Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 1001 posts

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

#311

Post by lostmyoldone »

jimmaswell wrote: post #188

They decided against paternalistic meddling and let discourse happen naturally? That sounds best to me. I don't want Facebook to be a school teacher hovering over a lunch table to make sure nobody swears. People posting "divisive" content is far preferable to the alternative.

It's not people posting divisive content that is the big problem, the big problem is divisive content getting all the eyeballs, causing people to (due to completely normal human psychology) to believe everyone either are completely against them, or completely with them, and nothing in between.

Even disregarding anything but mental and physical health, the consequences are significant and quite real.

No, they don't need to become the gatekeeper of all "bad things"(tm) the same way they protect us from accidentally gazing at a terrifying nipple, that would be preposterous, but they could probably try a little harder to not act completely opposite to their users best interest as often as they do.

Especially when that happens to be a significant fraction of all the people on earth, that's probably not too big of an ask?

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

#312

Post by bradlys »

_tulpa wrote: post #227
_2d30 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt you and I are socially or professionally connected and yet here we are.

This connection doesn't mean shit compared to someone you see face to face and share experiences with. Yet this watered down form of connection seems to have replaced the latter, which I think is the fundamental social problem of the internet.

Does it matter the quality of the connection? The argument is about being shown different viewpoints and that the internet shows you more than in person.

Is that hard to disagree with? I didn’t even know atheism was a thing until I was on the Internet. No one in my community was an atheist and the media we were provided didn’t reference it much.

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

#313

Post by GuiA »

fpgaminer wrote: post #299

You know what the internet needs? User agents. We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us. What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. Instead of being tuned…

What you’re referring to is splitting the presentation from the content. The server (eg Facebook) provides you with the content, and your computer/software displays it to your liking (ie without ads and spam and algorithmically recommended crap).

There’s a lot of history around that split, and the motivation for HTML/CSS was about separating presentation from the content in many ways. For another example, once upon a time a lot of chat services ran over XMPP, and you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google Hangouts account. Of course, both Google and Facebook stopped supporting it pretty quickly to focus on the “experience” of their own chat software.

The thing is that there is very little money to be made selling content, and a lot to be made controlling the presentation. So everyone focuses on the latter, and that’s why we live in a software world of walled gardens that work very hard to not let you see your own data.

There is some EU legislation proposal that may make things a bit better (social network interop), but given the outsized capital and power of internet companies i’m not holding my breath.

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

#314

Post by AgentME »

LordHumungous wrote: post #33

> Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in vetting proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make conversations on the platform more civil were “paternalistic,” said people familiar with his comments. I think Joel was right.

>The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

They're responsible for 64% of extremist group joins. Is trying to change that number to 0% paternalistic?

I assume I'm currently not responsible for any extremist group joins. Am I being paternalistic by not pushing people toward joining extremist groups? Is it only paternalistic if you first find yourself responsible for some extremist group joins, and then try to lower that number?

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

#316

Post by specialist »

supernova87a wrote: post #149

I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Specifically, and more importantly, combined with the human inability to actively decide to not pay attention when things are inconsequential or not yet worth arguing about. Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the…

"There is no vaccine yet for this."

What would that look like?

Given our current (social) media ecosystem, converting outrage into profit (per Chomsky, McLuhan, Postman, and many, many others), what does a non-outrage maximizing strategy look like?

I currently favor a slower, calmer discourse. A la both Kahnemann's thinking fast vs slow, and McLuhan's hot vs cold metaphors.

That means breaking or slowing the feedback loops, removing some of the urgency and heat of convos.

Some possible implementation details:

- emphasis on manual moderation, like metafilter, and dang here on HN

- waiting periods for replies. or continuing allowing the submissions but delay their publication. or treat all posts as drafts with a hold period. or HN style throttling. or...?

- only friends can reply publicly.

- hide "likes"

- do something about bots. allow aliases, but all accounts need verified real names or ownership.

Sorry, these are just some of misc the proposals I remember. I should probably have been cataloguing them.

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

#317

Post by visarga »

cryptoz wrote: post #288
ErikAugust wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this. They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so. Nothing they ever did in terms of facilitating pointless arguments has been all that original either. People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed. Now that said, they know what they have on their hands and how it makes th…

> I think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this. I don't agree with that. I very strongly think that Facebook did invent a lot of this. > They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so Scale does matter though. There is a lot in life that is legal or moral at small scale but illegal or immoral at large scale. Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you are d…

> Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you are doing.

"Quantity has a quality of its own"

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

#318

Post by catalogia »

AlexandrB wrote: post #9
sneak wrote: post #4

Do we ask or expect the same of the phone or cable companies? Why the agenda to (further) censor Facebook and similar?

Phone companies don't set up incentive structures that encourage a certain kind of content. Facebook has an "algorithmic" feed, likes, and "engagement" metrics that rewards certain behaviours and punish others. They are rightly being pilloried when these incentives encourage and promote constant outrage, conspiracies, and completely fact-free fear mongering.

> Phone companies don't set up incentive structures that encourage a certain kind of content.

I'm not convinced of that. Through technical and billing means, phones encourage one-on-one conversations while discouraging conversations with multiple participants. By disincentivizing certain kinds of conversations, they disincentivize certain kinds of content. It's hard to say exactly what sort of impact this may have on society, but I doubt it doesn't have any.

This may be a far cry from Facebook's deliberate algorithmic tweaking to manipulate the emotions of their users, but I think it's interesting to consider in it's own right.

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

#319

Post by DSingularity »

NoodleIncident wrote: post #262
DSingularity wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are more isolated in the real world? Please provide a source. Aside from the fact that this is hard to measure now that the underlying medium has itself been modified — I would hardly expect this to be the case. Online I am connected to those whom I socialize with or am otherwise professionally connected to. In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.

This is the hardest source I can find, but it only measures what happens on Facebook. The numbers do seem higher than what I'd expect for IRL conversations, though: https://research.fb.com/blog/2015/05/exposure-to-diverse-inf... > Online I am connected to those whom I socialize with or am otherwise professionally connected to. In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent. This seems entirely backwards to me?…

Thanks for the link. Reading now. Regarding my reply, I was thinking more about social networking apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, or linkedin and less about hackernews/reddit types. Mainly because I think the bulk of social interactions happen there.

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

#320

Post by specialist »

brewdad wrote: post #195
derg wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general and not necessarily related to just facebook, but one of the best things I've come to learn about myself and the world around me is that sometimes the absolute _best_ thing you can do for yourself is to just shut up and walk away, even if you know in your heart of hearts that you are correct.

I've gotten better, over time, at typing my heated, emotional response to someone online and then hitting Cancel or the back button and not posting. Sometimes I do hit the Reply button though. I still have room for self-improvement. :-)

Not gonna like. u/dang has had to scold me a few times.

Improvement takes time.

We certainly need more and better role models.

Post reply on HN