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(Ex-Facebooker. When the Cambridge Analytica stuff went down I wasn't too thrilled, but above all I left because of lack of work-life balance.)
A lot of the issues are perceived to be overblown - and in more cases than HN would like to admit, they indeed are overblown. Quite a few double standards are being applied to Facebook by the media-industrial complex and the uninformed. On the other hand, Facebook has stumbled a lot on their own and deserve a significant portion of the criticism they get. It's a nuanced topic and isn't as simple as "FB bad, pls delet…
People working for Facebook, taking the money Facebook has because of all of it it is doing but the AI Expert doesn't care?
Thats probably the same people who like the challenge for military drone guidance systems because they like the challenge.
Great.
A lot of the issues are perceived to be overblown - and in more cases than HN would like to admit, they indeed are overblown. Quite a few double standards are being applied to Facebook by the media-industrial complex and the uninformed. On the other hand, Facebook has stumbled a lot on their own and deserve a significant portion of the criticism they get. It's a nuanced topic and isn't as simple as "FB bad, pls delet…
Really? overblown? They just don't care. People working for Facebook, taking the money Facebook has because of all of it it is doing but the AI Expert doesn't care? Thats probably the same people who like the challenge for military drone guidance systems because they like the challenge. Great.
I don't have anything to contribute here that I think can be productive for us.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
...and to hell with minor, uninteresting and not cutting-edge issues like impact on society.
Or, alternatively: moderation at global scale with billions of pieces of content per day is an incredibly difficult, challenging, interesting, and impactful problem to work on and requires a lot of new technology. If you can reduce abusive patterns of misinformation on Facebook by a few percent, that's a huge win for both the company and for the billions of people affected by the service - by extension, society. This…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, alternatively: moderation at global scale with billions of pieces of content per day is an incredibly difficult, challenging, interesting, and impactful problem to work on and requires a lot of new technology. If you can reduce abusive patterns of misinformation on Facebook by a few percent, that's a huge win for both the company and for the billions of people affected by the service - by extension, society. This…
Yeah, it's very hard, all but impossible, when your primary constraint is maximizing profit while holding tons of market power in an unregulated environment. Poor facebook, they really try their best. It's just so hard.
You have to remember that this is a global service cutting across all cultures, countries, governments, and circumstances.
At some level, it becomes trying to design a system of governance that cuts across all those things in a scalable way. This is a problem where there is very little precedent.
The original sin in my opinion was Facebook charging ahead with a historic rate of growth without building the rails (moderation systems, governance, etc) to support that growth.
However, that ship has long sailed. Facebook is already massive now. It's easy to say with hindsight that the problems were obvious and to be expected. But the pressing question for society now is what do we do about it?
Not just for Facebook but for all similar services - of which Facebook isn't the first and it won't be the last. And what software solutions will the industry invent to combat some of this stuff? Who is building it? How much is shared? How much is driven by regulation versus this stuff becoming a competitive moat? etc etc.
It's a very interesting question and I look forward to progress in the area from all levels, including our legislators (whom I have little confidence in, but I'm an optimist at heart).
Facebook is today's tobacco company. Tobacco companies need to pay 2-5 times to the "normal" rate to get people to work for them.
Does the Television industry hit too close to home to not use as an analogy instead?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it's very hard, all but impossible, when your primary constraint is maximizing profit while holding tons of market power in an unregulated environment. Poor facebook, they really try their best. It's just so hard.
I think once you start thinking about the scope and scale of the problem, you'll start to realize how difficult it is even without the question of money involved at all (but yes, money does often complicate things). You have to remember that this is a global service cutting across all cultures, countries, governments, and circumstances. At some level, it becomes trying to design a system of governance that cuts acros…
Deregulate and cut corporate taxes. If they have access to more private user data and keep more of their money from atrocious behaviour they'll be less atrocious.
Oops, I meant the opposite of that.