Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by kmeisthax » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

badRNG wrote: post #52

ipaddr wrote: post #35

Earlier 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…

Niche communities are easier for a small handful of volunteers or employees to moderate. There's simply less shit to clean up. Compare that to Facebook, Google, etc; all of whom have to hire armies of moderators who will burn out in a span of months. The attrition rate is very high, and there's just too many moderators to have consistent platform policy enforcement.

Furthermore, if someone is just there to be toxic, you have an easy justification to shut them down: "I'm sorry, but this is an underwater basketweaving Discord, please stop spamming #offtopic with why you think we should call in the National Guard to fight the war on Christmas." Many small communities have very strict regulation of political speech purely because it causes most of their problems.

Alt-tech is trying to collect all of the toxic bullshit in one place, so obviously they're going to be way more toxic despite their small size. It's also possible for niche communities to have their own toxicity problems, too. It's more that large communities are just inherently more difficult to govern.

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

#82

Post by streamofdigits » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

Good luck supporting a $trillion valuation on the basis of a "healthier place". The business of social media platforms is to maximize profit by monetizing their user base. Friedman instructed MBA students that they must pursue this diligently, using any and all legal tricks in the book.

Yes sure, as good managers they need to protect long-term shareholder value. They should, in general, want to strike the right balance that will be maximally extractive without incuring uneconomic fines, or unduly damaging the reputation of the platform. With all the top brains in the payroll this is an optimisation problem that seems easy to crack.

For as long society thinks this business model is kosher there is really nothing to do about it. If we want to ever turn a page and start worrying about more serious problems we simply need to move on to open source decentralized media.

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

#83

Post by kordlessagain » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

foofoo4u wrote: post #63

Excerpts 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 p…

Fuck Facebook.

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

#84

Post by akira2501 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

somedude895 wrote: post #76

elliekelly wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scale…

Anecdotally this is what I've been seeing over the years. Most of my friends and acquaintances seem to have left Facebook behind and moved to Insta. The people that stayed on FB are mostly those who like to express strong opinions and engage in pointless discussions.

> engage in pointless discussions.

Pointless to some, I'm sure, but if they're that engaged it's meaningful to them. Viewed through that lens, then attempting to externally manipulate and cajole their conversations was never going to have a positive outcome or even impact on the rest of the userbase.

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

#85

Post by akira2501 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

jimt1234 wrote: post #27

MattGaiser wrote: post #22

Part of the problem is a lot of people enjoy the anger.

This ^^^!!! People are, or can be, total garbage, especially when they're behind a keyboard and not face-to-face.

Our evolutionary history is not filled with times of peace and enlightenment. Simply creating the internet and giving to the public wasn't going to change this fundamental equation.

The need to judge these people as "garbage" who simply aren't handling technology well is worthy of interest itself.

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

#86

Post by cat199 » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

again and again, user-controlled 'knobs' controlling content presentation/filtering would solve many 'platform content' issues, but platform providers consistently remove user control over content moderation instead of simply providing appropriate controls.

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

#87

Post by smoldesu » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

maxfurman wrote: post #3

> Data scientists on that integrity team—whose job is to improve the quality and trustworthiness of content on the platform—worked on a number of potential changes to curb the tendency of the overhauled algorithm to reward outrage and lies. Mr. Zuckerberg resisted some of the proposed fixes, the documents show, because he was worried they might hurt the company’s other objective—making users engage more with Facebook…

Is this any more helpful than saying "throw away your iPhone" or "uninstall Windows"? For the record, I fully agree that Facebook is poisoned, but frankly this is true of any company with a board of shareholders. The vast majority of people just don't care, like how we failed to get America to care about recycling. Habits, vices and consumerism are what drive this machine, even the VC one that funds the very website we use to discuss this stuff. I reckon the majority of users are just fat and happy, with no real incentive to leave. That's how TikTok and Twitter have stayed successful, though it's often at the cost of the user.

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

#88

Post by donmcronald » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

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…

> Facebook is trying to fix an algorithm that can't possibly work, because it has two opposing jobs, increase time spend on the platform and at the same time it has to downplay the content people engages with the most.

Would it be fair to say they're trying to increase time spent by existing users on the site? Does Facebook have such a huge number of users there's no growth from building a better product? I personally think the product is awful.

I have an account, but I only log in often enough to keep it active. If I had a nice, reverse chronological feed of things posted (not shared) by my friends I would read it.

Maybe the subset of people like me is too small to worry about, but there's definitely some of us where the current algorithms work against engagement.

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

#89

Post by soylentcola » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #35

JasonFruit wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the same old joke/complaint about the comment sections on other large, general audience sites (Youtube, news sites, etc.) The same old gag about "never read the comments section!" applies.

Once a social platform goes from "chatting with maybe a hundred friends/family max" to "basically everyone", it becomes the "comment section" for the entire region (or even the internet at large).

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

#90

Post by bertil » Wed, Sep 15, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

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…

Not really: ads have a budget of attention within an envelope that Engagement (the team whose work is described here) is trying to maximise. There’s detailed estimates to how much ads take away but it’s minimised and isolated from that conversation completely.

There are many issues, some addressed there; some more nuanced (figuring out that is a good post or comment is genuinely hard with crude metrics because clickbait and flamewars look very much like compelling content); some that I can’t mention publicly.

There are non-scalable ideas for solutions (my PhD was around complex network so check Jure Leskovec’s research for ideas like isolating cliques and defining them as meaningful or not). One idea that I’ve floated, but less than I should, and many other have too, but more than they should (or at least not articulated well around this problem of sorting good from bad content to inform the News Feed algorithm): have secret negative and positive reactions per post and comment. The fact that Likes are public makes them performative, both very compelling (it’s who you want your friends to see in you) and counter-productive. But giving people the ability to say: "look, I will comment on every flame bait that I see, because I can’t help myself, but please, remove from from my feed" would have helped argue against what is still a very linear model of weighting acting that are uniformly seen as "engagement".

Source: I was the DS looking into those questions in 2015.