Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–699 of 699 posts

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#691

Post by native_samples »

YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #688
native_samples wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm British. I don't think anyone in the UK has tried to argue that disagreements over Brexit are caused by Facebook. Actually the whole idea would sound kind of absurd. People disagreed over Brexit because: 1. Some people disagree fundamentally over the nature of government and how power should function. 2. Some people were afraid of various kinds of "punishment" or instability that they were told leaving would caus…

Thanks for your comment. You make some good points. Zuckerberg's comment about the incentives of leaking research is certainly worthy of consideration. And while I don't have first hand experience with Brexit, I do not mean to claim that the disagreements were caused by FB. Only that FB may have had a role in causing people to become more entrenched in their positions. One of the points I'm making is that Zuckerberg'…

I think part of the disagreement here is you see a whistleblower, but I see an activist. One who frankly, if I were Zuck, I would have fired or simply never hired in the first place.

Arguing that Facebook causes tribal conflict in Ethiopia by not "policing aggressively enough" or "understaffing" teams is not, to me, the argument of a whistleblower. It's the argument of someone who has totally lost perspective, of a totalitarian who believes that any and all of humanities ills can be fixed by manipulating communication platforms. It's no different to saying "if the phone company cuts off any phone call in which people are arguing, there will be no more arguments and everyone will be happy". When phrased in terms of slightly older-gen tech it is obviously absurd.

"Were they to tweak the IG recommendation algorithm so that an interest in healthier eating did not lead to anorexia content, people like myself would applaud"

Good on you for being consistent then! Sadly it seems to be very rare. Look at Zuck's post. He points out that Facebook did in fact make changes to prioritize stories from friends and family, even though that reduced their income and reduced the amount people used the site i.e. a lot of users were actually people who don't care much about their cousin's cat pictures, but do care a lot about civics, or phrased another way, "divisive politics".

Yet it doesn't seem to have done them any good. For people like Haugen and a depressing number of HN posters it's not enough to re-rank nice safe family stories about new babies. For them Facebook also has to solve teenage depression, war in Africa and probably world hunger whilst they're at it. And if they aren't it's because they're "under-staffing" or refusing to "adequately police" things.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#692

Post by oriettaxx »

oriettaxx wrote: post #329

Would Ethiopia be in war now without nowadays radicalization web 'social' platforms? Its government shut down the Internet several times: officially to save lifes, while oppositors says it's just to perpetuate violence. We are facing big challenges here, where the danger to arm kids is just a small part.

I am so glad to see this issue with Ethiopia is coming out! https://www.theguardian.com./technology/2021/oct/07/facebook...

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#693

Post by seattle_spring »

shrimpx wrote: post #667
seattle_spring wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we go by the content of teamblind, then every company's engineers only care about TC and leveling up.

Are you saying that people on teamblind are only focusing on the TC aspect, and also care about many other things, or that only a subset of people only care about TC? If the latter, it’s still worrisome that so many of those people who hop around chasing only TC and not caring about subject matter, are highly valued at these companies like Facebook. Glib and shallow E6 and E7 don’t make for great tech leadership in a…

Seems like very few engineers that make it to E6+ are the ones rabbling on about "TC or GTFO" on Blind. It's mostly more junior engineers or bad engineers that will never make it past the 2nd or 3rd rung of the career ladder.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#694

Post by malandrew »

LudvigVanHassen wrote: post #398
malandrew wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to solve this problem by teaching people to have thicker skin so that we control the outrage regardless of the forum in which it occurs. However for the last 10 years or so grievance culture has taken root and not only excused outrage, its proponents have actively encouraged it. It makes me think of that scene in Star Wars where palpating is like “good, good. Let the hate flow through you”, expect we now have…

I think this is an important point indeed. A piece of this puzzle, in my opinion, is that people are not taught this at home anymore. Most familes have both parents working full time and they're exhausted after work. Their kids are raised in daycare and neglected. And so many are raised in divorced/broken/separated/single parent households that compound the problem much more. Furthermore, most of the US isn't religio…

> But so many kids are left to their own devices without parental oversight on this subject.

It's very "Lord of the Flies", isn't it?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#695

Post by wrycoder »

Yoric wrote: post #657
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have created a system of incentives that are inexorably leading to harmful outcomes If the people inside are "smart, thoughtful, kind, well-intentioned people", they would have tried to work around the incentive, influence them, denounce them, or quit. It rarely happened. Most of the time, the just take the money, and goes with the flow.

A long time ago, I worked in a startup full of smart, thoughtful, kind, well-intentioned people. Of course, there was also a CEO who was a ruthless manipulator and managed to make everyone believe that they were working for the greater good. In truth, in the course of lining his pockets, he was in the process of destroying several employees and former employees. Getting past the illusion was hard. Taking a stand agai…

Yes, that's what Zuckerburg said.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#696

Post by YossarianFrPrez »

native_samples wrote: post #691
YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your comment. You make some good points. Zuckerberg's comment about the incentives of leaking research is certainly worthy of consideration. And while I don't have first hand experience with Brexit, I do not mean to claim that the disagreements were caused by FB. Only that FB may have had a role in causing people to become more entrenched in their positions. One of the points I'm making is that Zuckerberg'…

I think part of the disagreement here is you see a whistleblower, but I see an activist. One who frankly, if I were Zuck, I would have fired or simply never hired in the first place. Arguing that Facebook causes tribal conflict in Ethiopia by not "policing aggressively enough" or "understaffing" teams is not, to me, the argument of a whistleblower. It's the argument of someone who has totally lost perspective, of a t…

My perception is that people aren't expecting facebook to solve teenage depression, but to prevent themselves from contributing to it if they are. FB's research has been criticized by scientists as being of poor quality [0], and Zuckerberg claims the findings were cherry picked. This actually good news for FB if true. Should they partner with neutral, third party university research teams, as well as commit to a transparent investigation, they'll be able to clear things up. Not everyone would agree, but I believe that many people are capable of changing their minds when presented with new evidence.

The metaphor of a phone company cutting off an argument is an interesting one. I agree that people arguing is a fact of society / nature, and I also agree that cutting off a phone call seems like an absurd way to try and solve the larger problem. But at the same time, I don't think the metaphor fully applies, for the following reasons:

First, a phone call is a one-to-one communication, and Facebook is one-to-many. It's rare if not unheard of for strangers to call each other and say what they think about, for example, a NYT article. Second, there is no recommendation system pushing "engaging" subjects, where engagement can be defined in terms of how controversial it is. Third, only 9% of FB users speak english, and Haugen testified that the non-english safety features, tweaks to the ranking algorithm, and tooling are not as good (potentially drastically worse?) in non-english languages.

Most people would argue that phone companies have some responsibility to prevent spam calls, similar to how an email services prevent or flag spam emails. These are network level actions, and a lot of Haugen's testimony was about how FB was being irresponsible in this regard.

[0] https://unherd.com/2021/09/facebooks-bad-science/

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#697

Post by the_other »

whakim wrote: post #675
the_other wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you’re still on FB? It’s quite hard to see how it’s just a business that doesn’t give one shit about you no matter now many followers you have or how many likes you got when you’re still using it. An actual social network would care how you feel today.

A social network is just a kind of business, like a chain of supermarkets or a steel mill. You could, of course, have a non-profit social network (or a business with a different corporate structure - as I allude to in a parent post), but that's not what Facebook is or what its peers are. In the United States, businesses are beholden first and foremost to their shareholders, which means that there's an inherent tensio…

You’re trying to appeal to “my better nature”, to help me believe that FB can be changed. It wont work.

In 2007 or 2008 I promoted the idea amongst my friends to “poison the well”, to feed bad data into FB’s algorithms. If they enjoy Coke, talk about Pepsi, I said. If they vote Green, share far right news. I called it Falsebook.

It didn’t work, because the problems inherent in the advertising auctions are not very visible to users. They mesh with the echo chambers of our friend circles and fizzle into the background. We seek out echo chambers in order to feel safe and validated. It’s mostly fine when it’s just humans relaxing with friends. But when that echo is robotically generated from an accurate model of all individuals involved, it can be leveraged for all sorts of big scale shady crap. Advertising is the village idiot of this town and corportate-backed political propaganda is the warring gang lord.

And Zuck does what any market owner does.. sits back and rakes in profit, cleaning up the mess when it suits him. And mostly it doesn’t.

I’ve never felt it could be fixed from the inside. I’ve never thought it was a good idea to begin with but I let peer pressure and my magpie nature suck me in. I regret signing up for FB and GMail back in the day because corporate surveillance has fucked our society hard and let sociopaths run rampant.

You will not change my mind. I wasn’t contributing to the conversation in good faith. I shall assume you were. My original glib comment about FB abusing social networks wasn’t an invitation to learn a new perspective, it was a war cry, a flag raise, a call for comrades. I was hoping someone would respond with links to a new Scuttlebutt implementation or tell me about a cool Masto instance. Or try to explain why I should bother with Matrix. Or something more interesting than all of those.

The web is sick. Personalised advertising has made it ill. We need to fix it and I don’t believe FB or GOOG are interested in trying.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#698

Post by SheikhSalman »

nonameiguess wrote: post #581
sofixa wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see it working. Instagram and WhatsApp should be spun off, absolutely no question about it. But Instagram and Facebook still remain way too big. And how do you break them up? By geographic area? People would be pissed because they have contacts with, or maybe want to watch vacation videos from people from different areas. IMHO the only options would be: * non-profit run by the UN or similar * forced to open a…

It's probably too late for any specific publicly traded company that already exists, but social media as a protocol, with forced interoperability if necessary, is the way to solve this. Many regional phone carriers doesn't prevent people from communicating across regions. Of course, it does cost more, so the question becomes who is willing and able to pay for a socially less harmful means of networking individuals wi…

Thanks for the Great Content Sir. I will share with my friends & once again thanks a lot. https://beingkurt.com/

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#699

Post by SheikhSalman »

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #540
tablespoon wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're exactly describing a "Potemkin village in case anyone accuses the execs of not caring." The people in power weren't serious about solving the problem (because the only things they'd accept were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or an easy magic solution that could never actually exist), and the main benefit your team provided was PR/regulatory cover for the organization.

So here's a much more general statement: your identity and your sense of self, your consciousness, your "choices" that build your life's narrative, are all actually a "Potemkin village in case anyone accuses the execs of not caring". The "anyone" in this scenario being other social agents you interact with (see [1] for further thoughts on this). > the main benefit your team provided was PR/regulatory cover for the or…

Thanks for the Great Content Sir. I will share with my friends & once again thanks a lot. https://beingkurt.com/
Post reply on HN