Part of the problem is a lot of people enjoy the anger.
There must be a better word for "enjoy" here.
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
#62Ugh, WSJ audio playback is a god damn robot.
They're covering all of their Facebook Files reporting on their daily podcast, The Journal. https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal?mod=podcasts_carous...
Awesome, thanks for that.
UPDATE: Yea, the point about how those with the most influence on the platform are getting the least moderation was very compelling. So much of the problem really is just how secretive the whole thing is. I understand the nuance, but timely independent (and validated) review seems necessary for high profile cases.
Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier
#63Excerpts from one of the leaked documents. Disturbing.:
> Research conducted in the EU reveals that political parties "feel strongly that the change to the algorithm has forced them to skew negative in their communications on Facebook, with the downstream effect of leading them into more extreme policy positions." For example, in Poland, "one party’s social media management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative and 20% positive, explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm… Many parties, including those that have shifted strongly to the negative, worry about the long-term effects on democracy." We have heard similar feedback from parties in India and Taiwan.
> News publishers, too, are concerned about the incentives MSI created. We received direct feedback from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti that his team feels "MSI ranking isn’t actually rewarding content that drives meaningful social interactions. They feel pressure to make bad content or underperform." Peretti related that "when we create meaningful content, it doesn’t get rewarded, "but more sensationalist and divisive content (such as "fad/junky science", "extremely disturbing news", "gross" images, and content exploiting racial divisions) is more successful.
Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I guess you missed the part about meeting new people? I'm in contact with people I know over other apps. But there's no replacement for that discoverability of local groups and events or facilitating the meeting with new people.
Meetup? Am I missing something that FB offered vs Meetup other than user base?
(TBH, I never used FB to meet new people, just encourage relationships with people I had met elsewhere and I haven't been on the platform in years)
Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Anecdotally, I've seen far more polemic and vitriolic posts on so-called alt-tech social media sites compared to even Twitter and Facebook, which are horrendous in this regard. Sites like Gab, Voat, Ruqqus, etc seem to be filled with the absolute most toxic, angry, and hateful discourse imaginable. I've noticed sites that tend to be for something other than "just chatting" tend to do better: many hobby specific forum…
Incidentally, most of the sites you mentioned were the "but mah free speech!1" equivalents of mainstream sites, created by the alt-right.
Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
This reminds me of Jonathan Haidt's "Righteous Minds". One of the key points in the book is that "righteousness binds and blinds". As in, the 'righteousness binds' part is there's a social bond between people who believe the same thing. (And "blinds" is that the righteousness will blind you to certain truths).
I think flamewars are like that. You gotta leave a comment otherwise you feel your side loses out.
Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier
#67One 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…
This is a social science experiment with 3 billion guinea pigs.
Every time you rerun it, if someone somewhere (and the people connected to them get effected) how many attempts do you get?
Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier
#68One 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…
This is my take as well. It's the business model itself that's toxic, or at least predatory, as the necessary outcome of it is to lean as hard as possible on known frailties of human behavior and psychology in order to cultivate advertising placement and revenue.
There's no tinkering around the edges of that control loop that's going to fix the problem. What we observe as the deleterious effects on society are in fact systematic (as in, "design failures") faults in the thesis of Facebook's business model.
Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier
#69Re: Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier
#70One 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…
I think another factor is that they’re trying to quickly turn a massive ship that has, for years, self-selected users intent on heading in the direction of outrage and toxicity. The people who are the most “engaged” with the platform are the people who get a dopamine rush from arguing and baiting and instigating. The nice people who just want to see what their friends are up to have either left or significantly scaled back their use.
I think that makes any algorithmic “fix” much harder. Or perhaps even impossible.
I think the solutions you’ve suggested would have worked had they been implemented five years ago. I’m not so sure they would work today.