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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

#471

Post by anigbrowl »

grishka wrote: post #353
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…

ActivityPub and other federated networks are the answer. They do exactly that: if you aren't satisfied with the rules on existing servers, you host your own. The network itself is wide open, and its control is distributed across many server admins. The way the content is presented is of course completely up to the software the user is running. Having no financial incentive to make UX a dumpster fire visible from spac…

They're not the answer as long as they don't have loads of people. The attraction of FB and the like is that almost everyone has a FB account, just like almost every public figure has a twitter account. The downside of things like Mastodon is how do you know what server you want to connect to? For a non-technical user it doesn't offer any more obvious utility than a FB group.

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

#472

Post by mpfundstein »

jackandrew wrote: post #408
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…

We're a small team working in stealth on this exact challenge. Shoot me a note if you're interested in hearing more or getting involved. itshelikos@gmail.com

good luck

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

#473

Post by richardw »

GuiA wrote: post #313
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…

Your friends provide you with the content, not Facebook. You only need Facebook now because you don’t have a 24/7 agent swapping content on your behalf and presenting it how you like it.

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

#474

Post by fpgaminer »

ralston3 wrote: post #442
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…

> I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse. This. Also. What incentive does a walled garden even have to allow something like this? Put a different way, what incentive does a walled garden have to not just block this "user agent"? Because the UA would effectively be replacing the walled garden's own "algo curated new feed" - except if the user builds their own AI bot -- the walled garden can't…

True, but we have ad blockers and they're effective. They're effective against the largest, richest companies in the world. There are various reasons for that, but at the end of the day it remains true that I can use YouTube without ads if I choose to. There's clearly a place in the world for pro-user curation, even if that's not in FAANG's best interests. I think it's antithetical to the Hacker ethos to not pursue an idea just because it's bad for mega-corps.

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

#475

Post by artificial »

wdb wrote: post #398
gonehome wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is generally helpful to keep in mind. I also think there’s an art to deescalation and discussing ideas or persuading someone you disagree with to see an alternative view (and then giving them space to change their mind). Productive discussion isn’t possible with everyone or even one individual depending on where they are in their life, but I’ve generally found it works better than expected when you can r…

Personally, I think most of the persuasive related research is not done through public research (universities, public funding) but more through corporate or military (?) research. I can even imagine that there is obtained knowledge being used to help persuade the public for political gain. Which the wider public or public universities aren't being shared and is oblivious to the public and the wider science community.…

Unfortunately social media sock puppets were so hot last decade: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...

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

#476

Post by Merad »

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…

I think the overwhelming majority of users don’t want to deal with this kind of detail. IMO most people would end up using some kind of preset that matched their preferred bubble.

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

#477

Post by pdonis »

gonehome wrote: post #405
pdonis wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless you can get people to value trying to figure out what's true and updating on evidence itself What evidence could you give to disprove the belief that abortion is murder? The belief is not a claim about evidence; it's a claim about priorities, as the GP said. Or, if you like, about what actions count as belonging to what categories.

See my other comment for how I think about/tackle abortion specifically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315552

I see it, I'll respond further there.

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

#478

Post by a1369209993 »

munificent wrote: post #461
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…

The fundamental flaw is this: The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads . Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business, they are obligated to fight against user agents or other intermediary systems. The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enriching content from your friends and family. They want to show you ads. The good content is just…

> The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads.

Not that you're wrong, but: that's the fucking point!

Advertising delenda est.

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

#479

Post by s1t5 »

devonkim wrote: post #446
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…

I think transparency matters more. I liked Andrew Yang’s suggestion to require the recommendation algorithms of the largest social networks to be open sourced given how they can shape public discourse and advertising in all mass media is regulated to prevent outright lies from being spread by major institutions (although an individual certainly may do so).

Open sourcing the algorithms (however we define it) does absolutely nothing. What use is a neural network architecture? Or a trained NN with some weights? Or an explanation that says - we measure similar posts by this metric and after you click on something we start serving you similar posts? None of those things are secret. More transparency wouldn't change anything because even if completely different algorithms were used, the fundamental problems with the platform would be exactly the same.

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

#480

Post by Kaze404 »

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…

I had the same realization recently, and deleted my Twitter account in favor of a new one where I only follow people I know in real life.

That worked great for a couple of weeks, but now I log on Twitter and half of my feed is tweets of people I don't know or follow, with the worst, most infuriatingly stupid hot takes. No wonder they have literally hundreds of thousands of likes. The platform is built around this "content".

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