751–760 of 1001 posts
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> The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Not that you're wrong, but: that's the fucking point ! Advertising delenda est.
Pay for Facebook then. 1.5% of total YouTube users subscribe for YT Premium. I love how the smartest minds will ignore the most primitive economics. Ads work. For everyone. Except deluded.
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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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I think there is a crowd that kneejerk downvotes ideas they interpret as anti-capitalist, without reading the argument. An example: I am not a Marxist. But I think the Marxist question of "surplus value" as an ethical question is relevant and interesting. I pointed it out on HN a few times. Again, without being a Marxist, just intellectually curious. Nobody ever asks me if I am really a Marxist. I get downvoted prett…
I don’t ask people if hey are really Marxists because when I have in the past I get accused of “pigeonholing” their idea(s)
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…
I am not at all outraged that Facebook would impose "restrictions" on speech, nor I think are people in my social circles. You can't have a working newsfeed without a significant amount of filtering, for example. So I suspect that's a straw man.
All that being said, I have left Facebook because I prefer to exercise my freedom _not_ to hear the kinds of speech Facebook has made their stock in trade. So, as far as I'm concerned, Facebook can do as they like.
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> 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…
I'm curious why you don't want to encounter these "manipulations". Is it because of the brainpower it uses to identify them as such? Are you particularly susceptible to giving in to them? Something else? I'm genuinely curious.
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They're not the answer as long as they don't have loads of people. The attraction of FB and the like is that almost everyone has a FB account, just like almost every public figure has a twitter account. The downside of things like Mastodon is how do you know what server you want to connect to? For a non-technical user it doesn't offer any more obvious utility than a FB group.
There is indeed the problem of discovery that Mastodon doesn't feel like addressing. Like, you pick a server, make an account and now what ? There's no way to bring your existing social graph with you. Even if your friends are there, you won't ever find them without asking each and every one about their username@domain. But I have some ideas on fixing that for my fediverse project — like making a DHT out of instance…
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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.
It’s also not possible to audit the code for anything unusual without taking it all the way back through all tools source, all hardware, down through the chips, through the doping in the chips, and even lower. This stack is such a hard problem that DARPA has run programs for a long time to address this. Start by reading Thompson’s ACM article titled something like “Reflections on Trustimg Trust” where he shows code audits don’t catch program behavior, then follow the past few decades where these holes have been pushed through the entire computing stack.
This WSJ story cites old research and falsely suggests we aren’t invested in fighting polarization. The reality is we didn’t adopt some of the product suggestions cited because we pursued alternatives we believed are more effective. What’s undeniable is we’ve made significant changes to the way FB works to improve the integrity of our products, such as fundamentally changing News Feed ranking to favor content from friends and family over public content (even if this meant people would use our products less). We reduce distribution of posts that use divisive and polarizing tactics like clickbait, engagement bait, and we’ve become more restrictive when it comes to the types of Groups we recommend to people.
We come to these decisions through rigorous debate where we look at all angles of how our decisions will affect people in different parts of the world - from those with millions of followers to regular people who might not otherwise have a place to be heard. There’s a baseline expectation of the amount of rigor and diligence we apply to new products and it should be expected that we’d regularly evaluate to ensure that our products are as effective as they can be.
We get criticism from all sides of any decision and it motivates us to look at research, our own and external, analyze and pressure test our principles about where we do and don't draw lines on speech. We continue to do and fund research on misinformation and polarization to better understand the impact of our products; in February we announced an additional $2M in funding for independent research on this topic (e.g. https://research.fb.com/blog/2020/02/facebook-misinformation...).
Criticism and scrutiny are always welcome, but using cherry-picked examples to try and negatively portray our intentions is unfortunate.
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…
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>comments are much more valuable to the reader than others This presupposes some kind of universal value function. >but how can you tell whether a response is "genuine"? It sounds like it'd devolve into people leaving vacuous replies just to clear that prerequisite This is like perfect is the enemy of good counterargument. I don't know and I'm not going to hypothesize right here right now where one misstep on my part…
> This presupposes some kind of universal value function. Sorry, I did not mean to suggest that some comments are intrinsically more valuable. But we do want to sort comments so that, on average, the distance between the "ideal" order for any given reader and the actual order is minimized, don't we? > This is like perfect is the enemy of good counterargument. I'm not trying to argue anything here, I just wanted your…
why? who cares? do you not know how to skim and skip irrelevant text?
>I just wanted your thoughts on how this could be implemented effectively
you could think of any number of ways to vet comments. we live in the future after all; you could require a minimum length, you could classify comments according to sentiment and reject those that have unwanted overtones, you could use topic modeling to see whether in fact the comment was on topic, etc etc etc. ranking algorithms have had thousands of labor hours invested in them across all social media sites - apply the same fervor to this problem and there will be an adequate solution.
>the posts are much fewer, the range of interests is much narrower, and the site itself is very heavily moderated.
you're wrong that there are fewer submissions to arxiv
https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2018_by_area
you're also wrong that it's moderated - the only thing that you're required to have to submit is endorsement. but i also don't understand how heavy moderation is a counterpoint? yc is one of the most successful vcs in the world - they can't afford moderators? i also don't know what the relevance of arxiv's narrow range of topics is.