Key issues with “social media”
#1: too “intelligent” not enough “common sense”
#2: you aren’t the centre of the universe
There are a couple of “social media issues” I have been experiencing lately. One of them is spam. Spam in the form of unwanted information and unsolicited adverts. I suppose nowadays this is so commonplace that instead of spam, it’s really just noise.
All the things I don’t want to see, yet there it is, dropped in front of me and published for my viewing pleasure.
So it happens that when we started building phlow, we took a stand on how we would have organised its contents. We believed then — and believe even more so today, that an artificial intelligence was one of the biggest contributing factors of the above problem as it simply does not know me well enough to decide what I do and do not want to see; therefore and with phlow it was not going to give us anything new.
We wanted to show images based on a principle much older than artificial intelligence: the way we behave.
Focusing on following context rather than people, and actively analysing the behaviour of people within those context, we came to realise that it was solving some of the social networking issues we experience daily.
advertising at the root of social network issues
Advertising is one of the key issues we see on social networks, but at the same time it is one of the ways they survive. So we can’t really blame the likes of Facebook for having it as a revenue stream.
However, why have advertisers become more important than us?
The systems we use daily don’t have us at the centre of the world. It is not what I love, but what advertisers wants to show me. Alas, pushing paid unwanted content in front of my eyes means I see the content that I love.
What differences would there be on the likes of Facebook, Instagram or Twitter if attention was refocused to the user? Spam and noise would become a thing of the past, and even advertising would be tailored towards the things you are interested in.
AI vs. behavioural analysis
If you read the articles here on phlowzone regularly you will hear us refer to “behavioural analysis” quite a lot. Our team have varied experience working with AI, and there are fields in which it does work and work well. I personally have set up fuzzy networks which were amazing at organising written content. However, my experience with it in photography and visual content, is a let down.
Whether Facebook, throttling the information coming from the pages you are subscribed to, or Flickr’s home page. There hasn’t been one artificial intelligence that hit the nail on the head for me.
Rather than AI vs behavioural analysis; at phlow we like to think of it as “intelligence vs common sense”
why phlow will make it where others are failing?
If we have said it once, we have said it 100 times already in this blog — the issue is the fundamental principles on which social networks are built. As a user, you are seeing what others want you to see, what others choose to publish. You have no simple way to tell the A.I. that something is just noise and therefore not relevant to you.
Okay on Facebook you can decide to silence a thread or hide a user, but it is a cumbersome experience and it’s also user centric. It’s focusing on the user that posted the content, not the content they posted.
In other words, not every post that user makes is going to be noise to you.
so why phlow will be any different?
Well, first of all phlow is not social media, at least not in the common sense of term; however, there is a much more important reason, and it is linked to “behavioural analysis”.
To organise content by relevance, phlow analyses what users do.
We don’t want users having to spend time telling us what they do and do not want to see, instead it is through natural gestures that we understand it.
The time and attention spent on an image is a good example. You move on quicker from an image that you dislike or do not find interesting than the time you spent to pause and admire one that leave you breathless.
Added to this, the fact you don’t need to like, comment or share removes one of the social networking issues, reciprocity — like4like and comment4comment in order for images to be seen by more individuals.
We have added some very direct and indirect ways to say “Yes” or “No” to an image, all of which take a fraction of a second and you probably don’t even realise you are doing some of them.
saying NO to spam
The moment you have a system that carefully analyses what people do with a series of images, it is easy to understand basic patterns. One of the simplest one is to understand when people just “dislike” an image. Actively or passively, you tell us if an image is a big “no-no”. If one person shows negative sentiments towards an image, it is a personal trait; however, if the same behaviour is underlined by many people that share similar passions and interests, then that is a global pattern.
One of the ideas behind phlow is that the publisher of an image can be either more or less relevant for each specific context.
Imagine a great wedding photographer, whose images are constantly amongst the most relevant for #wedding and #weddingdress. Every time she posts an image, it rises to the top thanks to its qualities and impact on that specific audience.
Now, imagine how hard the life of a spammer will be in phlow. Your photographs are out of context and the audience of that particular stream simply see it as noise, and your images repeatedly get down voted.
As simple as it gets, phlow identifies this, and won’t foster his images.
finally…
phlow is not social networking, why? Because it puts you as the user at the centre of your own world.
What you like and what you want to see, before what your friends like to publish. Gives us a huge number of advantages over existing platforms.
