I remember content from friends, then no related content when Facebook was testing feed changes and now, it's mostly based on meme pictures and group posts. I forgot that there are any "friends".
Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
481–490 of 1001 posts
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#482I've posted a lot over the years about FB being leveraged by genocidal regimes and bad actors. While I don't think they necessarily pursue such ends, the fact is that social media is a battlespace from where real-world aggression can be launched, and that renting out platform space to this end has been extremely profitable.
Perhaps it has already been posted elsewhere in this very long thread, but if not I heartily encourage more ethically minded FB employees to leak the presentation in question and indeed anything else they consider relevant. At some point it will be too late to feel bad about not having done so when it could make a difference.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#483Earlier 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…
The profit maximizing (shareholder value) argument is fairly recent. At many other times, the concentration of wealth, and therefore power, was identified as a problem and actively mitigated. For example, the founding fathers of the USA were quite anti corporate and actions like the Boston Tea Party were explicitly so.
Nah. The founding fathers were the richest colonists and George Washington was the richest of them all. It was some rich people opposing richer people overseas that they were descended from.
They didn’t want concentration of political power but they had the economic power. Interestingly the political power endangers them because it has the power to take away their economic power. That’s the real battle still going on today.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Pay for Facebook then. 1.5% of total YouTube users subscribe for YT Premium. I love how the smartest minds will ignore the most primitive economics. Ads work. For everyone. Except deluded.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this idea. In response to it just creating more echo chambers: - it can't be worse than now - At minimum, it's an echo chamber of your own creation instead of being manipulated by FB. There's value in that, ethically. - Giving people choice at scale means it will at least improve the situation for some people.
Isn't facebook (and reddit, and twitter) showing you posts by people companies etc. that you decided to follow? (And some ads)? I am pretty sure things can be worse than right now, pretending like we are in some kind of hell state at the bottom of some well where it can't possibly be worse, seems unrealistic to me.
I've seen Twitter pull tweets from an account merely because someone I follow follows them. Facebook is the same.
I think Reddit sticks strictly to your subscriptions, unless you go to /r/all.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Pay for Facebook then. 1.5% of total YouTube users subscribe for YT Premium. I love how the smartest minds will ignore the most primitive economics. Ads work. For everyone. Except deluded.
Where did you get that number? That's actually far, far higher than I would have thought and quite encouraging...
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#487The problem really is platforms that give people content to please them. An algorithm selects content that you are likely to agree with or that you have shown previous interest. This only causes people to get reinforced in their beliefs and this leads to polarization. For example, when I browse videos on Youtube I will only get democratic content (even though I am from Poland). Seems as soon as you click on couple en…
> The problem really is platforms that give people content to please them. But it doesn't please them -- study after study shows a high correlation between depression and anxiety and social media use.
Plenty of things don't cure depression. Doesn't make them bad.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
Studies on persuading people out of prejudice do exist (see e.g. https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~broockma/kalla_broockman_reduc... ). The problem is that the approaches are not as emotionally satisfying as just affirming your moral superiority and calling people bigots, so not many people do it (though some do, search for "deep canvasing"). Abortion is tricky because once you recognize the life of the embryo as a value…
I think abortion is a lot easier when you frame the argument around suffering. I think part of the problem with abortion is the left argues that "it is not a life" which is generally a weak argument. It's better to accept/concede that you are ending life, but doing so without suffering before there's a neural net that can recognize anything - I think that's the important bit (and why third trimester abortions are ban…
> It's better to accept/concede that you are ending life, but doing so without suffering before there's a neural net that can recognize anything
First, this assumes that such a "neural net" is required for suffering. I personally don't have a problem with that, but making an ironclad scientific case for it is going to be very difficult, since we don't understand how "neural nets" actually produce suffering even in the case of humans with fully developed brains.
Second, by this criterion, it's not just third trimester abortions that should be banned, but abortions at any time after the "neural net" develops. That's a lot earlier than our current jurisprudence draws the line (neural activity can be detected in the brain of a fetus at about six weeks, vs. viability at roughly 24 weeks as more or less the current jurisprudence line), which means that our current jurisprudence is allowing a lot of suffering by this criterion.
So I'm not sure this framing actually makes the argument any easier.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Pay for Facebook then. 1.5% of total YouTube users subscribe for YT Premium. I love how the smartest minds will ignore the most primitive economics. Ads work. For everyone. Except deluded.
> Pay for Facebook
You can do that?
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
I, too, agree. Facebook is just an extension of the open society.
Disagree. It's different to normal society. Normal society encourages civility by offering the inclusion into a needed physically-near social group. Digital society deincentises civility by offering a multitude of alternative groups.
It's localness by homogeneity rather than geography.