Interesting People mailing list archives
Re These Failed Apps Discovered a Hidden Rule of the Web
From: "Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:05:55 +0000
---------- 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. 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