All about social networks

And there was something else to look at what urban planner William White calls triangulation. You don't have to directly engage with other people who are here. You can both be looking at the fire. You're having a nice time. You're warm, you're feeling good. And over the course of sitting for a while, there's opportunity to strike up a conversation... See more

So what can we do to ameliorate this problem? Making individuals better at thinking and seeing the blind spots in their own individual reasoning will only go so far. What we need are better collective means of thinking. As Hugo, Melissa and I argue here (academic article, but I think fairly readable), much of the work on human cognitive bias... See more

For example, Facebook ran an experiment where they sent people less notifications. Over the short term, the findings were pretty intuitive: sending people less notifications increased their satisfaction but decreased their engagement. However, over the long term, sending people less notifications actually increased their engagement, likely because... See more

One of the things I talk about in the last chapter is this idea of a social network that’s actually a utility, where you go to it to do the thing you wanted to do and then you leave. It’s just sort of there for you to use, like a landline. Certainly, it’s nowhere close to a landline, but having the News Feed Eradicator does take out that really

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