Facebook Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App

#131

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #83

athenot wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience as well. Equally annoying are the notifications menu (the actual notifications, I disabled a long time ago). I've been relying on them since the feed is useless but now they too have become cluttered with things like "posts you may have missed". I would love a platform that is just original content (text and original media), and where any links are just text WITHOUT previews. Kinda like ho…

> I would love a platform that is just original content (text and original media), and where any links are just text WITHOUT previews. I've got this vague idea in my head of a WordPress plugin that cooperates with other WordPress installations with the plugin, such that your own blog could turn into a social network. So you publish content to your blog, and your blog pulls content from your friends' blogs with the pl…

It was called "trackback", and it never quite solved the spam problem.

Re: Facebook Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App

#132

Post by mountainofdeath » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

dangrover wrote: post #98

jbob2000 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what people used to call "selling out". There's no money in original content between friends, facebook doesn't care that they no longer serve this need for you. Their new job is to show ads for fortune 500 companies so that the pension funds invested in the facebook stock can continue to make money.

Of course there's money in original content. You need that to keep people coming back to the feed to make any money on the ads. What you're seeing is the results of dozens of teams individually optimizing against growth goals, which are actually inputs to a complex system that is difficult to predict.

This is exactly what happens. Each team has their metrics that need to grow. Taken individually, it probably is the right move but when multiple groups optimize their little space, they end up drowning each other.

This is true of any large organization really. It's just that the blind insistence on data at the micro level makes the effect far more profound.

Re: Facebook Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App

#133

Post by flycaliguy » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

deanclatworthy wrote: post #56

Zak wrote: post #55

I can say what has reduced my Facebook use, if anybody in a relevant position at the company is reading. It's the content Facebook shows me. A decade or so ago, most of the content I saw on Facebook was original content from people I know. Most posts were either text written by someone I knew, or a photo taken by someone I knew. Perhaps not everybody shares this position, but what I most want from Facebook is to keep…

Enjoy insta while it lasts. They are having more and more sponsored posts creep into the feed. I don’t expect this trend to reverse. It’s how they make money.

Somehow I have zero ads on instagram. I don't know how that happened, but I suspect it has to do with a period of time on facebook where I was just marking every ad as not relevant to me. Everytime I visited, I'd let their system know that any type of ad doesn't suit me.

So maybe that tricked the system? My only other theory would be that they somehow know I wouldn't use the service at all if it had ads. I'm a fickle user who happens to produce some quality, original artwork for their service.

Re: Facebook Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App

#134

Post by jdofaz » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

Facebook is kind of like my email Spam folder now. I check it once or twice a month to see if anything useful was caught there but I otherwise ignore it.

It took me way too long to notice, but facebook stopped being an enjoyable thing a long time ago.

Re: Facebook Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App

#135

Post by meowface » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 6:15 PM UTC

salsadip wrote: post #25

meowface wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only thing even more insane than that is the creator of an app that lets you set a timeout when you send images and videos thinking $30 billion was a lowball insult and that they're clearly worth far more.

Quote? From what I read it wasn’t about the money for the founders but they thought they had something unique going for them which they wanted to have control over instead of selling. At least that’s what they said when Facebook made multiple offers

I was definitely heavily hyperbolizing and assuming. I have no idea what their actual thought process or response was. I just think you probably have to be pretty arrogant to deny 30 billion from Google for your gimmick fad app, even if you really don't care about making money. It seems arrogant to think that that business could really grow beyond such a valuation. Why not take the 30 billion and spend it on a new company you want to make, or something? Is the Snap brand truly that powerful to them? Even if you're totally happy living modestly, you can do a lot with that money.

It might be hindsight bias on my part, though. The hype at the time was very high, and maybe it was actually rational for them to think they had serious longevity. But still, I'm not really seeking money, and I don't see how I could've turned down that offer.

For Zuckerberg, it made more sense to reject early offers, because he could see the mega-monopoly in the distance. I don't see how Snap could think they could make a monopoly out of their app. For one, the app's not really even a social network.

It was a good idea and good execution, but like so many startup founders, I think the success of the app may have gone to their heads. Users aren't buying into the Snap brand / ecosystem / network, they just like to send ephemeral photos and videos to their friends with minimal friction. This is not a new paradigm in itself; it's a feature. Like many startups, Snap is a cool new feature dressing itself up as a serious corporation, and features only remain new for so long.

One could say the same of Instagram, but the difference is they managed to get the social network stuff right, so they could sustain exponential growth. Maybe Snap could've done the same if they were more willing to branch off from their original feature earlier on in their company's existence. I'm not totally sure why Snap failed to evolve from a sexting app to a social network, but it was clearly their plan, and it flopped.

Re: Facebook Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App

#136

Post by ghostbrainalpha » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

RandallBrown wrote: post #123

about_help wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be, the Facebook app explicitly does listen to the mic unless you opt out. It has also come out that Google and Amazon are storing people's personal voice requests, and aside from that the mics are always on waiting to hear the trigger words. This means by default that the apps are listening and analyzing everything, though how much of the non word-triggered speech gets recorded is unknown. Facebook's init…

The Facebook app, on iPhone at least, requires you to opt in to giving it microphone access. I've seen the myth that Facebook is targeting ads based on what it hears debunked several times. Do you have a source that shows that it is in fact listening? I think it's more likely that the same reason someone is talking about something (they're in a demographic interested in that thing) is the reason that Facebook gives y…

I am so frustrated by this "debunking", because it defies logic and experience.

Let's say Facebook NEVER listens to you... I'm 100% on board with them and their honesty. It still doesn't matter.

If you let ANY third party app listen to you, and identify you, for example the latest Candy Crush game, then your information along with preferences are being uploaded to databases for re-targeting.

When I do a big campaign in Facebook, or any sophisticated marketer does, I don't ask Facebook for users who like Cats and are looking for brands of organic cat food. I PROVIDE them a pre-vetted list of people looking for cat food that I generated and the emails associated with those Facebook accounts.

Facebook has NO WAY to know how I came up with my list, and no possible way to find out. It could have been from listening to conversations while someone played Candy Crush, or it could have been from a form submitted on my website.

One of these days I'm just going to actually document myself doing this and publish it to a website so more people understand what is happening and how easy it is to use data from people's conversations.

TLDR: Any time you buy a list of potential customers from a market research company, that data could have been gathered with conversation tracking. It's not Facebook's fault, it's just the reality.

Re: Facebook Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App

#137

Post by dwoot » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 6:58 PM UTC

Zak wrote: post #55

I can say what has reduced my Facebook use, if anybody in a relevant position at the company is reading. It's the content Facebook shows me. A decade or so ago, most of the content I saw on Facebook was original content from people I know. Most posts were either text written by someone I knew, or a photo taken by someone I knew. Perhaps not everybody shares this position, but what I most want from Facebook is to keep…

Another thing is Facebook provided options for selecting what to display -- just status, just photos, and something else before this was stripped away. I definitely used to use Facebook similarly to how I use Instagram today.

They could increase engagement if they simply put this back -- providing filters for original content versus external.

I, too, only want to see original content from people I actually care about. However, "care about" is very loose here, because for people with few connections, this probably doesn't matter much, but for users that have many connections and pages, etc, it makes sense to condense and perhaps rank content that a user likes from their connections higher.

Facebook is more of a visual Twitter for me -- people post articles and we have discussions as Twitter's format doesn't facilitate discussions nearly as well.

Re: Facebook Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App

#138

Post by ljlolel » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 7:11 PM UTC

calaphos wrote: post #61

nolok wrote: post #14

While I have a facebook account I'm not a big user, it's mostly for a few contacts that are only on messenger. I don't look at my "stream" a lot, and when I do it's mostly useless content like meme, self-centered post and whatnot that I personnaly have zero interest in, with maybe 1% of actually interesting thing in between like birth annoncement from acquaintances etc ... I don't plan to delete my account because I…

I 've heard thag Facebook uses microphones in smartpones to correlate users with TV or billboard ads. They use ultra or infrasound to broadcast information to nearby phone microphones so Facebook (or others) now that you watched the add

Some apps do this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-a...

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/02/some-apps-were-listening-t...

Re: Facebook Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App

#139

Post by chipperyman573 » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

joncrane wrote: post #97

8ytecoder wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mentioned this before here - instagram ads are a bit too creepy. I have had multiple personal ads that were eerily accurate and I hadn’t even discussed these things over any written form. I’m not paranoid to think they are listening to the microphone but the coincidence is super uncanny. It crossed the line for me twice in the past few months alone.

For me this only started happening after I offered feedback aka "Don't show me ads like this any more." Of course I realized shortly thereafter: "Do I really want better targeted ads on my Instagram feed?" It's a little too late now but if I had to do it over again I would let it guess, mostly poorly, and that makes it easier to filter out the sponsored content.

You can always give it incorrect data to train with :) I've been muting ads from the twitter account of every ad I've seen on twitter and the tweets I get are really, really weird and often more interesting than the tweets it gave me to begin with (because now I'm mostly down to the ads that some random person spent $5 promoting as a joke). But there was a weird 2 month period where twitter was trying to determine what I did want to see and actually had real inventory to play with, and it was hilarious how wrong it would get me sometimes. As far as I can tell, this is the only way to keep your privacy - to confuse the algorithms by overloading them with random data.

Re: Facebook Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App

#140

Post by tfha » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 7:17 PM UTC

Zak wrote: post #55

I can say what has reduced my Facebook use, if anybody in a relevant position at the company is reading. It's the content Facebook shows me. A decade or so ago, most of the content I saw on Facebook was original content from people I know. Most posts were either text written by someone I knew, or a photo taken by someone I knew. Perhaps not everybody shares this position, but what I most want from Facebook is to keep…

I'm starting to struggle with this on Twitter. Got frustrated enough to uninstall it a few weeks ago, still haven't put it back (though I continue to be tempted).

So many promoted tweets and the uncanny feeling that my feed is being shaped in strange and unwanted ways.

The straw that broke the camel's back was the banner where twitter declared that it was doing more tracking and targeting so that I would be served better ads, both on AND off of twitter. "Great!", "Learn more" were the two buttons.

I want my mindshare and my thought direction to be in my own control. The feeds are stealing my self control over my own thoughts. I hate it.