And yet in a way, computers are ALREADY learning to forget like us. Show me one search engine that doesn't promote recent-ness. All the big internet-wide searches do, all the per-page social media search engines do as well.
And it seems that creeping deep through someone's social timeline is fast becoming a faux pas. You already avoid doing it, and if you do end up doing it, leaving a trace is mortifying.
To the point that people will never mention to you in person that they saw something from your profile that happened a long time ago. As someone with a strong-ish internet presence, it's funny to see how flustered people get when they accidentally reveal themselves to know more than they feel it's polite for them to know.
Same way as we've always had the norm that you let people tell their stories even though you've heard the same story ten times already. It's just polite.
Show me one search engine that doesn't promote recent-ness. All the big internet-wide searches do, all the per-page social media search engines do as well.
And this seems like an annoying bug, not a feature. Internet is becoming more and more of an ephemeral place. That interesting news article you read few years ago? It's URL has probably changed twice, then it was deleted, and even if not, unless you remember the exact wording of the headline, you probably won't find it on Google as it will be buried under three pages of recent tweets that match your search query - tweets no one will care about or remember next week.
People do want to remember some things perfectly - that's why we invented writing, textbooks, diaries and libraries.
It's annoying as hell because Google promotes "freshness" over quality. You can get a very high position in Google by knocking off someone else's tech news story while removing half the facts and adding nothing of any consequence, as long as your do it quickly. This kind of blogspam also vanishes quickly, but only after the damage has been done.
Meanwhile anything that might actually be worth reading is somewhere around page 10...
Meanwhile anything that might actually be worth reading is somewhere around page 10...
...much like the way things were in 1997 with Google's predecessors. Funny how despite exponentially more layers of code running (with eons of iterative advances), it all still somehow comes full circle.
I feel like I keep seeing this all around. It seems that there's a point in the product after which any further optimization to "extract more value" actually degrades things. Comapnies need to learn when to stop messing with their product further and focus on something else.
What you're describing seems to be a natural process through which people try to cope with the new reality. New social norms are created and enforced to make people avoid one another's past timelines, and market forces emerge to make search engines rank more recent pages higher. It's all part of our natural response to what makes us uncomfortable. We respond in such a way as to restore comfort, because being creepy is neither polite nor profitable.
What that doesn't fix, however, is the fact that old information is still out there, on somebody's server, every bit unchanged and ready to resurface at a moment's notice. Sometimes the old information is just a statistic in the grand scheme of Big Data. Other times, it can be very specific, such as the one-liner that allowed the Feds to attribute to Ross Ulbricht the very first mention of Silk Road on the open Internet.
Computers aren't learning to forget, they still remember everything. We're just training ourselves to pretend that computers are just as forgetful as we are, because it's a comfortable thought. The problem, of course, that collective games of make-believe have a tendency to break down at some point.
Comments
And yet in a way, computers are ALREADY learning to forget like us. Show me one search engine that doesn't promote recent-ness. All the big internet-wide searches do, all the per-page social media search engines do as well.
And it seems that creeping deep through someone's social timeline is fast becoming a faux pas. You already avoid doing it, and if you do end up doing it, leaving a trace is mortifying.
To the point that people will never mention to you in person that they saw something from your profile that happened a long time ago. As someone with a strong-ish internet presence, it's funny to see how flustered people get when they accidentally reveal themselves to know more than they feel it's polite for them to know.
Same way as we've always had the norm that you let people tell their stories even though you've heard the same story ten times already. It's just polite.
And this seems like an annoying bug, not a feature. Internet is becoming more and more of an ephemeral place. That interesting news article you read few years ago? It's URL has probably changed twice, then it was deleted, and even if not, unless you remember the exact wording of the headline, you probably won't find it on Google as it will be buried under three pages of recent tweets that match your search query - tweets no one will care about or remember next week.
People do want to remember some things perfectly - that's why we invented writing, textbooks, diaries and libraries.
It's annoying as hell because Google promotes "freshness" over quality. You can get a very high position in Google by knocking off someone else's tech news story while removing half the facts and adding nothing of any consequence, as long as your do it quickly. This kind of blogspam also vanishes quickly, but only after the damage has been done.
Meanwhile anything that might actually be worth reading is somewhere around page 10...
...much like the way things were in 1997 with Google's predecessors. Funny how despite exponentially more layers of code running (with eons of iterative advances), it all still somehow comes full circle.
It's an interesting observation that agrees with my experience as well.
I feel like I keep seeing this all around. It seems that there's a point in the product after which any further optimization to "extract more value" actually degrades things. Comapnies need to learn when to stop messing with their product further and focus on something else.
What you're describing seems to be a natural process through which people try to cope with the new reality. New social norms are created and enforced to make people avoid one another's past timelines, and market forces emerge to make search engines rank more recent pages higher. It's all part of our natural response to what makes us uncomfortable. We respond in such a way as to restore comfort, because being creepy is neither polite nor profitable.
What that doesn't fix, however, is the fact that old information is still out there, on somebody's server, every bit unchanged and ready to resurface at a moment's notice. Sometimes the old information is just a statistic in the grand scheme of Big Data. Other times, it can be very specific, such as the one-liner that allowed the Feds to attribute to Ross Ulbricht the very first mention of Silk Road on the open Internet.
Computers aren't learning to forget, they still remember everything. We're just training ourselves to pretend that computers are just as forgetful as we are, because it's a comfortable thought. The problem, of course, that collective games of make-believe have a tendency to break down at some point.
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