I can never take seriously someone explaining something in detail over a long series of tweets. What ever happened to personal websites for god's sake?
Let me summarize it for you, since it's worth taking seriously:
1) Facebook has a view into the opinions and behaviors of the people that use it. Hopefully this statement is not controversial.
2) Facebook also has the ability to influence those opinions and behaviors, by controlling what you see when you use it. This statement may have been controversial at some point, but experiments have been run (by Facebook!) that demonstrate this is true.
Put the two together and you have a feedback loop that can be optimized to produce a particular set of opinions and behaviors. To pick an extreme (and extremely obvious) case, if Facebook decides it needs to goose revenue, one way to do that would be to selectively filter in the posts (both ads and non-ads) that reinforce purchasing things through Facebook ads.
> The impact is also diminished by the fact that they're complaining about the idea of a powerful social media empire on Twitter.
Not really, if twitter is a good platform for him to get his message out, I'm all for it.
I also like the irony of using social media platforms to spread ideas that could hasten their downfall. Its sort of like in some martial arts where you exploit the weight and strength of your opponent to defeat them.
If you're arguing against social media, social media reaches the exact people you most need to reach.
do they have this but for forum email? I really want my emails from forums, groups and reflectors to look and feel like reddit's threaded replies, instead it's a disorganized mess and always has been for literally 20 years.
The advantage of a tweetstorm is that readers can like/retweet individual paragraphs. This high-granularity feedback can be surprisingly useful data to the writer.
On the other hand, it encourages writers to make every individual paragraph as inflammatory as possible (I've never once read a quality newspaper article with "Let that sink in" in it), wilfully encourages paragraphs to be taken out of context, and means that 'readers' get a half-baked thought from the middle of an article dumped in their newstream. This is entirely not how media was meant to be consumed.
I've never sold anyone's Neocities data. I wouldn't even know how to (and nobody's asked anyways). We get paid by supporter accounts and there's really no reason to change that. It works well for everybody and the relationships are clear.
1) Facebook has a view into the opinions and behaviors of the people that use it. Hopefully this statement is not controversial.
2) Facebook also has the ability to influence those opinions and behaviors, by controlling what you see when you use it. This statement may have been controversial at some point, but experiments have been run (by Facebook!) that demonstrate this is true.
Put the two together and you have a feedback loop that can be optimized to produce a particular set of opinions and behaviors. To pick an extreme (and extremely obvious) case, if Facebook decides it needs to goose revenue, one way to do that would be to selectively filter in the posts (both ads and non-ads) that reinforce purchasing things through Facebook ads.