[HN Gopher] Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier plac...
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got
angrier
Author : tysone
Score : 178 points
Date : 2021-09-15 14:01 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| bastardoperator wrote:
| The amount of hatred on facebook is staggering. I just group text
| or call when it comes to friends and family. A lot of us are on
| discord these days because we want to communicate without all of
| the noise or drama.
| efleurine wrote:
| May be we need two news feeds. One for our friends and one where
| you see the whole metaverse.
| strict9 wrote:
| > _Company researchers discovered that publishers and political
| parties were reorienting their posts toward outrage and
| sensationalism. That tactic produced high levels of comments and
| reactions that translated into success on Facebook._
|
| This is why The Daily Wire and other such outrage aggregators are
| consistently on Facebook's Top 10.
|
| Not coincidentally, it's also been the source of fuel for the
| anti-vaccine movement that is resulting in overflowing ICUs and
| well over a thousand deaths per day.
|
| Masks, social distancing, vaccines--are a political issue and
| FB's feed that prioritizes "engagement" (or enragement) causes
| false medical information to float to the top and get the most
| comments/shares.
|
| FB got more engagement but in the process became the main outlet
| for medical misinformation.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| And don't get me started on how Twitter consistently pushes
| those "influencers" on the left to the top of the trending
| feed. "Duty to Warn", "Palmer Report", "Gravel Institute",
| "BrooklynDad", and others. In many ways I feel like those smug
| hot-takes are even more corrosive than what the Daily Wire
| does.
| strict9 wrote:
| We are in agreement. "engagement" is a plague that brings out
| the worst of all sides of the political spectrum.
|
| But worse than political rhetoric is the proliferation and
| promotion of medical misinformation.
|
| It's resulting in the deaths of thousands of people who were
| duped into believing the vaccines are part of some sort of
| conspiracy and that bogus treatments are the only thing that
| work.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >the proliferation and promotion of medical misinformation.
|
| I can see that working both ways. The anti-vax folks are
| never going to believe the 'get vaccinated or you'll die'
| sort of rhetoric. Better to use real numbers. There's been
| enough time and cases to make good estimates.
|
| Do masks work very well? What kinds of masks? Where do
| people actually get COVID (home? bars? schools? hiking in
| the forest?). What are the actual results from non-vax
| drugs or treatments? How long are the vaccinations likely
| to be useful? Did early large-scale vaccination simply
| cause forced evolution of variants?
|
| There's a shroud of mystery throughout this situation with
| a need by some people to simply shout down to the masses.
| None of this is that complicated and medical leadership is
| some mixture of secretive and incompetent, and I'm not sure
| what the strongest tendency is.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Do masks work very well? What kinds of masks? Where do
| people actually get COVID (home? bars? schools? hiking in
| the forest?). What are the actual results from non-vax
| drugs or treatments? How long are the vaccinations likely
| to be useful? Did early large-scale vaccination simply
| cause forced evolution of variants?
|
| These questions are always asked in bad faith, if they're
| even asked at all rather than just taking the word of
| right-wing talking heads at face value. Anti-vaxxers and
| COVID deniers don't care what the science says and
| willfully ignore peer-reviewed studies.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >These questions are always asked in bad faith,
|
| I'd say not. I'd genuinely like to know if a cloth
| bandana has any value, if grocery stores are dangerous,
| is the mass of people actually better off for an early
| and hard vaccine regime. It's partly intellectual
| interest and partly an attempt to guide my own behavior.
|
| Having said that, everyone is too invested in their
| theories to be skeptical.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| For sure, and as much as I loathe Ben Shapiro's smugness,
| and by extension, his "news" outlet, I'd be remiss if I
| didn't also point out how it's happening elsewhere from the
| other side of the aisle, too.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| I'd love to talk to the folks that work at the outrage porn
| outlets. Are they true believers doing whatever it takes?
| Actually think they print news? Just in it for the money?
|
| How honed is the writing and how is that done? How do
| advertisers (the point of the exercise after all) respond? How
| has it all changed over time? How do people become writers, how
| much of it is done programatically?
|
| It's a small thing, but something I'm struck by is how little
| international news is out there anymore.
| sayonaraman wrote:
| Exactly, you can probably add Washington Post, CNN and The New
| York Times to the list. If not for the continuous lies and
| "outrage engineering" by mainstream media BLM riots wouldn't
| have happened and hundreds of small businesses wouldn't have
| been destroyed in 2020, not to mention all the innocent people
| injured and killed for fake political cause.
|
| Facebook and other social media are definitely partly
| responsible for the outrage culture and divisiveness plaguing
| the country.
|
| But I assume it's a difficult problem for algorithms to detect
| political agenda, as it seems to pervade every aspect of news
| these days.
| the-dude wrote:
| For how long will articles like these hit the FP? When does it
| stop being news? Will it ever change?
|
| I wonder from which year the 'first' of articles like these is.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Usenet moderation debates? probably before that. Perhaps the
| "editors" columns of society journals.
|
| If i recall, there were some laws about what could be printed
| shortly after printing presses began to proliferate that went
| beyond "don't say anything bad about lawmakers or the church"
| and ventured into early libel/slander by attempting to say
| "dont be controversial". which is pretty much what everyone is
| wishing for now, when they're demanding various forms of
| censorship and filtering performed pre-consumer.
| jes wrote:
| Facebook was a really unhealthy place for me. In part because of
| my own insecurities.
|
| I gave it up a year or so ago. Lots of pictures from the last ten
| years of my life were lost. Which is fine. The last decade has
| been a huge shitstorm for me.
|
| Facebook did leverage my attention seeking and my unhealthy need
| to be seen as right and smart.
|
| I don't miss it. I think their platform does a lot of damage in
| the world. Yet I'm sure that many people get value from it as
| well.
| rflec028 wrote:
| wsj.com is not a trustworthy news source and should not be
| posted.
| badRNG wrote:
| Why do you say that? Content here seems pretty reasonable most
| of the time.
| Pxtl wrote:
| WSJ's editorial pages have a long and storied history of
| supporting conservative positions that are utterly
| disconnected from reality, for example on climate change or
| the Iraq war. These are not trivial matters that we should
| quickly forgive them over.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >These are not trivial matters that we should quickly
| forgive them over.
|
| Just imagine the fun you'll have when you start kicking
| them out of helicopters. The endorphin rush should be
| incredible.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| You're thinking of their opinion section. The reporting is
| solid.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Which is another argument for scrapping the opinion section
| of every newspaper, it confuses people.
|
| But they keep it for the same reason FB doesn't turn down
| their own volume, angry people make for better customers.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >Which is another argument for scrapping the opinion
| section of every newspaper, it confuses people.
|
| At this point, I'd say that that's the entire newspaper.
| They operate in the same ad space as Facebook.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Respectfully I disagree. The opinion section is
| fundamentally different (and damaging) to the news
| reporting, and shouldn't exist. But opinion content is
| many times more popular than straight news, it seems
| people like being told what to think.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| I think that news has extended quite far into op-ed
| space. There's a combination of just what news is
| reported and just how a thing is worded.
|
| Modern newspapers and news magazines (they still exist?)
| don't read at all like the ones from 50 years ago.
| mdoms wrote:
| Is anyone else finding this WSJ reporting a bit overwrought? They
| got access to some internal documents and decided to make hay
| while the sun shines, but most of it is frankly not very
| interesting. WSJ pretty clearly have an axe to grind and are
| building a narrative in an unbalanced way.
| bertil wrote:
| I'm very tempted to agree in general, and I've seen a lot of
| bad takes that cured my Gell-Mann amnesia but on this
| particular take, I think they are sensible. I would know
| because all this was my job in 2015. It's partial because it's
| based on contained leaks, there's couple of inaccuracies, but
| not much more than what your team mates would make.
|
| I think the reason why it adds up is that it's starting from a
| good point of view: Why is that job hard? There seem to be no
| easy fixes, why? What the people trying to fix are struggling
| with?
|
| That's universally a good question to ask anyone and a great
| way to get a nuanced point of view -- far better than the usual
| outrage at "Why is Facebook so terrible?!" which is best
| described as scapegoating to make an obvious reference to
| Thiel's PhD advisor.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Facebook is fundamentally a dead platform, as far as I can tell.
| I've got over 500 "friends" and I see almost nothing on the news
| feed, to the point where it remains static aside from the
| shifting ads, for days at a time.
|
| There's a chilling effect at some level with the way that
| Facebook has a defacto "real name" policy, combined with the fact
| that it's your real-life family and friends and normies that you
| are connected with. Only the most disagreeable bother posting
| outside of the realm of baby pictures and recipes and small-
| business self-promotion.
| mandevil wrote:
| Facebook agrees with you, per the article. The article places a
| lot of the blame on the changes to the algorithms in January
| 2018, which at the time Zuck portrayed as a sacrifice: "Now, I
| want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time
| people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will
| go down," he wrote on Facebook. "But I also expect the time you
| do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the
| right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and
| our business over the long term too."
|
| "Facebook training videos and internal memos show another
| reason for the change -- the company's growing concern about a
| decline in user engagement, which typically refers to actions
| like commenting on or sharing posts.Comments, likes and
| reshares declined through 2017, while "original broadcast"
| posts -- the paragraph and photo a person might post when a dog
| dies -- continued a yearslong decline that no intervention
| seemed able to stop, according to the internal memos. The fear
| was that eventually users might stop using Facebook
| altogether."
|
| So they made changes to the algorithm and ended up making
| things worse, by emphasizing politics, hate-clicks, and
| arguments. This shows the limits of algorithms: there is a
| reason that actual news organizations rely on humans to decide
| on what information to present to you, not some machine
| learning black-box.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| Good luck supporting a $trillion valuation on the basis of a
| "healthier place". The business of social media platforms is to
| maximize profit by monetizing their user base. Friedman
| instructed MBA students that they must pursue this diligently,
| using any and all legal tricks in the book.
|
| Yes sure, as good managers they need to protect long-term
| shareholder value. They should, in general, want to strike the
| right balance that will be maximally extractive without incuring
| uneconomic fines, or unduly damaging the reputation of the
| platform. With all the top brains in the payroll this is an
| optimisation problem that seems easy to crack.
|
| For as long society thinks this business model is kosher there is
| really nothing to do about it. If we want to ever turn a page and
| start worrying about more serious problems we simply need to move
| on to open source decentralized media.
| owl_troupe wrote:
| > start worrying about more serious problems
|
| I completely agree with your sentiment, but what societal
| problem isn't currently being made worse by political
| polarization and misinformation on Facebook?
|
| Take your pick: genocide[1], climate change denialism[2], anti-
| democratic efforts[3], public health misinformation [4], just
| to name a few.
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-
| facebook...
|
| [2]
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/08/climate-...
|
| [3]
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/faceb...
|
| [4] https://www.fastcompany.com/90657622/as-the-delta-variant-
| sp...
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Part of the problem is a lot of people enjoy the anger.
| snarf21 wrote:
| For sure, but it is also that outrage is _hugely_ profitable.
| We need a digital advertising tax on revenue. By making all
| these internet companies so profitable, we 've given them
| perverse incentives to make it worse.
| amelius wrote:
| There must be a better word for "enjoy" here.
| [deleted]
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Revel in? I think it makes sense though. We live in a world
| where trolls are happy to cause all manner of misery.
| Freskis wrote:
| I think it's called "doomscrolling".
| Applejinx wrote:
| That's what I called it just before I deleted Twitter and
| Facebook.
|
| I made a dummy Twitter account to be logged into, that has
| no friends, just to be able to see links people post.
| There's no such thing as a dummy Facebook account and I've
| not looked at anything on Facebook since. The only account
| there is their shadow account on me, something Twitter has
| no interest in doing, and which Facebook must do so it can
| accurately assign accounts to every living human and avoid
| dummy/sockpuppet accounts.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| In a way one's politics has usurped one's religion. People
| are getting upset at others having differing political
| opinions the way they get upset at others having different
| religious beliefs. And they hold their beliefs as sacrosanct.
| Their identities are inextricably linked to being a
| Democrat/Republican/etc. It's profoundly sad.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Orwell's prescient "Two minutes of hate."
| jimt1234 wrote:
| This ^^^!!! People are, or can be, total garbage, especially
| when they're behind a keyboard and not face-to-face.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I can absolutely confirm this, I fell down an unfortunate
| rabbit hole of posting about politics on Reddit (fairly
| mainstream politics, but politics nonetheless). There's
| nothing quite like the dopamine rush of righteous anger, and
| mixing that with the disinhibition of just being another
| pseudonym it's quite easy to understand why "enrangement is
| engagement" is such a powerful and insideous tool to drive
| people's use of social media. I was a shitehawk and I'm not
| afraid to admit it.
|
| I'd never advocate something as obviously ridiculous as
| requiring ID to post on social media or the other sort of
| rubbish people outside of the tech industry come up with to
| deal with this problem, though I'd also point out that
| quitting Reddit did wonders for my mental health and
| generally made me less of an arse. Facebook strikes me as
| even worse, even more tuned towards pissing you off and
| preying on that human need to have the last word.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| As I recall, when Facebook was first becoming a thing, a
| major narrative was that the quality of discourse and level
| of civility would be so much better than anonymous
| platforms - after all, they're your friends, of course
| they're gonna be on their best behavior. Seems that didn't
| happen, at least partially because Facebook figured out
| that civility is boring, doesn't get clicks.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Our evolutionary history is not filled with times of peace
| and enlightenment. Simply creating the internet and giving to
| the public wasn't going to change this fundamental equation.
|
| The need to judge these people as "garbage" who simply aren't
| handling technology well is worthy of interest itself.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It isn't that they aren't handling technology well. It is
| that a large segment of the population consists of terrible
| people. Technology is just their latest way of being
| terrible.
| k__ wrote:
| Never understood that debate.
|
| FB is almost dead for me in terms of interaction with
| individuals.
|
| A few of my friends post a meme now and then and I look for
| events.
|
| That's it.
| maxfurman wrote:
| > Data scientists on that integrity team--whose job is to improve
| the quality and trustworthiness of content on the platform--
| worked on a number of potential changes to curb the tendency of
| the overhauled algorithm to reward outrage and lies. Mr.
| Zuckerberg resisted some of the proposed fixes, the documents
| show, because he was worried they might hurt the company's other
| objective--making users engage more with Facebook.
|
| Delete your facebook account. Zuck and co. are poisoning their
| users for profit.
| mzkply wrote:
| Am I in the super-minority if I say I've unfollowed about 80%
| of my FB friends? I've never seen a political or outrage post
| in the last 3 years since I just unfollowed everyone but my
| closest friends and family.
| krn1p4n1c wrote:
| I did this as well and FB has been fine for me.
|
| Same thing as in real life, don't willingly subject yourself
| to toxic people.
| VortexDream wrote:
| I unfollowed everybody, joined a bunch of local special
| interest groups and met a ton of new people who lived in the
| same city. Facebook is actually an incredible tool to connect
| with other people.
|
| But the more I saw how FB behaved, the less I wanted to be
| involved in any way with their business. I ended up deleting
| my FB account, which even now 3 years later I feel was a huge
| loss for me. But I just can't do FB anymore knowing how
| they're driving outrage and political/societal issues in the
| name of "user engagement".
|
| I wish there were some alternative, but there isn't. It
| genuinely feels like I've cut myself off from modern city
| life without it and it frustrates me so much.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| It is supposed to make you feel that way. That is on FB's
| agenda to achieve, in order to bind you to their
| (dis-)services.
|
| Real friends will not require you to use FB and sacrifice
| your privacy to communicate with them. You might feel a
| loss, but there are alternative ways of communicating. Get
| as many friends as possible over to messengers, which are
| not owned by FB. Give people a call every now and then.
| Write them SMS, write them e-mail. All of that is better
| than communication on FB services. Real friends will
| initiate as well. If you are not on FB, they will have to
| contact you through other means. If you are not worth the
| "trouble" or effort in their eyes, then good riddance, you
| do not need them.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| People still use FB marketplace and events. If you can't
| be reached on events, many times you simply won't be
| invited.
| trhway wrote:
| many years ago you would similarly be excluded from some
| social stuff if you didn't smoke. That is one of the best
| business models around - tying, or better even locking
| in, people's socializing to your product. Humans, being a
| social animal, have very hard time getting out of such a
| trap.
| tharne wrote:
| Some of us see this as a feature and not a bug :)
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Some of you are clearly not very social
| VortexDream wrote:
| I guess you missed the part about meeting new people? I'm
| in contact with people I know over other apps. But
| there's no replacement for that discoverability of local
| groups and events or facilitating the meeting with new
| people.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| When you meet friends, are there never new people around?
| Do they never introduce you to their other friends? How
| did people get to know people before FB became big?
|
| There are other websites, where you can find local groups
| of people. Some also group you into local areas, so you
| know anyone around there will be living nearby.
|
| I do not see a problem with meeting worthwhile new
| people.
|
| "FB is the only way." or "there is no replacement" are an
| illusion.
| moate wrote:
| Meetup? Am I missing something that FB offered vs Meetup
| other than user base?
|
| (TBH, I never used FB to meet new people, just encourage
| relationships with people I had met elsewhere and I
| haven't been on the platform in years)
| foxfluff wrote:
| Every time someone mentions meetup, I go check it out and
| search for events around me. Nothing in 50 miles.
| dntrkv wrote:
| > If you are not worth the "trouble" or effort in their
| eyes, then good riddance, you do not need them.
|
| Relationships are a spectrum, and your friends move
| around on that spectrum over time. Social media gives you
| the ability to maintain some kind of connection to people
| even though maybe at a certain point in time, those
| friends are distant from you on the spectrum. But that
| can change at any moment and having that line of
| communication makes it that much easier to reconnect at
| any given moment.
|
| Sending a text or calling someone randomly is not always
| easy to do, especially if it's someone you haven't spoken
| to in a while. Whereas commenting on a post or replying
| to a story has much less friction and can result in
| reconnecting with people you otherwise wouldn't.
| bingohbangoh wrote:
| I've always been surprised that Facebook did not try to
| spin out Events like they did with Messenger.
|
| Facebook Events is an incredible product.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| > Facebook is actually an incredible tool to connect with
| other people.
|
| I guess you have to be a certain age, being < 40 you aren't
| going to meet anyone on FB anymore.
| moate wrote:
| As someone in that cohort who was also there for the
| "glory" days of early FB (when you had to have a college
| email to sign up), I have to agree that at this point the
| idea of making friends on FB weirds me out. How? Why?
|
| FB is what my racist parents use to circle jerk
| conspiracy theories with their friends in Cabo. Who in
| their right mind wants that anymore? (This is a
| rhetorical question, I understand there are still tons of
| people using FB, presumably because of inertia).
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >FB is what my racist parents use
|
| It looks to me like you've got bigger fish to fry than
| Facebook. It's probably time to give your parents a
| break.
| VortexDream wrote:
| It's not like I'd make friends on FB itself. For example,
| there'd be an impromptu meeting of random strangers in
| town for whatever event and you'd make friends through
| that. This was only a few years ago.
|
| Or some woman randomly posted that she was going to the
| movies in like half an hour and would anybody be
| interested in joining? We became friends from that and
| ended up doing a lot of things together, and I know I
| never would've met her otherwise because of how our lives
| didn't overlap at all before meeting her.
|
| FB can enable a lot of cool meetings with new people that
| I haven't been able to find anywhere else.
|
| FB is, in the end, a tool. It's what you make of it. If
| your circle of contacts is tied up in conspiracy Trumpian
| bullshit, then sure, FB is a cesspool. But I was a part
| of plenty of special interest groups filled with
| incredibly friendly and helpful people. It's like a
| completely different world.
| Falling3 wrote:
| > As someone in that cohort who was also there for the
| "glory" days of early FB (when you had to have a college
| email to sign up), I have to agree that at this point the
| idea of making friends on FB weirds me out. How? Why?
|
| I was a freshman when Facebook was introduced and
| required a .edu email. I've used it on and off since the
| beginning. I've made lots of friends there - both local
| and in other states/countries. It usually comes down to
| interactions in groups for niche interests. Why is this
| so striking to you?
| moate wrote:
| I just don't know people that still use Facebook with any
| regularity. I understand selection bias is at play (I'm
| inclined to hang out with people like myself, and I think
| Facebook is a flaming trash-pit).
|
| I made friends on Facebook years ago. I felt fundamental
| changes in both the user-base and use-cases that I don't
| find enjoyable. I assume most people under the age of 40
| feel similarly, and those that don't aren't the type of
| person I'd want to be around.
|
| I'll rephrase: It's not that I assume nobody is making
| friends on Facebook in this day and age, just that I'm
| less likely to want to befriend them myself and I was
| applying this personal assumption unilaterally.
| Falling3 wrote:
| I completely understand avoiding Facebook; I haven't
| deleted my account yet, but I've been off it for the past
| year and a half. I also understand it not being your
| choice for a people meeting platform. But there is such a
| variety of users there - I think it's a bit silly for you
| to think that there's no one there you'd be willing to
| befriend on Facebook.
| moate wrote:
| I specifically said "less likely". Less is not always
| "none". I may be willing to befriend .00001% of their
| userbase today compared to .0001% 10 years ago.
|
| Let's bring this back: Of course there are interesting,
| worthwhile people on Facebook (presumably you are, and
| I"m taking time to talk to you). But who cares?
|
| If they're in communities that I'm actively engaging,
| then I'll find them through those channels. If they're
| not...I don't care. There are billions of people I will
| never interact with. And that's fine.
|
| I don't want Facebook. The cons outweigh the pros. This
| doesn't mean there aren't any pros. I realize now that
| other people still like Facebook for purposes I don't
| have.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Meeting people online before you know them offline is
| always a risk. People are good at misrepresenting
| themselves online (either on purpose or by accident).
| wombat-man wrote:
| yeah I unfollow people who moan about politics and stuff
| constantly. I am here for the life updates and the vacation
| photos thank you!
| mrweasel wrote:
| My experience was that people stopped posting around
| 2014/15. After that people only liked and shared stuff.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I ended up in the same place, by a different route.
|
| Because I spend too much time on HN, I was convinced that the
| correct answer was to delete my FB account. So I did.
|
| But I really missed out on some family interactions, and
| after about a year I caved and created a new account. But I
| have been super careful about who is allowed to be my friend
| on FB. And for the few people I care about who still insist
| on posting political nonsense, I muted them. My feed on
| Facebook is basically inert, I only see posts about family
| things, pictures of grandkids, that kind of stuff. No
| politics at all. I'm glad to have it back.
|
| I am more careful now to appreciate that HN commenters lean
| heavily toward the extremes, and do more due diligence in my
| own decision making to ensure I'm being sensible, not
| reactionary, when I follow advice that originates here.
| rkk3 wrote:
| > Am I in the super-minority if I say I've unfollowed about
| 80% of my FB friends? I've never seen a political or outrage
| post in the last 3 years since I just unfollowed everyone but
| my closest friends and family.
|
| Yes but when I started unfollowing people who were over
| sharing political or outrage posts, that included my family,
| at which point I thought why bother using it at all.
| tsian2 wrote:
| I have several hundred friends added (think that's average)
| but I've never needed to do this because none of them seem to
| be interested in politics. Even the ones that have studied it
| at university only mention it occasionally and very briefly.
| However, my parent's friends seem to comment on every viral
| politics thing they can find.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I did the same. It's onlh local news, a local group and an IM
| client for me now. Not seen any of this stuff people are
| talking about and it sounds like I'm healthier for it.
| kradroy wrote:
| I did that too. Until I realized most of the group that
| remained overlapped with friends/family I communicated with
| in Telegram, WhatsApp and SMS chats. So there was no point to
| keeping a Facebook account.
|
| Addition/edit: Furthermore I closed my account because I
| truly and sincerely believe that mass social media has a more
| negative impact on society than addiction, untreated mental
| illness, and all forms of abuse (child, domestic, etc) put
| together.
| mrweasel wrote:
| That was my experience as well. Facebook was just reduced
| to people I talked to on other channels every week, so I
| ended up not logging on to Facebook anyway. When GDPR
| rolled in and Facebook asked to accept the updated terms
| and conditions I just clicked "no" and Facebook told me
| that I'd have to close my account.
| dont__panic wrote:
| Probably? I know that you're capable of doing that, but most
| of our friends and family log onto Facebook to zone out, not
| to curate their feed. Their feeds will continue to be full of
| garbage, not even counting the ads that show up that often
| target people for political ends.
|
| I would much rather Facebook removed link posts entirely, and
| also provided an easy toggle option to disable shared content
| in the feed.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I deleted it becuase it was easier to not manage it than it
| was to be forced to deal with it.
|
| The benefits absolutely did not outweigh the consequences.
| But, just like any lifestyle change, it took a while to
| notice all the ways it affected my life.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Is this any more helpful than saying "throw away your iPhone"
| or "uninstall Windows"? For the record, I fully agree that
| Facebook is poisoned, but frankly this is true of any company
| with a board of shareholders. The vast majority of people just
| don't care, like how we failed to get America to care about
| recycling. Habits, vices and consumerism are what drive this
| machine, even the VC one that funds the very website we use to
| discuss this stuff. I reckon the majority of users are just fat
| and happy, with no real incentive to leave. That's how TikTok
| and Twitter have stayed successful, though it's often at the
| cost of the user.
| tharne wrote:
| > Is this any more helpful than saying "throw away your
| iPhone" or "uninstall Windows"?
|
| I've done both those things, and am happier for it. So yes, I
| would argue that it's helpful to advise people to cut junk
| out of their lives.
| maxfurman wrote:
| It's more like saying "don't smoke." You'll live a longer
| healthier life if you choose not to engage with this
| particular vice. We managed to get many Americans to give up
| cigarettes, and even created a market for cessation products
| like Nicorette. So I do believe there is a market solution
| here but it needs to be coupled with the sort of public
| education I don't have a lot of hope for.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It's easy: Clickbait sells. Outrage sells.
|
| Tabloids knew it decades before Facebook. Nothing new here.
| mullingitover wrote:
| My recommendation for making Facebook a healthier place: unfollow
| _everyone and everything_. There are scripts that will automate
| this process for you.
|
| Once you have a completely blank slate Facebook feed, you're
| free. You can proactively look up your friends' activity if you
| want to, but otherwise you just get the good parts of facebook
| (like event invites and a chat app) and great meme groups like
| "This cat is CHONKY" and "Foods with threatening auras."
| adventured wrote:
| You make Facebook a healthier place by reducing connection and
| reducing velocity. The things that Facebook will absolutely never
| be willing to do.
|
| You reduce connection and velocity by ending feeds that show you
| most of everything, and switch to making people manually seek out
| what they want to get updates on. People will overwhelmingly be
| inclined to seek out updates and connections that they get
| enjoyment from, rather than having agitation/reaction/trigger
| porn shoveled on their heads all day long.
|
| Tear down that wall.
|
| This would ultimately be labeled as encouraging echo chambers /
| bubbles. People are typically happiest in their own bubbles, and
| certainly the majority of the time. That was true 20 years ago.
| It was true 50 years ago. It will always be true.
|
| If you make a very far left liberal type watch nothing but
| FoxNews as their information source, they will not enjoy it. That
| person is going to be happiest, by a dramatic margin, in their
| own bubble, swimming in their own worldview. That isn't a defect
| of humanity, it's perfectly ok. It's healthy to enjoy swimming in
| your own beliefs. People will not all agree with each other, what
| matters is civility, not agreement.
|
| Stop being psychotic authoritarians and trying to force people to
| exist in a way they do not want to, an unnatural way. People want
| to live in their echo chambers, whatever that chamber happens to
| be. It's healthy to prefer one's own echo chamber the majority of
| the time (and yes, it's occasionally also good to step outside of
| that echo chamber). Stop trying to control them, let them live as
| they see fit (so long as they are not attempting to harm others),
| as they are happiest.
|
| Stop pushing connections that should not exist. Not all people
| should be connected. Not all people will get along. Not all
| people will like each other. Not all people will agree on
| ideology/beliefs/whatever. That's perfectly ok, it's best that
| some people are apart, including friends from the distant past
| who may not like each other in the present. Facebook does the
| opposite and attempts to drive everyone to be connected, which
| was more or less their original mission. That's a mission that
| can only cause strife. A thousand friends? Bullshit. That's fake.
| That's 950 people that will just largely be annoying at best,
| with feeds you'll derive very little value from (or negative
| value). It's obvious what the outcome inherently has to be in
| quasi forcing so many fake connections.
| vmoore wrote:
| > switch to making people manually seek out what they want to
| get updates on
|
| Twitter lists have been my go-to solution for a while now. Yes,
| I still get spammed by 'promoted tweets' but it's a small price
| to pay for keeping tabs on my interests and also: the interests
| of others (which is the concerning one). Keeping tabs on the
| very people you most despise. What is the saying: `Keep your
| friends close, but your enemies closer`? I do that all day on
| Twitter.
| warning26 wrote:
| It all comes down to every PM's favorite metric: _engagement_.
|
| When users get into a heated flamewar, that's high-engagement. So
| you want to do _everything you can_ to ensure that the most
| possible users get sucked into flamewars. I feel like this should
| be banned, but it 's unclear what the best approach would be.
| Mandating chronological feed order?
| JasonFruit wrote:
| MeWe has chronological feed order, and I've found fewer flame
| wars there. The user base is smaller and possibly more
| ideologically uniform, though, which may be an alternate
| explanation.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Yes, but small size seems to intrinsically produce nicer
| platforms. Even within the large platforms, you still get
| "stick to the small groups/subreddits/pages and folks are
| nice there".
|
| So there's no guarantee a structure that seems to encourage
| peace will actually work when scaled up.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The big tent for everyone sites are toxic because people
| don't interact as closely in real life with people from
| different groups. We group for a reason. Within those groups
| common understanding on certain ideas is the connection. With
| that connection you let down your guard, you can be this side
| of yourself freely. In a big crowd you have to wear all faces
| to relate to everyone.
| badRNG wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've seen _far_ more polemic and vitriolic
| posts on so-called alt-tech social media sites compared to
| even Twitter and Facebook, which are horrendous in this
| regard. Sites like Gab, Voat, Ruqqus, etc seem to be filled
| with the absolute most toxic, angry, and hateful discourse
| imaginable.
|
| I've noticed sites that tend to be for something other than
| "just chatting" tend to do better: many hobby specific
| forums, HN, hobbyist subreddits, etc. all seem to do better
| discourse-wise when focused on something specific, but I'm
| not quite sure why that'd be the case.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Niche communities are easier for a small handful of
| volunteers or employees to moderate. There's simply less
| shit to clean up. Compare that to Facebook, Google, etc;
| all of whom have to hire armies of moderators who will
| burn out in a span of months. The attrition rate is very
| high, and there's just too many moderators to have
| consistent platform policy enforcement.
|
| Furthermore, if someone is just there to be toxic, you
| have an easy justification to shut them down: "I'm sorry,
| but this is an underwater basketweaving Discord, please
| stop spamming #offtopic with why you think we should call
| in the National Guard to fight the war on Christmas."
| Many small communities have very strict regulation of
| political speech purely because it causes most of their
| problems.
|
| Alt-tech is trying to collect all of the toxic bullshit
| in one place, so obviously they're going to be way more
| toxic despite their small size. It's also possible for
| niche communities to have their own toxicity problems,
| too. It's more that large communities are just
| _inherently_ more difficult to govern.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The people going to those sites or TheDonald in it's
| heyday are bonding over being able to say things that
| cannot be said elsewhere. To those users none of the
| discourse is toxic.
|
| There are similiar left leaning sites where the anita
| hangout that have similiar discourse but no one finds it
| toxic.
|
| Combine those two groups and you have the most toxic
| place where everyone feels attacked, the need to attack
| and piling on a victim feels good. That could describe
| twitter or other public squares.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Incidentally, most of the sites you mentioned were the
| "but mah free speech!1" equivalents of mainstream sites,
| created by the alt-right.
| soylentcola wrote:
| It's the same old joke/complaint about the comment sections
| on other large, general audience sites (Youtube, news
| sites, etc.) The same old gag about "never read the
| comments section!" applies.
|
| Once a social platform goes from "chatting with maybe a
| hundred friends/family max" to "basically everyone", it
| becomes the "comment section" for the entire region (or
| even the internet at large).
| Pxtl wrote:
| Chronological feed wouldn't help. Friend of a friend pushes
| "bad stuff". Friend comments to tell him it's stupid. They get
| into argument.
|
| Each of your friend's comments would still give FB a
| "chronological" reason to bump this post to the top of your
| feed, enticing you to get into the mix and increase the viral
| engagement of the original "bad stuff".
| hinkley wrote:
| PMs who think like this are the kids who stand around two kids
| about to fight, egging them on.
|
| These are not your friends. These are not good people.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it 's unclear what the best approach would be. Mandating
| chronological feed order?_
|
| I'd use the laws around tobacco as a framework.
|
| Ban the opening of social media accounts for children under 13;
| restrict it for adolescents. Ban marketing for social media
| over a certain size (the caveat to preserve the threat of new
| entrants). Require warning labels; for minors, the warning
| should be attested to by a parent or guardian.
|
| Require public disclosure of any sorting, filtering and
| moderation algorithms and policies. Require a public comment
| period for modifications to the foregoing. Require open access
| to researchers, where Facebook retains data control but let
| researchers query it (subject to oversight).
|
| Let users tosue social media platforms for damage they
| intentionally or negligently cause. Create a fund social media
| companies must contribute a fraction of revenue to which
| subsidies mental-health services for people harmed by their
| social media use.
| wussboy wrote:
| I love this. Interacting with other humans online isn't evil,
| our current social media has made it evil. But it can be
| fixed and I think what you're outlining would be a great
| start.
|
| I'd add that a "no marketing/algo/data collection" option
| should be required that users would need to opt out of
| (although I would settle for opt in).
| badRNG wrote:
| Don't the constant flamewars push people away from Facebook,
| thereby reducing engagement in the long run? I quit Facebook
| several years ago because I honestly just didn't like the
| experience. It was miserable and I didn't enjoy going to it any
| longer.
|
| I have the phone numbers of my closest friends and family, why
| wouldn't I just call or text when I want to talk to them?
| dtech wrote:
| Apparently most people don't work that way. Or at least it
| drives up engagement up until a person-specific breaking
| point.
| badRNG wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've known several folks who've left Facebook
| for one reason or another, often at least in part because
| of the poor experience they had on the platform.
|
| > Or at least it drives up engagement up until a person-
| specific breaking point.
|
| Surely as this plays out, Facebook will see it's userbase
| fall out at some point...
| xmprt wrote:
| This is completely anecdotal but at least in my friends
| circle in the US a lot of people have stopped using
| Facebook (Messenger is different) or they use it for very
| specific purposes like Marketplace, specific events, or
| major life updates. None of those are really engagement
| driving activities. It seems like most of Facebook's growth
| is coming from developing nations and older generations who
| are just now finding about it or haven't bothered moving on
| to other forms of social media.
| jayess wrote:
| My guess is that they've determined what that breaking
| point is and have optimized for it.
| badRNG wrote:
| So basically "How much daily misery can we put our users
| through algorithmically before they break down and
| uninstall"? Why does anyone who is sufficiently aware of
| this still use Facebook? Not even as an ethical question,
| why use something that makes your life miserable?
| rgoulter wrote:
| This reminds me of Jonathan Haidt's "Righteous Minds".
| One of the key points in the book is that "righteousness
| binds and blinds". As in, the 'righteousness binds' part
| is there's a social bond between people who believe the
| same thing. (And "blinds" is that the righteousness will
| blind you to certain truths).
|
| I think flamewars are like that. You gotta leave a
| comment otherwise you feel your side loses out.
| wussboy wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of "The Righteous Mind" and think it is
| almost horrifically relevant for our times. Recommended
| to all.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Facebook is following the same playbook that a lot of mobile
| games are doing. They don't really care about user attrition
| because most users are low-value. If you're just checking
| Facebook once or twice a day, you're probably not worth the
| server time cost to Facebook. What they really are trying to
| do is target high-engagement users ("whales" in mobile game
| developer slang) and make the service more addictive for
| them.
| gotostatement wrote:
| the problem with this analogy is that when you lose a lot
| of users, you lose the network effect. so even if a user is
| low-value in terms of their actual engagement, they bring
| value by luring others in
| hinkley wrote:
| 'The long run' looks like it's going to play out over three
| generations, not unlike Big Tobacco.
|
| Not only can you get rich in that sort of time frame, you can
| retire and let your kids take over. The grandkids will be
| proper monsters who don't work at all, so they will probably
| cash out before the lawsuits get teeth.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Here is the interesting bit: "Mr. Zuckerberg announced he was
| changing Facebook product managers' goal from helping people find
| relevant content to helping them interact more with friends and
| family."
|
| What this did not take into account -- and I suppose it is easy
| to see in hindsight -- is that the Buzzfeed social justice stuff
| is proselytized by _people you know_. We have all heard various
| people "going no contact" with "toxic" (as in "masculinity") on
| Facebook and other social media. When people get into social
| justice, they constantly hammer the people they know about it,
| doing "call-outs" and "checking privilege." This does not happen
| to strangers, it happens to people they know ... just like a
| recent convert to a religion can become an irritant with their
| newfound beliefs and their attempts to work it into conversation
| on almost any pretext.
|
| Here is another type of example for you: check your various feeds
| about COVID. One group is "they are killing us with their refusal
| to vaccinate" and the other is "they are killing us with these
| vaccines." _Nobody_ is convincing _anybody_ else, it is just
| yelling across the aisle. More sharing between people you know
| just means more yelling.
|
| Facebook focused on the easy part -- who, upon which they already
| have a firm grasp -- rather than the hard part, _what_ , namely
| trying to automate some kind of machine understanding of content.
| It's the _what_ which is divisive and angry, not the who. My
| friend 's wife shares photos of her garden and her chicken, fine.
| But she goes on and on and on about COVID, about four-fifths of
| her posts are about it. I'm already vaccinated, I am tired of
| hearing about it. And the people who are not vaccinated by now
| are not going to be convinced by yelling at them constantly, but
| it sure feels good to yell about the bad people, whoever they
| are.
|
| We saw this all before with the various Christian fears about D&D
| in the 1980s and the Satanic panics. It's just a new flavor of
| people yelling at those nearby: friends and family. Now it is
| mediated by Facebook, Instagram, and the like.
| cat199 wrote:
| again and again, user-controlled 'knobs' controlling content
| presentation/filtering would solve many 'platform content'
| issues, but platform providers consistently remove user control
| over content moderation instead of simply providing appropriate
| controls.
| workinghard wrote:
| social networks are a cancer. i realized that when its thought to
| be cool and never used any since then.
|
| Good thing is its very easy to get rid of this from one's life.
| dang wrote:
| Previous threads on articles in this series:
|
| _Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company
| documents show_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28523688 -
| Sept 2021 (624 comments)
|
| _Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of
| its rules_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121 - Sept
| 2021 (502 comments)
| standardUser wrote:
| I always feel like people never discuss the elephant in the room,
| which is that whoever you are, your feed is dictated by the
| people and pages you have chosen to follow. It doesn't matter
| what the platform is. If you give people the flexibility to craft
| their own feed, and they want to craft a feed full of hate and
| lies and nonsense, how can we ever stop them?
|
| Meanwhile, my feed has zero politics and is comprised almost
| entirely of retro video game stuff, plus a few local NYC groups.
| I kind of love it!
| pradn wrote:
| Twitter has ended up pretty good for me.
|
| 1) I set my location to the country Chad so I don't see popular
| trends that aren't very interesting, or serve as sources of
| outrage. 2) I use the word-based content filters to omit
| annoying politicians or topics from my feed. So much more
| peaceful now that I don't have to see people's outrage at the
| latest political enfant terrible. 3) I primarily follow
| primarily historians who make fantastic long threads, film
| critics I respect, movie/art channels. No crazy politics stuff.
| Few of my friends are on it so I don't have to see their stuff
| either.
|
| If I want the news, I just read a few major newspapers. It
| works well enough for me!
| [deleted]
| benoror wrote:
| FB should probably make it easier to identify and unsubscribe
| from those feedback loop silos
| golemotron wrote:
| People communicate to say things that they think are important.
| We should not be surprised when a medium that allows more
| broadcast-level communication becomes dominated by those things
| rather than "how was your day?"
|
| Ads are a canard. The earliest non-ad-driven social networks:
| USENET, mailing lists etc, had the same problems.
| randcraw wrote:
| USENET had an entirely different set of users than today's
| anonymous trolls, which minimized flame-fests. Sure,
| disagreement drove much conversation on the groups, but it was
| generally topic-driven and constructive, targeting ideas much
| more than people. Vitriol back then was the exception rather
| than the rule. Those groups (aside from alt.*) where denizens
| crossed the line often added moderation, which usually tamped
| down the flames.
|
| No, I think things are MUCH worse now than USENET ever was.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/GQFLq
| sharadov wrote:
| Facebook over time became an echo chamber of toxicity, emphasis
| having moved from banter and sharing pictures between friends in
| the early days to "shock and awe". Guess who stays and who
| leaves?
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Ugh, WSJ audio playback is a god damn robot.
| mdoms wrote:
| They're covering all of their Facebook Files reporting on their
| daily podcast, The Journal.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal?mod=podcasts_carous...
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Awesome, thanks for that.
|
| UPDATE: Yea, the point about how those with the most
| influence on the platform are getting the least moderation
| was very compelling. So much of the problem really is just
| how secretive the whole thing is. I understand the nuance,
| but timely independent (and validated) review seems necessary
| for high profile cases.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| Excerpts from one of the leaked documents. Disturbing.:
|
| > Research conducted in the EU reveals that political parties
| "feel strongly that the change to the algorithm has forced them
| to skew negative in their communications on Facebook, with the
| downstream effect of leading them into more extreme policy
| positions." For example, in Poland, "one party's social media
| management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion
| of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative and
| 20% positive, _explicitly as a function of the change to the
| algorithm..._ Many parties, including those that have shifted
| strongly to the negative, worry about the long-term effects on
| democracy. " We have heard similar feedback from parties in India
| and Taiwan.
|
| > News publishers, too, are concerned about the incentives MSI
| created. We received direct feedback from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah
| Peretti that his team feels "MSI ranking isn't actually rewarding
| content that drives meaningful social interactions. They feel
| pressure to make bad content or underperform." Peretti related
| that "when we create meaningful content, it doesn't get rewarded,
| "but more sensationalist and divisive content (such as "fad/junky
| science", "extremely disturbing news", "gross" images, and
| content exploiting racial divisions) is more successful.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Fuck Facebook.
| owl_troupe wrote:
| > For example, in Poland, "one party's social media management
| team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their
| posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative and 20%
| positive, explicitly as a function of the change to the
| algorithm... Many parties, including those that have shifted
| strongly to the negative, worry about the long-term effects on
| democracy."
|
| Not only democracy but, eventually, world peace. There are an
| increasing number of countries turning toward authoritarianism
| and the effects here could not only polarize political
| discourse, but also international relations.
| yosito wrote:
| > the change to the algorithm has forced them to skew negative
| in their communications on Facebook
|
| I suspect that one of the reasons for this is that negative
| reactions to posts (like anger) actually have a positive effect
| on engagement. Facebook never really implemented any kind of
| downvote like other platforms have. Downvotes tend to suppress
| content that people don't want to see.
| croo wrote:
| An ideal social platform should aim for its users to spend the
| least amount of time behind screen (and the most with each
| other). Facebook has the opposite aim. This simply cannot align.
| mrweasel wrote:
| One reason why Facebook keeps failing in increasing "meaningful
| social interaction" could be because they at the same time tries
| to sell ads.
|
| It seems like it would be easy to simply exclude "reshares" from
| users news feed. They could try to: "Sort by date" and "only
| posts posted/shared by my friend directly". Personally I think
| that would remove much of the toxicity. Secondly, simply ban news
| sites from the platform.
|
| Facebook is trying to fix an algorithm that can't possibly work,
| because it has two opposing jobs, increase time spend on the
| platform and at the same time it has to downplay the content
| people engages with the most.
| naravara wrote:
| The article makes it seem like people at Facebook have ideas on
| how to potentially thread the needle, but Zuckerberg (and
| probably a handful of other senior executives) keep putting the
| kibosh on it.
|
| We know there are some people with pretty idiosyncratic
| political beliefs and unsavory connections on Facebook's board
| and within its senior executive leadership. It's not hard to
| imagine that maybe they _like_ it being an engine for stoking
| outrage and perpetuating disinformation for reasons unrelated
| to the financials or for any intelligible design /engineering
| logic. It doesn't even necessarily have to be malicious. They
| could literally just be blinkered by a weird ideological belief
| in "absolute" free-speech.
| [deleted]
| yann2 wrote:
| This is a social science experiment with 3 billion guinea pigs.
|
| Every time you rerun it, if someone somewhere (and the people
| connected to them get effected) how many attempts do you get?
| nradov wrote:
| Facebook does most of their experiments by rolling out
| changes to a smaller subset of users. The number of guinea
| pigs is much smaller.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| This is my take as well. It's the business model itself that's
| toxic, or at least predatory, as the necessary outcome of it is
| to lean as hard as possible on known frailties of human
| behavior and psychology in order to cultivate advertising
| placement and revenue.
|
| There's no tinkering around the edges of that control loop
| that's going to fix the problem. What we observe as the
| deleterious effects on society are in fact systematic (as in,
| "design failures") faults in the thesis of Facebook's business
| model.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I think another factor is that they're trying to quickly turn a
| massive ship that has, for years, self-selected users intent on
| heading in the direction of outrage and toxicity. The people
| who are the most "engaged" with the platform are the people who
| get a dopamine rush from arguing and baiting and instigating.
| The nice people who just want to see what their friends are up
| to have either left or significantly scaled back their use.
|
| I think that makes any algorithmic "fix" much harder. Or
| perhaps even impossible.
|
| I think the solutions you've suggested would have worked had
| they been implemented five years ago. I'm not so sure they
| would work today.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Relevant CGPGrey: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
| somedude895 wrote:
| Anecdotally this is what I've been seeing over the years.
| Most of my friends and acquaintances seem to have left
| Facebook behind and moved to Insta. The people that stayed on
| FB are mostly those who like to express strong opinions and
| engage in pointless discussions.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > engage in pointless discussions.
|
| Pointless to some, I'm sure, but if they're that engaged
| it's meaningful to them. Viewed through that lens, then
| attempting to externally manipulate and cajole their
| conversations was never going to have a positive outcome or
| even impact on the rest of the userbase.
| native_samples wrote:
| It feels like this is a core point that's somehow got
| lost here.
|
| There's a lot of assumptions in these discussions that
| connections and sharing are only good and useful if the
| results look a certain way. People sharing dog photos:
| good. Sharing approved mainstream news stories: good.
| People posting personal politics: bad. People disagreeing
| with each other: also bad. Etc. But it's a purely
| subjective take. Maybe our society needs to talk about
| politics way more than it does. Historically, instead of
| talking there's often just been fighting, and everyone
| agrees that talking is far healthier.
|
| Facebook's original working assumption was that
| connecting people and letting them communicate and share
| is inherently a valuable thing. Is that actually wrong?
| Clearly, there is enormous demand to discuss politics
| that was unleashed by the internet, whereas before then
| only a small number of people had the access to present
| their opinions to those around them via opt-in channels
| like TV, the press, etc. Other people had to make do with
| phone calls. Something once restricted to a very small
| group is now available to all. Unsurprisingly, the sort
| of people who feel ill when they see the results are
| those whose views are the same as those who previously
| had a monopoly on group communication of various kinds.
| The ones most engaged are the ones who feel the media
| ignore their worldviews.
|
| It's pretty dangerous to just say, well, if people are
| arguing about stuff that the establishment wouldn't let
| them argue about before, then it's "toxic". It's
| certainly risky to blame social media as the _cause_
| rather than merely a _symptom_ of disagreements that
| would be there anyway. Far better to have "toxic" social
| media than a revolution!
| romwell wrote:
| The problem I see on FB is less with what people argue
| about, but _how_.
|
| It feels like people are just saying things _at_ each
| other trying to "win" an argument.
|
| Of course, that's a problem with education, not FB. And I
| think it's a good thing that it's surfaced on FB.
|
| FB can act as toxic behavior multiplier, though.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _FB can act as toxic behavior multiplier, though._
|
| Indeed, the medium can alter the message. For example,
| supposedly any extra lag in voice communication makes
| participants think the other person is angry.
|
| We also see groups that never had close proximity now
| interacting directly and finding that they disagree
| pretty strongly on fundamentals.
|
| So there may be ways to facilitate the same discussions,
| but more productively and humanely. And it simply might
| not be possible for people with diametrically opposed
| beliefs to do this -- there may need to be a game of a
| few layers of telephone, or at least an active moderator
| as in a formal debate, to help translate meaning and
| intent across the epistemological divide.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Sadly, some of my friends now use Insta to propagate the
| same level of political vitriol as they did on FB. They
| just leverage text overlays to accomplish their goal.
| stadium wrote:
| I see the same on WhatsApp too. Family members blindly
| forwarding whatever outrage meme of the moment lands in
| their message queue. Especially for family outside the US
| who use WhatsApp as their primary way to communicate with
| groups.
| marttt wrote:
| Living in a country of 1.5 million people, it often feels
| devastating how big a part of political/intellectual
| discussion in our (tiny) language actually takes place in
| Facebook. I have worked in journalism, so maybe it's sour
| grapes in a way, but: most of the great writers are there.
| All the politicians are there. Our prime minister first
| announces crucial things on her FB wall, etc.
|
| In short, if you want to participate in the public sphere
| of our tiny society that yet speaks its own tiny language,
| you'd better have a FB account. The account provided by an
| American Megacorp, that is. This actually feels really
| strange.
|
| I've been more or less off FB for 5-6 years, occasionally
| feeling lonely and intellectually isolated. I would love to
| see things like the Fediverse/Mastodon or tilde.town take
| off for speakers of our language, but I'm having doubts
| whether this could ever happen.
|
| For the lingua francas, there will always be a considerable
| chunk of alternative culture and great, bright discussion
| outside dominant platforms (howdy, HN!). For smaller
| cultures, this relationship status is surely complicated.
| FB is just so damn big.
| olivermarks wrote:
| I feel you can apply the maxim 'in politics nothing
| happens by accident' to Facebook despite their earnest
| attempts to claim unintended consequences. They are a
| highly important component of our divide and rule
| political era on multiple levels and sadly are doing an
| excellent job.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > I think another factor is that they're trying to quickly
| turn a massive ship that has, for years, self-selected users
| intent on heading in the direction of outrage and toxicity.
|
| But are they actually trying to turn? They say they are but
| all evidence points to them maintaining the status quo
| because fear and outrage boost engagement and engagement is
| king.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Well, that and rationalization. Everyone's subject to
| rationalization.
|
| You can say 'maintaining the status quo because fear and
| outrage boost engagement'...
|
| ...and they can think 'we represent the social engagement
| of ALL people, how dare you tell us not to support genocide
| fanciers when our data shows that's a solid 27% of our
| actual platform'...
|
| ...and then they can say 'we are trying to turn the massive
| ship, Senator' and tell each other 'stay the course, we
| have a responsibility to ALL our users', and the whole
| time, engagement will still be king.
|
| People don't always know why they're doing what they're
| doing, and even if they do, they won't always tell you.
| gjvc wrote:
| Right on. I've seen the posts/posters in many local fora in
| the UK have two defining characteristics. They are
| judgemental, and they are nosy in equal measure. [1]
|
| I put the recent increase in this down to people's
| familiarity with the technology, having grown up with it --
| those people only 10/15 years older have seen life before and
| after the revolution, and behave differently. Specifically,
| when local fora started to make an appearance, they were a
| bit more diffident in their postings.
|
| [1] (I don't want to start splitting hairs on which might be
| greater. :-))
| q-big wrote:
| > I think that makes any algorithmic "fix" much harder. Or
| perhaps even impossible.
|
| Optimize for another metric than engagement.
| wheybags wrote:
| While I'm sure there are some people at fb genuinely trying to
| "fix" toxicity, overall the issue is that they're not trying to
| fix it. They want to do the minimum possible to protect their
| image / bottom line, they don't care if it actually works.
| Actually fixing toxicity is one way to improve their image, but
| appearing to try can be good enough.
| foobarian wrote:
| It's really difficult to make that kind of change from the
| rank and file. Once revenue is involved, it's amazing how
| nervous people get and nobody wants to approve some change
| that might lose as little as fractions of a percent of the
| money stream. There has to be a clear, explicit mandate from
| leadership that acknowledges there will be a revenue hit, and
| absolves any project members from bad outcomes / or rewards
| them for participation. I.e. it's hopeless :-)
| artificial wrote:
| I think all of the problems they have are earned. They've
| got, what, 3 billion users? How many 9s (99.99999) effective
| does the solution need to be to wrangle edge cases?
| Moderation is an eternal issue.
| mhh__ wrote:
| The only time I ever have meaningful interactions on Facebook
| is in niche groups like meme groups with a few thousand people.
|
| Every single one gets banned eventually. My favourite Top Gear
| meme group has been through I think 6 groups now.
|
| Facebooks potential to destroy culture if they throw a hissy
| fit is dangerous and not being paid attention to.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >My favourite Top Gear meme group has been through I think 6
| groups now.
|
| I think I know the one you mean, that group's been through
| quite a few "Zuckings".
| mandevil wrote:
| The Facebook Integrity team agrees with you, Zuck just doesn't
| want to give up the cash.
|
| "Early tests showed how reducing [downstream MSI- the
| likelihood of creating long chains of reshares] of the
| algorithm for civic and health information helped reduce the
| proliferation of false content. Facebook made the change for
| those categories in the spring of 2020. When Ms. Stepanov
| presented Mr. Zuckerberg with the integrity team's proposal to
| expand that change beyond civic and health content -- and a few
| countries such as Ethiopia and Myanmar where changes were
| already being made -- Mr. Zuckerberg said he didn't want to
| pursue it if it reduced user engagement, according to the
| documents."
| themolecularman wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| But I think big tech didn't use their power years ago when
| advertisers started demanding their ads don't appear next to X,
| where X is the offensive thing/position/etc.
|
| Big tech has power but it folded and immediately started
| policing when this happened. Instead of a united front each of
| them caved to advertisers and now the content on each platform
| must be kosher according to the ethics that the platforms'
| rulers have.
| nradov wrote:
| Big tech never had that power versus advertisers. There's no
| possible scenario where major mass market advertisers like
| Coca-Cola or Toyota would ever tolerate having their ads
| displayed on highly offensive content, like say a Facebook
| group for white supremacists. If the social media companies
| hadn't imposed stricter content censorship then the
| advertisers would have simply dropped those channels to
| protect their brand images.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > Facebook is trying to fix an algorithm that can't possibly
| work, because it has two opposing jobs, increase time spend on
| the platform and at the same time it has to downplay the
| content people engages with the most.
|
| Would it be fair to say they're trying to increase time spent
| _by existing users_ on the site? Does Facebook have such a huge
| number of users there 's no growth from building a better
| product? I personally think the product is awful.
|
| I have an account, but I only log in often enough to keep it
| active. If I had a nice, reverse chronological feed of things
| _posted_ (not shared) by my friends I would read it.
|
| Maybe the subset of people like me is too small to worry about,
| but there's definitely some of us where the current algorithms
| work against engagement.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| > Does Facebook have such a huge number of users there's no
| growth from building a better product?
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-
| monthly...
|
| >How many users does Facebook have? With roughly 2.89 billion
| monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2021
|
| >MAU: A registered active user who logged in and visited
| Facebook through the website, mobile app, or Messenger
| application in the last 30 days as of the date of
| measurement.
|
| It would be physically possible to have better engagement,
| yes. But they're already the most wildly used
| website/software platform/media outlet in the history of
| humanity. Given from how much regulatory attention they're
| attracting, you could make a solid argument as a PM that it
| would be better for the company to _reduce_ MAUs and spike
| user logins. From how Congress is talking, they 're not far
| from just ordering Facebook to be shut down, which will
| reduce MAU to 0.
| bertil wrote:
| Not really: ads have a budget of attention within an envelope
| that Engagement (the team whose work is described here) is
| trying to maximise. There's detailed estimates to how much ads
| take away but it's minimised and isolated from that
| conversation completely.
|
| There are many issues, some addressed there; some more nuanced
| (figuring out that is a good post or comment is genuinely hard
| with crude metrics because clickbait and flamewars look very
| much like compelling content); some that I can't mention
| publicly.
|
| There are non-scalable ideas for solutions (my PhD was around
| complex network so check Jure Leskovec's research for ideas
| like isolating cliques and defining them as meaningful or not).
| One idea that I've floated, but less than I should, and many
| other have too, but more than they should (or at least not
| articulated well around this problem of sorting good from bad
| content to inform the News Feed algorithm): have secret
| negative and positive reactions per post and comment. The fact
| that Likes are public makes them performative, both very
| compelling (it's who you want your friends to see in you) and
| counter-productive. But giving people the ability to say:
| "look, I will comment on every flame bait that I see, because I
| can't help myself, but please, remove from from my feed" would
| have helped argue against what is still a very linear model of
| weighting acting that are uniformly seen as "engagement".
|
| Source: I was the DS looking into those questions in 2015.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| Yup, which points out the fundamental problem: Facebook is a
| product of its incentives. Its incentive is to maximize
| engagement. Why? Because more engagement equates to more ad
| revenue. The externalities of this behavior do not align with
| what society seeks. Therefore, if we wish to fundamentally
| transform Facebook, then we must change the incentives. The
| incentives are not going to change on their own. Enough time
| has passed to demonstrate that the market will not correct for
| this. This can be deemed a market failure. This means some
| intervention by the state must be made. I propose that having
| the platform free should be illegal. Instead, the company
| should be forced to charge customers a recurring fee,
| sufficient enough to cover operation costs, and to no longer
| obtain revenue through advertising. This, I believe, will shift
| the incentives to produce the behavior we as a society seek.
| Facebook will no longer optimize for engagement, as that no
| longer drives revenue, and must instead compete on something
| else, like quality of experience on the platform. Of course,
| such policy would have to be applied across the board for all
| social networks as to not undermine Facebook's existence with a
| competitor offering the same service for free.
| Foomf wrote:
| Couldn't a company outside the US just set up a free Facebook
| competitor then?
| foofoo4u wrote:
| True. There is nothing that would prevent a software
| company within Sweden, let's say, from opening a free
| Facebook competitor. Given the reality, such a law as I
| proposed would be seen as unfair from Facebook's
| perspective. In many ways, I would say I agree with them.
| To remedy this, the law could be constructed so that it is
| only illegal within the confines of the United States. In
| other words, a paid subscription is mandatory within the
| United States, while it can be offered for free for anyone
| outside.
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