I'm building a social media site that will bring people together rather than drive people apart. It's called Belief Challenge. It's social media for open-minded people. Try it! http://beliefchallenge.com
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
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this. I don't agree with that. I very strongly think that Facebook did invent a lot of this. > They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so Scale does matter though. There is a lot in life that is legal or moral at small scale but illegal or immoral at large scale. Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you are d…
Have you read a newspaper comment section recently? Lots and lots of shouting going on between readers.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I also think there’s an art to deescalation and discussing ideas or persuading someone you disagree with to see an alternative view This doesn't really work with core views like politics. Some of the most polarizing topics are not because the opposite side can't see your view, it's because you fundamentally disagree on priorities. Examples: Anti-abortion people aren't going to be persuaded by yet another view on wom…
That's a learned behaviour - to ignore opposing arguments. They train themselves to counter arguments they don't like with their own prefabricated arguments, learned from the mass media. Like, for example: politician X is corrupt, he was caught taking bribes. Counter: everyone is stealing, at least his party gives our group more benefits than the other party.
No, it’s not about ignoring arguments. It’s about talking past each other by adding more anecdotes to an entire class of data the other side does not prioritize.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#624You 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…
Separating presentation and content is one way to do it, but it's not the only way.
For example, Facebook could create some kind of plugin API that allows you to interpose your filtering/ranking code between their content and their presentation.
For example, maybe they give you a list of N possible main page feed items each with its own ID. Your code then returns an ordered list of M Something like that could run in the browser or Facebook could even allow you to host your algorithm in a sandbox on their servers if that helps performance. (Which means you trust them to actually run it, but you have to trust them on some basic things if you're going to use their service at all.)
In other words, changing the acoustics of the echo chamber doesn't mean you need to be the one implementing a big chunk of the system. You just need a way to exert control over the part you want to customize.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it wasn’t concentration of power they were concerned with. They were only concerned with concentration of power against them (political power against their right to profit). It was a selfish play not a principled one. For example, slavery was written into the constitution. How the hell does that happen when all men (and no women) were supposedly equal? Slavery was enshrined as an economic and then a political…
The colonists were ALL for maximizing economic power (pursuit of estate). They were ALL for limiting political power against economic power. So this notion that colonists were against economic power is just wrong. Others may have held the notion but not as the colonists if you go by the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
You have to go to other historical events to find evidence of that. French Revolution, Bolshevik Revolution.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#626Earlier 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 guess it's worth clarifying what exactly you're talking about. If you want to share images and text with a small group of people, okay, that might be useful in some cases. But that's not the use case that Facebook users have in mind - you're setting the bar almost comically low and the impact on the actual landscape of the web will be exactly zero.
If you mean something that can make a splash in the social media space to address the "user agents on Facebook" problem, color me skeptical about the prospect of competing on useful features with the Facebook behemoth while fighting the complexity up and down the stack of making everything decentralized and trying to make it friction-free for casual users to run, with no funding from ads, and starting out at square one on network effects. Yes, Mastodon is a possible counter to this line of argument, but Twitter is so stagnant and their product is so simple that I feel like it's almost a unique case. And for most people the Facebook use case includes being able to find all their real-life contacts; by that measure even Mastodon would fail.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
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" a…
Your idea doesn't sound particularly tenable. A pay social network that limits you to only your close friends and family, that will have no network effects, have less features, and be more difficult to set up...
It's easy for people to point what they don't like about Facebook, but I don't think you are really comprehending why they dominated the social network space to begin with. It's not as easy as making a product that doesn't advertise, if it costs money to use instead.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#628Earlier 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…
Excuse my ignorance, but isn't the overlay network setup problem one that has problems at almost every level of the stack? If there is not any definitive technical problems to overcome, why is it not possible to create a mobile app that friends and family could use as their own private network? Isn't the internet supposed to be every node acting as it's own server and client simultaneously anyways? Is the problem jus…
"Excuse my ignorance, but isn't the overlay network setup problem one that has problems at almost every level of the stack?"
It works for me and has worked for others. The keyword here that distinguishes this idea from almost every other "peer-to-peer overlay network" project that you can read about is "small". If you limit the size of the network, you can avoid some problems. Most projects you read about aim at the ability to create a single, large network that potentially everyone can join. Open to the public. However using a different approach it is possible to create only small networks that are only open to people you know, e.g., friends, family, co-workers. There are still problems, but there are always going to be some problems. The internet you are using right now has problems. The question is does it work well enough. The small overlay network idea has worked well enough for me that I consider it one of the better ones. It is really impossible to debate these ideas on the internet. Opinions are strong and negativity is even stronger. If you want an answer you need to try things out yourself and draw your own conslusions. No peer-to-peer solution is "perfect" and if you are always looking for the solution with zero negatives and zero limitations, you will never find it. Worse is if you never actually try these solutions, you just read about them. After you try many of them and learn what you like and do not like about the design/implementation, it is easier to chose one idea that works for your use case. Everytime someone starts promoting a peer-to-peer project you can quickly evaluate it, based on what types of designs/implementations have worked for you and which ones didn't. Well, that's my opinion, anyway.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#629Earlier 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.
Also the Boston Tea Party wasn’t anticorporate. It was against the tea tax to be paid to the government of England. “No taxation without representation”. It was anti government without representation.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That’s a very good point. One line of thinking I’m interested in is social networking over email.
Everyone has email, so you could imagine a social networking app that’s just a thin layer over your email, and every interaction is encoded as an email being sent under the hood. Want to share a picture with your friends? Send an email. Someone wants to comment on it? They just send an email. Etc.
The main purpose of the app would be to offer a nice, device responsive, consistent presentation. Additionally if this were an open, documented standard, an entire ecosystem of “email apps” could emerge.
(Of course as far as your actual email account goes you’d want to auto archive the emails + not get notifications for them, but that’s easily configurable)