Sierra_rider

Speak for yourself. My Youtube channel of 68 subscribers and my Strava with 69 followers were being sponsored by Canyon...at least until they found out that I was moonlighting with PON holdings. I was getting kickdowns from Specialized too, but I criticized the "Brain" rear suspension on my Epic too much and lost out on that cash cow. I was raking in the dough, just advancing the corporate agenda of disc brakes, thru axles, and blacked out bikes. Now I survive on a meager income by dowsing steel bikes with battery acid.

Polaris OBark

That's like when the CIA, under the MK-ULTRA program, recruited the Grateful Dead lyricist/poet Robert Hunter (who it turns out was not only related to Robert Burns, but actually had the birth name of Robert Burns, before he was adopted) and fed him a lot of acid.

Except different. Robert Hunter had talent, and they only influenced the same 650 people, over and over again.

Chuck M 

The heirs of some gentleman named Moore in Oklahoma City are going to pay me the prevailing steel scrap rate for all the Takaras I can get my boney fingers on.

Kai Winters

W...T...F...that is all...now go about your day and do something productive or at least pretend to...

Koyote

Eleven pages of chatter....And still no one has given a single solid reason why, for my riding and my bikes, I should shun disc brakes.

calamarichris

Maybe because we wouldn't presume to dictate what you should do. We can only tell you why we prefer or shun disc brakes. If you go back through those eleven pages, you'll find plenty of opinions, kindly and delicately expressed.

PeteHski

Along with some complete lunacy.

calamarichris

Be nice. You came to cyberspace for other peoples' opinions and experiences.

PeteHski

Opinions are interesting until they suggest we are all dumb, gullible sheep or industry shills. Especially when their opinions are stated as indisputable fact.

LarrySellerz

This was posted 7 days ago, forgive formatting issues, I think you may find it interesting. I’ve been posting about Big Gravel, partially in jest, for a long time now, but it could be true. It’s long been speculated that most content on the internet is created by bots


"I can't name names for privacy reasons.

The gist of what I do is teach computers to do sentiment analysis on social media posts that are of interest to clients, tag them based on their various properties (author, sentiments, keywords, etc), and add them to a giant graph of all social media posts we're interested in, who else has retweeted them or the link, who responded to them, etc. We use this to estimate exposure numbers and influence, and try to isolate the key people in a social graph which are causing an opinion to form. (Ideally, on the order of minutes or hours instead of days or weeks.)


Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream -- people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense ****** posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).

The goal is to keep opinions we don't want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they've gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.

(All of the stuff above is basically the "standard" for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you're above a certain size.)

Careful analysis of online communities (or reading the papers where they got caught) would tell you that various nations are using similar technologies against their citizens and other nations. It's not entirely about business that China is concerned with building a domestic social network, and DARPA runs extensive research programs on social graph analysis and influence, on behalf of the Pentagon."

indyfabz

smd4

No tinfoil hats necessary for that.

genejockey 

When you look at the world, it is important to remember - "Never Attribute to Malice That Which Is Adequately Explained by Stupidity"

Trakhak

For anyone interested, here's a 2022 article published in the Decision Analytics Journal:

A systematic review of social media-based sentiment analysis: Emerging trends and challenges

Trakhak

FYI, I've reported my previous post and LarrySellerz' post 260 for being potentially too political (for General Cycling, anyway).

LarrySellerz

calling my post political is absurd. I’ll probably receive a ban, and tbh you should feel bad about that. I know you’re confused by my postings, you said you think I’m a performance artist earlier in this thread, which is a more personal attack than almost anything in my post history.

The tendency to want to silence someone when they speak something that makes you uncomfortable is human and understandable, I’m not angry, but you should try to do better. Especially with the algorithms putting us into echo chambers.

I’ve smoked salvia Divinorum a few times this last month, and it’s made me more open minded to outlandish theories.

calamarichris

I'm confused now. Are you asserting that I called you or anyone else dumb or gullible? Or that my opinions were indisputable fact? If I did, I apologize. I've been diligently drinking myself to death, so if I said something hurtful, I'm very sorry.

smd4

So you literally are hallucinating?

tomato coupe

Shocking.

3alarmer 

...if you really want to discuss shunning, you ought to start a thread on that topic in P+R.

rsbob 

Starting to find conspiracies so overdone these days. People need to find a new schtick. Now back to my Space Alien Monkey Babies novel. Edit: A special thanks to Steve Martin for inspiring that last line.

Trakhak

Three things:

First: My "Theater major" post was simply meant to demonstrate how easy it is to come up with a conspiracy theory on the strength of scanty or nonexistent evidence. You and I both know no one could take it seriously.

Second: Before you added the post I quoted here, I had pretty much no idea that "sentiment-based" marketing analysis existed, and certainly no idea that the field of study had advanced so far. Honestly, having barely skimmed the article that I linked to, I'm shocked and depressed.

Despite that, and despite the fact that I'd almost rather not know it existed, I'm grateful to you for providing the information that sent me off to find out about it.

Third and finally, you absolutely do not deserve an infraction. You're far from only one who has gone off on a tangent in this thread. I reported your post and mine only because the frightening topic of machine learning being used to manipulate our reactions doesn't feel much like a General Cycling topic, or even Foo.

Dave Mayer

Back on topic. I was in a newly opened local high-end shop yesterday. They sell road bikes for the fast crowd. I did not see anything for sale at less than $4k. All bikes had hydraulic discs, and most featured electronic shifting and fully-integrated frames and bars. The mechanic in the back corner was swearing under his breath trying to fish a hydraulic line through a handlebar.

The higher-end carbon bikes that I lifted up all weighed more than any of my carbon road bikes, some considerably more. More than even my 20-year old titanium bikes.

So if you need better braking in the rain, at the expense of a couple of extra pounds of bike weight, and you are willing to spend $3k more for a 2024 bike relative to a good used high-end 2015 rim brake model, then these bikes would be for you.

BTW: I'm not an AI influencer bot; I think we need to include this disclaimer on posts going forward.

tomato coupe

Once again, your claim that disc brakes come with a two pound weight penalty is false.

PeteHski

Sorry, I wasn’t referring to you.