This is fascinating.
I'd posit that this random blog is harmless. It's better that some random dropship site is connected to this traffic than a more sophisticated organization IMO.
Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
51–60 of 152 posts
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
I mean, you must see the primal appeal - essentially the posts are "haha, who else does {{COMMON_THING}}?!". Millions of people want other people to know they too are just like them. Facebook's algorithm is optimized for engagement - but people aren't desperate to engage - they are desperate to be engaged with .
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Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't seem like facebook pumped the whole page, all other posts have extremely low engagement, literally < 10 likes. What's wrong with pumping individual "good" posts? If anything it can be seen as honorable/egalitarian giving folks a chance to make it even if they aren't some media behemoth.
This is the central tragedy of Facebook. They set out to build a platform where anyone, no matter how small, could compete with big media on a level playing field based on a straightforward metric: whether a user cares enough about a post that they're willing to engage with it. Publishers get rewarded for producing compelling content, users get to see more content they care about, and Facebook makes money since peopl…
I'm really not sure if that was ever what Facebook set out to do.
My mental construct of Facebook is analogous to Morty following the path defined by the death crystal but towards the end goal of 'the most money'.
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more complicated than that. Facebook is a company. People in different parts of the company do different things, have different motivations, etc. One cannot look at a large organization as an individual. I tried to come up with a more apt analogy... but analogies are awful here.
So, probably lots of people actually did notice it, and either (a) shrugged and thought "not my job", or (b) notified someone else about it, who then did (a)?
There's also likely a (c), which is people who don't think that Facebook should do anything about it. I guess that could be considered part of a set with (a), but I thought it should be mentioned separately as it's a different motivation.
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even worse: They’re paid to not care.
When conducting scientific research, I'd think "not caring" is a desirable trait. You don't want anyone's personal feelings to get in the way of reporting accurate information.
I think this is just being pedantic. You have to care about something to formulate and test a hypothesis. You have to care about what the data say to bother gathering them and collating them into some report in the first place. "To care" can be "to be curious about something" or "to have an interest in something", not just "to be concerned about something."
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#56I 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.
Burying the lead, to be sure.
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#57You 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 m…
Plastic Love doesn't quite serve your point, it's just they released the MV after literally decades, and nostalgia is handy for engagement.
Granted I do see that YT has the same issues. I don't think its easy to manipulate, but all recommendation systems are going to have people trying to manipulate it.
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#58"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?
I mean, the "who here has never had a DUI?" question is tailored for engagement. The actual % of people who have had a DUI is really low, and so the number of people who can engage with that honestly is really high. Then there's the fact that DUIs tend to evoke a strong moral response, so people will dive into the comments to wag the finger at all the DUI havers.
We're all here commenting on posts about tech and tech-adjacent concerns, so the community is pretty niche and interesting (to us). This is what you get when someone crafts content for literally everyone, and you'd be right to find it simultaneously bland and bizarre. But people, it turns out, do engage with it.
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#59What I hate is that Facebook's intentionally nerfed reporting mechanisms keep it's customers from self-reporting.
For a period of time I'd get a post 'From %Person%, With some other %entity%' and they're less than interesting...and you CAN'T block it. One of your friends comments on a stupid post and the only option you have to send a signal is 'mute my friend for 30 days'...because the 'with' account always changes.
This actively makes Facebook unfun and had the great side-effect of sending my on a 2 week hiatus.
If I could block posts 'commented on by a friend, but has engagement above 100,000 people' I'd block it in a heartbeat...because the content has NEVER been entertaining, and has often been half-a step away from learning people's security questions....at scale.
Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 appr…
Yeah I also find it surprising that people are shocked that Facebook have internal studies into e.g. whether instagram causes depression in teenage girls (answer: inconclusive), like they’re a bad company for investigating whether their products have negative effects on people…
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