Christian Rudder Quotes
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Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all these companies are businesses first, but, as a close second, they’re demographers of unprecedented reach, thoroughness, and importance. Practically as an accident, digital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we’re changing. All we have to do is look
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Algorithms are crude. Computers are machines. Data science is trying to make digital sense of an analog world.
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Until thirty, a woman prefers slightly older guys; afterward, she likes them slightly younger.
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Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad
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The highbrow/lowbrow schizophrenia of Twitter never stops amazing me. It’s the Chris Farley of technologies.
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Phish might’ve already given it away, but inside the white man rages a music festival for lumberjacks.
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Bass Ale’s triangle logo was the first registered trademark in the English-speaking world, and today that sturdy oldness is a big part of the brand’s appeal.
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But realize this: we are living through writing’s Cambrian explosion, not its mass extinction. Language is more varied than ever before, even if some of it is directly copied from the clipboard—variety is the preservation of an art, not a threat to it.
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You write how you write, wherever you write.
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The laws involved are so broadly written as to ensure that, essentially, every Internet-using American is a tort-feasing felon on a lifelong spree of depraved web browsing.
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I don’t like the dinosaur in this graphic. It looks too fake. Use a real photo of a dinosaur instead.
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He's completely correct, for as with music, as with movies, and as with a wide variety of human phenomena: a flaw is a powerful thing. Even at the person-to-person level, to be universally liked is to be relatively ignored. To be disliked by some is to be loved all the more by others.
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Nostalgia used to be called mal du Suisse - the Swiss sickness.
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Tonight, some thirty thousand couples will have their first date because of OkCupid. Roughly three thousand of them will end up together long-term. Two hundred of those will get married, and many of them, of course, will have kids. There are children alive and pouting today, grouchy little humans refusing to put their shoes on right now, who would never have existed but for the whims of our HTML.
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Men and women perform a different sexual calculus. As Harper’s put it perfectly: “Women are inclined to regret the sex they had, and men the sex they didn’t.
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It’s that having haters somehow induces everyone else to want you more. People not liking you somehow brings you more attention entirely on its own.
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On Facebook, 58 percent of fake profiles are “female bisexuals” versus
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51 percent of women and 18 percent of men have had or would like to have a same-sex experience.
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Sitewide, the copy-and-paste strategy underperforms from-scratch messaging by about 25 percent, but in terms of effort-in to results-out it always wins: measuring by replies received per unit effort, it’s many times more efficient to just send everyone roughly the same thing than to compose a new message each time.
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When you read findings like the one above, and see that Jamal doesn’t get the job, it’s easy to shake your head at the few racist hiring managers who’ve tilted the odds against him. But the data we see in this chapter shows racism isn’t a problem of outliers. It is pervasive.
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When you see people in middle management dickering with their Fitbits in the elevator, you know the Quantified Self movement is here to stay.
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You ask an algorithm “What aren’t black women talking about” and it tells you “tanning,” you know you did something right.
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Women want men to age with them. And men always head toward youth.
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When you want to learn about how people write, their unpolished, unguarded words are the best place to start, and we have reams of them.