Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Tag: Algorithm

  • Over time the algorithm and the crowd moves

    Things seem to be changing a bunch in terms of social networks this year. I’m curious to see if a return to the weblog and self hosted content is coming. The problem with that creation of your own island of content is that the crowds are generally elsewhere. We have seen massive changes in where new crowds are going. I mean MySpace was exciting before it was a wasteland. Sometimes I miss the community of the early communities like what happened on Flickr at the start. Some of that early community started to happen on Substack Notes. You will find that the best chance to see a smaller number of creators and have a solid level of interaction with people is at the start of a thing. 

    Over time the algorithm and the crowd removes the elements of community that form up the things I generally like about new platforms. I mean where Twitter is now and where it was coming out of SXSW (2006) is like two entirely different companies that just happen to share the same name. It was interesting to see what was happening on Substack Notes. At the time, I was at a soccer practice and thought using the post template that Substack provided to share the news about notes was a good idea. I’m not sure my sharing helped drive any degree of adoption, but I did share that news. So far I’m checking into Substack Notes every day as a part of my entertainment routine. It’s probably eating up a little bit of time that would have been spent on Twitter. 

    Sometimes I play Boom Beach, the rather mindless smartphone game, on my Google Pixel 7 Pro (now repaired) for a couple of minutes during the afternoon. I’m actively considering just hitting delete on my Twitter account. It is not really something that I need for any reason. Maybe spending some time without any social media would increase my writing output. I had Facebook turned off for years and that was fine. Maybe getting rid of Twitter would be a good thing to complete. Anyway, that is a course of action that I’m strongly considering. The fact that I did not just complete the action is probably an indicator that it won’t happen. It however is something that I have spent some time considering.

  • That last day of April

    We made it to the last day of April. I have spent the last two hours researching and writing this morning. My writing output in terms of weblog posts was not very good this month. I have a calendar view that shows me the gaps in my daily publishing and it clearly shows that this month was not full of productivity. Overall my productivity was ok and no goals or deadlines were missed, but it was not the peak of my writing productivity.

    Earlier today I started to sketch out an algorithm to define offensive vs. generally normatively accepted utterances. That is something that I think could be defined as an algorithm to reflect a point of time, but I don’t think it would stay consistent over the course of time. It would probably take me about 4-6 hours to fully sketch and get the basic algorithmic definitions lined up. Today will not be the day where that time is committed to making that happen. Deciding how to spend time each day is an important part of the decision making process.