Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 1001 posts

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

#591

Post by banads »

s1t5 wrote: post #479
devonkim wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

It's silly to so confidently assert that opening up a closed source algorithm to 3rd party analysis will "do absolutely nothing". How could you possibly know there is nothing unusual in the code without having audited it yourself?

Seeing how the sausage gets made certainly can make lots of people lose their taste for it.

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

#592

Post by solarkraft »

austincheney wrote: post #578
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 if, instead, you had a personal AI I was in agreement with you until I read that. People don’t need to have content dictated to them like mindless drones whether it is from social media, bloggers, AI, or whatever. Many people prefer that, though, out of laziness. It’s like the laugh track on sitcoms because people were too stupid or tuned out to catch the poorly written jokes even with pausing and other unnece…

I think your suggestion is a bit out of scope for what's actually being discussed/not really a solution.

I'm active on the somewhat (not fully) decentralized social medium Fediverse (more widely known as Mastodon, but it's more than that) and I think a lack of curation is a problem: Posts by people who post a lot while I'm active are very likely to be seen, those by infrequent posters active while I'm not very likely to go unnoticed.

How would your proposed system (that seems a bit utopic and vague from that comment, to be honest) deal with that?

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

#593

Post by TeMPOraL »

TwoBit wrote: post #547
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…

Facebook would be perfectly happy to eliminate all ads if instead you paid a small or even tiny monthly fee. But you won't pay it.

No, they wouldn't, unless advertising gets banned. They'd instead accept your payment and find a way to shove ads in anyway, in a covert or overt way, just as many paid services do, because why leave money on the table?

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

#594

Post by adrianmonk »

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 like the line of thinking, but who actually provides the agent, and what are their incentives?

This is far from a perfect analogy, but compare it to the problem of email spam. People first tried to fight it with client-side Bayes keyword filters. It turns out it wasn't nearly as simple as that, and to solve a problem that complicated, you basically need people working on it full time to keep pace.

Ranking and filtering a Facebook feed would have different challenges, of course. It's not all about adversaries (though there are some); it's also about modeling what you find interesting or important. But that's pretty complicated too. Your one friend shared a woodworking project and your other friend shared travel photos. Which one(s) of those are you interested in? And when someone posts political stuff, is that something you find interesting, or is it something you prefer to keep separate from Facebook? There are a lot of different types of things people post, so the scope of figuring out what's important is pretty big.

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

#595

Post by 2019-nCoV »

solarkraft wrote: post #584
2019-nCoV wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as?

Twitter shows me garbage I don't like, as does YouTube. They do this with very little regard for who you follow nowadays and give you no say in what types of stuff you actually want to be recommended. Sometimes they're nice enough to say why they recommend something (which should be standard), but most of the time it's just infuriatingly stupid. I'm not against machine curation at all, mind you. I want the infrequent…

For Twitter use curated lists. This allows you to avoid "the algorithm".

You are bemoaning YouTube's discovery process, you need not watch what's "Up Next" — that's your choice.

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

#596

Post by pwdisswordfish2 »

ggggtez wrote: post #555
pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 incen…

"Users who just use a phone as their primary computer will still want to able to publich to their millions of followers, and so it wouldn't work to have these millions of people connect directly to this person's device."

You have shifted the discussion from small overlay network for friends and family to large overlay network for "millions of followers".

Those methods of sharing content with "millions of followers" are already available and will no doubt continue to be available.

A small private network is a different idea, with a different purpose. People will always have the choice of using a public network however a small overlay can avoid sending traffic through third party servers, like Facebook's.

There is no requirement that a service has to be "free", or supported by ads. This is something else you injected in the discussion. I use free software to set up overlays, but I have to pay for internet service and hosting. The cost of the "service" is not the setup it is the internet access and hosting.

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

#597

Post by TeMPOraL »

fpgaminer wrote: post #474
ralston3 wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Mega-corps don't stop themselves from pursuing an idea just because it's bad for the hoi polloi, so why should we?

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

#598

Post by truculent »

yumraj wrote: post #50
truculent wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't apply, don't get hired, or don't get promoted, depending on how effective their hiring processes are.

That leads me to another question: are there people/companies who will not hire someone who has been an employee of FB?

That seems generally unlikely to me, but it’s a big ol’ world out there so I am sure it has occurred someplace

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

#599

Post by dctoedt »

cityzen wrote: post #580
dctoedt wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The right course of action is to stop using Facebook. That'd give rise to something akin to a Gresham's Law problem [0]. I think we have a civic duty to engage patiently — and politely — with our friends who hold views we disagree with, because (A) they get to vote; (B) angry invective isn't persuasive; and (C) social proof is a thing, and sometimes people can be persuaded to come around to their friends' point of…

So stay on Facebook. Keep in mind that while you're trying to patiently and politely engage, Facebook continues to build a profile about who you are and how to manipulate you. The more you feed it, the more it learns and knows how to use yourself against yourself. In terms of civic duty, this definition of American civic duty made me laugh: Citizenship connects Americans in a nation bound by shared values of liberty,…

> others... well, they are going to show up at a state capital carrying military grade weapons because they don't want to wear facemasks in a pandemic. Would you like to patiently and politely engage with them?

I have a few friends like that on Facebook, and yes I do patiently and politely engage with them — but on occasion I've had to remind them that they aren't the only ones who own guns and know how to use them ....

Post reply on HN