Signal vs Noise

One thing which is going to become even more cen­tral to our online exis­tence is the preva­lence of sig­nal vs noise. We’re being bom­barded with more and more infor­ma­tion about friends, fam­ily, idols and news. I pride myself on keep­ing a fairly short (150) list of feeds in my Google Reader, of which I speed through the major­ity of them, skim­ming with lib­eral use of the key­board shortcuts.

In my Twit­ter though, I’m wrestling with the issue as there are a num­ber of peo­ple who I fol­low, but are not peo­ple I’m truly that inter­ested in. In my per­sonal Twit­ter app, Tweet­Core, I had come to a solu­tion where it used a sim­ple algo­rithm to hide tweets from some­one past the first X, and thus remove the noise to allow me to enjoy my feed with­out too much noise. It’s not per­fect, but it’s bet­ter than any other twit­ter app allows right now.

It’s also the sin­gle rea­son I haven’t killed of the Tweet­Core project. It has had almost no time devoted to it in the recent months, but I need it to man­age this level of infor­ma­tion and noise in my life.

While on vaca­tion in DC though I found another inter­est­ing exam­ple of this: our hotel TV. The hotel had numer­ous issues, but the TV had about 25 chan­nels, of which only three were really of inter­est to us. They were ESPN, HBO, and USA. The rest were news, non-marquee sports (SPEED TV, ESPN2, ESPN Clas­sic), Span­ish or local. We’d put the TV on in the bed­room just for the sake of noise, or for enter­tain­ment but usu­ally we had to chan­nel surf around the chan­nels two or three times before set­tling on some­thing to watch.

When I real­ized we were ‘set­tling’ I knew there was an issue. In today’s day and age, set­tling for enter­tain­ment is a thing of the past. I began try­ing to use Hulu more as an option to allow us to choose what to watch rather than to set­tle with some mediocre mind-numbing show.

Another point this has come up was a dis­cus­sion on Hacker News, when Jeff Atwood (blog­ger at CodingHorror.com and Stack­Over­flow) wrote his case for why social book­mark sites should pro­vide a down-vote option. It was a bit of an incen­di­ary issue as he took some very broad strokes against HN, with the mem­bers clearly defend­ing and respond­ing, though it teeters on the edge of dis­sent into flamewar.

The down-vote is a nat­ural incli­na­tion as it puts that con­trol I spoke of ear­lier, but the premise of HN is that it isn’t needed and it avoids the hordes of down-voting gangs who bury sto­ries they dis­agree with. This instead comes to rest on a group of edi­tors and high-level mem­bers who will remove sto­ries which are errant either in topic or tone.

In truth I think it’s a per­sonal preference.

I’m okay with the occa­sional noise which rises up on HN, and I trust that the edi­tors will han­dle it if needed. Over­all HN is a peace­ful nook on the Internet.

That being said, con­trol is slowly shift­ing into our hands, but it’s up to us to grab it and use it before it drifts away.