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Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
651–660 of 1001 posts
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
[Edit: Can no longer edit my above comment so putting it in a reply]
I had some time to think, I think you're right and at some point it becomes a utilitarian trade-off where there is no obvious answer, but a lot of factors that can help support/determine what the best policy is.
I think the suffering framing does move the needle away from the 'life is sacred argument' to something more actionable and specific (also honest/consistent with other beliefs often held by that crowd like the death penalty). There is a baked in assumption here that everyone is arguing in good faith though which I don't think is necessarily true (see the edit on my initial comment).
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know the worst part? I do pay for YT Premium and yet Google still finds a way to throw ads at me on Youtube videos through videos it suggests via Google Feeds (the leftmost screen on a Pixel). I bloody pay for the service and yet I am still getting ads on any youtube video I play when clicking any youtube suggested video on that feed. How annoying do you think that is? When you give in and pay, yet you are still…
I had this issue as well and logging out (in my case, switching accounts) wiping Google app cache, and I think rebooting to make Pixel Launcher refresh, then logging back into the YT Premium subscribed account fixed it for me. Convoluted I know, but I think the issue was it wasn't picking up some profile variable or token denoting me as a subscriber. Hope that helps!
Hey, thanks for this, just did this. Will now just have to wait and see until Google suggests me a new youtube video to see if it worked.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#654Why post something on Hacker News that can't be read because it's behind a paywall?
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#655You 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…
> AI that read every Facebook post I doubt FB would let you do that. It's "their" content.
Sure, you can't read every facebook post, but if your browser extension is scanning your feed and suppressing posts for you, how can they even stop you?
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#656The degree to which “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” is in effect here is remarkable. If Facebook literally removes anything, then HN is outraged because it’s censorship, paternalism, all that. But if Facebook does not adopt an actively paternalistic attitude where it shows people content that they deem is “good for them” , then that’s outrageous too. Both complaints predictably rocket to the top of HN. Which…
There is no single voice here on HN. It is a divisive, complex issue. Not only are (some) individuals uncertain on where they stand, but the community itself does not entirely agree. I know personally that I draw the line somewhere, though where exactly isn't clear. I suspect that to fully articulate my opinion on this, I would have to spend about a week doing research and forming a truly educated opinion.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#657Earlier 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 "no user"? Nope. People buy magazines, that are 90% ads. Subscribe to newsletters. Hunt for coupons. Watch home shopping channels. Etc, etc. There's large part of population that wants to see ads. Scammy and bad ads? No. Good and relevant ads? A LOT of people do want them. Even tech-folks, who claim that ads are worst thing for hu…
Honestly a truly well-made ad targeting on me, something that really ticked all the right boxes... gosh I'd spend 3-4× more, easily. Because ordinarily I just don't lose time on shopping websites, but I'm kinda of a spender when I do find things that I like. And I'm a sucker for good deals, I'm a patient prey hunter, I can wait months in ambush for the right deal.
Anecdotally of course, as one of those tech-folks who's got nothing against good and relevant ads.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
And many horrors of the past and present were and are caused by optimizing for profits. So it's not like we get to side-step horror-avoidance. I'd start with treating users as partners, and not cattle.
>So it's not like we get to side-step horror-avoidance. Which is my point. It's easy to say "just force them to optimize for value to society" and then ignore what that really entails in practice. And what giving someone the power to do that tends to cause. Actually solving the related problems and making things actually better is probably possible but it's messy and hard and complicated.
> It's easy to say "just force them to optimize for value to society" and then ignore what that really entails in practice. And what giving someone the power to do that tends to cause.
> Actually solving the related problems and making things actually better is probably possible but it's messy and hard and complicated.
What you describe is politics, and it's inescapable.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#659Earlier 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…
Why are you defending Zuckerberg for being a dick? If you have power, you have responsibility: full fucking stop. The idea that it's okay to be a selfish child with power is tantamount to allowing driving while drunk. Power is deadly, you can just as easily crush a persons life as you could their legs with a car. Don't drive drunk, don't be in power if you can't be a responsible citizen about it.
Power does not imply responsibility, nor visa versa, there is definitely a venn diagram here. Dictators - all power, no responsibility. Manager of a homeless shelter - lots of responsibility, little power.
I believe, with nothing to back this up, that social media would be improved with a better educated population. One that knows and values the basic tenets of critical thinking and debate. No amount of policing will make people smarter or more courteous. People have to choose to be more civil and be more interested in views counter to their own.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#660Earlier 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 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 sp…
You can be as skeptical as you want to be. Even assuming this idea was intended to "make a splash" (it isn't), these sort of comments make no difference whatsoever. We have all seen how HN commenters have criticised ideas that, rightly or wrongly, later went on to become successful businesses. The thing is, this is definitely not intended to be a business. It is just some software that exists and that works. If it works for me, then it is "successful". There is no budding "founder" to shoot down. Just a user with some software that works. The assumptions of "make a splash in the social media space" and "competing with Facebook" are all wrong.
The business of Facebook is not the "comically low" bar of sharing text and images with friends and family. An overlay solution that avoids sending traffic to a third party server is not "competing with Facebook". However it could be used to avoid Facebook which is the point we are discussing here. The fact that only a small number of people actually use a solution does not mean it is a "failure". If the software is relatively small, compiles fast, runs on different OS and architectures, stays available for download and reliably works as intended, then to me it is "successful". The way I evaluate "success" and "failure" of a software is probably different from many commenters/readers.