The article may be an oversimplification, but your comment is an equal oversimplification. There are many environmental conditions that need to be assumed when comparing reactivity.
For instance, if you have pure Titanium, pure Magnesium, pure aluminum in a vacuum at room temperature and proceed to introduce oxygen, you get the following reactions (simplified elemental chemical reactions, the Enthalpy of formation is what is important here):
Ti + O2 -> TiO2
(Std. Enthalpy of formation is -945kJ/mol)
Mg + O -> MgO
(Std. Enthalpy of formation is -601kJ/mol)
4Al + 3O2 -> 2 Al2O3
(Std. Enthalpy of formation is -1675kJ/mol)
As a result, aluminum is most reactive, followed by titanium, then magnesium.
This is the reason why aluminum is used in solid rocket motors and various other explosive devices.
Under different conditions, these numbers may change: for instance a reaction with water instead of air may yield different enthalpies. At quick glance in water, titanium is actually least reactive when compared to aluminum and magnesium.
So from a high enough vantage point, Ti is very slightly less reactive than Al, less reactive than Mg, and not too far from Fe. A far cry from being "a streetwalker" of a metal.
to make a fair comparison here, you need to normalize per mole of metal. these enthalpies of formation are reported per mole of oxide, but there's twice as much Al per mole of Al2O3 than Ti in TiO2.
This practice leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Presents an inauthentic vision of what people are.
Anger and other negative emotions are part of the human condition. Suppressing their expression doesn't change the underlying issue that caused the emotion.
The prior algorithm was also "inauthentic". There is nothing about anger or negative emotions that are inherently more authentic than positive emotions. And because anger tends to increase engagement (be less "bland"), algorithms tend to amplify anger artificially in order to juice their own metrics. This is why Twitter was a shithole even before Musk took over.
I think Google is doing this to protect creators. There have been a lot of people speaking out about burnout and severe mental health struggles on YouTube for a while now. A big contributor to this is toxic engagement from the community. Some people get very upset when they see a whole bunch of negative comments directed at them.
You might want to say “these people should just suck it up” but that’s not a road Google wanted to head down. They see healthy and happy creators as more productive and hence more profitable. Hiding downvotes and sentiment analysis on comments are two ways they can protect creators from this stuff.
I constantly see creators stress over unclear guidelines from YouTube with inconsistent enforcement on what content is or is not allowed or will or will not be monetized.
If YouTube's priority was creators they'd give clearer guidelines to creators and broaden the range of personal expression that can still get ads put on it.
No - YouTube's push for positivity at all costs is to appease investors and media critics who've complained about comments and downvote campaigns and to appease advertisers who were seriously uncomfortable with the media attention given to them during the initial media push for the adpocalypse.
It's concerning, yes. But before this, YouTube comments were complete toxic garbage fire for _years_. It's definitely a much nicer experience than it used to be.
that's only if you're viewing "people" as a whole. If you instead view each commentor as an individual, it only makes sense that you would promote what improves the health of your service and punish those who stir up strife.
In general, anyone can find some reason to criticize even the best things, and if there's one lesson humanity can take from social media it's that negativity and cyber-bullying is contagious. I am completely in favor of YouTube for creating a comment section that I actually enjoy reading; one that enhances the video-watching experience. Not even a single flavenoid of bad taste in my mouth about this.
People suck online. It's rare to have interactions IRL that are as bad as what you see in the old Youtube comments section. So which is more authentic? How people behave in person or in unfiltered comments/fora?
I think that's part of it, and part of it is that we curate real-life interactions a lot more than online. There are plenty of places I would never show up to / people I wouldn't talk to in real life (precisely because they would be the sort of people who troll online).
Whether that filtering is done explicitly or implicitly (i.e. neighborhood wealth)
Thanks for highlighting that point, the geopolitical filter,along with 'physical availability' (as you stated) are likely larger contributing factors than I had initially considered.
It's pretty clear that the people who engage in toxic behaviours online are no different than they were prior to the emergence of those environments. It's the environment itself which triggers that behaviour.
That's baked into HN's philosophy:
"As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening." <https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>
One of dang's fairly frequent observations is that HN tends to operate at the edge of chaos:
- "if moderation doesn't evolve as a community grows, one ends up with the default dynamic of internet forums: decay followed by heat death." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435202> (2019)
- "If 500-point stories on hot topics were dispositive, HN would be a 500-point-stories-on-hot-topics site. It isn't that kind of site, and intervention is required to keep it from going that way." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14306144> (2017)
- "Our job is to somehow balance the conflicting vectors. That's not so easy, and also not so easy to articulate. The idea is not to maintain a centrist position, it's to try to keep the community from wrecking itself via ideological fracture." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34025076> (2019)
could be. I think it's mainly the phone number requirement within the past few years. The bad accounts have washed out. It's also likely why Google will soon delete old inactive accounts, created before this policy.
Positive or negative ? Positive comments don’t generate interaction. If a comment was positive I’d like and move on not comment. Negative comments in the other had generate a lot of interaction. If I was to guess, Google as a marketing company loves interaction.
I've had an awful lot of engagement that's produced little value. (As I get older, I try to avoid that, increasingly. Not always successfully.)
I've had tremendous value from some very brief engagements, often one-liners or casual remarks, though also when someone shares a deep knowledge of a subject or a truly insightful personal experience.
Those are all exceptionally valuable, but in terms of "engagement metrics" such as replies, time-on-site, etc., they're often negatives. To turn a phrase: feed a person endless questions and challenges, and you'll keep them on site for a day. Provide them the answer or tools they need, and they disappear forever.
(Dating / matchmaking sites face a related version of this problem.)
With time, people who do value useful information come to realise the timesuck nature of high-engagement, low-value sites (o hai redditz) and avoid them like the plague.
Side observation: I'm playing with FastGPT (largely because it doesn't require registration to use, so I can't compare it to ChatGPT or other registration-required generative AIs), and one of the things that's useful about it is that it gives specific answers to specific questions, rather than sending me off on an endless quest through low-grade online sources.
Or even relatively high-grade ones such as Wikipedia, which might answer the immediate question but tend to prompt more. Curiosity ain't necessarily bad, except for cats....
What generative AI does that General Web Search does not is actually quench the thirst. Which is useful from a personal value perspective, though possibly a shock to the system for both online search and content providers.
I believe their point was that we no longer see as much nonsensical hate in YouTube comments anymore - or at least that rings true to me and I've actually wondered about it for awhile
So that's why every comment has seemingly become a variation of "Can we all just appreciate the effort that X puts into their videos"? I guess it is better than flame wars but that's a low bar. These comments are just as uninteresting to read as the flame wars they replaced.
It is better than flame wars, so unless you have a suggestion, I don’t know what else they could do.
But I disagree with your premise. I know several YouTubers with reasonably large communities that have incredibly fun and wholesome interactions in the comments, mainly made possible by this sentiment analysis. Negativity and positivity both have feedback loops. If you display negativity, people will be more negative; if you display positivity, people will be more positive.
They could remove the comment section entirely. They've had some version of a comment section for almost two decades now and at no point during that time have they succeeded at cultivating a platform wide culture for interesting comments.
Flame wars were obviously bad and negative. Generic positive comments are slightly better but they still do not say anything interesting related to the content of the video.
At this point, comments could just as well exist out-of-band on other platforms that have figured out how to foster discussions better (hint: extensive manual moderation is required, which Google will never provide).
> They've had some version of a comment section for almost two decades now and at no point during that time have they succeeded at cultivating a platform wide culture for interesting comments.
I'd propose there is no need for a public comments section. I honestly don't understand this feature creep.
You can't call it feature creep if it's been there since literally day 1.
Some channels use the comment section extensively. PBS Space Time for example does a Q&A almost every episode where they answer questions posted as comments from previous videos.
Almost certainly this would negatively impact some engagement metric that is tied to someone’s sense of self worth, and this will not happen despite being clearly the best thing for the product.
Yeah agreed. I'm a bit doubtful of the data presented in the article mostly because the company/CEO has a conflict of interest with objective analysis. They earn money from producing 'EV battery and range' reports.
The data in the article could easily be cherry-picked.
I would partially disagree. I think your statements are true, but only for companies that raise investments on the promise of scaling to greater profitability, but ultimately fail to deliver. If the founders delude themselves or are overly optimistic, the only recourse they have to investors is to gouge the customer.
Raising the 'right' amount should be the goal. Not 'as much as possible'
If employee wages are a large part of the rising costs, then perhaps the cost of living for living in SF is too high. The cost of living is too high because rent is too high.
Since there is so much political contention to building more housing, there is no chance that housing prices will decrease (nobody wants to see their property lose value).
Now they are complaining about the problem they caused?!?
I don't know if this is ironic, justified or just funny. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Somebody at a planning meeting for an apartment building in Nopa was arguing that it would go against the working-class history of the neighborhood (homes sell for >$1M there now btw). People here are in deep denial about SF being a world city, and the fact that people with (realized or paper) gains in the high hundred thousands are not "working class".
Don't fall for easy bullshit and let it lead you to making "dunk" comments that don't actually engage the problems and instead act as thought ending cliches. That's their entire goal.
Sounds like conspiracy theories. No dunking, just saying. SF is far left just like Oakland and they both seem to have unique problems other cities aren't experiencing. I could be wrong, but so far I've predicted the downturn and I think it won't get any better unless people start holding the decision-makers accountable (which sounds like it's not going to happen).
So the problem is that SF is liberal? That caused the homeless to be sent from around the country?
It's expensive there because a lot of people want to live there (ye olde supply demand thang, ya know?), and the more affluent squeeze out the poor folk. A lot of that affluence seems to be all of us lucky tech people, so in a sense we're part of the problem (not blaming, just noting).
There is corruption and incompetence too but that seems to exist lots of other places too.
Isn't it beyond liberal? I would almost say it's so left it's not even liberal anymore, but that's a different matter. i think for sure it is a factor because the people who make decisions in the city, who are elected to manage the city, are probably not afraid of losing their jobs or the consequences of the decisions they make. There is so little pushback they can just run experiment after experiment with zero repercussions. I don't know what the solution is but I sure know that I don't hire the same company over and over if they keep failing at solving a problem I'm paying them for.
Granted, corruption is a big part of it (i.e. public services wasting tax payer money instead of solving the problem), and dealing with that would be a step in the right direction.
Are you familiar with the Overton Window? It's shifted hard to the right.
So if you want to say: is San Francisco tolerant of the LGBQT+ community? Absolutely, with flying rainbow flag colors.
But that's the key driver in the culture wars, and it has nothing to do with the business of running a government (other than minimizing government persecution of that community.
All of these issues could and should be dissected, analyzed, and addressed. But blaming it on the boogeyman of "DemonRats are destroying everything" is tiresome.
You state "experiment after experiment" but don't give any examples. I'd be happy to discuss them individually if you'd like.
p.s.: My mother was one of those awful homeless people littering the streets of SF in her final years. She migrated from the burbs so she wasn't the city's fault. How she got there is the complicated issue of many of them and never gets properly discussed or addressed. That's my skin in the game of this story.
> Are you familiar with the Overton Window? It's shifted hard to the right.
This is incorrect. It may have widened in both directions, but it absolutely did not shift to the right.
Transgender support from mainstream corporations (Target, Budweiser, etc) would have been completely unthinkable 10 years ago.
That’s just one example of many. What has happened is that the Overton window is broken because people don’t even engage with “the other side” anymore. So we just end up with both sides discussing things with impunity that were previously off-topic and still are for the other side.
I think this is a perfect example of why the left-right axis doesn't capture the issues here. Support for gay or trans rights seems to have little or nothing to do with the problems described.
These tactics are intentionally meant to divide us and it's wildly effective.
Disclaimer: I'm an atheist but believe people should have the right to worship as they see fit, defend themselves appropriately, and love and be whoever they want.
Overton window has mostly moved left, but it has also expanded because we are more polarized than ever. The mainstream culture is definitely on the left, and I think that people on the left don't like that because you need to be constantly fighting the "oppressors", so it works against the left narrative to be dominant culture. However you can see this in movies, games, fashion, the mainstream media, the most used apps... of which Twitter is a good example and also an exception because it took one of the richest people to lose money on buying it in order to show how biased it was. That said, we could be seeing a slow return to the center which only recently started, although I can't say just yet.
I'm a centrist and try to stay in the middle because usually that's where solutions are. Whenever political extremes get their way, it tends to go wrong. Case in point is SF. It's not just gender identity politics or allowing people to live outside on the streets, it's also the attitude towards crime, the prioritization of climate change over everything else (while rejecting nuclear energy), and the tendency to control businesses which was evident throughout the pandemic as many small businesses struggled.
Sorry to hear about your mother. I do wonder why you would let her even experience that for a day. Maybe you didn't know, and you don't need to explain, but the left's position here is to think housing is the solution, when I think there is a big factor of families failing to take care of their loved ones and then demanding government pick up the pieces.
They're most severe in SF but all major west coast cities are experiencing the same issues. Saying it's a result of "liberalism" is simply empty reflexive rhetoric. What's happening is a complex set of intersecting problems. If you'd like to talk about those I'm interested. If you just want to punch at what you see as "far left" I am not inclined to waste my time.
Yeah, I keep forgetting that, somewhat hilariously as I'm at radius 2 to the family. My dad's best friend worked for Koch industries and described his job as "keeping the brothers from killing each other." They are extremely unpleasant people based on all the stories I heard growing up.
They are a right wing group of policy grifters and they would have been making similar arguments even if SF was running billion dollar surpluses and had 0 homeless, no crime, etc. in fact, then and their likes have indeed been making similar arguments for decades.
The problem is that their arguments are now getting purchase because SF is indeed facing problems. Since this grift site doesn’t actually prescribe any solutions it’s hard to say how right or wrong they are, but there’s definitely a need for SF, and more broadly expensive cities across the U.S., to take a hard look at how they’re operating.
The fact that we are allowing the US’s great cities to crumble because people are forced to move to suburbs in the middle of the desert since housing is so expensive is an absolute tragedy for everyone.
The thing is...
Pushing outside your lane is VERY often discouraged. The manager sees that any time outside of your lane is less time in "your managers" lane, where you help buml his KPIs/goals.
Actually - It doesn't get the numbers right either. If you look at the first reference, "[1]", the author says:
"I’ll justify this figure in detail later on. For now, consider that each SLS launch costs $4.2B, and that developing just the Orion space capsule has cost $20B. The ISS, which is functionally close to a Mars transfer vehicle, has so far cost $250 billion."
With absolutely no regard for the massive cost per kg to orbit improvement being achieved by new space companies (SpaceX, RocketLab, etc.)
The author has cherry-picked his facts to fit his opinion.
For instance, if you have pure Titanium, pure Magnesium, pure aluminum in a vacuum at room temperature and proceed to introduce oxygen, you get the following reactions (simplified elemental chemical reactions, the Enthalpy of formation is what is important here):
Ti + O2 -> TiO2 (Std. Enthalpy of formation is -945kJ/mol)
Mg + O -> MgO (Std. Enthalpy of formation is -601kJ/mol)
4Al + 3O2 -> 2 Al2O3 (Std. Enthalpy of formation is -1675kJ/mol)
As a result, aluminum is most reactive, followed by titanium, then magnesium.
This is the reason why aluminum is used in solid rocket motors and various other explosive devices.
Under different conditions, these numbers may change: for instance a reaction with water instead of air may yield different enthalpies. At quick glance in water, titanium is actually least reactive when compared to aluminum and magnesium.