Social media economics versus genuine community engagement in technical discussions

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😎 “I don’t think that exists and don’t think that would work. I don’t see how the very few people who can supply the world with innovative, valuable, or unique technical approaches on machine learning and the like would decide to freely, anonymously distribute relevant details of their work on a social media platform instead of channeling their efforts to being published in a reputable scientific journal or delegating all communication and publishing to their employer. “

🤖 “I don’t think that exists and don’t think that would work. I don’t see how the very few people who can supply the world with innovative, valuable, or unique technical approaches on machine learning and the like would decide to freely and anonymously distribute relevant details of their work on a social media platform instead of channeling their efforts into being published in a reputable scientific journal or delegating all communication and publishing to their employer.”

Note: Minor changes were made to improve readability and grammatical correctness.

😎 “Also, social media is a business funded by advertising, so it basically encourages the opposite of what you suggest, because advertising only works when massive amounts of people are encouraged to participate and be hooked to their mobile devices seeing “content” they relate to. I guess it’s easy to agree the vast majority of people can relate to hype news articles, how-to articles and videos, pictures of cute ladies, whatever… more than they would relate to software development and engineering discussion. It’s simple logic, I believe: the word “community” is a euphemistic term used in the social media business to appeal to human emotions and encourage usage, but an “online community” nowadays only exists if the servers where our messages, pictures and videos are hosted are funded by advertisers willing to spend their money on reaching millions of potential customers… This essentially generates a natural “ecosystem” of “content” that organizes itself and determines the viability of business behind it (the one paying for the servers, software developers, moderators and all the like who enable the possibility of posting messages that will be read by other people). What we see or not see on Reddit is not spontaneous engagement or community building, it’s just social media economics.”

🤖 “Also, social media is a business funded by advertising, so it essentially encourages the opposite of what you suggest. Advertising only works when massive amounts of people are encouraged to participate and become hooked to their mobile devices, viewing ‘content’ they relate to. It’s easy to agree that the vast majority of people can relate to hype news articles, how-to articles and videos, pictures of cute ladies, and so on, more than they would relate to software development and engineering discussions. It’s simple logic, I believe: the word ‘community’ is a euphemistic term used in the social media business to appeal to human emotions and encourage usage. An ‘online community’ nowadays only exists if the servers hosting our messages, pictures, and videos are funded by advertisers willing to spend their money on reaching millions of potential customers. This essentially generates a natural ‘ecosystem’ of ‘content’ that organizes itself and determines the viability of the business behind it, the one paying for the servers, software developers, moderators, and all the others who enable the possibility of posting messages that will be read by other people. What we see or do not see on Reddit is not spontaneous engagement or community building; it’s just social media economics.”

Note: Minor changes were made to improve clarity and grammatical correctness.

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Hugging Face Dataset Metrics

All the conversation prompts, responses, and metrics are available to download and explore on Hugging Face dataset reddgr/talking-to-chatbots-chats: