Ryan Wright

Philosopher-CEO at thatDot

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

21 thoughts from 2021 I'd like to take into 2022:

[Ryan Wright @rrwright]

@joshuareeves I'm about to cancel my @GustoHQ service because of 3+ months horrific support for one tax withholding issue. This is last ditch effort to resolve it. A subset of the support reference numbers:
31331591
31507279
31745568
32101660
32108380
32102921
32110193
32250308

[Ethan Bell @emanb29]

I'm excited to speak on behalf of @thatDotinc at https://t.co/Ij5Y4yuHdt & Cassandra Summit https://t.co/GC0z51uBXp. Thanks to @sched for providing a sweet management platform, and to @DataStaxDevs and @linuxfoundation for hosting!

[Cory Zue @czue]

The Slow Death of Authenticity in an Attention Economy

I’m not quite sure when I started feeling uncomfortable with Twitter.

It wasn’t when Elon Musk bought it, or during the mass firings, or the bluecheck fiasco, or the rebrand to X, or any of the other politically-obvious times that many people decided to give up on it.

No, I was a Twitter optimist for a long time.

But somehow, somewhere over the last few months, my positive outlook on the platform has slowly eroded away. As I—ironically—spend as much time as ever scrolling through my feed—I find myself more and more annoyed, jealous, outraged, yes, but mostly just… bored.

And what’s funny is that the content is more “engaging” than ever. My feed is full of posts that have obviously had more effort put into it than most of what I used to see. Megathreads about AI, thoughtful, longform narratives that could have been blog posts, carefully curated images, and super-positive business updates. It’s mostly engaging stuff.

And therein, I think, lies the problem. The content I now see on Twitter is content that has been designed to be seen on Twitter. Tweeting has become a job. Quite literally, for many people, ever since they’ve started paying creators a share of ad revenue.

And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. The better your content is, the more it gets seen, and the more money you make. And yet, my felt experience of this change is the exact opposite—as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here?

One possibility is that I am unusual. I go on Twitter for authenticity. I have carefully curated a list of human beings who I know by name, and whose ideas and actions interest me. But authenticity is often at odds with growth.

Why? Well to grow you need to be noticed. To be noticed, you need to stand out. And to stand out is—usually—inauthentic. Yes, we all say and do noteworthy things, but not every day. To do or say noteworthy things every day involves some degree of forcedness, repetition, or trying. The opposite of authenticity.

If I wanted to get 10x more engagement than usual on a Tweet tomorrow, I could. I could post some celebratory brag about how much money I’m earning from my businesses (“omg $10k MRR!”). I could pick a fight on a topic people feel strongly about (“React sucks!”). I could mention it’s my birthday and post a picture of myself (“Can’t believe I’m 41!”). I could ask a question that lets people promote themselves (“What’s your favorite personal website?”), angrily quote-tweet a terrible take, and so on.

I know these things work. And I occasionally do them, knowing they will work. I try to do this only a handful of times a year, because even though they work, and even though they are useful for me and my businesses, and even though they make my lizard brain feel good, a part of me still hates them. Even a few times a year.

But oh boy, not the people in my feed. The people in my feed—most of whom I’m not following, by the way—love posting for engagement. Some of them love it so much that they offer courses teaching other people how to do it—which amplifies this godforsaken death spiral even further.

And so now we find ourselves in a situation where all these asshats with 20k followers and a Stripe account are now running their Twitter account as a business. And this has led to a slow and inevitable decline from authenticity to some version of marketing (look at my content!) and sales (follow me!).

And look, I don’t think it’s just the algorithm and the incentives. Elon’s political antics chased away a lot of good people. Many of my favorite follows have moved to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Also, more and more people are waking up and realizing that social media is actually quite bad for you, and leaving it behind. Good for them. Bad for me.

Still—and quite ironically—if anything actually gets me to stop using this platform, it’s going to be the changes that are supposed to make it grow.

[Peter Corless 🇺🇲 🇮🇪 🇺🇦 @PeterCorless]

@startreedata @tlberglund @zychr @gunnarmorling There's been some really amazing work being done for "standing queries" on streaming data. One example in particular I am intrigued with is @thatDotinc's implementation in #Quine, their streaming graph database:

https://t.co/plglOXR7q2

[Paul Graham @paulg]

I'm not warning about the switch to AI in the hope of averting it, but to warn the few people who care enough to save themselves, or their kids. Learn to use AI. It's a powerful technology, and you should know how to use it. But also learn how to write.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Observation suggests that people are switching to using ChatGPT to write things for them with almost indecent haste. Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. Way more than admit it. Within a year the median piece of writing could be by AI.

[Ryan Wright @rrwright]

@aronchick @GoogleAI +1

[The Knowledge Graph Conference (KGC) @KGConference]

📢 KGC 2023 UPDATE 📢

Introducing Ryan Wright @rrwright, founder & CEO of @thatDotinc.

Ryan will deliver his talk on #StreamingGraphs Because We Cannot Afford to #Query Anymore at The Knowledge Graph Conference 2023.

More info: https://t.co/7yuUcUQWp2

#dataarchitecture

[thatDot, creators of Quine @thatDotInc]

If you're at @MontySummit today check out @rrwright presenting at Quine streaming graph, the technology at the convergence of real-time event processing and graph neural networks. Slides available soon as well.

More on the Summit here - https://t.co/dyFR7dE6k3

[Ethan Bell @emanb29]

Thanks @ScyllaDB for the awesome swag! Incredibly proud to share our work @thatDotinc pioneering real-time streaming graph at-scale at the 2023 Scylla summit, powered in part by Scylla!

[Ethan Bell @emanb29]

For those attending #ScyllaDB #ScyllaSummit: Here's a direct link to @thatDotinc's awesome "booth" on supercharging data pipelines with Quine and Scylla. We worked really hard on this, and I'm super excited to see people interested! https://t.co/sIU6Tb0jjx

[Ryan Wright @rrwright]

It turns out that buying "fake engagement" is against the "Platform Manipulation and Spam" policy. Don't worry @Gizmodo, I reported this "@elonmusk" user. I'm sure @Twitter will dutifully sanction this user and make the community better for everyone.
https://t.co/4Gn81DAmqs

[Farnam Street @farnamstreet]

Richard Feynman on the difference between knowledge and understanding:

"Names don't constitute knowledge...You have to be very careful not to confuse yourself."

[thatDot, creators of Quine @thatDotInc]

Quine at the @ScyllabDB Summit: @thatDotinc Director of Engineering, Matthew Cullum will share how to build an event processing pipeline that scales to millions of events/second with sub-millisecond latencies.

Don't miss this free session; sign up today: https://t.co/mlzXvD73zW

[Ethan Bell @emanb29]

Great retrospective of some of the work we've been doing @thatDotinc. We're pushing the bounds of Quine and Scylla, and therefore of what's possible in complex event streaming systems.

[7evenbridges @7evenbridges]

When someone like @thatDotinc's Director of Engineering, Matthew Cullum shares his hard won experience, you'd be silly not to listen.

[swyx @swyx]

ChatGPT’s current killer app isn’t search, therapy, doing math, controlling browsers, emulating a virtual machine, or any of that other cherrypicked examples that come with huge disclaimers.

It’s a lot more quotidian:

Reformatting information from any format X to any format Y.

[ScyllaDB @ScyllaDB]

At our free #ScyllaDB Summit, @thatDotinc's Director of Engineering, Matthew Cullum, will share how to build an event processing pipeline that scales to millions of events per second with sub-millisecond latencies. Don't miss this session; sign up today: https://t.co/zn3PN8xZk8