McKay Thomas | Blog

Signal To Noise: Dancing?

It’s been two weeks since my last post and my only excuse is that I’m finding that I’ve been busier than at any other time in my life and haven’t had a moment where my mind was free enough to share anything worthwhile. I mean, I can only post a new playlist so many times.

I read an absolutely maddening post on TechCrunch this evening and could help but calm myself down by posting about it.

Josh Constine writes:

“Users still expect to have to actively share something in order for it to reach their audience. That’s no longer true. Instead we’ll need to learn to filter out the noise in reverse, opting out when we don’t want to share instead of opting in when we do. That’s a huge behavioral realignment that will take time and won’t come easy. If learned, though, we’ll be able to dance across the web from one piece of great content to the next, sharing it all effortlessly, and only having to stop when something deserves to be struck from the record. And as algorithms improve to show us what’s most relevant, we won’t have to unshare as often.”

Algorithms? Josh, please. The reason Google is on the ropes is because it thinks it can solve problems with algorithms, while the rest of the web moves on. Automated curation is not dying, it never worked to begin with. Facebook’s social solution is the first that approached the problem with a sense of realism, let friends curate the web for each other.

However, that isn’t even my biggest problem with his post. The biggest problem is that Josh thinks that the web by default is interesting enough to share with our friends as we dance from webpage to webpage and story to story. It isn’t. I read, watch, view something like hundreds of pieces of content for every one I share throughout my networks. Why? Because there is a social responsibility amongst those you are connected with online that we won’t pollute each other’s feeds.

Josh’s point ignores human behavior and social context all together. He acts like Facebook’a new live ticker some how reworked the human race and even somehow took over Facebook. It didn’t. The ticker has been a small addition to my Facebook usage and I don’t expect it to change the way I think or act or even surf the web.

Josh is completely of point in his post and to think that it might be read with the same credibility as yester-month is frustrating to me. I’ve written before, a few times, about the unfortunate fall of TechCrunch with the exodus of ALL of its key players (and no, I don’t consider Erik Shonfeld a key player). This article tonight by Josh Constine typifies my exact point. In the old days rubbish like this would be reserved for a guest post, but these days this stuff is coming directly from full-on TC staff.

Human behavior hasn’t changed and won’t change and Josh, you’re an idiot and part of the next TC class that will teach all of us why we shouldn’t come back to TechCrunch for anything but to reminisce.