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by Towaway69 563 days ago
page 27

> Zuckerbergs's Law: The amount each person shares doubles each year.

I initially thought wealth, ideas and love was meant but no ... it's just data.

4 comments

For a moment I read that "the amount of each person's shares doubles each year"
What I find interesting about this "law" is that for a while it seemed true, but things seem to have reached some kind of peak for some of us, and nowadays, I rather share very little online.
People like to look at the start of the sigmoid and extrapolate.
..because it reinforces what Wall St. wants to hear.
Why would you think it was anything BUT data?
Before we started using "share" to mean "post" or "upload", and long before it meant "rent", it meant other things. Now it's so normal that we don't even think of how that word is a particular framing of those activities.
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I’m quite confident this would have been based on metadata collected by Facebook from its user activity. The company has been extremely analytical about its own growth, and id be surprised if this wasn’t a conclusion from an in-house data scientist that just got Zuckerberg’s name stamped on it.
I looked up "psychohistory" and while the definition makes sense, I don't really understand what you mean by this comment.
It just sounds vaguely prophetic like he thinks he knows how every person will behave for the foreseeable future.

But I was referring to the fictional version from the Foundation series, not the apparently real (pseudo-)science that I didn’t know existed.

While I’m sure Facebook had data to roughly justify this, just like Moores Law, I’m sure this is equal parts back-projection as prophetic declaration of intent.

For Facebook, they needed the cultural expectation to be ever-increasing data sharing. They (along with other companies) facilitated the creation of tools to share ever-increasing amounts of data.

I guess this presupposes that people’s appetite for sharing data is unlimited, they just need the tools?
That quote is from ~2012. I’d say it’s held up pretty well in the following decade.
Has it? So we’ve shared 1000x more in 2022 than in 2012, with the amount doubling every year?