siderea

siderea, 5 months ago

For instance, consider the questions "How likely, statistically speaking, are you to run into your boss on this social media platform?" and "How likely, statistically speaking, are you to run into your mother on the social media platform?" While obviously there is wide individual variation based on personal circumstances, in general the answer to those questions is going to be a function of how widespread adoption is in one's communities.

Thing is, people behave differently on a social media platform when they think they might run into their boss there. People behave differently when they think they might run into their mother.

And it's not just bosses and mothers, right? I just use those as obvious examples that have a lot of emotional charge. People also behave differently depending on whether or not they think their next-door neighbors will be there (q.v. Nextdoor.com).

🧵

siderea, 5 months ago

How people behave on a social media platform turns out to be a function of whom they expect to run into – and whom they actually run into! – on that social media platform. And that turns out to be a function of how penetrant adoption is in their communities.

And a problem here is that so many assume that the behavior of users of a given social media platform is wholly attributable to the features and affordances of that social media platform!

It's very easy to mistake what are effects of being a niche or up-and- coming platform for something the platform is getting right in its design.

The example I gave about people behaving differently depending on what the likelihood is they estimate of running into certain other parties in their lives is not the only example of how scale affects how people engage with a social media platform. There are others that I know about, and probably lots I don't.

🧵

siderea, 5 months ago

For instance, tech people are probably aware of the phenomenon that virus writers are generally more attracted to writing viruses for platforms that have more users. This is one of the main reasons that there are (and have always been) fewer viruses written against the macOS than Windows.

You've probably never thought of it this way – mad props to the article in Omni I read a long time ago that brought this to my attention – but writing a virus is a kind of griefing. Like in a game. It's about fucking up other people's shit for kicks and giggles, if not for profit, and doing so at scale.

Well, griefers – people who are motivated by enjoying griefing as a pastime – are going to be more drawn to bigger platforms with more people to fuck with.

Deliberate malicious obnoxiousness and trolling varies not linearly with population size, but geometrically or worse.

🧵

siderea, 5 months ago

Or put another way, a social media platform can avoid a certain amount of social griefing just by being small, and therefore not worth the time of griefers who are looking for bigger fish to fry. As that platform grows, it loses that protection.

So you can't tell, not for sure, how good a platform's systems are for managing that kind of griefing until it gets big enough to really start attracting griefing at scale.

🧵

siderea, 5 months ago

So that's one problem: there are simply social size effects, that affect how people behave on a social media platform, so as the platform grows in adoption, how people behave on it will change. Usually not in ways that are thought of as for the better, because being a niche platform can avoid various social problems that can no longer be avoided as it grows.

The other problem I think is even more fascinating.

When a social media platform is founded, there are filter effects on who joins that platform. But as a social media platform grows, those filters – some of them – fall away.

🧵

siderea, 5 months ago

When I talk about filters, I mean things like the following famous examples:

• When Facebook was founded, it was only for students at universities; one could only sign up for it with a college email address. Consequently, Facebook's early userbase was almost entirely college students – with all that implies for socioeconomic class.

• When G+ was founded, it was initially opened to Google employees, and used an invite code system for rollout, such that overwhelmingly its early users were people in the same social worlds as Googlers.

• In the heyday of USENET, the vast majority of internet users, at all, were college students who are majoring in technical topics.

These social spaces, consequently, inherited (in the object oriented sense) the social norms of the demographics that initially populated them.

🧵

siderea, 5 months ago

@admin

Re:
> 4) A comment in the discussion thread also links to a British Medical Journal article on Metformin improving Long COVID symptoms

That's not an accurate description: the research in question, which is in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal (it's a BMJ news article talking about it, not research in the BMJ), is about preventing long COVID in the first place, not at all about treating the symptoms. As the BMJ news article says:

"The authors of the study, published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, caution that the trial did not look at whether metformin would be effective as a treatment for those who already have long covid."

@psychotherapist @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork

siderea, 6 months ago

This article in the Boston Globe during the height of the first wave of the Spanish Flu 1918 global pandemic in the US, alerting the populace of Boston that the previously promulgated social distancing guidelines were inadequate, was published mere days after the publication of a scientific research article in the Journal of American Medicine.

Two medical researchers working for the army decided to experimentally determine how far infectious material was dispersed by air.

It was a clever, simple, and elegant experiment.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

The scientists used a model infectious organism, a bacterium – at the time, viruses were only a suspicion, but science knew about bacteria – Bacillus prodigiosus (which has since been renamed Serratia marcescens).

The test apparatus was a room set up with an array of petri dishes coated with agar, a material in which bacteria can grow. Each dish marked with its distance from the subject.

They squirted the bacteria into the mouths of research subjects and had them engage in various behaviors: talking, shouting, coughing, and so on. After each behavior, they slapped lids on all the dishes and took them away to incubate.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

Quote:

Method and Technic

B. prodigiosus was selected as a suitable organism to introduce into the mouth for these experiments, because of its innocuous character* and because its pigment formation makes its recognition easy on agar plates.

For our experiments two small rooms were selected which were used for no other purpose during this time. Each of these rooms contained a metal topped table and a chair. The arrangement of furniture is shown in Figure 1. When the observer was seated in the chair, the tabletop was just below his ensiform. Agar plates exposed on the surface of the tables showed no B. prodigiosus circulating in the air and dust.

• I don't think it's considered innocuous today.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

Quote, continued:

Experiment 1 – To determine the limits of projection of B. prodigiosus from the mouth by ordinary speech, loud speech, and coughing. – The observer first thoroughly rinsed his mouth and gargled his throat with a suspension of B. prodigiosus in 0.85 per cent. sodium chlorid[e?] solution, the viability of which was proved by subcultures at suitable intervals. The observer then entered the room and seated himself in the chair, facing down the length of the table. In line with the observer's mouth, agar plates were exposed from 1 to 6 feet distant, except in some of the coughing experiments, when plates were exposed up to a distance of 10 feet.

The observer then proceeded: (1) to talk in an ordinary conversational tone for five minutes; or (2) talk in a loud tone for five minutes; or (3) cough as much as he could for five minutes.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

Quote, continued:

In one instance conversational speech was maintained for a period of thirty minutes*. At the conclusion of his speaking or coughing, the observer left the room. In order to allow the droplets in the air, if present, to settle on the surface of the plates, the plates remained exposed an additional ten minutes after the period of speaking or coughing. The colonies appearing on the plates were counted and recorded after seventy-two hours' incubation at room temperature.

Agar plates were exposed for one hour in the room between different stages of this experiment. By this means we found that an eight hour interval between periods of talking or coughing was sufficient to ensure the absence of B. prodigiosus in the circulating air.

• Oops. #overlyHonestMethods

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

Quote, continued:

The results of projection of B. prodigiosus from the uncovered mouth during ordinary conversational speech, loud speech, and coughing, are shown in Table 1. The experiments were paralleled by two observers working in separate rooms.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

As predicted by droplet theory, they found that speaking dispersed the bacterium 1 to 4 ft.

But they found they hadn't placed the plates far enough to account for coughing. I assume they stopped at 10 ft because they ran out of room, because they certainly hadn't run out of reach of B. prodigiosus expelled when the researchers coughed.

It is worth noting that bacteria are very many times the size of viruses. This experiment was conducted with an organism that is vastly heavier than any virus, whether influenza, coronavirus, or any other.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

Quote, from further on down the article:

From our own work, however, we judge that the infected zone has a considerably greater radius. Our data indicate that during ordinary or loud speech, droplets are rarely projected more than 4 feet, irrespective of the duration of the experiment. In talking for thirty minutes there was no greater projection of bacteria than in talking for five minutes, though during the longer time there may be a heavier seeding of a plate within the effective range.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

During coughing, however, the danger zone is immensely widened. We were surprised at the distance we could project the organisms during a hard spell of coughing. At first we exposed plates only to a distance of 6 feet. Subsequently we exposed plates up to a distance of 10 feet, on which we recovered B. prodigiosus in sufficient numbers to suggest the possibility of even greater projection. We found that the chances of recovering B. prodigiosus from the more distant plates were increased if the observer renewed the organisms in his mouth during the period of coughing. From our work it would seem that the danger zone about a coughing patient has at least a 10-foot radius.

End quote.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

1918, yall. This experiment was conducted and published in 1918. It made the front page of the Boston Globe in 1918.

For the record, the Spanish Flu pandemic landed in the US in Boston, MA, on August 28th, 1918. It jumped to the civilian population (having first appeared among service members) and became headline news two weeks later.

This paper? Was published October 12th. Not even 8 weeks later.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

The paper in question, by the way, did not primarily set out to find out how far was the "safe zone", as telegraphed by their describing this experiment as assessing the dispersal of B prodigiosus from the uncovered mouth.

They were doing this to get a baseline, to evaluate the efficacy of masks.

Quote:

Abstract

The use of face masks to prevent infection is now generally accepted, but the type of face masks worn remains variable; experimented with commonly used mask material to prove their efficacy or lack of efficacy in preventing infection; experiments show a 10-foot danger zone for speaking; experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of three layer buttercloth masks.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

The research paper is

Doust, BC & Lyon AB (1918) Face Masks in Infections of the Respiratory Tract. Journal of American Medicine. October 12, 1918, p. 1216 - 1219.

It is available here as images: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/flu/7350flu.0016.537/1/--face-masks-in-infections-of-the-respiratory-tract?rgn=full+text;view=image

Or this permalink:
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7350flu.0016.537

Compliments of the Influenza Encyclopedia ( http://www.influenzaarchive.org )

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

Yall. I will probably never not be mad about this.

There was a big article in Wired magazine titled "The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill" ( https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/ behind a paywall, but https://archive.ph/pzGCD ) abstracted "All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences."

It's an okay article, and has many informative things to say, but doesn't go deep enough, and it chalks the controversy of how far viable infectious material travels through the air up to a basic physics mistake.

I'm sorry. This wasn't just a physics mistake.

This was a psychological mistake.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

This was a painful example of motivated reasoning and a whole bunch of other psychological nonsense that leads people, people who should be in some sense scientific and rational, to glom onto a paradigm and not let go in the face of evidence.

At the point that aerosol physicists are telling you, No, really, what you believe doesn't make any sense, and you are telling the aerosol physicists, You're not medical professionals, what could you possibly know? you are at the point – if not long, long past it – to notice something has gone COMPLETELY off the epistemological rails.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

But that going off the rails didn't just happen during our pandemic. It's been going on for decades.

And it's not limited to rigidly clung to, fiercely defended wrong beliefs about the range of dispersal of exhaled infectious agents.

My on-ramp to the pandemic – the point at which that which was going on in Wuhan came to my attention – was a point in January 2020, where all of a sudden people were talking about social distancing in terms of the flu.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

In case you had forgotten this little bit of recent history: at the beginning of the pandemic, US media and social media was full of people – left leaning, science prizing, generally sensible and humane people – SCOFFING at the idea that what was happening in Wuhan could possibly come and touch them in their lives, and MOCKING the very idea that anyone should be concerned about it.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

One of the frequent things that was expressed in those circles was that whatever was happening in Wuhan would never be as bad as the flu, so if you wanted to be worried about an infectious disease, be worried about influenza.

Consequently, people took that in the direction of discussing how to protect oneself from the flu.

And that was the first thing to come to my attention. All these people sanctimoniously repeating "six feet apart".

To which I was of course responding in my head, "Six feet? No, at least ten. Doust and Lyon, 1918."

But that just piqued my curiosity: where the hell were people getting 6 ft from?

Well, I chased it down.

It was the CDC of course.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

Before the CDC had anything to say to the US public about COVID, their influenza page said six feet.

And I was like ????

My first assumption was, Hey it's been a century, I bet there's been more science between then and now. Presumably somebody has disproven Doust & Lyon if the CDC thinks it's 6 ft.

Certainly, as a graduate student in a medical field, I was quite explicitly told not to trust old research papers. My school had a standard that any research paper more than 5 years old was not to be, well, cited for one thing, but really considered valid at all.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

So I went looking for the source of the six feet guideline.

This was the first point at which I noticed that the CDC does not cite its sources.

I figured, Well this is information about social distancing and influenza is for the general public. Surely on their other pages, the ones for medical professionals, they'll have references. They'll let us know which science they are basing their recommendations on. Because that is how you do in the sciences. And also that is quite literally what the World Wide Web was invented for: the dissemination of research papers, with hyperlinked sources, so you could go right to them.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

But nah. There was nothing on the CDC's website to explain why they thought it was 6 ft, when here I am staring at a research journal article from 100 years ago that says 10 ft is not sufficient.

(For the record, I did reach out to the CDC, asking them, using their contact form, but somewhat understandably given this circumstances – a nascent global pandemic – I never heard back.)

This was the point at which I began to get a very bad feeling.

And to be clear, that point was in the middle of January 2020.

(I posted this https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1575317.html on Jan 29.)

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

Like I said, my graduate program told us that any research older than five years was not valid to be cited in our assignments, and we were cautioned to assume that all older papers were invalid.

That immediately struck me as... Odd. And by "odd" I mean bad.

For one thing, I'm a historian, even if an amateur one, and it is offensive to me to scorn things just because they're old. My area of work in history is in early music, and as a natural consequence of that, I had spent my twenties swimming upstream against prejudices about the artistic worth of pre-classical musics. Assuming older research papers were wrong not because of their contents but because of their date stamp smelled entirely too similar to scorning pre-classical music not due to any exposure to it, but arrogant, ignorant presuppositions about what would be found in it.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

But for another and much more important thing, the obvious logical consequence of discarding older research papers as presumed to be invalid, was that all it took for previous research findings to be discredited was the tick of the clock.

If you just drew a moving line 5 years ago across the scientific corpus, then all you had to do to invalidate a finding is wait. You didn't actually have to prove it wrong. You could just airly wave your hand and say, Well you know that was from way back when.

And THAT made my skin crawl.

🧵

siderea, 6 months ago

Because that is not how science works. That is not how reason works.

And it most definitely should not be how medical science works.

The business with 6 ft social distancing was my first inkling that something very bad had taken root and proliferated in the CDC. Something I had first seen as a graduate student studying psychotherapy, and subsequently had started recognizing in the rest of medicine. A kind of epistemological disease.

A lot of people were invested in the idea that the CDC's..."missteps"... were the fault of the Trump administration. But while some things improved under Biden, many did not.

I recognized the pathology and knew it was not specific to any presidential administration.

🧵

siderea, 7 months ago

There is an entire little universe of people using Patreon to be funded to do good works in the world. These may be open source contributors. They may be activists. They may be journalists or bloggers. They do not make things that they exchange for money with the people who pledge them on Patreon.

Their patrons do not pay these creators to give things to them. Their patrons pay these creators to give things to the world: to release code for anyone to use, to engage in activism that changes the world for the better, or to write things that anyone can read.

siderea, 7 months ago

I'm one of them. The number one reason I signed up for Patreon as my funding platform 9 years ago, was because it was literally the only way of funding my writing that did not entail my SELLING it: my withholding it only for those people who paid me for it.

People get confused here. I'm not talking about my intellectual property rights. I'm not worried somebody is going to steal my copyright in my writing. (I mean it's a legitimate concern but that's not what I'm talking about here.)

I'm talking about the very basic nature of what it means to sell a work of writing, as a book or a magazine or a stand-alone article in a PDF.

siderea, 7 months ago

If I put my writing into documents that then I sell on Amazon or Kajabi, then the only people who get to see them are the people who pay me for them.

That is the antithesis of what I want to do. What I want to do is write openly on the internet where anyone can read what I write. Where what I write can be cited by anyone who wants to refer to it in any internet discussion.

The audience of my writing is not my patrons, and it is not just the people who pay me for it. It's the whole world.

And that, quite explicitly, is what my patrons pay me to do.

siderea, 7 months ago

Most would-be competitors to Patreon think it's some sort of DRM system. There are definitely people who try to use Patreon that way, and it works about as well as any DRM system does.

We have lots of other "pay us to access this document" platforms, starting with the 800 lb gorilla, Amazon. If you think there is some benefit to wedding a membership system to a document storefront, I think you're probably wrong. I could be convinced otherwise – since I'm not actually in that business, I assume there's a lot I don't know about it – but my guess is having to join a club just for the privilege of buying a PDF introduces friction that reduces revenue. Heaven knows I resent it as a customer.

siderea, 7 months ago

(All that said, I also absolutely someday intend to write books that I will sell for money. But that is a very different project.)

siderea, 7 months ago

And this brings us to number four:

4. An audience relationship management system, ideally one with an API one can build against

Here's where you can really kick Patreon's ass in the market for alternatives, because Patreon's game has been slipping very badly in this area.

I just invented the term "audience relationship management" system, by analogy to "customer relationship management" system. Like I said patrons are not the same thing as customers. But if you're a creator you do need to keep track of them, and you do need to keep track of their payments, and you do need to be able to communicate with them.

Also you would probably like to be able to tell what's going on with your money: with the amounts pledged, the amounts received, the fees deducted, the credit cards declined, stuff like that. You might also appreciate some analytics.

siderea, 7 months ago

Patreon's infrastructure for doing all of this is kind of falling apart. In some places they've just taken things down rather than fix bugs.

The really big example of this, I'm not wholly familiar with, because I don't really use it, and I was hearing about it and it's problems from other people on the creator forums that then patreon took down.

I'm talking about the API.

siderea, 7 months ago

So here's what I think I know, and my information is kind of old, and the pandemic happened, and I wasn't directly involved myself, so I might be misremembering.

But as I understand it it goes something like this:

Patreon has the affordance of allowing creators to establish "tiers", where the creator associates certain dollar amounts of pledges with certain package deals they put together. Patreon has – had – has – an API that creators can have their own software query, so that the creators other systems can tell in real time whether one of their users is a paid up patron over on Patreon, and if so at what tier level.

siderea, 7 months ago

So for instance, if you (a creator) wanted to run a private discussion forum on the web somewhere just for your patrons, and you're willing to do some programming, you could implement a system whereby your discussion forum software checked in with Patreon.com when someone logged in, comparing their email address with the one on file for patrons, to see whether or not they should be let in in the first place, and if so which forum features they should have access to, based on their tier.

Well, you could.

siderea, 7 months ago

They were creators whose entire business models were based on this. I gather there were also a third party integrations, companies that actually developed against the API so that their services could be integrated with creators campaigns on Patreon – that is to say there were companies that made products that they sold to creators, that relied on the API.

Well Patreon decided that they're not supporting the API anymore. Apparently, from the screaming on the (now long defunct) creator forums, for a while there it looked like Patreon was going to turn it off. The Patreon walked that back and said that they wouldn't turn the API off, but they wouldn't be supporting it anymore, and they wouldn't be doing any further development on it.

siderea, 7 months ago

So in a really important sense, these creators (and these companies that had third party integrations) were (are) using Patreon.com as an identity server. But not just an identity server. It doesn't just serve the identity of patrons, but their status as patrons. That's part of what makes it "audience relationship management".

siderea, 7 months ago

Patreon also has removed key functionality from within the web interface that creators used to tell what's going on – particularly if their campaign is by-works, as discussed previously.

More generally, Patreon's UI for creators is really kind of terrible. I could itemize why but we'd be here for a while. A company could go far that offered the same services as Patreon, but let creators actually see what was happening to their money.

siderea, 7 months ago

For instance, the creator UI used to have a page that listed all of the works a by-works creator had submitted, that listed, for each work, how much money was pledged in the first place, how much revenue was actually collected (declined credit card charges are a thing), how much Patreon's cut was, how much Patreon took out to pass on to the payment processor, and how much you, the creator, would actually net.

They took that away.

siderea, 7 months ago

So there you go: four crucial aspects of what Patreon is ACTUALLY up to – what its value proposition is to the creators that choose to use it – that you're not going to be able to compete with Patreon unless you implement, and ideally improve upon.

siderea, 7 months ago

@Arotrios I figured I'd probably be throwing it up as a post on my journal. Don't know I'll get that done tonight, but probably soon. I'll come back and link you when I have.

siderea, 7 months ago

@Arotrios Aaand we're live. I've made it a blog post, and expanded it further. Enjoy!

"How to Compete with Patreon"
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html