We are encouraged to build platforms rather than software. We are encouraged to do things that wont scale.
The platform concept is great, but where do you start with that?
Archives for August 2014
“One thing I’ve learned from my friends in the street art community is to always document your work. It’s such a temporary form of art.”
— thinkITEM. Watch the talk.
“One thing I’ve learned from my friends in the street art community is to always document your work. It’s such a temporary form of art.”
— thinkITEM. Watch the talk.
This is why I hack Reddit posts
Vice just posted this: Reddit’s Favorite Scientist Just Got Banned for Cheating the Site (link: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/reddits-favorite-scientist-just-got-banned-for-cheating-the-site)
A hacker news commenter explained why this is important.
Visibility on Reddit is essentially predicated on early votes. Get a few upvotes and even mediocre comments will often remain at the top due to momentum. Less than -4 and it’s doomed to oblivion (ie. downvote the competition).
One of the most popular linked sites on reddit (quickmeme) got to where it was with only a few strategically placed votes for each link, and it took ages for them to be found out and similarly banned: http://www.dailydot.com/business/reddit-quickmeme-banned-mil…
More broadly, the algorithm reddit uses is not only known wrong/buggy:
http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-e… but also generally defective:
http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/vqy9y/dear_circ…
It’s possible HN suffers from the same flaw (initial sort and feedback loop from such) since it’s the natural (naive) way to produce such algorithms. The machine can’t tell if it’s quality content or just easy to upvote, and the latter is more common.
TL;DR: Visibility == early votes from people who have no interest in depth and don’t read the articles anyway.
Manipulating social media follows
I wrote about using IFTTT to generate a rich stream of twitter followers. Soon after, I wrote about how I was contacted about the quantity of posts I had on the same account.
The latter was important because I saw a trend in unfollows, which was easily explained by the comment. My account was firehosing #graffiti and #streetart posts every 15 minutes. This often resulted in dominating my followers’ feeds.
As a solution, I disabled the high quantity IFTTT recipes. Last week, I watched as my account got less than 5 follows, while occasionally posting content. I felt like the account stagnated.
Yesterday, I turned on the IFTTT recipes that produced high quantity of posts. Immediately, I noticed a different in engagement. Over the day, I had over 60 follows and retweets.
I decided I can not curate the te tweeted content and expect to get the same benefit. Instead, I can mitigate the negative effects. I’m doing this by disabling my recipes during my day time, so as not to overwhelm followers who are in my timezone.
This has some obvious issues, but I believe it may actually make a noticeable difference. If I can accumulate followers and minimize the rate of unfollows, I succeeded.
4 ways to get 20 retweets or 4 ways to finish Gary’s 20 retweet/reblog assignment
Use someone else’s content – it doesn’t need to be original. Find someone will a strong social following on a social networking service and repost their content on another service using lots of tags.
Ex. Find a popular artist and tweet their picture. Find a quote and overlay it on a picture to share on tumblr.
Use instantly gratifying visuals – use images that inform. Find or make something that people are surprised to learn and proud to share.
Ex. Infographics or “before and after” pictures.
Play both sides of an argument – ask for your audience to engage. Present a black or white situation to your audience and ask for an answer through engagement.
Ex. RT If you love the weather. RT if you hate the weather.
Just ask. Tell your friends and DM people to repost your content. Individually ask people in exchange for something. Or just ask them for a arbitrary favor.
Ex. I’ll give you a cookie if you retweet this. I need you to retweet this, or I will fail my class.