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Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

wsj.com

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Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#171

Post by crocodiletears »

jbay808 wrote: post #151

I'm no fan of Facebook. But for what it's worth, back when I was still using it in ~2010, it helped me learn a lot about the worldviews of people on the opposite end of the political spectrum who I rarely if ever interacted with in person. The mechanism for this was Facebook Groups - I'd hang out in climate change denial groups talking to denialists and asking them questions. And although it didn't change my mind and…

It's less like that anymore. Group raids involving post reporting became a huge issue a while back, so most political pages use membership application questions requiring you to positively affirm or signal in-group association before joining. Nothing prevents you from lying to get into a group, but it's oddly effective as a mechanism for preventing partisan opponents from engaging in any dialogue.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#172

Post by phkahler »

dragonwriter wrote: post #147
crazygringo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged No, but it's not always clear what the ethical choice is. In philosophy, this is known as pluralism [1] -- the fact that different people have irreconcilable ethical views, with no way to find any "truth". That might seem like a lot of justificatory mumbo-jumbo, but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides. For example, did you know that in the postwar…

> For example, did you know that in the postwar 1950's, the lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society was widely seen as a major problem, because it didn't provide enough voter choice between the two parties? There was not a lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society . The divides in American society and politics didn't map well to the two major political parties because there was a maj…

So are you saying polarization makes it easier for people to vote? It sounds plausible and undesirable.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#174

Post by beepboopbeep »

This is why twitter and facebook don't have dislike buttons. By removing a quick and easy way of voicing dissent to a point, people take to the comments to verbally punish others. For a site that is dependent on user engagement, anger/outrage/frustration/negativity in general is a gold mine. I remember when reddit tried removing the down vote button the comments got NASTY. They back-peddled very quickly from that decision.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#175

Post by nickff »

shadowgovt wrote: post #107
nickff wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Boeing 737 MAX killed 346 people. So, it seems that death is not a deterrent." I really don't understand your point, unless you're implying that there was a meeting where Boeing planned to kill those people. I am not an aviation expert, but what happened with the MAX seems to be a product of the certification process, urgent business needs, systems engineering issues, and bad internal communications at Boeing. I h…

It's more that there were several meetings where issues were raised that would kill people if they occurred, and those in charge decided the risk factors were minimal enough that they could execute on the plan. Nobody planned to kill the astronauts on the Challenger. Such a systemic failure to anticipate and manage risk correctly is a team effort and heavily incentive-driven. Putting incentives in place that reward r…

I think I have a very different understanding of the root cause of the o-ring failure on Challenger than you do.

The common understanding seems to be that the managers decided to launch when the booster temperature was cold (though not necessarily out of limits), and some were warning that it may cause some unforeseen issues.

My read is that each limit in the operations manual should have been backed by a test to failure, or at least a simulation of what would occur if the vehicle was operated outside the limits. Such a process allows the operators to clearly understand what can go wrong, and why the limits are set where they are. This is what they did on the SSMEs, but not on the boosters (because they thought the boosters were fairly simple).[0]

[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-...

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#176

Post by maest »

drchopchop wrote: post #152
vtail wrote: post #100

Disclaimer: I started working at FB recently. Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's tough to measure it accurately). One day, your brilliant data scientist…

No. Why should the only desirable metric be user engagement? Is the goal of FB engagement/virality/time-on-site/revenue above all else? What does society have to gain, long term, by ranking a news feed by items most likely to provoke the strongest reaction? How does Facebook's long-term health look, 10 years from now, if it hastens the polarization and anti-intellectualism of society?

> How does Facebook's long-term health look, 10 years from now, if it hastens the polarization and anti-intellectualism of society?

Arguably, the PM doesn't care since they have short term targets the want to hit and they might not even be with the company in a few years' time.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#177

Post by Osiris »

vtail wrote: post #100

Disclaimer: I started working at FB recently. Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's tough to measure it accurately). One day, your brilliant data scientist…

I miss the days when my feed wasn't curated at all and just sorted by most recent post.

The whole point of having friends and being able to (un)follow people is to I can curate my own feed.

I don't use Facebook anymore except for hobby related groups like my motorcycling group.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#178

Post by dd36 »

vtail wrote: post #161
pacala wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predicting political preferences is a huge can of worms. Don't do it. Have the data scientist delete their model.

They did as you say (you are a PM, after all!), and next week they rolled out the "likelihood of engagement" model. An independent analysis by another team member, familiar with the old model, confirmed that it was still mostly driven by politics (there is nothing much going on in Elbonia, besides politics), but politics was neither the direct objective not an explicit factor in the model. The observed behavior is th…

We used newsgroups and message boards long before Facebook. They weren’t as toxic, I’m assuming due to active moderation. The automated or passive or slow moderation is perhaps the issue.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#179

Post by ptudan »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #95
yumraj wrote: post #17

I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company. I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves t…

> I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. Seems likely that social media as an industry selects more strongly for unethical executives, presumably because online advertising is the only effective way to monetize social media and it is more or less fundamentally unethical. I imagine the same effect can be observed among tobacco and fossil energy executives--these ar…

Online advertising as a concept is fundamentally unethical? I think you're speaking in hyperbole here. Stealing user data without consent (or with fake here read this 500 pg legalise consent) is unethical for certain.

But a bike blog putting ads for bike saddles on the bottom of their page to pay for their server costs and writing staff? Hard to see how that's unethical unless you think selling anything is unethical.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#180

Post by ggggtez »

vtail wrote: post #100

Disclaimer: I started working at FB recently. Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's tough to measure it accurately). One day, your brilliant data scientist…

This is a false choice. The real problem stems from the fact that the model rewards engagement at the cost of everything else.

Just tweaking one knob doesn't solve the problem. A real solution is required, that would likely change the core business model, and so no single PM would have the authority to actually fix it.

Fake news and polarization are two sides of the same coin.

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