xtcc logo A web-log of art, violence,
software, and schadenfreude.
xtcc updates every Monday, except when it doesn't.

Many thanks to Tristan Morris for creating a beautiful illustrated hardcover print edition of the site

Case 185:

Social Media Comment Compression

(not geeky)  

Social media is consuming resources at an alarming rate. Every day, users post roughly 40 million tweets and 3.5 billion Facebook messages alone 1 . . . In addition to which, we have Google Plus, Kinja, Reddit, LiveJournal2, and so on . . .

Fortunately, semantic analysis of the traffic reveals a staggering amount of duplication. So to reduce bandwidth consumption, storage space, and work hours lost to “texting thumb”,3 I propose a new standardized menu that reduces each social media comment to a simple five-bit number (0 to 31):

  1. “Like” (or “Plus 1”)
  2. “Hate” (or “Minus 1”)
  3. “Whatever” (or “Times 1”)
  4. tl;dr
  5. LOL
  6. SMH
  7. LOLSMH
  8. ZOMGROTFLMAOSMH [don’t try this IRL].
  9. Obligatory XKCD.
  10. Irrelevant trivia.
  11. Snark.
  12. Boojum.
  13. A picture of your lunch.
  14. A picture of your junk.
  15. A picture of the “that’s enough internet for today” cat.
  16. “Firefly” quote.
  17. Pun.
  18. Worse pun.
  19. Small unfunny joke made at expense of absent partner/spouse, giving readers a glimpse into the seething bitterness underlying your joyless relationship.
  20. Creepy attempt at flirting, via sexual innuendo followed by ;-)
  21. Clumsy attempt to cover up flirting, via “j/k” followed by ;-)
  22. Trolling.
  23. Vaguebooking.
  24. Sycophantic mollycoddling [now illegal in Indiana].
  25. Drunken confession [adjust security settings to disable].
  26. Sweeping generalization.
  27. #NotAll___.
  28. Observation that YOUR gender/religion/political party does something EVEN WORSE.
  29. Argumentum Ad Hominem.
  30. F-bombs away!
  31. Invocation of Godwin’s Law [automatically ends thread].
  32. I made $6400/week working at home, using this one trick invented by a mom to enlarge your penis: ask me how! 4

1 Statistics courtesy of this site.
2 No, really, LiveJournal is still around. Snopes confirmed it.
3 “Texting Thumb” is a thing that is real. It’s formally known as De Quervain’s Syndrome.
4 90% of all Internet traffic is this, according to a statistic that I made up just now.
Topics...  

An excerpt from The Codeless Code, by Qi (qi@thecodelesscode.com).
RSS Feed

Warning: this website occasionally contains violence (which may be unsuitable for children), computer science (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors), and poetry (which may be unsuitable for anyone).

In case Randall Munroe is reading this:
Hey, Randall, seriously: thanks for all you do.

Provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.