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An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

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Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#251

Post by TeMPOraL »

markus_orlandis wrote: post #98
dannykwells wrote: post #12

I think it's things like this that will ultimately bring the downfall of the tech giants - the fact that even with "machine learning", the quality if the experience is still so low. They built an addictive product in the beginning, but now all of them are starting to make us feel nauseous, which is one of the fastest ways to break an addiction. It's true here for social media (in spades), but it's true with Amazon (s…

I think that's pretty optimistic. Society seems to constantly drone on about "garbage" reality television and yet the networks keep pumping them out at an ever-increasing rate with more ridiculous plots all the time. For every person you hear complain, there are many more behind the scenes that you don't hear from who are the exact demographic that these companies are appealing to. These companies wouldn't be doing i…

A filter bubble. Or "dark matter people" - all evidence points to their existence, and yet you don't seem to meet any one of them.

I had a huge realization about this when one day, I counted up how many distinct people I ever interacted with in meatspace, however briefly (say, by saying "hello", or even noticing their existence and thinking about them). I've added that up to _maybe_ 10 000 people. Which amounts to 1% of the population of my home town.

It's less surprising to see the market (or politics) producing weird outcomes if you realize that your direct experience isn't even giving you a good statistical sample of the population.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#252

Post by Spooky23 »

jeremy7600 wrote: post #135
Spooky23 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She's demonstrating a huge amount of entitlement and technically illiteracy. No, she's not. I do have a problem with all of the various people that we interface with, including insurance organizations and pharmacies, abusing data sharing agreements intended for subrogation and similar procedures to manage pharmaceutical sales quotas and conduct outbound marketing. My wife was admitted to the hospital due to complic…

Forces.. WHO?! to care? You can't be serious. And she sounds exactly entitled. The system isn't there for her.

We should be able to communicate and conduct our lives without service providers mining our data for profit without compensation or consideration.

My cellular company shouldn’t be selling my location data, my pharmacy shouldn’t be selling my prescriptions to some aggregator. The people running the companies that aggregated my wife’s medical history should be in prison as far as I am concerned.

This forum was vociferous against the NSA when Snowden came out. Why is NSA a bad guy when a formula company has access to similar telemetry to peddle product?

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#253

Post by TeMPOraL »

nyxxie wrote: post #118

I felt immense pity for the mother in this scenario, and after reading the article I agreed that FB aught to have some sort of way to indicate that such advertisements are offensive and should not be shown to the user. Ideally, I'd like to see a paid tier that gets rid of advertising altogether. Then I read some of the comments here and on other sites. To put it bluntly, I don't understand the tone of entitlement peo…

Individual "entitlement" multiplied by enough people becomes a market signal for the company to adjust their product. While it's stupid to expect a platform to change just because you complained, the act of complaining is a proper, kosher way of influencing a company - even if rarely effective, for the same reason that people just packing up and leaving for a different provider is a rare occurrence.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#254

Post by freeone3000 »

lenzm wrote: post #192
Notorious_BLT wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like screwing with advertisers, I recommend the browser extension AdNauseam https://adnauseam.io/ Basically, it hides and silently clicks on every ad in the background. It even has an archive where it shows you the ads it has hidden and clicked, so you can check in to see what advertisers think you are interested in, and it tries to eyeball the cost of those clicks to advertisers. Lots of fun to load the worst…

You probably aren't. That's highly suspicious behavior that isn't hard for the ad networks like Google to detect and they'll just refund any costs as fraudulent activity.

It gets you banned rather quickly as a bot from most ad networks. Win-win.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#255

Post by lkdjjdjjjdskjd »

danso wrote: post #112
lkdjjdjjjdskjd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know non-transgender people also get unsuitable ads, right? It's not a "rejection" of your reality. AI and ad logic simply isn't very good, and apparently business sense isn't either. Maybe if there were products targeted at transgender people, somebody could make a killing with them.

Where did she say that her suboptimal experience was exclusive to her?

She said it is a "rejection of her reality", which is complete hyperbole. I can't find the original comment to check the exact words she used.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#256

Post by danaris »

NorthOf33rd wrote: post #214
danaris wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Social media companies are incredibly clear about what information they gather and how they will use it: everything and however they want. OK, but...the thing is, that's not actually true, however much their less ethical executives might prefer it to be. They don't, for instance, collect data on what games I play on my iPhone, because that information is not available to them. But while I have enough technical know…

Should have said, "Everything they can that's potentially profitable," but overall I'm aiming for pith over nuance. I'm not throwing up my hands, I'm here saying: consider the things you're letting into your life and their motivations. There are plenty of things we can do about it. Not share every single detail about ourselves on social media being a good start. This isn't private data we're talking about with the au…

But I think that her post highlights some other obvious holes in what we know about what information these companies collect and what they do about it.

Did they notice the posts she made and the behaviour she exhibited after she lost her baby? Did their algorithms capture it in any way, and they just aren't tuned to do anything about it because it's unprofitable?

Or are their algorithms dumber and less all-consuming than we give them credit for?

The whole point is we don't know, and we really, really should.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#257

Post by asadlionpk »

hangonhn wrote: post #52

That reminded me of this speech by Jeff Bezos to Princeton: https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate... “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.” It really had an impact on me.

Video link of the same: https://youtu.be/vBmavNoChZc?t=367

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#258

Post by KingMob »

jeremy7600 wrote: post #186
KingMob wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at the end of the day, humans are still in charge, not algorithms. If they can't adequately control the algorithms, perhaps they're not ready to be deployed. To see this a little more clearly, if a military deployed autonomous killer robots that kept accidentally killing civilian children, would you then argue the military isn't responsible?

false equivalency, no thank you.

Ummm, you're the one whose position makes them equivalent. Either humans are responsible for the algorithms they deploy, or they're not. To argue unintended effects can be ignored in one case but not the other is inconsistent.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#259

Post by brohoolio »

srvo wrote: post #21

This seems to happen a lot when one's experience is statistically unlikely, or when it doesn't neatly mesh with a commercial opportunity. For instance, I am a transgender woman and I get THE WEIRDEST ads. Makes sense, since an algorithm meshing together my engagement histories from ten years of social platforms must see something quite strange. The only appropriately targeted advertisements I get are from academics i…

There’s over 3 million miscarriages a year in the U.S. Often time it’s the worst event in your life.

Stillbirths are about 1/45 births.

This reminds me of when engineers were designing the first air bags. They didn’t think about the size difference between women and men. Diversity matters because it gives you different perspectives about life. I suspect that if the ratio of men to women in the tech industry were reversed this wouldn’t be an issues because it would have come up in discussions.

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