet. It's
biggest downfall was increasing the postcount so that now it just feels like
browsing another reddit. I liked the fact that I could get a 'digest' version
of 'what happened today on the internet'.

------
phreeza
I think HN is the closest place to what he describes I know. Thats what keeps
me coming back.

~~~
ryaf
Yes, I must second this. The quality of conversation on HN is simply put...
amazing. It boils down to the people that you choose to associate with.

Think of your Facebook friends. I seldom talk to my "friends" there so it
would make sense that the content they produce is usually of very little
value. Most times Facebook makes me aware of internet memes and that is about
it.

------
signalsignal
Just Divide your social networking accounts into a Work account and a personal
account. Simple really.

------
rtisticrahul
Completely agree with the author. I have signed the Gentleman's Agreement.
Have you? :)

~~~
c1sc0
I wasn't meant to be something you sign, but that smells like an idea in its
incubation period ... a website where you could go & sign the "Gentleman's
agreement". Hmmm ...

~~~
rtisticrahul
Would be great to have such a website ;)

------
zyfo
Am I the only one who thinks this whole sharing business has gone a bit too
far?

Honestly, how many people would say that finding content is one of their
biggest problems today?

It's easy to think all you need is more optimized/better content while what
you really need in fact is probably something of the following:

\- think about something

\- focus your attention

\- get to work

\- get in touch with other people

~~~
c1sc0
Finding _good_ content is a problem for me in the sense that content
consumption has become a new form of entertainment. So if you don't entirely
dismiss entertainment, then, yes, finding good content I will enjoy and maybe
learn something from is a problem to me. The main issue I see here is that the
incentives in social networks are all wrong: we're being prodded into over-
sharing because that's where the money is. As a result of that we're drowning
in a shit-stream of content.

~~~
glanch
Imagine Facebook with this rule: when a user posts content, that content is
rated by popularity (number of likes/shares/comments). Every user has a
popularity score. Users can opt in to being ranked on a public popularity list
in, let's say, up to 3 categories like Sports, Tech, Music, Politics, etc. Any
FB user can check out the "top 50" lists for topics they're interested in, and
subscribe/friend/follow people that are on those lists.

~~~
c1sc0
So you're basically saying that the solution to our content quality problem is
turning it into a popularity contest?

~~~
glanch
Categorized popularity. If a user in interested in a topic, they would have
the ability to find the prominent voices related to that topic.

------
cheatercheater
I don't like "the gentleman's agreement". The worst part of it is limiting
yourself to one post a day. Even looking at my comment history on HN, things I
have "just posted" without caring too much get on average more points than
posts where I really tried and made a lot of effort.

Ergo: Filtering at the source only works if the source knows what the
countless receivers will like most. It never does, though. That's why sources
on any platform _need_ to be verbose. I'd even say this is the law of social
networks and what makes them so great:

Verbosity over self-control -- put the control in the hands of others.

If you want to separate the gold from the drivel, you can do it later. But if
you constantly keep on removing gold from your cart before you even get it out
of the mine, you've already lost at this game.

