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Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

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

#551

Post by ardy42 »

marcinzm wrote: post #512
manquer wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Minimum doesn't matter, the only question is if it's more profitable than the current approach. Facebook makes $9/user/quarter. That's every user no matter how little they use the site. The issue however is that the users advertisers care about are the ones with disposable income. The users most likely to opt out of ads are the ones with disposable income. Thus the marginal cost to Facebook from such users is signifi…

>>> 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 a necessary evil to make you tolerate looking at ads.

>> 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.

> Minimum doesn't matter, the only question is if it's more profitable than the current approach.

Only if you think strictly inside the box.

The real problem here is one is a misalignment of incentives: Zuckerberg is managing Facebook to maximize the metric he's being evaluated on (profit and wealth), not the value provided to society.

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

#552

Post by ssss11 »

ereyes01 wrote: post #539
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…

Another early assumption about the internet and computers in general is that users were going to exert large amounts of control over the software and systems they use. This assumption has thus far been apparently invalidated, as people by far prefer to be mere consumers of software that are designed to make its designers money. Even OSS is largely driven by companies who need to run monetized infrastructure, though p…

Are there research papers you could link that prove users don’t want to exert more control? I’d be interested in reading more.

It always appears to me that the companies are making it difficult and users have no voice.

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

#553

Post by airstrike »

scotty79 wrote: post #392
zachware wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk is that it behaves like a reinforcement learning algorithm which essentially rewards itself by making you more predictable, I'd argue that's what curated social networks do today. If you're unpredictable you're a problem. Thus, it makes sense to slowly push you to a pole so you conform to a group's preferences and are easier to predict. A hole in my own argument is that today's networks are incentivized to d…

> If you're unpredictable you're a problem. But you are predictable, even if you think you are unpredictable, you are just a bit more adventurous. Algorithm can capture that as well. It will be easier for algorithm that works on your behalf.

Reminded me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19336754

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

#554

Post by hi_im_miles »

ErikAugust wrote: post #269
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 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…

Part of this is that Facebook makes the opinions of people you know but don't really care about highly visible, which I think leads to some of the animosity you see on the platform. When the person you're confronting is the uncle of someone you talked to once back in high school, there's little incentive to be kind.

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

#555

Post by ggggtez »

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #526
munificent wrote: post #461

Earlier 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 ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enrishing content from your friends and family." Well, it is someone else's website. What do you expect Zuckerberg has his own interests in mind. In 2020, it is still too difficult for everyone to set up their own website, so they settle for a page on someone else's. If exchanging content with friends and family (not swaths of the public who visit…

I don't think that "user-agents" are the hard part either. At this point, I think any grad student would happily write a NN implementation that took various posts as input, and returned to you a sorted list based on your preferences (with input layers like: bag of words, author, links, time, etc, that the user could put more or less weight into just by simple upvote/downvote).

The problem is that no one has the incentive to host such a service for free, and users wants the content to be available 24/7. So it's not as simple as just setting up a peer-to-peer network. Users who just use a phone as their primary computer will still want to be able to publish to their millions of followers, and so it wouldn't work to have those millions of people connect directly to this person's device. Maybe you can solve that with a bit-torrent like approach, but the problem gets harder when you include the ability to send messages privately.

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

#556

Post by mudlus »

Are we are going to have to wait for a generation to die and for millions of lives to be lost (indirectly, say, through a demagogue's botched response to a pandemic needlessly leading to the infection of millions) before the average person is comfortable using a protocol (say, ActivityPub and RSS) instead of these parasitic for-profit platforms?

As long as the search for truth is burdened with advertising on platforms democracy and freedom are doomed.

If you don't see these things are linked, then you're part of the problem.

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

#557

Post by ssss11 »

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 agree - wasnt the browser intended to be the user agent? And counterpoint to some of the replies to you, surely people can just pay instead of sites being ad-based, what other industries operate in this absurd way? The public must think there’s no cost to creating software if everythings always free.

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

#558

Post by razzimatazz »

tantalor wrote: post #361
ENOTTY wrote: post #302

Here's the paragraph I found most damning. It would make me want to assign liability to Facebook. > 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…

You are surprised? Here's the mission statement: > Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them. Encouraging group communication is the primary goal, regardless of the consequences.

It sounds like an honorable goal, doesn't it? But when you build a community that becomes simply a place for shared anger, you allow that anger to be amplified and seem more legitimate.

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

#560

Post by kelnos »

pdonis wrote: post #370
cataphract wrote: post #327

Earlier 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…

> Studies on persuading people out of prejudice The GP is not talking about prejudice; he's talking about a genuine difference in priorities. Calling that "prejudice" implies that one of those choices of priorities is simply wrong; it ignores the possibility that there is no one "right" choice of priorities.

I think "priorities" is a pretty good way of framing it, at least when considering the abortion debate. I'm pro-choice, but I don't consider my position to be any kind of moral right; I just believe that in this situation, the priority should go to the mother and her wishes, not the fetus. I don't think that giving priority to the fetus is inherently illogical or wrong, it's just not the choice I'd make.

The problem that I have, though, is that I don't believe that many pro-life advocates look at it that way; instead of thinking about what's best for the people around the potential baby, they resort to religious or strictly emotional arguments in support of their views[0], which I will never consider persuasive.

The cut-off point is entirely up to society's consensus. You could go to the extreme and say that vasectomies (or even male masturbation) and tubal ligations are murder, because they destroy germ cells that could turn into children eventually. Some religions prohibit birth control of any kind. Many people aren't comfortable with the morning-after pill. Some people are fine with an abortion up to N weeks, but not after.

And that's what I find sad about arguments on this topic: people have drawn their line in the sand, and they believe that they are right, any other option is wrong, and that they must impose their rightness on everyone else, regardless of any disagreement in beliefs.

As a result, I just tend to not get into arguments about this, as I don't think it's worth the blood-pressure increase to engage a pro-life advocate in discussion.

[0] I may be wrong about this; I frankly do not have many (any?) pro-choice friends, so I only know what I read, and that may be a case of me just hearing the loudest voices, not the most representative ones.

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