[HN Gopher] Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
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Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
Author : antoniokov
Score : 190 points
Date : 2021-11-22 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.garbageday.email)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.garbageday.email)
| ffhhj wrote:
| I developed software for lottery and casino services, and when I
| read stories like this the first thing that comes to my mind is
| this "golden ticket winner" effect that ranking algorithms are
| designed to generate.
|
| The chances of winning the lottery are so low, but whoever wins
| will get so much media coverage that everybody believes they can
| win.
|
| I don't think it's a coincidence that "poor" content makers are
| on top of the transparency list, it's just the algorithm
| exploiting this "you can be a winner too" effect.
| h2odragon wrote:
| "The Algorithm" or "Its Zuckerberg's fault" etc are all
| simplistic, comforting narratives to distract from the horrifying
| truth. The Clickfarm bots and fake account NPCs have collectively
| achieved an emergent intelligence. We humans aren't the majority
| of our social networks anymore, and we don't have any idea what
| it is the bots are pushing for.
|
| The people we want to hold accountable for this mess are being
| run over by this steamroller just as we are.
| FredPret wrote:
| That's a book I'd read
| ffhhj wrote:
| Waiting for the movie of the book
| EmilioMartinez wrote:
| Waiting for the Black Mirror ripoff of the movie
| IncRnd wrote:
| > If that bothers you, now imagine if, instead of being a random
| woman, you were a company with employees, and the same thing
| happened. Imagine if Facebook allowed you to reach inconceivable
| levels of scale and then, one day, they flipped a switch and made
| it all disappear. Pretty messed up, right?
|
| This was buried right at the end. I estimate this is the real
| import of the article, but it went virtually unnoticed and
| unattended, only mentioned in passing.
| blackearl wrote:
| You see this on Youtube as well. Comments acknowledge "The
| Algorithm", mentioning that the algorithm suddenly chose this
| video from 2013 to be popular, or that people who were picked by
| the algorithm to like this video must be cool. This has happened
| with music too, Plastic Love and Ryo Fukui's Scenery being some
| examples I noticed. Maybe it really is "the algorithm" right now
| but it seems like this could be easily manipulated.
| selwynii wrote:
| Plastic Love doesn't quite serve your point, it's just they
| released the MV after literally decades, and nostalgia is handy
| for engagement.
|
| Granted I do see that YT has the same issues. I don't think its
| easy to manipulate, but all recommendation systems are going to
| have people trying to manipulate it.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| "All hail the algorithm" - SuperfastMat on Youtube
|
| (which is a highly entertaining channel, it's good he's self-
| aware)
| tyingq wrote:
| I had a somewhat similar experience at a much smaller scale a
| long time ago. I used to buy and sell domains. Bought one that
| was very close to being on the first page of Google results for a
| keyword related to personal finance.
|
| Did a bit of sprucing up the page, dropped a few links, and it
| did get on the front page for a few months, with AdSense paying
| me several thousands dollars a month while it lasted. The page
| itself wasn't a scam per se, but it was roughly 1000 medium-
| effort words on the topic I wrote in a day, along with a few
| original photos that took another day, and a couple of inline
| AdSense ads.
|
| It didn't deserve to be on the first page of results. I guess the
| "kingmaker" thing still exists where big tech decides who today's
| winner is, and doesn't always get it right.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| What I hate is that Facebook's intentionally nerfed reporting
| mechanisms keep it's customers from self-reporting.
|
| For a period of time I'd get a post 'From %Person%, With some
| other %entity%' and they're less than interesting...and you CAN'T
| block it. One of your friends comments on a stupid post and the
| only option you have to send a signal is 'mute my friend for 30
| days'...because the 'with' account always changes.
|
| This actively makes Facebook unfun and had the great side-effect
| of sending my on a 2 week hiatus.
|
| If I could block posts 'commented on by a friend, but has
| engagement above 100,000 people' I'd block it in a
| heartbeat...because the content has NEVER been entertaining, and
| has often been half-a step away from learning people's security
| questions....at scale.
| cm2012 wrote:
| This is fascinating.
|
| I'd posit that this random blog is harmless. It's better that
| some random dropship site is connected to this traffic than a
| more sophisticated organization IMO.
| hedgehog wrote:
| We have built the paperclip factory only instead of paperclips it
| is making clicks.
| woudsma wrote:
| https://clickclickclick.click
| tapgnid wrote:
| Paperclicks.
| goldenkey wrote:
| Vaporclicks ;-)
| r721 wrote:
| >18M comments
|
| That is just sad. I wonder how many times each one of those 18M
| comments was viewed on average.
| dreyfan wrote:
| There are millions of fake social profiles on Facebook,
| LinkedIn, Twitter, etc that use fake generated profile photos,
| friend networks among both themselves and gullible real users,
| and automated markov chain style comments on popular content.
| It's a self-perpetuating system and an effective way to see
| inside the walled gardens.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| It's been a few years since I've been on Facebook, but doesn't
| facebook show your comments to your friends by default? It's
| not like Reddit or Hacker News where everyone sees the same
| comments, is it?
| FilthyAnalyst wrote:
| Yes, you will see comments from friends on posts like these.
| Even if they have a million comments it will come into your
| feed with a friends replies visible.
| simoneau wrote:
| And I think that's why these are so viral. When you see a
| question and your friend's answer, it makes you feel like
| you're responding as well.
| input_sh wrote:
| That or the post is some variation of "tag someone that
| does X", or the one I've recently noticed "tag your
| favourite celebrity and see if they'll respond". Random
| pages I've no connection to are now popping into my feed
| because some page I follow responded to someone that
| tagged them under one of those. Completely pointless.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| A while back I was trying to get twitter followers. I
| experimented with a few different strategies - quick reactions to
| big accounts I agreed with or disagreed with, saying what I
| thought people wanted to hear, saying what I thought would be
| controversial hot takes, tweeting about everything trending, etc.
| I basically got no traction. I was getting low tens of thousands
| of impressions a month according to the twitter analytics tool
| and maybe 1 or 2 new followers a month - and, to be honest, those
| new followers were probably bots.
|
| Eventually, I hit on a new strategy. Instead of trying to
| generate good tweets I just followed people at random. I forget
| the exact number, but somewhere between 15-30% of the people I
| followed at random would follow me back. I realized I could
| probably get an arbitrary number of followers this way but it
| would be a pretty stupid and meaningless achievement so I quit
| doing it.
|
| The "viral post" strategy of the article, asking things like "Who
| the heck sleeps with the fan on?" maybe similar as a kind of
| brainless strategy to get followers. I guess some people like
| responding to these prompts. I suspect it has the same weakness
| as the "follow back" strategy though. Nobody really cares about
| the account or connects with it or even understands what you're
| trying to do. These people aren't _your_ followers so much as
| they are people who like small talk and coalesced around you for
| a time.
| Traster wrote:
| >Eventually, I hit on a new strategy. Instead of trying to
| generate good tweets I just followed people at random. I forget
| the exact number, but somewhere between 15-30% of the people I
| followed at random would follow me back.
|
| This is exactly what my teenage cousins used to do (maybe not
| twitter maybe snaphat?) but with one tweak- they'd go through
| following people, and then once they'd followed they unfollow
| them again so now it looked like they were following you but
| you weren't following them back.
| miohtama wrote:
| > I just followed people at random.
|
| AFAIK follower building like this is now banned in Twitter ToS
| rconti wrote:
| > I suspect it has the same weakness as the "follow back"
| strategy though. Nobody really cares about the account or
| connects with it or even understands what you're trying to do.
| These people aren't your followers so much as they are people
| who like small talk and coalesced around you for a time.
|
| But if the entire point is to get impressions so you can sell a
| product, or whatever, do you are if people don't particularly
| like you?
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Twitter users with 1:1 followers: following are known to be
| trying to get followers and aren't actually reading posts
| from those users. It's all circular, a bunch of people
| juicing each other's follower stats.
|
| They use lists or separate accounts to read the accounts they
| care about. They have bad engagement on their posts
| kingcharles wrote:
| OK, I can give you a real world example of why parent
| commenter's strategy is useless.
|
| I had two pages on Facebook based on a very popular movie
| from the 1980s.
|
| One was the actual studio's page for the movie that I was
| given access to (as the studio admitted they don't give a
| fuck about any IP that doesn't have an immediate release -
| e.g. Blu-ray etc - planned for it), which had over 2 million
| likes. When you opened a Facebook account this page was one
| of the list that was often presented to a new user as
| something they should "like".
|
| The other was a fan page I'd made which was niche, had to be
| actively sought out, and had 30,000 likes.
|
| I experimented with selling branded products through the
| accounts. The small fan page sold 10X as many products as the
| official page that had almost 100X more followers.
|
| tl;dr: if you want to sell shit to your followers they need
| to be engaged with you - just having people follow you on
| autopilot is going to create nothing of value.
| coldcode wrote:
| One thing that gets me is that people have such a pathetic life
| that they feel they have to share these lame posts.
| Traster wrote:
| I can't help but think it's not a coincidence that Facebook
| decides to produce a content report that lists the top 20 most
| viewed items and _it just so happens_ that the top 20 items are
| inexplicably spam. Either facebook is enitrely dominated by spam
| (possible) or facebook figured out they could just boost a few
| items to make sure anything embarassing doens 't make the short
| list.
| jedimastert wrote:
| I mean, at that point they could just drop stuff off of the
| list they didn't like. Does anyone have independently
| verifiable data to compare against?
| Traster wrote:
| They link to the page - so if someone can say "Hold on, page
| X only has N likes/shares, page Y has >N likes/shares!"
| they'd have problems.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The entire existence of the Facebook Transparency report is as
| a counter to the Facebook Top 10 Twitter account
| (https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10) showing that Facebook
| tends to surface right-wing content.
|
| Facebook prefers to be known for facilitating spam than right-
| wing content.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| The purpose of this report is to show widely-viewed content.
| Maybe the embarrassing stuff is not as widely-viewed as you
| imagine.
| Traster wrote:
| Well what I'm saying is... if it _were_ would facebook tell
| you? Or would they find a way to produce a report that tells
| you something else? As another commentor points out - the
| independent version of this consistently ends up listing
| right wing content.
| hirundo wrote:
| "Facebook flipped a switch, favoring comments and reactions over
| shares, and suddenly a food blogger from Utah became the largest
| publisher in the country, if not the world."
|
| While the firehose volume is disproportionate, the direction
| wasn't random. Whoever is copywriting these messages is an
| artist, drawing an outstanding number of responses. I felt the
| urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself.
| There's a lot of power in asking someone the right personal
| question.
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely
| restrained myself._
|
| You feel an urge to react at bizarro twilight zone non-sequitur
| text posts?
|
| I'm sitting here trying to fathom why millions of people would
| even react to something like that. Like... what was "thumbs up"
| worthy in any of those?
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| I mean, the "who here has never had a DUI?" question is
| tailored for engagement. The actual % of people who have had
| a DUI is really low, and so the number of people who can
| engage with that honestly is really high. Then there's the
| fact that DUIs tend to evoke a strong moral response, so
| people will dive into the comments to wag the finger at all
| the DUI havers.
|
| We're all here commenting on posts about tech and tech-
| adjacent concerns, so the community is pretty niche and
| interesting (to us). This is what you get when someone crafts
| content for _literally everyone_ , and you'd be right to find
| it simultaneously bland and bizarre. But people, it turns
| out, do engage with it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Reminds me of those posts from a few years ago that were
| like: "[Simple math problem, like what's
| 5 x 4?]: 95% of people can't solve this! I bet you can't
| either!"
|
| With hundreds of thousands of commenters "engaging" with
| it. I don't understand anything about this behavior. 1.
| What does the poster have to gain from a post like that, 2.
| What do all the commenters have to gain, and 3. What does
| SocialMediaCompany gain? The promise of social media is
| long dead. It seems to now just be bots (or people who
| behave as bots) responding to bots (or people who behave as
| bots)... everywhere.
| kingcharles wrote:
| The poster gains by getting a large amount of interaction
| with their page, which is certainly a ranking factor for
| future posts. e.g. SocialMediaCompany will say "This new
| post by Poster will get higher placement because their
| previous posts were enjoyed (interacted with) by many
| people, and therefore Poster must be producing good
| content."
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Well, for (1) the poster gets engagement from low-effort
| posts. The end game is usually monetizing their social
| media presence, and though there's multiple ways to do
| that, they all involve getting eyes on your page.
|
| Your (2) should be evident from the phrasing of your
| example: if 95% of people can't do it, people want to
| prove they're in the 5%. They get a few minutes'
| distraction, some self-satisfaction, and maybe some
| conversation. I'm not going to play psychologist, but
| that's enough for some folks. And it really only has to
| be some: if your post is seen 32 million people and 30
| million dismiss it, you still got 2 million people to
| engage.
|
| (3) is, I guess, money again? Active users means
| SocialMediaCompany can tout the value of their platform
| to advertising partners. The bot problem is a good
| observation, though, because platforms with a reputation
| for bots are less valuable to advertisers who want human
| attention. People who _act like_ bots are probably great
| for advertisers, though, so idk; maybe that 's a wash.
| [deleted]
| erulabs wrote:
| I mean, you must see the primal appeal - essentially the
| posts are "haha, who else does {{COMMON_THING}}?!". Millions
| of people want other people to know they too are just like
| them.
|
| Facebook's algorithm is optimized for engagement - but people
| aren't desperate to engage - they are desperate _to be
| engaged with_.
| [deleted]
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _I mean, you must see the primal appeal - essentially the
| posts are "haha, who else does {{COMMON_THING}}?!"_
|
| No, and I feel like I'm explaining to the AI what human
| behavior looks like here. Yes, the sort of meme discussion
| you quote is fairly common, but it's not just "common
| thing", it's some sort of shared experience that's probably
| private; you're not _sure_ if everyone else experiences it,
| but saying you experience it might sound weird to others,
| and the (usually unneeded) thoughts of potential
| embarrassment maybe prevents you from doing so. Until
| someone does, in such a post, and yeah, those take off as
| the day 's lucky 10000 are all sighing a collective "I'm
| not weird!" sigh of relief. Eye floaters come to mind as an
| example.
|
| But ... that's not the case here. "Who the heck sleeps with
| a Fan (sic) and AC on?". Heck, that odd capitalization just
| makes it even more uncanny valley. Like Zuckerberg really
| is a robot, and he's just tried a new social subroutine out
| on me.
|
| Who the heck eats Food?
| seltzered_ wrote:
| not trying to make a conspiracy theory, but the Utah
| association is interesting considering how many lifestyle
| influencers are supposedly Mormon :
| https://twitter.com/Karnythia/status/1442840097032921088
| giarc wrote:
| I agree - The author hits at topics that are somewhat
| controversial but at the same time everyone has a story. I
| suspect, and I could be wrong, but majority of the comments on
| that DUI post are people over the age of 40 or 50. They all
| want to share their story of how drinking and driving wasn't a
| big issue when they grew up, that their dad always had a drink
| in hand. People love to talk about themselves and this topic,
| combined with that audience creates a lot of "nostalgia" for
| lack of a better term.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Have you ever seen the posts? Some relatives comment on them so
| they show up on my feed, but the post will be something like
| "do you like dogs or cats better?" And my aunt and 10 million
| other people will make a post just saying "cat" or "dog"
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| when I see these posts i always figured it was a kind of bot-net
| role call. imagine you pay a contractor for one million sock
| puppets and you want to check how many of them aren't
| shadowbanned - the bots already follow each other and are
| programmed to "engage" with posts their bot-friends engage with,
| so it becomes a follow the leader effect, and allows the
| purchaser of a botnet to inspect their army, kind of like Obi-Wan
| getting a tour of the Kaminoan's clone army after finding the
| official records were deleted from the archive.
|
| no official list of which accounts are bots == check the size of
| the network myself, and if a few million retirees get caught up
| in the net, all the better for camouflage
|
| just a conjecture :)
| h2odragon wrote:
| Interesting notion. I've seen people speculating on "WTF are
| these nonsensical google ads about", perhaps botnet C&C could
| be an answer there too.
| creato wrote:
| I greatly enjoyed this sentence:
|
| > The one mystery we weren't able to figure out is why any sane
| person working at Facebook would feel comfortable publishing a
| content report that admitted that the most viral publisher on its
| platform this year was a barely active drop-shipping scam page
| full of stolen video content run by an LLC that doesn't even
| exist anymore.
| mdaidc wrote:
| When corporations hide facts we call them immoral, and when
| they publish the facts we are scratching our heads?
|
| Facebook does a lot of internal research which to me seems to
| be coming from a good place. Doing that research carries a lot
| of risk for them; e.g. the recent 'whistleblowers' mainly
| leaked that exact research reports. But instead of giving
| Facebook credit for even doing that, we always take a negative
| approach.
|
| Note: I don't like facebook, I don't even have a facebook
| account, but unless we encourage good behavior (even at places
| we dont' like) how do we expect things to get better?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Yeah I also find it surprising that people are shocked that
| Facebook have internal studies into e.g. whether instagram
| causes depression in teenage girls (answer: inconclusive),
| like they're a bad company for investigating whether their
| products have negative effects on people...
| xmprt wrote:
| The shock is that someone at Meta looked into these studies
| and decided not to take actions to fix it because it might
| hurt their revenue.
| aierou wrote:
| We are told again and again that correlation is not
| causation, but we readily ignore this maxim when we are
| looking for an account that we hope is true. At a time
| when Facebook is regularly vilified (sometimes
| deservedly), wanting to believe that its practices have
| caused teenagers' mental health to suffer is
| understandable. But wanting doesn't make it so.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-
| faceboo...
| [deleted]
| rand49an wrote:
| Didn't their own research show that it made 13% of teenage
| girls who use the platform seriously depressed?
| jefftk wrote:
| The reporting on this study has been terrible. It was a
| really small study of female teenage Instagram users who
| reported having various problems. Of them, 13% blamed
| Instagram for making things worse, which was actually
| less than the number that said Instagram made things
| better. And this is all based on self-reported data
| anyway, so none of us should be taking it very seriously.
| Marvin_Martian wrote:
| Its more that people are shocked* that facebook
| communicated to the outside that such problems were
| nonexistent, despite knowing that this was a lie.
|
| *not sure wether shocked is the right term to begin with,
| it seemed more like indignation to me.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Did they actually know it was a lie? E.g.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-
| faceboo...
| aierou wrote:
| Thank you for this article. I was beginning to lose hope
| that there was anyone with a measured view on this issue.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| The shock comes because it doesn't fit the narrative that
| Facebook is all evil, all the time. Nuance, complexity, and
| evenness are lost on some. No one and nothing is all bad
| all the time.
| A_non_e-moose wrote:
| I think the shock is how old the reports are, and how since
| then things have not changed, but in fact worsened.
| creato wrote:
| In hindsight, I can see this quote is generating a lot of
| discussion about the content reporting, but I intended to
| focus the latter part of the sentence, which I thought really
| highlights the ridiculousness of social media.
| jancsika wrote:
| > When corporations hide facts we call them immoral
|
| Not really.
|
| When corporations hide externalities that negatively impact
| the entire population we call them immoral.
|
| I mean, nobody has ever called KFC immoral for having "secret
| spices."
| pessimizer wrote:
| Just because you were honest with your partner about cheating
| on them doesn't mean they have to stay with you. That isn't a
| mixed message about whether your partner wants to hear the
| truth or not. You're not being punished for telling the truth
| about what you did, you're being punished for what you did.
| stefan_ wrote:
| I think you are just missing the backstory. Of course if you
| are approaching what Facebook does with naivety you end up
| sounding.. naive.
|
| The whole reason this report was put out by Facebook in the
| first place is because people used their own tool Crowdtangle
| to point out how the most popular pages of all were pushing
| political and medical misinformation to billions and were run
| by foreign spam mills. So they gutted Crowdtangle and
| published this report cleansed of any reference to
| "questionable" pages. But as a previous submission [1]
| showed, the numbers they state don't add up. And as this
| submission shows, if you dig into what Facebook wants to tell
| you is popular, it's all still the most garbage, devoid of
| value scam content - and it is their algorithm that is
| promoting it above all.
|
| 1: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2021/08/18/facebooks-new-
| transpar...
| Causality1 wrote:
| They're not paid to care.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Even worse: They're paid to not care.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| When conducting scientific research, I'd think "not caring"
| is a desirable trait. You don't want anyone's personal
| feelings to get in the way of reporting accurate
| information.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| I think this is just being pedantic. You have to care
| about something to formulate and test a hypothesis. You
| have to care about what the data say to bother gathering
| them and collating them into some report in the first
| place. "To care" can be "to be curious about something"
| or "to have an interest in something", not just "to be
| concerned about something."
| mitigating wrote:
| No, you have to be interested in something. Caring
| implies that you have an emotional desire for the
| hypothesis to be either true or false and that leads to
| bias. Scientific interest drives motivation.
| tantalor wrote:
| Burying the lead, to be sure.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so
| here it is:
|
| Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in
| charge of what is being reported, which is not sane.
|
| Like, imagine if your friend was slowly poisoning himself by
| flavoring his food with lead for a month. Even if he is honest
| with you about what he's been doing, it's still not a sane
| situation. If anything it's _less_ sane to be seemingly lucid
| and forthright about a month of self-destructive behavior, but
| not actually do anything to change it.
|
| The question here is: why did Facebook allow the situation to
| get so bad that this page was the top for a whole month? Why
| didn't someone at Facebook notice this stupid pointless scam
| page was surging and do even a little of research and tweaking
| to change that?
|
| They have seemingly abandoning any responsibility for the
| behavior of the machine they built and operate. Personally I
| don't give them many points for just reporting that.
| klyrs wrote:
| It's more complicated than that. Facebook is a company.
| People in different parts of the company do different things,
| have different motivations, etc. One cannot look at a large
| organization as an individual. I tried to come up with a more
| apt analogy... but analogies are awful here.
| rob74 wrote:
| So, probably lots of people actually did notice it, and
| either (a) shrugged and thought "not my job", or (b)
| notified someone else about it, who then did (a)?
| xmprt wrote:
| Which is totally fair in my opinion. It is no single
| individual's job to fix an issue this big and I don't
| think it's even feasible for a single person to do at a
| company like this. And if management hasn't set up
| incentives for people to proactively fix issues like this
| then they probably won't get fixed. Upper management can
| and should fix these issues but they probably don't care
| because they don't think it's an issue.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| There's also likely a (c), which is people who don't
| think that Facebook _should_ do anything about it. I
| guess that could be considered part of a set with (a),
| but I thought it should be mentioned separately as it 's
| a different motivation.
| kreeben wrote:
| Might I suggest (d): analysts, disgusted by the fact this
| crap is on top, tweaked The Feed in an attempt to
| disfavor that type of content then ran a simulation but
| saw their simulated ad revenue become lower than allowed
| minimum, then did (a) and went out to have lunch.
| fragmede wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something,
| when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
|
| - Upton Sinclair
|
| In particular, stare too hard at that viral page, realize
| how scummy that page is, and then spend the rest of a
| career at facebook trying to tear down the systems that
| made that the most viral page, are likely going to earn
| you enemies, and cause the company to lose money (in the
| short term, at least).
| IncRnd wrote:
| Did you stare at that page on Facebook? The top post has
| millions of comments.
| cj wrote:
| If it were a tiny thing that slipped under the radar, I'd
| buy it, but if my company were being dinged in the media
| every day for spreading misinformation, I would make sure
| the whole company is hyperaware of how misinformation
| spreads... which is often through viral posts and pages. I
| don't think this sort of oversight is something to blame on
| corporate bureaucracy.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| maybe these junk posts are all that's left to boost after
| tamping down the obvious misinformation and political
| propaganda
| thinkloop wrote:
| It doesn't seem like facebook pumped the whole page, all
| other posts have extremely low engagement, literally < 10
| likes. What's wrong with pumping individual "good" posts? If
| anything it can be seen as honorable/egalitarian giving folks
| a chance to make it even if they aren't some media behemoth.
| jonas21 wrote:
| This is the central tragedy of Facebook.
|
| They set out to build a platform where anyone, no matter
| how small, could compete with big media on a level playing
| field based on a straightforward metric: whether a user
| cares enough about a post that they're willing to engage
| with it. Publishers get rewarded for producing compelling
| content, users get to see more content they care about, and
| Facebook makes money since people spend more time on the
| site. Everybody wins.
|
| And they succeeded wildly at this. But as it turns out, the
| things people respond to most are spam and hate and
| conspiracy theories.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I'm really not sure if that was ever what Facebook set
| out to do.
|
| My mental construct of Facebook is analogous to Morty
| following the path defined by the death crystal but
| towards the end goal of 'the most money'.
| krolden wrote:
| Collect data
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| And collecting data leads to what in this day and age?
|
| Collecting money.
| MrAwesome wrote:
| Ex-FB here. My guess is that it's primarily a combination of
| two factors:
|
| 1) Someone / some org was slow to notice that this was
| happening. 2) Bureaucratic muck slowed resolution down. Even
| once escalated, there would be a _lot_ of red tape to go
| through to make the necessary changes to how things are
| ranked. The people noticing the problem most likely aren 't
| the people able to make changes, the changes would need to be
| tested at scale and their effects evaluated, and the people
| making the changes would have a lot of deliberating,
| politicking, explaining, and appeasing to do. Add onto that
| that everyone is stressed out of their minds, worried about
| performance reviews, and having to balance changes they want
| to make against how they and everyone else are evaluated at
| perf time...
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Ok, but all that must also be true for the change that
| originally created this situation. There's all this red
| tape and large-scale testing and then... nobody _actually_
| looks at what hits the #1 spot?
| space_fountain wrote:
| Remember spam is an adversarial relationship. Almost
| certainly when whatever ranking change was exploited here
| was deployed the top ranked items were great, then some
| actor started realizing what was being selected for and
| exploited it
| addingnumbers wrote:
| > Even once escalated, there would be a lot of red tape to
| go through to make the necessary changes to how things are
| ranked.
|
| When I write a program that accidentally gradually fills a
| disk with garbage, I don't wait until I can redesign the
| program before I delete the garbage.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Yea, but does the garbage earn you money on ad views?
| avalys wrote:
| Well, perhaps whoever generated this report was simply
| reporting the truth and not trying to fabricate or distort the
| truth in order to make Facebook look better?
|
| The fact that the author of the linked article apparently just
| presumes that they would do so and "[can't] figure out" why
| they wouldn't says a lot about their own integrity.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| I don't think it says anything about their own integrity. I
| think it's just a tongue-in-cheek remark about how this
| information makes Facebook look ridiculous.
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