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Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

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Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#141

Post by mrpopo »

majani wrote: post #139
tyingq wrote: post #38

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…

On the bright side, the algorithms are way more fair and even handed than the human editors of old. I don't think the majority of YouTubers, Twitch streamers and bloggers would ever have made it past the editorial desk at traditional media companies

Because traditional media companies (I assume TV, radio stations) have a limited outgoing bandwidth in terms of outputting content, so they have to prune a lot more? The argument you are making is not in favour of content-ranking algorithms vs humans, but in favour of Internet-based media platforms (YouTube, Twitch, blogs).

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#142

Post by sundvor »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #135
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…

you have what I call a "Kardashian problem" - I don't understand why the Kardashians are popular. Who the hell would be interested in these people? Why would anyone waste any time watching them or paying them any attention? And yet people clearly do, as the Kardashians are (or were) making millions from other people's interest in them. Clearly it's not their problem, it's that I don't understand their market. If you'…

I know the name "Kim", and I know they are in plural, but wouldn't be able to tell them apart - or give any reason why they should be interesting either. The word "implants" springs to mind, before my brain shuts down to what I perceive as infinite stupidity overload.

I understand there's a significant number of people who quite clearly excel at getting through life worrying about rather different things than myself.

Facebook certainly knows where the numbers are.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#143

Post by rmbyrro »

deathanatos wrote: post #127
raunak wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't get why you're being down voted. It's a fair argument. We really don't know how many ignored the post.

Yes, since Facebook picked to promote it, probably a low percentage ignored. But what is "low percentage" to Facebook algo?

Maybe usual average is 90% ignores without "engaging". With this one, "only" 60% ignored.

Which means the majority are not triggered by this sort of thing.

This is only speculation, but just to illustrate the argument may be valid indeed and these networks like Facebook end up giving an impression that something is "normal" across humans, but they're actually not.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#144

Post by majani »

mrpopo wrote: post #141
majani wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the bright side, the algorithms are way more fair and even handed than the human editors of old. I don't think the majority of YouTubers, Twitch streamers and bloggers would ever have made it past the editorial desk at traditional media companies

Because traditional media companies (I assume TV, radio stations) have a limited outgoing bandwidth in terms of outputting content, so they have to prune a lot more? The argument you are making is not in favour of content-ranking algorithms vs humans, but in favour of Internet-based media platforms (YouTube, Twitch, blogs).

Even if you put human editors in charge of a video website, there's very little chance they would approve someone like Mr Beast for example (before he became famous). They would likely judge his looks (innate human bias), plus his high budget format (self preservation with the bosses) and say his is an unfeasible show. Only an algorithm could have green lighted Mr Beast's show

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#145

Post by wiether »

irrational wrote: post #137
vmception wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in a similar vein it is hilarious thinking about the people at the Donuts registrar confused about the sudden interest in .finance domains the .finance people are monetizing way more way faster without ads

I haven’t heard of this. What are people doing with finance domains?

Selling tokens ?

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#146

Post by wiether »

oh_sigh wrote: post #12
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.…

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"

> And my aunt

Facebook really ruined the opinion I had of my relatives because of that kind of stuff. Man, you taught me how to fish but look at you now, jumping on every bait thrown at you...

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#147

Post by vmception »

irrational wrote: post #137
vmception wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in a similar vein it is hilarious thinking about the people at the Donuts registrar confused about the sudden interest in .finance domains the .finance people are monetizing way more way faster without ads

I haven’t heard of this. What are people doing with finance domains?

crypto projects. for the past 18 months .finance has been the TLD de-jour.

not necessarily tokenized crypto projects. but definitely services that use existing crypto assets.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#148

Post by jandrese »

crdrost wrote: post #133
jandrese wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For folks that are out of the loop, the post looks something like “24/4*3: 80% of people get this wrong!” and the arguments in comments are between people who do this the way most computers do (multiplication and division have the same priority and the leftmost one goes first, so you first calculate 24/4 to get 6 then multiply by 3 to get 18) versus the way that the acronym literally says to do it, (multiplication co…

It's not even that. It will usually be something like "7 + 3 * 2" and you will see a huge stream of "20" in the comments.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#149

Post by worace »

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…

I enjoy this author's podcasts and newsletters, and an interesting angle they've covered recently is that Facebook, ostensibly trying to "clean up their act" with regard to being seen as a platform for disinformation and radicalization, has been tweaking their algorithm to not promote so much alt-right and similar content.

But the problem is, once they exclude all that stuff, there's just not a lot left. So you end up with inane garbage like this account being the most popular content on the platform. Like the whole platform is just Ben Shapiro and drop-shipping scammers. Really paints an "emperor has no clothes" picture of what's going on on Facebook these days.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#150

Post by Marvin_Martian »

dan-robertson wrote: post #81
Marvin_Martian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its more that people are shocked* that facebook communicated to the outside that such problems were nonexistent, despite knowing that this was a lie. *not sure wether shocked is the right term to begin with, it seemed more like indignation to me.

Did they actually know it was a lie? E.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-faceboo...

Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read, since I was mostly going of the WSJ stuff before. I nonetheless feel that with social research in the private sector absolute certainty or even studies that would pass peer review are a bit too high of a bar to meet before we can talk about the organisation knowing something. But I guess thats more of a semantic argument.

After reading the NYT article it still seems to me that a more ethical company would have done more to address the probable issues. Meta did very little and seemed to cherrypick the most favourable public studies. Anyyway, all this doesn't seem suprising or even unusual to me. I generally don't think that we should expect companies to act very ethical. Rather, incentive structures should be created/amended in a way so that purely self interested companies act as if they were ethical.

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