1/ Imagine you had your entire twitter history. As in, all the data necessary to replicate the entire feed at any point as well as replay all interactions. More than that — imagine you had everyone else’s data too. I can’t imagine a more fun way to probe social path-dependency.
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Replying to @generativist
The selection bias here in replicating not just the data but the timeline, the order — that's the real mystery and what makes traditional web archiving methods miss the mark on the modern web - personalization is part of the fabric itself.
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Replying to @generativist @JaimieMurdock
Like the joke is that people 20 years from now will think strong-to-weak forms of “none of this happened” but of course they won’t — there’s a lot of latent state that isn’t going to be transferable without actually walking this winding ass line.
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Replying to @generativist
Well, and it's literally impossible to recapture! How do you scrape each user's experience? Do you do a clean room recreation of the Timeline, like the old IBM clones had to do? What does that market open up?
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Replying to @JaimieMurdock @generativist
Biggest thought: the world went simultaneously closed+open - proprietary, yet interchangable. With the web, all the hand-wringing over digital sharecropping and walled gardens ended up being real, but in an unexpected way: it wasn't the content, but the context that we lost.
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Oh yea I def agree with this. Even in the narrow sense of twitter, one of the things that I doubt even twitter could reproduce is algorithmic state. Like even with good devops it’s pretty complex to roll back, so it would be a “it’s extremely hard to write emulators” thing.
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