Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

You can make money by making people feel good instead of bad. You can be rotten.com, or you can be Pixar. You have a choice. An organization with integrity will look at not just how much money they're immediately making, but whether they're pushing the world towards better or worse. A hands-off attitude of "it's not my problem that people like this sh*t" is not integrity, it's a rationalization for greed.

You can make choices that result in making less than the absolute maximum amount of cash you can get your hands on, in service of building a product/experience/brand with value and goodwill of its own. There are countless examples of this in other places— just look at any company that builds its reputation based on quality. Each of these brands could make their products for cheaper and lower quality, and make more immediate profit, at the (much larger) long-term cost of destroying the brand, the customer goodwill, and the market advantage. Defending against such short-term greediness is uphill work, but it's both the enlightened and profitable thing to do.

Instead of actively amplifying memes and misinformation, they could have chosen to build features supporting community and/or expert moderation. They built an algorithm that optimizes purely for attention, but they could have made something that accounts for quality; paying attention to patterns in good and bad sources of information, and reliable/unreliable discriminating tastes in the community. The emphasis on quality and reliability of content was the pitch for Quora, for example, and they did much better at that task than Facebook. Which is not surprising, because Facebook seems to clearly not be trying to optimize for this at all. Wikipedia and StackOverflow are also two huge success stories of community/expert moderation. It works if you actually prioritize it.

They could have chosen to hire journalists, editors, and artists to produce and vet high-quality content to drive people to the platform, and step responsibly and effectively into the media void that was created when newspapers began to collapse. An analogy for this would be the way that Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and friends have created a new boom and golden age of content creation to fill the void left by the dying medium of broadcast TV. There could have been something like this for print, and Facebook was well positioned for it.

[Jaron Lanier](https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake...) has lots of ideas about how to make an internet that isn't hostile toward its own users. One of his revolutionary ideas: Charge people money for services instead of siphoning their data and their attention in ways that hurt them.

There are a zillion directions they could have gone.

Short version: it's because this place is less divisive that it feels more divisive. HN is probably the least divisive community of its size and scope on the internet (if there are others, I'd like to know which they are), and precisely because of this, many people feel that it's among the most divisive. The solution to the paradox is that HN is the rare case of a large(ish) community that keeps itself in one piece instead of breaking into shards or silos. If that's true, then although we haven't yet realized it, the HN community is on the leading edge of the opportunity to learn to be different with one another, at least on the internet.

These companies do provide some value by building the infrastructure and so on. But the graph itself is kept proprietary, most likely because it is not copyrightable.

Which is it, guys? How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that it isn’t actively molding user behavior on a massive scale?

There’s an amusing comment from a Facebook employee downthread asking: if division is caused by showing people opposing political opinions, should we try to stop that to reduce division, or should we do nothing, to avoid forming filter bubbles? Predictably, every single reply condemns him as evil for not realizing one of the options is obviously right, but they’re split exactly 50/50 on what that right course of action is.