Being decent with only one of the three, I’ve seen some pretty weird things these past two weeks. For one, SFK begins today, and I wish I could push this post without a proper connection. Second, the Epitech pedagogical staff is coming and going like spring rains and I have no idea why. The current DPR doesn’t seem that bad, but we’ll see. At the very least, there’s a focus on maintaining what currently exists, rather than shoving up some random *.js and trying to fix problems with that…

My yearly nose-periods have recently started, and I’d like to explain to everyone that it’s (a) not a problem, (b) even if it were, it’s only mine and nothing relevant to you, and (c) of course I didn’t go to the doctor about the same issue for seven years straight! How come I never thought about that?
Sometimes I feel like this is all either a script to look concerned (and I feel I’ve started doing this too) or it falls into the ‘small talk’ bucket.

Whatever the reason, it seems that almost everyone is happier or less surprised when told that the doctor told me it’s harmless than when I just tell them the same thing without the ‘doctor’ reference, and based on what information I explicitly give, they might as well be a Doctor of Philosophy.

I don’t seem to shake off this idea that people (me included, probably) give more credibility to claims when giving a half-assed reference, which for all intents and purposes can easily be a lie, than when showing the full path to the source. Long story short, this kind of trust scares me, not about friendships and other interactions where communication itself is more important than the content being discussed, but in cases where a ‘How did you learn this?’ is a crucial question, such as any case when I’m in goddamn school trying to goddamn learn.

I’ve seen this thing happen with social media coverage of events and other grassroots advertising, both of which seem more effective when shared by people in some kind of relationship (romantic, work, friendship, anything beyond ‘acquaintance’). I think I understand that this happens in order to be a bit more efficient by offloading some of the research and fact checking to our peers, yet when everyone does this, there’s not much actual checking going on.

Let’s hypothesize I share some article somewhere. Looking at the frequency at which I post, which for our case would be seldom, I would either shoot up into the beginning of my friends’ or followers’ feed, if the platform has some form of frecency calculation in its algorithm (a la Reddit), or it would never show up. From what I know thus far, the vast majority follows the first route. Now let’s look at the possible options by reading the title (of course nobody reads the article if the title doesn’t pique their interests or clash with their core ideas and beliefs in an argumentative manner – /s just in case). Either it is a technically-focused piece of information, news about something relevant to me, a piece of art, or something I find genuinely interesting and that is unrelated to my interests.

If there’s a compelling reason to spend time, the currency of the twenty-first century, on the work at hand, then there’s one more click on my post, which means more probable future clicks. Disregarding factors such as time of posting, demographics, age and culture, and the fact that it may be just another old-fashioned rickroll, chances are it will do pretty well, no matter how much the clicker learned or enjoyed, since, for all that matters to the platform, the link was clicked, therefore it was interesting. What would cut down on the spam generated this way is either

  • a manual moderation system (not feasible for platforms with personal spaces, sort of like the Facebook wall),
  • a reporting system
    • paired with the moderation system (most common)
    • or automated (a la Youtube), or
  • tracking time spent on the hyperlink, either
    • via in-house tracker scripts that look at the time between the click and returning to the platform site/app
    • or with trackers on the other site (a la Facebook and G+ “share” “buttons”)
  • “democratic” voting
    • with positive or negative reactions (HN, Reddit, etc., forums)
    • positive-only (old FB likes, retweets)
    • or something else

Quite a bit of those are in use, huh?

While quite efficient, this kind of “thought outsourcing” is dangerous, for that thought is what leads our actions, and frankly, we’re all still glorified monkeys. Once is happenstance, two is circumstance, twenty is a tragedy, and a million is statistics.

But anyway, how was your day?