Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive • Hacker News Board

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

#491

Post by gonehome » Tue, May 26, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #488

gonehome wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Thanks - I think that's a fair criticism and I don't know enough to really comment further.

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

#492

Post by babesh » Tue, May 26, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

nickff wrote: post #132

lol636363 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, no one planned it. But encouraging or demanding to take shortcuts is what caused it. I have been in software industry for 15 years and this happens all the time, being forced to release unfinished features, asked to ignore security, backups, etc. I would imagine same thing happens in other industries.

My understanding of the MAX issues is that the issues were not really shortcuts, though they might look that way in hindsight (because every mistake looks that way in hindsight). From my non-aviation perspective, it looks like they basically pieced together a bunch of complex systems, with each team making a number of (different) assumptions about each system. The systems themselves were influenced by FAA requirement…

There is no FAA requirement to maintain the old certificate. Boeing and it’s customers wanted to do that for cost savings.

It is supposedly costly in time and money to acquire a new rating but it has been done obviously.

The airlines wanted a single pool of interchangeable pilots flying in name interchangeable planes (their existing 737s and the 737 MAX). Supposedly one of the airlines threatened to take new business to Airbus and had penalties written into the contract to make the 737 MAX fly under the existing certificate.

So it wasn’t the old certificate driving these issues, it was Boeing and it’s customers wanting to maintain the old certificate that drove the issues. That is a very large difference.

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

#493

Post by gscott » Tue, May 26, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

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…

Facebook figured out how to bring a Usenet flame war to the masses and profit from it, job well done!

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

#494

Post by jjjensen90 » Tue, May 26, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

creato wrote: post #486

arihant wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

On Feb 4th, Google said there were 20 million Youtube Premium users, and I believe the latest estimates put Youtube at 2 billion users, which would be a 1% subscription rate.

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

#495

Post by karmelapple » Tue, May 26, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

crocodiletears wrote: post #171

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.

I think a big part of the shift of interactions over the last 5 - 10 years is the communication platform (Facebook, in this case) bringing in new users who had zero experience debating in a text-only format. It’s probably inevitable, unless the platform tries to educate and heavily police new users on what proper behavior is.

Facebook was incentivized to grow as fast as possible. Comments and discussion was one of many vectors for growing; photos, news, and silly images was just as important. The quality of all that wasn’t as important as the content coming from people you know and trust.

Contrast that with a community like HN, where quality of comments and content is much more important, since you have little to no trust for almost all people submitting content.

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

#496

Post by grishka » Tue, May 26, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #471

grishka wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is indeed the problem of discovery that Mastodon doesn't feel like addressing. Like, you pick a server, make an account and now what? There's no way to bring your existing social graph with you. Even if your friends are there, you won't ever find them without asking each and every one about their username@domain. But I have some ideas on fixing that for my fediverse project — like making a DHT out of instance servers, thus making global search possible while keeping the whole thing decentralized.

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

#497

Post by anigbrowl » Tue, May 26, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #453

lmilcin wrote: post #98

The 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…

Sorry for the self-reference outside of a moderation context, but I wrote what turned into an entire essay about this last night: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 . It's about how this plays out specifically on HN. 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…

The thing is that HN is essentially run like singapore - a benign-seeming authoritarian dictatorship that shuts down conflicts early and is also relatively small and self-contained. One thing that doesn't get measured in this analysis is the number of people who leave because they find that this gives rise to a somewhat toxic environment, as malign actors can make hurtful remarks but complaints about them are often suppressed. Of course, it tends to average out over time and people of opposite political persuasions may both feel their views are somewhat suppressed, but this largely reactive approach is easily gamed as long as its done patiently.

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

#498

Post by closeparen » Tue, May 26, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

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).

>advertising in all mass media is regulated to prevent outright lies from being spread

Advertising in mass media is regulated. You are very much allowed to publish claims that the government would characterize as outright lies, you just can't do it to sell a product.

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

#499

Post by liopleurodon » Tue, May 26, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

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…

bring back rss feeds

then I choose what I read in my reader

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

#500

Post by manquer » Tue, May 26, 2020, 9:28 PM UTC

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…

That is how it is today. But does it have to be like that ? What is the minimum revenue per user required for service like FB to run.

While everyone is sceptical on whether such a service can reach critical mass to make financial sense, a brand new FB replacement may not be able to do it, However FB itself can certainly give that as an option without hurting their revenues substantially.

I was sceptical on the value prop for Youtube Premium, I am constantly surprised how many people pay for it, if google can afford to loose ad money with YT premium, I am sure FB can build a financial model around a freemium offering if they wanted to.