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Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier

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Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier

#31

Post by Pxtl »

warning26 wrote: post #4

It all comes down to every PM's favorite metric: engagement . When users get into a heated flamewar, that's high-engagement. So you want to do everything you can to ensure that the most possible users get sucked into flamewars. I feel like this should be banned, but it's unclear what the best approach would be. Mandating chronological feed order?

Chronological feed wouldn't help. Friend of a friend pushes "bad stuff". Friend comments to tell him it's stupid. They get into argument.

Each of your friend's comments would still give FB a "chronological" reason to bump this post to the top of your feed, enticing you to get into the mix and increase the viral engagement of the original "bad stuff".

Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier

#32

Post by strict9 »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #23
strict9 wrote: post #16

> Company researchers discovered that publishers and political parties were reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism. That tactic produced high levels of comments and reactions that translated into success on Facebook. This is why The Daily Wire and other such outrage aggregators are consistently on Facebook's Top 10. Not coincidentally, it's also been the source of fuel for the anti-vaccine movement…

And don't get me started on how Twitter consistently pushes those "influencers" on the left to the top of the trending feed. "Duty to Warn", "Palmer Report", "Gravel Institute", "BrooklynDad", and others. In many ways I feel like those smug hot-takes are even more corrosive than what the Daily Wire does.

We are in agreement. "engagement" is a plague that brings out the worst of all sides of the political spectrum.

But worse than political rhetoric is the proliferation and promotion of medical misinformation.

It's resulting in the deaths of thousands of people who were duped into believing the vaccines are part of some sort of conspiracy and that bogus treatments are the only thing that work.

Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier

#33

Post by Pxtl »

JasonFruit wrote: post #13
warning26 wrote: post #4

It all comes down to every PM's favorite metric: engagement . When users get into a heated flamewar, that's high-engagement. So you want to do everything you can to ensure that the most possible users get sucked into flamewars. I feel like this should be banned, but it's unclear what the best approach would be. Mandating chronological feed order?

MeWe has chronological feed order, and I've found fewer flame wars there. The user base is smaller and possibly more ideologically uniform, though, which may be an alternate explanation.

Yes, but small size seems to intrinsically produce nicer platforms. Even within the large platforms, you still get "stick to the small groups/subreddits/pages and folks are nice there".

So there's no guarantee a structure that seems to encourage peace will actually work when scaled up.

Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier

#34

Post by zelphirkalt »

VortexDream wrote: post #14
mzkply wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I in the super-minority if I say I've unfollowed about 80% of my FB friends? I've never seen a political or outrage post in the last 3 years since I just unfollowed everyone but my closest friends and family.

I unfollowed everybody, joined a bunch of local special interest groups and met a ton of new people who lived in the same city. Facebook is actually an incredible tool to connect with other people. But the more I saw how FB behaved, the less I wanted to be involved in any way with their business. I ended up deleting my FB account, which even now 3 years later I feel was a huge loss for me. But I just can't do FB anym…

It is supposed to make you feel that way. That is on FB's agenda to achieve, in order to bind you to their (dis-)services.

Real friends will not require you to use FB and sacrifice your privacy to communicate with them. You might feel a loss, but there are alternative ways of communicating. Get as many friends as possible over to messengers, which are not owned by FB. Give people a call every now and then. Write them SMS, write them e-mail. All of that is better than communication on FB services. Real friends will initiate as well. If you are not on FB, they will have to contact you through other means. If you are not worth the "trouble" or effort in their eyes, then good riddance, you do not need them.

Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier

#35

Post by ipaddr »

JasonFruit wrote: post #13
warning26 wrote: post #4

It all comes down to every PM's favorite metric: engagement . When users get into a heated flamewar, that's high-engagement. So you want to do everything you can to ensure that the most possible users get sucked into flamewars. I feel like this should be banned, but it's unclear what the best approach would be. Mandating chronological feed order?

MeWe has chronological feed order, and I've found fewer flame wars there. The user base is smaller and possibly more ideologically uniform, though, which may be an alternate explanation.

The big tent for everyone sites are toxic because people don't interact as closely in real life with people from different groups. We group for a reason. Within those groups common understanding on certain ideas is the connection. With that connection you let down your guard, you can be this side of yourself freely. In a big crowd you have to wear all faces to relate to everyone.

Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier

#36

Post by BitwiseFool »

strict9 wrote: post #32
BitwiseFool wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And don't get me started on how Twitter consistently pushes those "influencers" on the left to the top of the trending feed. "Duty to Warn", "Palmer Report", "Gravel Institute", "BrooklynDad", and others. In many ways I feel like those smug hot-takes are even more corrosive than what the Daily Wire does.

We are in agreement. "engagement" is a plague that brings out the worst of all sides of the political spectrum. But worse than political rhetoric is the proliferation and promotion of medical misinformation. It's resulting in the deaths of thousands of people who were duped into believing the vaccines are part of some sort of conspiracy and that bogus treatments are the only thing that work.

For sure, and as much as I loathe Ben Shapiro's smugness, and by extension, his "news" outlet, I'd be remiss if I didn't also point out how it's happening elsewhere from the other side of the aisle, too.

Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier

#37

Post by Pxtl »

badRNG wrote: post #21
rflec028 wrote: post #19

wsj.com is not a trustworthy news source and should not be posted.

Why do you say that? Content here seems pretty reasonable most of the time.

WSJ's editorial pages have a long and storied history of supporting conservative positions that are utterly disconnected from reality, for example on climate change or the Iraq war. These are not trivial matters that we should quickly forgive them over.

Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier

#38

Post by artificial »

wheybags wrote: post #20
mrweasel wrote: post #10

One reason why Facebook keeps failing in increasing "meaningful social interaction" could be because they at the same time tries to sell ads. It seems like it would be easy to simply exclude "reshares" from users news feed. They could try to: "Sort by date" and "only posts posted/shared by my friend directly". Personally I think that would remove much of the toxicity. Secondly, simply ban news sites from the platform…

While I'm sure there are some people at fb genuinely trying to "fix" toxicity, overall the issue is that they're not trying to fix it. They want to do the minimum possible to protect their image / bottom line, they don't care if it actually works. Actually fixing toxicity is one way to improve their image, but appearing to try can be good enough.

I think all of the problems they have are earned. They've got, what, 3 billion users? How many 9s (99.99999) effective does the solution need to be to wrangle edge cases? Moderation is an eternal issue.

Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier

#40

Post by badRNG »

jayess wrote: post #24
dtech wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently most people don't work that way. Or at least it drives up engagement up until a person-specific breaking point.

My guess is that they've determined what that breaking point is and have optimized for it.

So basically "How much daily misery can we put our users through algorithmically before they break down and uninstall"? Why does anyone who is sufficiently aware of this still use Facebook? Not even as an ethical question, why use something that makes your life miserable?
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