We have built the paperclip factory only instead of paperclips it is making clicks.
Paperclicks.
Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
11–20 of 152 posts
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#12"Facebook flipped a switch, favoring comments and reactions over shares, and suddenly a food blogger from Utah became the largest publisher in the country, if not the world." While the firehose volume is disproportionate, the direction wasn't random. Whoever is copywriting these messages is an artist, drawing an outstanding number of responses. I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself.…
Have you ever seen the posts? Some relatives comment on them so they show up on my feed, but the post will be something like "do you like dogs or cats better?" And my aunt and 10 million other people will make a post just saying "cat" or "dog"
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#13"Facebook flipped a switch, favoring comments and reactions over shares, and suddenly a food blogger from Utah became the largest publisher in the country, if not the world." While the firehose volume is disproportionate, the direction wasn't random. Whoever is copywriting these messages is an artist, drawing an outstanding number of responses. I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself.…
> I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself.
You feel an urge to react at bizarro twilight zone non-sequitur text posts?
I'm sitting here trying to fathom why millions of people would even react to something like that. Like… what was "thumbs up" worthy in any of those?
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#14You see this on Youtube as well. Comments acknowledge "The Algorithm", mentioning that the algorithm suddenly chose this video from 2013 to be popular, or that people who were picked by the algorithm to like this video must be cool. This has happened with music too, Plastic Love and Ryo Fukui's Scenery being some examples I noticed. Maybe it really is "the algorithm" right now but it seems like this could be easily manipulated.
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#15I greatly enjoyed this sentence: > The one mystery we weren’t able to figure out is why any sane person working at Facebook would feel comfortable publishing a content report that admitted that the most viral publisher on its platform this year was a barely active drop-shipping scam page full of stolen video content run by an LLC that doesn’t even exist anymore.
Well, perhaps whoever generated this report was simply reporting the truth and not trying to fabricate or distort the truth in order to make Facebook look better?
The fact that the author of the linked article apparently just presumes that they would do so and "[can't] figure out" why they wouldn't says a lot about their own integrity.
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#16Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#17"Facebook flipped a switch, favoring comments and reactions over shares, and suddenly a food blogger from Utah became the largest publisher in the country, if not the world." While the firehose volume is disproportionate, the direction wasn't random. Whoever is copywriting these messages is an artist, drawing an outstanding number of responses. I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself.…
I agree - The author hits at topics that are somewhat controversial but at the same time everyone has a story. I suspect, and I could be wrong, but majority of the comments on that DUI post are people over the age of 40 or 50. They all want to share their story of how drinking and driving wasn't a big issue when they grew up, that their dad always had a drink in hand. People love to talk about themselves and this topic, combined with that audience creates a lot of "nostalgia" for lack of a better term.
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#18when I see these posts i always figured it was a kind of bot-net role call. imagine you pay a contractor for one million sock puppets and you want to check how many of them aren’t shadowbanned - the bots already follow each other and are programmed to “engage” with posts their bot-friends engage with, so it becomes a follow the leader effect, and allows the purchaser of a botnet to inspect their army, kind of like Obi-Wan getting a tour of the Kaminoan’s clone army after finding the official records were deleted from the archive.
no official list of which accounts are bots == check the size of the network myself, and if a few million retirees get caught up in the net, all the better for camouflage
just a conjecture :)
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#19I greatly enjoyed this sentence: > The one mystery we weren’t able to figure out is why any sane person working at Facebook would feel comfortable publishing a content report that admitted that the most viral publisher on its platform this year was a barely active drop-shipping scam page full of stolen video content run by an LLC that doesn’t even exist anymore.
When corporations hide facts we call them immoral, and when they publish the facts we are scratching our heads?
Facebook does a lot of internal research which to me seems to be coming from a good place. Doing that research carries a lot of risk for them; e.g. the recent 'whistleblowers' mainly leaked that exact research reports. But instead of giving Facebook credit for even doing that, we always take a negative approach.
Note: I don't like facebook, I don't even have a facebook account, but unless we encourage good behavior (even at places we dont' like) how do we expect things to get better?
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been a few years since I've been on Facebook, but doesn't facebook show your comments to your friends by default? It's not like Reddit or Hacker News where everyone sees the same comments, is it?
Yes, you will see comments from friends on posts like these. Even if they have a million comments it will come into your feed with a friends replies visible.
And I think that's why these are so viral. When you see a question and your friend's answer, it makes you feel like you're responding as well.