I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads

Yeah I get that it is unfortunate to say the least that people need/want these loans. However, what is the right thing to do about the loans? If they are predatory, maybe they should be illegal. But who am I to tell people what they can and cannot do with their money? That would be rather patronizing. If we assume that people getting these loans are grown adults why shouldn't we allow people offering them to advertise to the people most interested in them? Is it ethically "better" if even wealthy women from the Marina see the ads despite everyone knowing they don't care about pay day loans for purposes other than discussing then on HN? I think it's honestly a really hard ethical question that I don't see a obvious answer to.

A little off-topic, but from the article:

> I’ll illustrate with an anecdote from my Facebook days. Someone on the data science team had cooked up a new tool that recommended Facebook Pages users should like. And what did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic stereotype you can imagine. We killed the tool when it recommended then president Obama if a user had “liked” rapper Jay Z...

The author left Facebook in 2013 [0], so I had assumed by now Facebook could do a proper job of recommendations. It's been awhile since I've "Liked" a page, so I just tried it (In-N-Out Burger) and was extremely surprised to see that Facebook apparently still doesn't provide a popup for related pages I may also "Like", in the same way that Twitter does whenever you follow any user.

That's really surprising. For starters, Twitter has had user suggestions for several years now, and it has much less structured data to work with than Facebook does -- for example, a FB page can specify its category, address, and many other attributes; Twitter has nothing to go by other than user's name, account screen name, biography, a location field, and connection metadata (i.e. geolocated IP). Yet it's been awhile if ever since I've seen Twitter recommend someone truly off, e.g. President Obama and Jay-Z.

In contrast, Facebook provides a related stories feature for news stories a user shares in the feed - or at least it did before the fake news thing blew up. Is this a signal that Facebook doesn't really care about user engagement with brand pages? Or did the fuckup that the author describes make it so that this was a feature that no product manager wants to be associated with?

(Or it could be that I'm just missing the Related Pages feature. Maybe it shows up in mobile and not the browser version)

edit: It's strange that the feature doesn't exist in 2017, but this anecdote, as portrayed by the author, reflects badly on both Facebook's data science and the author. I mean, how is it possible for so many smart people to not figure out how to fix such undesired associations? There are so many other signals for clustering related users beyond similar followers.

edit 2: This feature does exist -- you have to like a post in your news feed (on the website), and then Facebook will append a "Related" box in your newsfeed. Unless your browser window is open particularly high, the fact that the "Related" box was triggered by the Like action is obfuscated (because it is out of view). Still doesn't explain why they couldn't make the feature work in 2012-2013.

edit 3: Appears author is wrong about the tool being "killed". Seems to still exist, though maybe it was only temporarily "killed"

http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-suggests-similar-page...

https://www.facebook.com/addpage

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/antongm/

The product is bait.

You're keeping your friends there, they're keeping you there, and now the group of you brings in the bigger fish.