information trails

[kaycebasques]

• we're not tapping into our collective intelligence. we're really good at detecting the trails of others. we should leave more trails in our docs.
• stack overflow, lots of votes
• % of people who found a page helpful
• related functions? when I enter a certain path, highlight which other paths people followed after that
  • in other words, why are we treating all paths as equal, if we can anticipate that some paths are more helpful than others
• maybe you can help me scheme up ideas on how to implement and measure this

[kaycebasques]

https://aeon.co/essays/the-most-important-connection-in-any-network-is-the-local

Ants use pheromones to mark their trail. Other ants interpret where the pheromones are strongest as the path.

So there’s something to be said about showing pagevoews and “this page was helpful” to readers

Also, I think readers use “last updated” as a trail for determining whether a doc suits their needs

We need to think about all the ways that readers forage for information

[kaycebasques]

Jean-Louis Deneubourg ant experiment: connect ant colony to a food source, via 2 bridges. One much longer than the other. Ants use the shorter path, simply because the pheromone trail is stronger.

A general way to think about TW is that we're in the business of helping users find the shortest path to their information.

Apply ML to helping users find a shorter path. Leave as many hints as possible.

[kaycebasques]

People to study: Jean-Louis Deneubourg. "Self-Organization In Biological Systems"

Ilya Prigogine (Deneubourg's mentor).

[kaycebasques]

example:

While developing an application in React, I encountered this error:

Warning: setState(...): Cannot update during an existing state transition (such as within `render` or another component's constructor). Render methods should be a pure function of props and state; constructor side-effects are an anti-pattern, but can be moved to `componentWillMount`.

I pasted it into Google Search. The first result was a Stack Overflow question. I opened the page, and scrolled down to the accepted answer. The first paragraph of the accepted answer said:

Looks like you're accidentally calling the handleButtonChange method in your render method, you probably want to do onClick={() => this.handleButtonChange(false)} instead.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/37387846/1669860

That matched my situation. I went back and checked my code, and found where that might be happening.