Re These Failed Apps Discovered a Hidden Rule of the Web

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Hasan Diwan <hasan.diwan () gmail com>
Date: Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 6:52 PM
Subject: Re: [IP] These Failed Apps Discovered a Hidden Rule of the Web
To: dave () farber net <dave () farber net>


Dave,
[For IP, if you so choose]
I'm one of those left, possibly hard left, leaning individuals on reddit.
The fund I work at invested in a startup that seeks to turn reddit into a
PDF document, for testing they used the_donald as it is one of the more
active subreddits on the system, I read through the_donald the other day
and what I found puts the youtube comments section to shame, from my
perspective. A few highlights:

- Typical Libcuck Opinion On Our Support For European Nationalists
- Is Child Rape A War Crime?
- New York Scraps Literacy Test For Teachers After Minorities Fail To Pass
It | The Daily Sheeple

To the first headline, you can support whomever you wish to support in any
election. To wit, I'm a left-wing European and supported Mr Sanders.
To the second headline, I find rape of any kind -- man, woman, or child --
abhorrent and feel the perpetrators should be prosecuted to the harshest
extent of the law and I strongly believe that spending a life behind bars
is the way to go here, as I'm against the death penalty.
And, finally, and most amusingly, the third. I went and did a quick read of
the piece that was linked to. The linked piece[1] conflates skin colour
with English ability. Let me explain. When I took French and German in
school, I wasn't aware of the teacher's ability in the English language --
it just isn't relevant to the class at hand. Argentinians see themselves as
white, yet speak poor English. So, they would be qualified to teach pupils
under the article's terms, but I wouldn't? Even though I went to the same
school as half the British cabinet?

Throughout my education, whether in grade school, or tertiary, I've had
teachers of varying race who taught me to varying degrees of quality. The
biggest metric I came up with to use to gauge whether a teacher would be
effective or not was how engaging they were in their explanations of the
topic on a given day. And being "engaging", while hard to measure, had
nothing to do with the amount of melanin in their skin.

Now, I'm sure some of the right-leaning members of this list will be
tempted to say something along the lines of, "Hasan, you read these things
too carefully, you need to recognise the emotions underlying the words".
No, no, I don't, it's an article, not a theatrical performance. -- H

On 15 March 2017 at 05:42, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote:




Begin forwarded message:

*From:* Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
*Date:* March 15, 2017 at 8:07:44 AM EDT
*To:* Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
*Subject:* *[Dewayne-Net] These Failed Apps Discovered a Hidden Rule of the
Web*
*Reply-To:* dewayne-net () warpspeed com

These Failed Apps Discovered a Hidden Rule of the Web
Anonymous apps like Secret and Yik Yak set out to make social media more
authentic. Here’s why that failed.
By Miranda Katz
Mar 10 2017
<
https://backchannel.com/these-failed-apps-discovered-a-hidden-rule-of-the-web-391471ca5952
>

Four days after the election of Donald Trump, the former CEO of a failed
anonymous social media app tweeted: “Secret V2 is coming. It’s too
important for it to not exist.” About a year and a half earlier, Secret had
shut down, overwhelmed by an epidemic of cyberbullying and competition from
Yik Yak. But as America woke up to the fact that polling and data had
failed to capture the political leanings of the country, the power of the
unspoken was more apparent than ever. Shell-shocked Democrats were viewing
their more right-leaning friends and family with newly skeptical eyes,
wondering if they had kept quiet on mainstream social media for fear of
being attacked.

Meanwhile on Reddit, a community of diehard Trump supporters had swelled to
some 270,000 subscribers—now nearly 380,000—sharing memes, discussing their
fervor for Trump and dislike of Clinton, and, yes, penning some loosely
coded bigotry under the shelter of anonymity. There, legions of Trump
supporters felt free to express their opinions. But a liberal voter who
didn’t know to visit /r/The_Donald might never see those points of view.
That kind of disconnect raised a question in the mind of Secret’s former
CEO, David Byttow: Would the world look notably different to us if the
people in our social networks didn’t feel like they had to censor their
thoughts?

The original Secret app, which launched in early 2014, allowed users to
post anonymously and view anonymous posts from their friends, in what
Byttow envisioned as the “anti-Facebook, where you can actually say shit
that represents your most authentic self, as opposed to your best self.”

At their height, Secret and similarly anonymous apps like Yik Yak and
Whisper were hailed as the future of social media — an antidote to the
real-name controversies on Facebook and the highly polished, hyper-curated
look of Instagram. Anonymous apps harkened back to the bare-bones message
boards that brought early internet culture to life, but reinvented them for
the social network age. Yet despite a collective $200 million in funding,
anonymity has remained a kind of kryptonite for social apps. The reason is
simple: An online social network serves one purpose, to connect people.
Without names attached, people’s words become either mean — or meaningless.

When they first showed up, identity-free social media apps were a viral
hit—including on my own college campus. For most of my time at college,
anonymous discussion was limited to the “anonymous confessions board,” a
rudimentary forum moderated by, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, a single
student. The ACB wasn’t wildly popular, and it carried a certain stigma; it
was the kind of site you’d delete from your “top sites” to avoid getting
looks from your neighbors in the library. Once, I used it to find a lost
coat.

Then in the fall of 2014, Yik Yak took off — and the ACB went quiet.
Suddenly, it seemed like every student was on the app, filling it with
snarky one-liners, observations, party promotions, and, at times, malicious
gossip. My friends and I gleefully texted each other screenshots when one
of our Yaks made it onto the “hot” page and earned hundreds of upvotes. It
was the perfect procrastination tool — the ACB gone mainstream, and gussied
up with a slick design. Yik Yak, of course, had even loftier ambitions,
envisioning itself as the Twitter of the younger generation.

Meanwhile Secret exploded in its own right, gaining notoriety as a hub of
insidery, Silicon Valley gossip — the kind of place where one might go to
spread rumors of an Evernote acquisition, or discuss which startups use
marijuana as an interview intimidation tactic. Secret and Yik Yak grew
quickly, raising $35 million and $73.5 million respectively in their first
seven months. They were highly addictive: Byttow says that to this day,
people tell him they would compulsively delete and reinstall Secret, their
desire to stop wasting hours on the app at war with their FOMO. He hoped to
build Secret into a genuine rival to Instagram and Facebook, and for a time
it seemed that his dream might come true: After scoring its first taste of
virality in its birthplace of Silicon Valley, Secret went on to snag the #1
app store download spot in eight countries.

[snip]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>


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http://www.thedailysheeple.com/new-york-scraps-literacy-test-for-teachers-after-minorities-fail-to-pass-it_032017



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