111–120 of 152 posts
Facebook is selling a dream. A lottery. The idea that your form of engagement will become the favored form of engagement, just like this page creator got into dropshipping after falling for that dream.
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Ok, but all that must also be true for the change that originally created this situation. There's all this red tape and large-scale testing and then... nobody actually looks at what hits the #1 spot?
Remember spam is an adversarial relationship. Almost certainly when whatever ranking change was exploited here was deployed the top ranked items were great, then some actor started realizing what was being selected for and exploited it
You 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.
"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?
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Reminds me of those posts from a few years ago that were like: "[Simple math problem, like what's 5 x 4?]: 95% of people can't solve this! I bet you can't either!" With hundreds of thousands of commenters "engaging" with it. I don't understand anything about this behavior. 1. What does the poster have to gain from a post like that, 2. What do all the commenters have to gain, and 3. What does SocialMediaCompany gain?…
Well, for (1) the poster gets engagement from low-effort posts. The end game is usually monetizing their social media presence, and though there's multiple ways to do that, they all involve getting eyes on your page. Your (2) should be evident from the phrasing of your example: if 95% of people can't do it, people want to prove they're in the 5%. They get a few minutes' distraction, some self-satisfaction, and maybe…
Review: "I didn't like the color"
... okay? What is anyone supposed to do with that? And why would you think they would find it valuable to know?
"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"
To propagate (show up on more feeds), they need people to interact with it. So successful content will be that that best drives interaction, and I guess comments still weigh more heavily than likes?
Consequently, Facebook itself is a brute force algorithm for discovering the more virulently memetic content and phrasing.
I had a somewhat similar experience at a much smaller scale a long time ago. I used to buy and sell domains. Bought one that was very close to being on the first page of Google results for a keyword related to personal finance. Did a bit of sprucing up the page, dropped a few links, and it did get on the front page for a few months, with AdSense paying me several thousands dollars a month while it lasted. The page it…
the .finance people are monetizing way more way faster without ads
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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 .
> I mean, you must see the primal appeal - essentially the posts are "haha, who else does {{COMMON_THING}}?!" No, and I feel like I'm explaining to the AI what human behavior looks like here. Yes, the sort of meme discussion you quote is fairly common, but it's not just "common thing", it's some sort of shared experience that's probably private; you're not sure if everyone else experiences it, but saying you experien…
Now you're getting it, although you need to think of something that most people do, and then mock them. The key is to trigger confused/shock engagement. Plenty of people are obviously falling for this.
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I mean, at that point they could just drop stuff off of the list they didn't like. Does anyone have independently verifiable data to compare against?
They link to the page - so if someone can say "Hold on, page X only has N likes/shares, page Y has >N likes/shares!" they'd have problems.
"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"