11 Quotes by Christian Rudder

an unintentionally hilarious 84 percent of users answer this match question…Would you consider dating someone who has a vocalized a strong negative bias toward a certain race of people? In the absolute negative (choosing “No” over “Yes” and “It Depends”. In light of the previous data, that means 84 percent of people on OKCupid would not consider dating someone on OKCupid.

So much of what makes the Internet useful for communication - asynchrony, anonymity, escapism, a lack of central authority - also makes it frightening.

There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed.

I'm not going to pretend that a few minutes with Wikipedia can stand in for an understanding of a culture.

On the corporate side, the upshot of our data (the benefit to us) isn't all that interesting unless you're an economist. In theory, your data means ads are better targeted, which means less marketing spend is wasted, which means lower prices. At the very least, the data they sell means you get to use genuinely useful services like Facebook and Google without paying money for them.

You can find readings of the Ballou letter on Youtube, and many of the comments are along the lines of "They just don't make them like that anymore." That's true. But what they, or rather we, are making offers a richness and a beauty of a different kind: a poetry not of lyrical phrases but of understanding. We are at the cusp of momentous change in the study of human communication and what it tries to foster: community and personal connection.

Although the thoughts expressed on Twitter may be foreshortened, there's no evidence here that they're diminished.

Twitter actually may be improving its users’ writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters.

By forcing people to hide, intolerance creates its own cynical logic: when a large portion of a group goes unrecognized, it only makes marginalizing the whole easier. Visibility, on the other hand, creates acceptance.