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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

#731

Post by ccktlmazeltov »

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…

Not true, I want to see good ads, ads that relate to what I actually want to buy.

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

#732

Post by ccktlmazeltov »

kelnos wrote: post #690
justapassenger wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Don't you want to learn about sale for new tech gadgets? Discounts for AWS? Good rent deals? No, not at all. Ads don't just inform about deals, they also incite you to buy . I don't want to buy just because some random company got the chance to put some psychological manipulation in front of my eyeballs. If I want or need something, I will specifically seek it out. If I don't specifically seek it out, then I probab…

That makes no sense to me, I bought a lot of cool stuff just because I saw an ads on instagram :|

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

#733

Post by josho »

kelnos wrote: post #690
justapassenger wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Don't you want to learn about sale for new tech gadgets? Discounts for AWS? Good rent deals? No, not at all. Ads don't just inform about deals, they also incite you to buy . I don't want to buy just because some random company got the chance to put some psychological manipulation in front of my eyeballs. If I want or need something, I will specifically seek it out. If I don't specifically seek it out, then I probab…

> If I want or need something, I will specifically seek it out

Sometimes we don't know that we have a problem that is easily solvable. As an example, I had no idea that there was an industry to reduce aws spending. One day a marketer made it past my filters and made me aware of an industry that I benefit from today. Just one example of many where marketing is win-win.

On the other hand I agree that there is too much psychological manipulation, unfortunately it exists because it works. Maybe this is where we need to disrupt the industry through a different approach. Just brainstorming, what if we regulated advertising to prohibit emotional/manipulative messages and rely instead on advertising facts?

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

#734

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

rockinghigh wrote: post #612
TeMPOraL wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

YouTube and Spotify went that subscription route and it works well. There are no ads.

Spotify is reliant on copyright exclusions to keep competing free services at bay. So aren’t really providing any value.

YouTube is still reliant on ads, and ad-funded content creators, and will continue serving you manipulative content wether you pay or not. So can’t really count that as a success either.

The thing is when you remove the ugly side of those business what remains can bee done better for free using p2p networks or federation over open protocols.

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

#735

Post by breuleux »

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 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.

There is a feedback problem, though, which is that your preferences are modified by what you see. So the AI problem devolves to showing you the kind of content that makes you want to see more of it, i.e. maximize engagement. I think a lot of people are addicted to controversy, "rage porn," anger-inducing content, and these agents are not going to help with this issue.

If we could train AI agents to analyze the preferences of people, I think the best use for them wouldn't be to curate your own content, but to use them to see the world from other people's perspective. If you know in what "opinion cluster" someone lies and can predict their emotional reaction to some content, you may be able to identify the articles from cluster A that people from cluster B react the least negatively to, and vice versa. And this could be leveraged to break echo chambers, I think: imagine that article X is rated +10 by cluster A and -10 by cluster B, and article Y is rated +10 by cluster A but only -2 by cluster B. It might be a good idea to promote Y over X, because unlike X, Y represents the views of cluster A in a way that cluster B can understand, whereas X is probably some inflammatory rag.

The key is that you can't simply choose content according to a user's current preferences, they also have to be shown adversarial content so that they have all the information they need about what others think. This is how they can retain their agency. Show them stuff they disagree with, but that they can respect.

I expect that a system like the one I'm describing would naturally penalize content that paint people with opposing points of view as evil or idiots, because such content is the most likely to be very highly rated by the "smart" side and profoundly hated by the "stupid" side. Again, note that I'm not saying content everyone likes should be promoted, it's more like, we should promote the +10/-2 kind of polarization (well thought out opinion pieces that focus on ideas which might be unpopular or uncomfortable) over the +10/-10 kind of polarization (people who disagree with me are evil cretins).

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

#736

Post by lightgreen »

closeparen wrote: post #585
knzhou wrote: post #457

The 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…

If Facebook followed some deterministic algorithm like "show all content from friends, in chronological order" then I don't think there would be such loud voices calling for it to also solve $social_problem. But Facebook does exercise editorial control, in the service of engagement. It's fair to ask that this curation consider other objectives as well, or at least counterbalance the side-effects it's known to have (d…

> show all content from friends, in chronological order

Then typical user Facebook feed will be 99% pictures of funny cats from one of their loved friends, which are too good to unfriend (if that friend is, for example, mother).

(Not to mention, it's practically impossible to configure filtering for 99% users).

And then these users will just leave the service because it's boring, and that's it, end of Facebook.

We already had a lot of services with no feed ranking. All of them died or started doing the ranking.

> Facebook does exercise editorial control

As any other mainstream service with feed and user-generated content. For example, Twitter or TikTok.

> It's fair to ask that this curation consider other objectives as well

The big neural network which defines feed ranking is developed by hundreds of engineers, and already optimized for (I guess) hundreds of parameters, including time spend of website, ads revenue, fraud protection, lower risk of suicide and so on.

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

#737

Post by solveit »

stonogo wrote: post #720
bobthepanda wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no, today's model is "users tolerate your ad network in return for free content". Which is clearly true given that Facebook is making profits despite everyone and their mother grumbling about ads. Something has to pay the bills.

Yes, tolerating the ad network definitely falls under "users don't care"... until they do, and they start taking measures to counteract it, and then we're back to "something has to pay the bills," which is where I'm suggesting some R&D investment might be wise.

> until they do, and they start taking measures to counteract it,

When? Adblock has been free and easy for years now

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

#738

Post by birdyrooster »

justapassenger wrote: post #647
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 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…

Marketing is typically about getting to the customer before the customer does any homework. The more informed the customer is, the less conversions the marketing heavy company will get. This is because they spend their budget on marketing (thus you seeing their ad as opposed to the competition). That means they don’t have the same resources dedicated to their product.

Sure at some scale, marketing becomes a requirement to build your brand for many other purposes and I will also concede that in some cases, like with services that hinge on network effect, marketing is required for the product to even become viable. But most things are not social networks and we would be better served to learn of the product in context with its competition in a less biased setting.

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

#739

Post by sieabahlpark »

neilk wrote: post #540
knzhou wrote: post #457

The 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…

Facebook is sometimes in a difficult position. But, with respect, I don't think it's correct to say that it's the fault of their critics for putting them in a dilemma. Facebook does not face outrage for "literally remov[ing] anything". In the real world, Facebook is removing thousands of items every day, maybe tens of thousands. Most of them are totally justified. Is HN outraged about that? Also, keep vs. remove is a…

Facebook and Google know what's best for us, right?

That's why we give them all our data and complain that they have all our data and actively monetize and sell it. We can't trust them with our own data but we trust them to monitor others data they produce?

It's like trying to tell a cow not to eat grass, it doesn't understand your question and it'll still eat grass.

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

#740

Post by irishcoffee »

ccktlmazeltov wrote: post #614
closeparen wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Facebook followed some deterministic algorithm like "show all content from friends, in chronological order" then I don't think there would be such loud voices calling for it to also solve $social_problem. But Facebook does exercise editorial control, in the service of engagement. It's fair to ask that this curation consider other objectives as well, or at least counterbalance the side-effects it's known to have (d…

If facebook was following a deterministic algorithm, people would complain too.

Back in the day this is how it worked. They changed it. Nobody that I can recall was complaining for it to change at the time. Circa 2006 I think.

edit: grammar

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