Simon Willison’s Weblog

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6 items tagged “socialsoftware”

2024

Spam, and its cousins like content marketing, could kill HN if it became orders of magnitude greater—but from my perspective, it isn’t the hardest problem on HN. [...]

By far the harder problem, from my perspective, is low-quality comments, and I don’t mean by bad actors—the community is pretty good about flagging and reporting those; I mean lame and/or mean comments by otherwise good users who don’t intend to and don’t realize they’re doing that.

dang # 19th February 2024, 3:57 pm

2019

The Next CEO of Stack Overflow. “Including the Stack Exchange network of 174 sites, we have over 100 million monthly visitors. Every month, over 125,000 wonderful people write answers”—this fits the rule of thumb for user-generated content that only a tiny portion of your audience will actively create content: in this case it’s just 0.125% (one eighth of one percent). I’d love to know how many people are upvoting or performing other more lightweight interactions. # 28th March 2019, 3:12 pm

2009

Four reasons why public Facebook status updates won’t kill Twitter. Mike Butcher highlights the importance of “follow” rather than “friend” in social software. # 9th February 2009, 7:04 pm

2007

Scribd. This appears to be social software for the huge population of people who can’t imagine creating anything without using Word. # 25th April 2007, 7:22 pm

Digg to drop their global “top users” list. It’s fascinating how big an effect a simple feature like a top users list can have on the social behaviour of a site. # 2nd February 2007, 6:03 pm

2006

Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites. I finally got around to reading this. Fascinating; lots to digest. # 24th December 2006, 7:32 pm