Simon de la Rouviere

Changing information consumption habits.

As a person that is very involved with all that the wonderful web provides, it is sometimes a battle to not just dive into endless articles of fascinating news and ideas. The longer the web is around, the more interesting sites and reads I find. It starts to pile up!

It’s easy to get lost in reading reddit, twitter, facebook, G+, hacker news, reader, tumblr etc. Your brain goes off on this tangent of interestingness (fueled by dopamine hits of information). Before you know it, 2 hours have gone past and you haven’t done what you wanted to.

Adam Brault quit Twitter, and in that blog post, he said something that hit home:

I’ve realized how Twitter has made me break up my thoughts into tiny, incomplete, pieces—lots of hanging ideas, lots of incomplete relationships, punctuated by all manner of hanging threads and half-forked paths.

It’s time to change my consumption habits. This is how my mind is starting to think (and want).

There’s a reason why I decided to do my masters on information overload. I wanted to solve this for myself. How can we manage information in this unprecedented 21st century explosion of ideas?

I’ve already started to force myself to take breaks and just to go sit outside. I especially enjoy it in the summer as the sun sets, drinking a whiskey. I have to let go of wanting that constant drip of information.

The biggest change however is one that I’m embarking on right now. I recently got a Galaxy S3 (such a relief from my old HTC Wildfire). I’ve loaded up Pocket and going to use that as my main way to consume new articles. If I’m Hacker News or Twitter and find an interesting link, I’m going to add it to Pocket and leave it for later.

I want to unbundle information consumption to a set device, with set times.

In other words. My macbook needs to function mainly as a production or creative device. When I’m on it, I want my mind to be in a “write thesis”, “code”, “make music”, “e-mail” mode.

When I’m on my phone, it’s for Facebook, Twitter, G+, Tumblr, HN, etc.

To ‘stay’ recent, at first I’m going to try and restrict this to lunch and after ‘work’. At first, I’m only going to do this with feeds and articles. If that goes well, I can perhaps switch off Facebook and Twitter (other two culprits) during my times I want to product. Baby steps.

I’ve also started using Prismatic. It’s gotten great praise for handling news. So far, it’s been amazing. Finding awesome content through it. The interface still needs tweaks, and a native Android app. atm, I save links to Pocket through the browser. They haven’t integrated their “read later” with Pocket yet. I’ve tried to find a work-around, but haven’t found it yet. So, now I’m using Google Reader mainly for blogs that I know I want to read every post of (such as Elezea), which might not surface in Prismatic. I’ve unsubscribed from larger feeds such as TechCrunch.

My ideal flow would thus be to use Prismatic to surface content, save to Pocket and then read it mainly from my phone. If I find great links to share, I can simply add it from Pocket to Buffer and let fly back again into the www!

How has your information consumption habits changed? What is your main setup for reading new news and interesting articles?

Social Tax: Facebook’s promoted posts and the inherent problem with online social-networks.

I’ve been watching the whole debacle unfold surrounding FB’s recent changes that allow pages (and people) to pay to have their posts promoted to more people. There’s been a rather large backlash to this. I’ve seen a lot of bands share the “add to interest list” meme in order to stay more relevant to their fans. The bottom line is, is that most people see this as Facebook being greedy: purposefully limiting the reach of their posts for money. What most people don’t realize, is that FB has been limiting the reach of posts for quite a while.

Due to the nature of information overload, Facebook limits the amount of updates you receive through its edgerank algorithm. A lot of people know they haven’t seen updates from old friends they haven’t spoken to, but Facebook has been doing this with pages as well. A ‘like’ is an intent to subscribe to relevant updates, not ‘all’ updates.

This is (un)fortunately how an online social-network of this nature remains sustainable as an online community. Few people realize the importance of this. Filtering of updates must happen for a feed-based OSN to remain relevant. I’m sure Facebook knows this, because it is doing it. Paying for adding weight to a post is a great idea, but users don’t know this. Do you see Facebook trying to explain to users of these band pages the problem? Inherently, it is Facebook’s problem. A user will reply and add: “But if I like this band, I want all updates!” Yes. Sure. But you don’t know your intent for all the people and pages you like. I don’t trust myself to know precisely to what extent I “like” each thing I’m connected to on Facebook. And things change. Nothing will remain binary.

Facebook is ultimately losing with this approach. Users are becoming connected to more and more. Plainly filtering was okay. From a (perhaps greedy) business perspective, users wouldn’t know about this. They would’ve continued only receiving relevant updates. Now FB has opened up the inherent weakness of feed-based online social-networks to their users. They don’t like it, although it is what is needed. The problem will only get worse, receiving fewer percentage of updates from all connected nodes (as users add more connections), resulting in pages and people having to pay in order to be heard. It’s starting to feel like paying taxes. Most people don’t like doing it, because there is little transparency to what your money is doing (and you’d want that money). However it is needed to in order to sustain the system you function in. Ideally FB should explain and educate to users the benefit they are providing through, just as the government should about taxes. There will be users who will leave that more educated, however most people won’t want to bother. It’s easier to just moan about paying taxes. It’s easier to just moan about FB’s changes.

The big difference however is that it is probably easier to stick it to FB, than the “man”.

How do you use Twitter?

I’ve been using Twitter for quite a while and my use of it has been evolving along the way. It remains one of my favourite destinations on the web (if not my most favourite).

The way people use technology is always fascinating, especially with the sudden rise in popularity of social networks the previous 5-10 years. This passionate interest has led me to where I am now: doing Masters research on how information overload affects users on social networks (specifically Twitter).

So. I suspect. Most people start using Twitter without resorting to using lists. There’s little incentive to categorize, when in the beginning the effort outweighs the benefits. That’s what I did.

At a point, it became too much and I thought I’d start putting people into lists. Based on the research I’ve read, this point is close to 150 [1][2]. If you want, you can extend the results of that to research done by people like Robert Dunbar (although that’s a contentious point).

So. Currently, I have 3 main lists. Stellenbosch, SA Web People and Web. I have my own criteria for each, and it is pretty vague. These lists I actively check and for the most part (90% of the time), I don’t miss tweets. It’s enough to not be an issue.

It’s tough for me to unfollow people. I have what you might call internet-fomo. I’d rather sit through noise and possibly find a great tweet, than unfollow people. That threshold is different to each person. On the other hand, I have 1500 followers. This home feed ‘scrolls’ through, occasionally checking it now and again, but not actively. If miss updates, I miss it. I don’t bother. I mainly use Hootsuite (although it has irritated me) as my web client, to allow me to do this.

I have a problem though. My lists are getting bigger themselves… and the people in the lists aren’t tweeting quality content. I have started unfollowing people in these lists, and it is working in that regard. However, I’ve had an idea in the back of my head for quite a while now (a year or 2), that will make the consumption of Twitter easier once people start using lists.

Basically: Based on your followers, you specify a keyword and it builds a list of 150 people. You can then specify whether it should automatically update and change. Sort of like a dashboard of graph/list management for your Twitter. I’ve manage to profile users quite well, although it works only for people who are quite active. Still have to work on that.

But yes. It’s on my bucket list of projects-to-do. Eventually. I think necessity will lead me to it. I really do enjoy Twitter.

How do you use Twitter?

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[1] - Validation of Dunbar’s Number in Twitter Conversations (http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5170)

[2] - Social features of online networks: The strength of intermediary ties in online social media. (http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029358)