Has anyone actually used this? It was posted to HN the other day and didn't not seem to receive positive feedback.
Most of the users profiles I have clicked on seem pretty boring. I fail to see what is so attractive about it.
I definitely am taking the owners claim of "31,000 requests an hour" with a grain of salt.
Honestly, does the average person even care about being advertised to, or having their data mined? I have never heard anyone outside of tech circles even talk about it.
The people I talk to outside of tech circles care very muhc about privacy and having their data sold. But it's one dimensional to think about the average person when talking about Ello, or any other service. Why can't Ello just be a service for the not-average people who do care about their privacy?
I've had the opposite experience. The only reason anyone I know has signed up for Ello outside of the tech world is because they saw someone else sign up and don't want to miss out on something potentially cool. That's it.
I think it is very hard to have a social network that appeals to a limited subset but to have enough of any one collection of people to make communicating on there worth their time.
Just have a look at Google+, millions of people gave that a try but in the end only a very limited number of those formed enough connections to justify primarily sharing things on there.
The question then really is, if there is enough of these niche groups that will provide enough user retention to make the economics work. There has been plenty of things written regarding app development and the difficulties in supporting recurring costs with one time fees. I suspect you would need a pretty significant userbase to support even a small team on cheap one time feature purchases.
It's worth noting that G+ also chased a significant chunk of early adopters away when they added that "legal names only" policy. It's been rescinded but the damage has been done.
I got the impression that the people who cared about the real names policy was a pretty niche (although a quite active group) compared with the millions that the service really needed to attract to hit the mainstream and seriously compete head on with Facebook/ Twitter.
I may be biased by being in a subculture that likes to use obviously-not-real handles on the net (furries) - but seriously, like half my Livejournal circles migrated to G+ when it started because they were sick of where that was going, and then scattered elsewhere when Google said REAL NAMES ONLY.
This was a pretty connected set of early adopters moving at once. Would things have been different if Google had quickly relented and said "okay, sure, if you wanna be Fuzzybutt Wolftaur on G+, go for it"? I dunno. But chasing them away, along with all the other people with scarier reasons to want to avoid using their real name, sure didn't help.
1. It's beautiful, which they had to add because they knew just saying "we won't sell your data" would not go far enough. They needed that extra edge. In my humble opinion, it's actually quite ugly, so I find it pretty funny they are advertising this as a selling point.
2. They don't sell your data. We all know this is flawed because there is no promise this won't happen in the future, and to boot MOST normal people do not care about this.
Their initial launch had the right elements that allowed it to go viral and non-technical people started signing up. I would LOVE to see some stats from the Ello team around retention, as I am willing to bet a large sum of money that stat is really bad.
They should escrow a few million in a bank somewhere, and if the data has been deemed to be sold to anyone (judged by a third-party neutral arbitrator), the money is donated to the EFF. Then we'll see who is really serious about their promises.
31k/hr is < 9/s, and yet apparently it's been having issues scaling. Other social networks have started with similar ambitions of never showing ads, gotten investors and punt on monetization as they "perfect the product". If they don't collapse, they either go freemium and segment the userbase or provide all users the same features and support this by showing ads.
It's a nice idea but no for-profit has figured it out yet. Diaspora accomplishes it but lacks the most valuable asset a social network could have, which is a large userbase.
Yes, I've got an account there. For me, the early days of a social network are often very enjoyable -- lots of interesting people trying things out. The UI's not my favorite style and is a bit quirky but you can certainly have good conversations (at least on a computer; the mobile interface needs work).
As for what's attractive about it: it's not Facebook. People are ready for something different. I noticed more and more people talking about time spent on Facebook the way they talk about time watching bad TV or eating junk food ... plus, in my experience, most people really do find Facebook's ads irritating. Plus for a chunk of people, the "real names" issue is a big deal; and this follows the stuff about Facebook's emotional manipulation experiments.
Of course that doesn't mean that Ello's the answer to what people are hoping for; it's too early to tell how successful it will be. But I certainly believe they were getting 31,000 requests for invites an hour. Even if they were at level for 3 days straight at that level is only 2 million people -- a tiny portion of Facebook's english-speaking population.
From my observation it is only an issue, when they surface a new feature or start doing something that at first seems creepy. But then people adjust to it and think nothing of it.
Earlier last week, Ello was blowing up all over my Facebook feed. Mostly seemed to be a crowd that were tech-savvy enough to see the evil of Facebook's ways, but not knowledgeable enough to know that Ello is the exact same thing.
I've got my own account (https://ello.co/dredmorbius), and actually rather like the asthetic (though I've styled it a bit as I'm wont to do). The bones are _vastly_ better than G+, and a number of the features (Shift+[015] UI toggles) are actually pretty good.
A lot of bits are breaking, falling off, getting fixed, and getting added, so it's rather much in flux.
The clue factor is high, though one of my first observations is that one of the adventures of new discussion sites is rediscovering all the people you'd found annoying elsewhere and blocked.
It shines in some areas, lacks in others, the privacy, ads, and funding questions are very much open, but I think it's got a good start.
Andy Baio wrote a small piece exploring Ello's funding and hypothesizing that their bluster about not selling your data/running ads is worth about as much as Livejournal's was: https://ello.co/waxpancake/post/oy73kFfDdhOPh8Jv9z9pFA
Yeah one of the problems with Ello is that there's no real guarantee that they won't eventually start selling/mining/advertizing or that they won't be bought by a company that will.
I can't help but think of the arrested development scene. "Dozens, there are dozens of us!" It's like the cool party, if everyone goes it's like Project X, if only a few go, it's not a party. I want what Facebook used to be, no bs, just friends.
"We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life."
So... what if some of my "connecting" and "creating" is viewed by some as deception or coercion? Eye of the beholder and all that...
Certainly FB is a lot of data mining to sell ads, but I also see plenty of people connecting with family, creating groups and communities and communicating and growing... and they didn't need some monospaced hipsterific platform to do it.
Reprising and modifying an old comment from another account:
The latest trends in advertising has moved beyond 'behavioral' targeted advertising, where a user is served specific content because they may have browsed something similar in the past.
The new trend is to use social networking models to discover 'influencers' in social groups and use those people's reputations to recommend products to other people. The diagrams (a) and (b) on page nine of the following research paper is a crude example: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.4327v1.pdf
Lindex 'Enterprise SEO Software' has this to say: "Our latest innovation Linkdex Networks enables you to visualise and analyse these groups of relevant influencers. The objective is to enable digital marketers to gradually identify the right personalities and build relationships with them, spreading along those networks for maximum exposure.
If someone within your network has lots of relationships pointing to them you know that they are perceived as trustworthy sources. The aim is to find influencers who are passionate on a niche topic, have strong relationships with the group and are receptive to new ideas with plenty of reach." [1]
It's on fire everywhere in marketing and advertising and there are lots of variations being tried and tested at the moment, and also publicly funded research at universities [2]. Marketers will drop prices online when they detect influencers, in an attempt to encourage them to speak highly of their product to their friends and family (who will need to buy at full price). The Marketing Science Institute has a whole section dedicated to social networks and influencing them [3][4].
Just searching for the term "social contagion advertising" or "advertising influencers" reveals media research arms with nifty tables that map out ways of influencing social groups by targeting information strategically at certain members. For example you can get people to change their view of the "legitimacy of an item" by "encourag[ing] influential targets to adopt the item" or create the idea of a "status disadvantage of not adopting" by "Emphasiz[ing] activities of close connections in a social network to influence behavior". [5]
Perhaps a side note, but the DoD "MINERVA initiative" [6] studies social contagion strategies to track, create or lessen political instability in other countries (although the initiative studies a lot of other things too). The USAID Cuban Twitter project sought to (and nearly succeeded in) creating mass unrest by appearing to be a grassroots movement on Twitter in Cuba seeking the overthrow of the government. Snowden documents and leaked HB Gary memos show that both the NSA and GCHQ engage in astroturfing and social media manipulation [7][8][9]. The giant meta-data graph created by the NSA is also particularly valuable for 'influencer' and 'social contagion' analysis (leaks showed they do use it to understand internal chain-of-command and organization structure for target selection). You can bet - although direct proof is forthcoming - that other countries have these capabilities, or analogues to them, for targetting American and NATO news and social feeds.
These sorts of forces are abound on social media websites, as can be seen in the recent Wired article "I liked everything I saw on Facebook for two days" [10]. What's more, the role that social media has begun to play in political races is incredible. If you have the time and interest, look up the capabilities of incumbent Obama's "The Cave" for social media evangelism and tracking. Real time social estimates of support across dozens of major social media platforms with the ability to influence and target any of them at will. Interns scrambling to be "first to post" on online discussions in news media articles.
The creepy thing is that it's more than just shills. You can confront a shill. Information can be targeted to individual and to groups of people through multiple fronts in tandem with word of mouth. It wouldn't be a problem except that you can create consensus with the appearance of consensus [1].
If it achieves geopolitical policy goals or helps the bottom line, why wouldn't you?
Wow. I guess I'm out of date with state of the art after all...
Your post reminded me of an excellent passage from Yvain's recent post[0] (it's long, but it is a goldmine).
The point is – imagine a country full of bioweapon labs, where people toil day and night to invent new infectious agents. The existence of these labs, and their right to throw whatever they develop in the water supply is protected by law. And the country is also linked by the world’s most perfect mass transit system that every single person uses every day, so that any new pathogen can spread to the entire country instantaneously. You’d expect things to start going bad for that city pretty quickly.
Well, we have about a zillion think tanks researching new and better forms of propaganda. And we have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. And we have the Internet. So we’re pretty much screwed.
No, because the human immune system can learn to defend against propaganda. Many of the unfair advantages of propaganda arise from nominal invisibility when masquerading as healthy sensory input.
Take away that cover and it's much cheaper to audit and firewall hostile media, using exactly the same epidimiological and social network analysis techniques that can spread parasites and propaganda. The technology works in both directions, see Palantir and http://www.insna.org/socnet.html
> No, because the human immune system can learn to defend against propaganda.
Not only after a lot of damage has already been done.
Also keep in mind that they're not blindly evolving propaganda, they are engineering it. All that work goes to directly optimize propaganda to be effective and hard to counter. So by very definition, a good propaganda by their standards is the one you can't defend against.
Propaganda (and immune responses) have been co-evolving for as long as recorded history. The difference now is that we have free access via archive.org to much of the offensive and defensive literature prior to 1920s, mostly categorized under "occult" and "religion". Newer defensive material can be found via web search, youtube, etc. Offensive material is everywhere.
The ultimate form of propaganda is to convince the target that resistance is futile. It's not. The mere thought of resistance begins to alter the outcome. The best techniques have little to do with technology, e.g. watch "The Prisoner" UK TV series from the 1960's, much of which remains relevant to modern media, http://www.crackle.com/c/the-prisoner
> Propaganda (and immune responses) have been co-evolving for as long as recorded history.
Well of course, but the point is, immune response is always late to the party - in many cases only after we've tallied the body count and scared the living shit out of the next generation.
The other thing is, in case of immune system, we have the benefit of it working in parallel, not requiring to expend cognitive resources on it. In case of propaganda, we already have too much to think about. We've already reached the level where you can craft a message that will sound plausible but be impossible to fact-check for an average person (myself included). That is, we can make people believe anything; the main problem that is being worked on is how to make them all believe the same thing and to acquire that belief fast enough.
Only if readers rely purely on words. It's more efficient to triage by social identity, then decide whether to interpret words.
Here's a defensive browser extension that many HN readers could build: right-click on a username gives a list of user-defined categories and colors. Putting a name in a category/color will cause that name to be colorized on all future posts. Whitelist/blacklist of partisans or astroturfers, reducing cost of future triage. Since the list is local and the categories are unique to each person, it can't be manipulated. I've used this type of extension in another online community, it worked well.
Another fun project: sentiment analysis on HN posts, cross-referencing article subjects and company names with sentiment and timezone.
> Here's a defensive browser extension that many HN readers could build: right-click on a username gives a list of user-defined categories and colors. Putting a name in a category/color will cause that name to be colorized on all future posts.
I actually thought a bit about that, I really want to have such feature. I'm about to start writing myself a tool for browsing HN from my favourite editor, and on my TODO list is a feature for "taking notes about users". I didn't think about it as a counter-propaganda device though - I just felt that being able to easily take and recall notes about what a particular user seems to know well about, what he/she likes, where he/she works, etc. would help string more interesting and constructive conversations.
> Another fun project: sentiment analysis on HN posts, cross-referencing article subjects and company names with sentiment and timezone.
Once you have a whitelist/blacklist, you can filter HN via Algolia to see all stories where at least N interesting people have commented, almost a Twitter "follow" for HN.
I wish for an augmented browser, where an analysis app is linked to the browser by an extension. The extension sends URLs and text to the local analysis app, which could generate a hotkeyed overlay report within the page.
> The difference now is that we have free access via archive.org to much of the offensive and defensive literature prior to 1920s, mostly categorized under "occult" and "religion".
This may be more confusing than helpful, but here goes. As a tech person, my comments may offend professional historians :) Recorded history includes many transitions/translations of media, including:
Oral stories within a culture
Oral stories about distant cultures, by travelers
Written records of oral stories (e.g. "Aesop's" Fables)
Language translations (Egyptian, Greek, Latin, European, English)
Hand-written manuscripts
Printed books
Reprinted books
For a work to be migrated forward in history required:
(a) access to the original
(b) literacy in old & new formats
(c) financial resources & motivation
(d) political balancing acts with the rulers/censors of the period.
In the 17th century, Roger L'Estrange (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_L%27Estrange) was a publisher of propaganda in favor of Charles II, gained the authority to suppress (up to execution of the writer) seditious books (i.e. competing propaganda), and had licensing/publication veto over all books. Later in life, he would compile Aesop's fables and was allowed to print "problematic" fables by annotating them with apologetic commentary, http://bestlatin.blogspot.com/2011/09/sir-roger-lestrange-ae...
Fast-forwarding four centuries, R.A. Lafferty (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R._A._Lafferty), was an engineer and Catholic who took up scifi/fantasy writing in the 1960s at the age 45. He could read all languages of the Latin, German, and Slavic families, plus Gaelic and Greek. His personal library was about 8000 books, he wrote 29 novels and 225 short stories. His writing is a bit of an acquired taste, but often encapsulates multiple time periods of history. Don Webb, writing about Lafferty, http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=1110
---
"Lafferty makes use of dead language words to play
upon our collective unconscious ... Lafferty's use of Greek, Latin, Irish, and Hebrew tags is not merely demonstration of his
vast erudition. It is a technique used by magicians for
centuries to give their spells potency. Whereas he directs
most of his narrative at our conscious—using simple
daytime language—he also directs the same tale at our
unconscious achieving a form of meta-communication.
... Lafferty plays upon our subconscious in another
way—the use of rhythm. Yevgeny Zamyatin developed
the concept of a "prose foot" as a way of internal
pacing of fiction. He saw it as a kind of rhythmic device
that by causing the reader to remember an earlier part
of the narrative became a force for a choral (as in
pertaining to choruses) cohesion that bound the story
together in a different way than plot mechanics."
---
Because he could read so many languages, Lafferty was able to integrate primary source material, works which didn't migrate forward, today unavailable to readers who can't read Latin, Greek, etc. A recent article on Lafferty, http://www.theguardian.com/...
I'm not in the beta program so from the outside is hard to judge. That said I find it very difficult that can even touch twitter or facebook. It reminds me a bit of app.net and ghost.org
However is impressive to me how much exposure ello is getting every day, don't get me wrong but right now I can't see why. Feel free to tell me that's I'm wrong, I'm really interested.
I wish them all the best but more importantly that this "hype" will last
Yep, that's the whole point. Judging from the profiles shown seems like a microblog. App.net was another twitter like tool that aimed in not selling your data and not showing ads.
I think Diaspora happened at the wrong time. ello has a relatable "story" that people like and at this point pretty much everyone knows about privacy problems. I'm not saying ello is a better idea than Diaspora, I just think ello is making more sense to the average person right now than Diaspora ever did.
What is so "beautiful" about this? Honest question.
1) So much dead real estate.
2) The buttons the same as input fields. Only difference is color but there's no distinguishing otherwise.
3) Strange choice of font. Seems like they're going for a typewriter feel, but I'm not sure how that's useful for a website. My opinion of course, but I don't really see the aesthetic appeal of a typewriter look here.
The design is absolutely awful. I would be very surprised to learn that any of these designers are actually familiar with UX design, let alone web design. I'm not an evangelist of typical web design these days - I think there's often too much emphasis on graphics. It looks nice, but it's exactly useful - BUT, it's still much better than this. This seems to be.. hmm.. a boring concoction of void space and meaningless alternatives to well known design patterns. But maybe that's what it's got going for it. Medium is a good example of Ello's design done right; you can focus on content and make text look beautiful - but it's not easy and you probably won't accomplish it with a generic monospace font (not hating the typewriter look, but it's poorly executed).
The real problem I see with Ello from a business perspective is that they don't have one. Where's the business? You're not selling ads, you're not selling your users information, they aren't buying anything (and won't) - where will the money come from?
Yeah I saw that. I don't think that's going to work. People are really used to not paying for things, unfortunately. Also - your target demographic as a social network is usually young people from 13-21, and we don't have a payment solution for most of those users. I'm gonna have a hard time justifying the credit card purchase to my parents if I'm 14 years old. "What's it for?" "So I can reblog on my Ello" "Sorry, what? No."
Words, words, words. How many times a start-up pledges something (like, being there to actually solve a problem for users) only to get to "an exit" and disappear, selling on shutting down the product? Even if they really believe what they say (for which their cliché-laden copy is a negative evidence in my book), investors will want their returns. I don't think they're gonna pull this off with micropayments.
I need more than a pledge to start believing in a VC-backed startup.
Maybe "free" has become too expensive. As the technology needed to provide a service gets cheaper, the revenue needed to support it drops. The ad density ought to drop too, but it doesn't. That
creates a vulnerability for "free" social services. They can be undercut on user attention cost.
What does it really cost to run a social network? $5/user/month? $1/user/month? If you could put it on your phone bill, would you notice?
As for "The fact is nobody has ever made a significant move away from any internet provider because of advertising or data", remember Myspace. They were #1 once. Their ad density got too high and people got fed up and left.
> What does it really cost to run a social network? $5/user/month? $1/user/month?
More than ${what parents will let their kid spend on the Internet}, which is usually > $0. The problem with non-free Internet is that it quickly gets inaccessible to those without credit cards.
It looks like Ello's claim is that the problems with social networks revolve around privacy and data mining. Personally, those things aren't nearly my primary issue - my main frustration with social media is the type of content it encourages people to share, resulting in (in my experience) a platform built primarily for expressions of vanity.
For me, until that changes, social media primarily exists as a personal communication mechanism via messages. In that case the network effect dominates all other features.
I saw a lot of hype about Ello in the Hackathon Hackers facebook group. This may be against the typical positive feedback mentality of HN, but it kinda seems like a huge circle, a product of the tech bubble enthusiasm, as no one else anywhere has mentioned it (except on Hacker News that one time).
In fact, I suspect the "31,000 invites" was the result of one post on the Facebook group involving an exploit that used dictionary attacks to generate invites for someone's account, which was quickly used by several people, but eventually taken down, and is not their average traffic.
I suspect this because my personal opinion, my friends' opinions, and it appears quite a number of Hacker News peoples opinions, while anecdotal, seem to indicate that Ello is quite lackluster, and I find it hard to believe that many people would want to try a social media platform that:
a) has none of their friends on it yet
b) doesn't look great
c) appeals to you through things you typically don't care about ("ads", "data", "privacy")
Ello is living proof of the importance of a story. You see, Ello wasn't just built, it was built "by artists" "frustrated" with the "establishment". There you go! Instant story, instant success.
This. Is there really this much funding out there? Here I am trying to make useful things when all I need to do is collect users in some low stakes thing.
More focused development, for starters. Raising capital and getting features built is ... difficult.
Also a compelling story and userbase. There are people on Ello who aren't on Diaspora (I'm on both) despite the latter having been around for quite a while now.
Both lack search, which ... kind of sucks.
What would be really cool is if Ello might figure out a way to talk with Diaspora, essentially becoming a large node of it (or Friendica, or whatever).
77 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadMost of the users profiles I have clicked on seem pretty boring. I fail to see what is so attractive about it.
I definitely am taking the owners claim of "31,000 requests an hour" with a grain of salt.
Honestly, does the average person even care about being advertised to, or having their data mined? I have never heard anyone outside of tech circles even talk about it.
But I do know a bunch of people who value their privacy. They just don't know what they can do about it.
Just have a look at Google+, millions of people gave that a try but in the end only a very limited number of those formed enough connections to justify primarily sharing things on there.
The question then really is, if there is enough of these niche groups that will provide enough user retention to make the economics work. There has been plenty of things written regarding app development and the difficulties in supporting recurring costs with one time fees. I suspect you would need a pretty significant userbase to support even a small team on cheap one time feature purchases.
This was a pretty connected set of early adopters moving at once. Would things have been different if Google had quickly relented and said "okay, sure, if you wanna be Fuzzybutt Wolftaur on G+, go for it"? I dunno. But chasing them away, along with all the other people with scarier reasons to want to avoid using their real name, sure didn't help.
1. It's beautiful, which they had to add because they knew just saying "we won't sell your data" would not go far enough. They needed that extra edge. In my humble opinion, it's actually quite ugly, so I find it pretty funny they are advertising this as a selling point.
2. They don't sell your data. We all know this is flawed because there is no promise this won't happen in the future, and to boot MOST normal people do not care about this.
Their initial launch had the right elements that allowed it to go viral and non-technical people started signing up. I would LOVE to see some stats from the Ello team around retention, as I am willing to bet a large sum of money that stat is really bad.
https://aralbalkan.com/notes/ello-goodbye/
It's a nice idea but no for-profit has figured it out yet. Diaspora accomplishes it but lacks the most valuable asset a social network could have, which is a large userbase.
As for what's attractive about it: it's not Facebook. People are ready for something different. I noticed more and more people talking about time spent on Facebook the way they talk about time watching bad TV or eating junk food ... plus, in my experience, most people really do find Facebook's ads irritating. Plus for a chunk of people, the "real names" issue is a big deal; and this follows the stuff about Facebook's emotional manipulation experiments.
Of course that doesn't mean that Ello's the answer to what people are hoping for; it's too early to tell how successful it will be. But I certainly believe they were getting 31,000 requests for invites an hour. Even if they were at level for 3 days straight at that level is only 2 million people -- a tiny portion of Facebook's english-speaking population.
A lot of bits are breaking, falling off, getting fixed, and getting added, so it's rather much in flux.
The clue factor is high, though one of my first observations is that one of the adventures of new discussion sites is rediscovering all the people you'd found annoying elsewhere and blocked.
It shines in some areas, lacks in others, the privacy, ads, and funding questions are very much open, but I think it's got a good start.
Diaspora had the right philosophy.
So... what if some of my "connecting" and "creating" is viewed by some as deception or coercion? Eye of the beholder and all that...
Certainly FB is a lot of data mining to sell ads, but I also see plenty of people connecting with family, creating groups and communities and communicating and growing... and they didn't need some monospaced hipsterific platform to do it.
The latest trends in advertising has moved beyond 'behavioral' targeted advertising, where a user is served specific content because they may have browsed something similar in the past.
The new trend is to use social networking models to discover 'influencers' in social groups and use those people's reputations to recommend products to other people. The diagrams (a) and (b) on page nine of the following research paper is a crude example: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.4327v1.pdf
Lindex 'Enterprise SEO Software' has this to say: "Our latest innovation Linkdex Networks enables you to visualise and analyse these groups of relevant influencers. The objective is to enable digital marketers to gradually identify the right personalities and build relationships with them, spreading along those networks for maximum exposure. If someone within your network has lots of relationships pointing to them you know that they are perceived as trustworthy sources. The aim is to find influencers who are passionate on a niche topic, have strong relationships with the group and are receptive to new ideas with plenty of reach." [1]
It's on fire everywhere in marketing and advertising and there are lots of variations being tried and tested at the moment, and also publicly funded research at universities [2]. Marketers will drop prices online when they detect influencers, in an attempt to encourage them to speak highly of their product to their friends and family (who will need to buy at full price). The Marketing Science Institute has a whole section dedicated to social networks and influencing them [3][4].
Just searching for the term "social contagion advertising" or "advertising influencers" reveals media research arms with nifty tables that map out ways of influencing social groups by targeting information strategically at certain members. For example you can get people to change their view of the "legitimacy of an item" by "encourag[ing] influential targets to adopt the item" or create the idea of a "status disadvantage of not adopting" by "Emphasiz[ing] activities of close connections in a social network to influence behavior". [5]
Perhaps a side note, but the DoD "MINERVA initiative" [6] studies social contagion strategies to track, create or lessen political instability in other countries (although the initiative studies a lot of other things too). The USAID Cuban Twitter project sought to (and nearly succeeded in) creating mass unrest by appearing to be a grassroots movement on Twitter in Cuba seeking the overthrow of the government. Snowden documents and leaked HB Gary memos show that both the NSA and GCHQ engage in astroturfing and social media manipulation [7][8][9]. The giant meta-data graph created by the NSA is also particularly valuable for 'influencer' and 'social contagion' analysis (leaks showed they do use it to understand internal chain-of-command and organization structure for target selection). You can bet - although direct proof is forthcoming - that other countries have these capabilities, or analogues to them, for targetting American and NATO news and social feeds.
These sorts of forces are abound on social media websites, as can be seen in the recent Wired article "I liked everything I saw on Facebook for two days" [10]. What's more, the role that social media has begun to play in political races is incredible. If you have the time and interest, look up the capabilities of incumbent Obama's "The Cave" for social media evangelism and tracking. Real time social estimates of support across dozens of major social media platforms with the ability to influence and target any of them at will. Interns scrambling to be "first to post" on online discussions in news media articles.
To be a member...
If it achieves geopolitical policy goals or helps the bottom line, why wouldn't you?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
Your post reminded me of an excellent passage from Yvain's recent post[0] (it's long, but it is a goldmine).
The point is – imagine a country full of bioweapon labs, where people toil day and night to invent new infectious agents. The existence of these labs, and their right to throw whatever they develop in the water supply is protected by law. And the country is also linked by the world’s most perfect mass transit system that every single person uses every day, so that any new pathogen can spread to the entire country instantaneously. You’d expect things to start going bad for that city pretty quickly.
Well, we have about a zillion think tanks researching new and better forms of propaganda. And we have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. And we have the Internet. So we’re pretty much screwed.
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
No, because the human immune system can learn to defend against propaganda. Many of the unfair advantages of propaganda arise from nominal invisibility when masquerading as healthy sensory input.
Take away that cover and it's much cheaper to audit and firewall hostile media, using exactly the same epidimiological and social network analysis techniques that can spread parasites and propaganda. The technology works in both directions, see Palantir and http://www.insna.org/socnet.html
Not only after a lot of damage has already been done.
Also keep in mind that they're not blindly evolving propaganda, they are engineering it. All that work goes to directly optimize propaganda to be effective and hard to counter. So by very definition, a good propaganda by their standards is the one you can't defend against.
The ultimate form of propaganda is to convince the target that resistance is futile. It's not. The mere thought of resistance begins to alter the outcome. The best techniques have little to do with technology, e.g. watch "The Prisoner" UK TV series from the 1960's, much of which remains relevant to modern media, http://www.crackle.com/c/the-prisoner
Well of course, but the point is, immune response is always late to the party - in many cases only after we've tallied the body count and scared the living shit out of the next generation.
The other thing is, in case of immune system, we have the benefit of it working in parallel, not requiring to expend cognitive resources on it. In case of propaganda, we already have too much to think about. We've already reached the level where you can craft a message that will sound plausible but be impossible to fact-check for an average person (myself included). That is, we can make people believe anything; the main problem that is being worked on is how to make them all believe the same thing and to acquire that belief fast enough.
Only if readers rely purely on words. It's more efficient to triage by social identity, then decide whether to interpret words.
Here's a defensive browser extension that many HN readers could build: right-click on a username gives a list of user-defined categories and colors. Putting a name in a category/color will cause that name to be colorized on all future posts. Whitelist/blacklist of partisans or astroturfers, reducing cost of future triage. Since the list is local and the categories are unique to each person, it can't be manipulated. I've used this type of extension in another online community, it worked well.
Another fun project: sentiment analysis on HN posts, cross-referencing article subjects and company names with sentiment and timezone.
> Here's a defensive browser extension that many HN readers could build: right-click on a username gives a list of user-defined categories and colors. Putting a name in a category/color will cause that name to be colorized on all future posts.
I actually thought a bit about that, I really want to have such feature. I'm about to start writing myself a tool for browsing HN from my favourite editor, and on my TODO list is a feature for "taking notes about users". I didn't think about it as a counter-propaganda device though - I just felt that being able to easily take and recall notes about what a particular user seems to know well about, what he/she likes, where he/she works, etc. would help string more interesting and constructive conversations.
> Another fun project: sentiment analysis on HN posts, cross-referencing article subjects and company names with sentiment and timezone.
Nice idea.
This may be useful: http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2009/infoscraps/note154...
Once you have a whitelist/blacklist, you can filter HN via Algolia to see all stories where at least N interesting people have commented, almost a Twitter "follow" for HN.
I wish for an augmented browser, where an analysis app is linked to the browser by an extension. The extension sends URLs and text to the local analysis app, which could generate a hotkeyed overlay report within the page.
Could you expand on this a little bit?
This may be more confusing than helpful, but here goes. As a tech person, my comments may offend professional historians :) Recorded history includes many transitions/translations of media, including:
For a work to be migrated forward in history required: In the 17th century, Roger L'Estrange (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_L%27Estrange) was a publisher of propaganda in favor of Charles II, gained the authority to suppress (up to execution of the writer) seditious books (i.e. competing propaganda), and had licensing/publication veto over all books. Later in life, he would compile Aesop's fables and was allowed to print "problematic" fables by annotating them with apologetic commentary, http://bestlatin.blogspot.com/2011/09/sir-roger-lestrange-ae...1913 biography of Estrange, https://archive.org/details/sirrogerlestrang00kitcuoft
Some examples of his writing, 1681-1687, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40339/40339-h/40339-h.htm
Fast-forwarding four centuries, R.A. Lafferty (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R._A._Lafferty), was an engineer and Catholic who took up scifi/fantasy writing in the 1960s at the age 45. He could read all languages of the Latin, German, and Slavic families, plus Gaelic and Greek. His personal library was about 8000 books, he wrote 29 novels and 225 short stories. His writing is a bit of an acquired taste, but often encapsulates multiple time periods of history. Don Webb, writing about Lafferty, http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=1110
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"Lafferty makes use of dead language words to play upon our collective unconscious ... Lafferty's use of Greek, Latin, Irish, and Hebrew tags is not merely demonstration of his vast erudition. It is a technique used by magicians for centuries to give their spells potency. Whereas he directs most of his narrative at our conscious—using simple daytime language—he also directs the same tale at our unconscious achieving a form of meta-communication.
... Lafferty plays upon our subconscious in another way—the use of rhythm. Yevgeny Zamyatin developed the concept of a "prose foot" as a way of internal pacing of fiction. He saw it as a kind of rhythmic device that by causing the reader to remember an earlier part of the narrative became a force for a choral (as in pertaining to choruses) cohesion that bound the story together in a different way than plot mechanics."
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Because he could read so many languages, Lafferty was able to integrate primary source material, works which didn't migrate forward, today unavailable to readers who can't read Latin, Greek, etc. A recent article on Lafferty, http://www.theguardian.com/...
However is impressive to me how much exposure ello is getting every day, don't get me wrong but right now I can't see why. Feel free to tell me that's I'm wrong, I'm really interested.
I wish them all the best but more importantly that this "hype" will last
1) So much dead real estate.
2) The buttons the same as input fields. Only difference is color but there's no distinguishing otherwise.
3) Strange choice of font. Seems like they're going for a typewriter feel, but I'm not sure how that's useful for a website. My opinion of course, but I don't really see the aesthetic appeal of a typewriter look here.
The real problem I see with Ello from a business perspective is that they don't have one. Where's the business? You're not selling ads, you're not selling your users information, they aren't buying anything (and won't) - where will the money come from?
>> It has been dubbed the "anti-Facebook" network because of a pledge to carry no adverts or sell user data.
If you want to keep something private, don't post it on a social networking site.
I need more than a pledge to start believing in a VC-backed startup.
What does it really cost to run a social network? $5/user/month? $1/user/month? If you could put it on your phone bill, would you notice?
As for "The fact is nobody has ever made a significant move away from any internet provider because of advertising or data", remember Myspace. They were #1 once. Their ad density got too high and people got fed up and left.
More than ${what parents will let their kid spend on the Internet}, which is usually > $0. The problem with non-free Internet is that it quickly gets inaccessible to those without credit cards.
Exactly! It's actually a lie that it's free in the first place: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372640
For me, until that changes, social media primarily exists as a personal communication mechanism via messages. In that case the network effect dominates all other features.
Honestly, their copy feels like written by WhatsApp wannabes that got wind of some tech crowd clichés.
In fact, I suspect the "31,000 invites" was the result of one post on the Facebook group involving an exploit that used dictionary attacks to generate invites for someone's account, which was quickly used by several people, but eventually taken down, and is not their average traffic.
I suspect this because my personal opinion, my friends' opinions, and it appears quite a number of Hacker News peoples opinions, while anecdotal, seem to indicate that Ello is quite lackluster, and I find it hard to believe that many people would want to try a social media platform that:
a) has none of their friends on it yet
b) doesn't look great
c) appeals to you through things you typically don't care about ("ads", "data", "privacy")
And here was me thinking that to be successful now you needed a somewhat original idea or a flawless execution, shows what I know I guess.
I had to search to find out it's ello.co Average user won't bother.
Also a compelling story and userbase. There are people on Ello who aren't on Diaspora (I'm on both) despite the latter having been around for quite a while now.
Both lack search, which ... kind of sucks.
What would be really cool is if Ello might figure out a way to talk with Diaspora, essentially becoming a large node of it (or Friendica, or whatever).