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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

#771

Post by int_19h »

marcinzm wrote: post #619
TeMPOraL wrote: post #590

Earlier 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.

"force them to optimize" doesn't mean putting a gun to somebody's head. But it's clear that the existing socioeconomic arrangements overall incentivize companies, including Facebook, to do a lot of harm while chasing profits. Forcing them to not do so can also mean changing the arrangements to remove the incentives.

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

#772

Post by int_19h »

TheHegemon wrote: post #641
solarkraft wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me think of a talk with an AI-optimistic Microsoft sales guy I had a few years ago. His argument was essentially the same:"Look, it's no problem to have an AI curate everything for you because the algorithm will just know what you want, even if your habits are unusual!" Of course this hasn't happened yet and I doubt it ever will. Maybe I'm just insane, but most of the recommendations from services I have f…

Interesting because I think I have some rather random assortment of hobbies that generally tend to have no overlap and I get pretty good recommendations all the time.

It gets pretty bad when the hobbies have some political affinity to them, and it's opposite from your actual politics.

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

#773

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

That would be great. Having an artificial intelligence as a user agent would be perfect. That'd be the ideal browser. So many science fiction worlds have the concept of an intelligent navigator who acts on behalf of its operator in the virtual world, greatly reducing its complexity.

Today's artificial intelligences cannot be trusted to act on our best interests. They belong to companies and run on their computers. Even if the software's open source, the data needed to make it useful remains proprietary.

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

#774

Post by int_19h »

anigbrowl wrote: post #471
grishka wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ActivityPub and other federated networks are the answer. They do exactly that: if you aren't satisfied with the rules on existing servers, you host your own. The network itself is wide open, and its control is distributed across many server admins. The way the content is presented is of course completely up to the software the user is running. Having no financial incentive to make UX a dumpster fire visible from spac…

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.

> The attraction of FB and the like is that almost everyone has a FB account

This is exactly why FB should be forced to federate with other social networks, by law.

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

#775

Post by orcasauce »

redelbee wrote: post #636
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…

Neal Stephenson explores something like your “user agent” idea and comes up with an different solution in his novel “ Fall; or, Dodge in Hell.” Spoilers ahead: In Stephenson‘s world people can hire “editors” to curate what they see, and those editors effectively determine reality for people at a mass scale. This is just one of the many fascinating ideas Stephenson explores and I highly recommend reading the book. Thi…

Highly recommend reading Reamde first if you can. The story is entirely different, but is the same world and comes chronologically first; I felt the continuity added a lot when reading Fall.

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

#776

Post by nikanj »

dimator wrote: post #769
throwaway93132 wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this would be a good idea. There's a lot of content created on Facebook at any given moment. If you show things only in chronological order, it would take an incredible amount of filtering (that the vast majority of users won't do) to get to anything reasonable.

But this is how Reddit works. And HN actually.

Reddit and HN front pages are both driven by an algorithm sampling both popularity and time. I think HN also has a chronological view, but that's not considered the front page.

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

#777

Post by int_19h »

GuiA wrote: post #630
richardw wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We could do all the same things on the web, so long as the standards are open. But that's exactly the problem - lock-in is how social networks make profits, so the largest ones (where most people already are) are also the least likely to support anything like this.

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

#778

Post by lucio »

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…

maybe you're interested in hearing about X tech, or you can tell your "Agent" that you want to buy Y thing, or travel to Z. That's where ads and reviews get thru.

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

#779

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> Don't you want to learn about sale for new tech gadgets? Discounts for AWS? Good rent deals?

Sure. The thing is: when people are interested in something, they look for it. When I want to buy some games, I open my PS4's store. Any advertising I get there is absolutely fine because I asked for it. I told the software to show me the stuff that's available for me to buy.

The problem is when I open a link to some web page and 80% of my phone's screen turns into advertising noise I didn't ask for and couldn't care less about. I make it a point to delete this noise.

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

#780

Post by dang »

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…

Neither of the top two subthreads matches this description.

(I meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315216 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314507)

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