Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#121

Post by Igelau » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 2:18 AM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #26

creato wrote: post #2

I 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.

Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so here it is: Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in charge of what is being reported, which is not sane. Like, imagine if your friend was slowly poisoning himself by flavoring his food with lead for a month. Even if he is honest with you about what he’s been doing, it’s still not a sane situation. If anything it’s less sane to be seemingly…

You just don't understand the Metav3rse.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#122

Post by Igelau » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 2:20 AM UTC

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #53

jonas21 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Mine is Universal Paperclips, except it makes engagement statistics instead of paperclips.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#123

Post by rgoulter » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 2:56 AM UTC

blackearl wrote: post #14

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…

Many channels I saw were inspired by SpiffingBrit's claims.

He claimed that creators using the Community tab was disproportionately rewarded by the recommendation algorithm. (Since the community tab was a new feature, YouTube wanted the feature to show up in peoples' feeds; but since few creators were using the community tab, it meant those that did got a big boost). -- IIRC, this evened out once everyone started using the feature.

SpiffingBrit also suggested that copy-pasting many of the trending keywords in comments would help the recommendation algorithm show the video. -- This turned out to be incorrect; but for about a week, most of the comments I saw in a bunch of videos had the same 300 words copied and pasted.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#124

Post by nefitty » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 3:12 AM UTC

Traster wrote: post #33

ALittleLight wrote: post #25

A while back I was trying to get twitter followers. I experimented with a few different strategies - quick reactions to big accounts I agreed with or disagreed with, saying what I thought people wanted to hear, saying what I thought would be controversial hot takes, tweeting about everything trending, etc. I basically got no traction. I was getting low tens of thousands of impressions a month according to the twitter…

>Eventually, I hit on a new strategy. Instead of trying to generate good tweets I just followed people at random. I forget the exact number, but somewhere between 15-30% of the people I followed at random would follow me back. This is exactly what my teenage cousins used to do (maybe not twitter maybe snaphat?) but with one tweak- they'd go through following people, and then once they'd followed they unfollow them ag…

"Oh wow, this person with 20k followers just followed me! He only follows 600 other people... I knew I was special. Twittersphere here I come!"

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#125

Post by Uehreka » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 3:15 AM UTC

I clicked through to the Q3 transparency report, and when I got to the list with Thinkarette at the top, I looked at the next handful of slots and audibly exclaimed “THESE GUYS” (substitute an expletive for “guys”).

- 96.9 The Eagle KKGL

- 101.9 KISS FM

- That ain't right

These pages have been all over my timeline the past year. I blocked “That ain’t right” a few months ago because I found them particularly obnoxious, but I had assumed that the radio station ones were just local Baltimore area radio stations that people followed (I don’t listen to the radio). But no, it turns out these are actually EVERYONE’S local radio station! We’re all calling in to tell the same person whether we flip over our pillow to get to the cold side!

Really though, I find this absolutely fascinating. For about a year, big corporations with hundreds of social media marketers who get paid bundles to spend their day figuring out how to win social media were undercut by a couple radio DJs and food bloggers who had the guts to ask the big questions everyone was really thinking about, like “What happens if you spell your name but use predictive text after each letter?”

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#126

Post by jandrese » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 4:10 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #69

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?…

Those posts really are a curse. And they are usually not quite that simple, there is always some PEDMAS quirk to it so ~70% of the people get it wrong, causing yet more comments pointing out how they are wrong and further inflating engagement. Those are worse than the stupid Farmville/Mafia Wars posts that used to horrendously clutter up the platform, at least those are easy to block. Those math things come from all different sources so blocking them isn't effective.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#127

Post by deathanatos » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 4:34 AM UTC

raunak wrote: post #107

deathanatos wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Have you ever considered the fact that because clearly much of the world's population _does_ in fact comment on these posts, that _they_ have said normal "human behavior" and not you or I? We're the outlier on Facebook.

While several million is a lot, yes, it is a far cry from the 7B people in the world, or the just shy of 3B users FB claims to have. The question is how many ignored that post; it could very well be that they out number the ones who commented, and those who comment are the outliers.

It could also be sockpuppets are commenting to drum up the numbers to make the post look hotter than it actually is.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#128

Post by 14 » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 5:14 AM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #13

hirundo wrote: post #5

"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 totally agree with you. These posts all seem like a way to scape data about me. Why would anyone want to know if someone else had a DUI? If I sold insurance I would like to know that about you so I can increase your cost and lower my risk. All these questions seem to ask questions you are better off not answering because it builds a profile about you. I just don’t get it but definitely see aunts and coworkers who are totally into posts like these. Bizarre

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#129

Post by wyager » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 5:17 AM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #88

erulabs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme)

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#130

Post by naniwaduni » Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 5:53 AM UTC

> We had a breakthrough about what exactly is going on here after we put “thinkarete.com” into WhoIs Domain Tools, which listed “thinkarete.com” as “ThinkaRete.com”. It’s a small difference, but after we googled “Thinka Rete,”

Another poor soul misled to believe that DomainFools isn't just totally guessing at word boundaries!