131–140 of 239 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is worse than that. Imagine your Trump-supporting extended family voting down CNN news stories as "not credible." Expect mass brigading by The_Donald.
Please read the article. This isn't how any of this works. It is a randomised sample of their user base. It will not be possible for any group to gain an advantage.
A random sampling of shit is still shit.
This is so stupid. For one, people tend to have herd mentality. An article seen the wrong way could trigger an immense backfire where a medium's credibility tanks in a matter of days. And then it would take years to reverse the damage. Furthermore, it opens the way for anyone with a botnet of infected machines to rig the credibility of any news outlet to his liking.
It would seem that Facebook is rather well-positioned to identify such problems in the data. They could, for example, only count votes by long-term users. They also have almost complete knowledge of their users' political leanings, making it possible to counteract any attempts at manipulation.
This of course just shifts the problem to Facebook then ranking the credibility of users, on which they will base the raking of credibility of news.
This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these number…
If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education. Should we censor social media, because people are too stupid to deal with it? I don't think so and if you do, you're playing in the hands of corporations who want a cheap work force. Your "solution" isn't a solution, but a hot fix that will cause more damage in the future. It's exactly the shortsighted crap politics are t…
I believe this is a design issue (systems design, not UI design). Filter bubbles and confirmation bias can reinforce each other in a vicious circle. Financial incentives for "news outlets" to mislead people make it worse. That's the heart of facebooks issue.
With a herculan effort we might be able to overcome that with education, but improving Facebook's design to lessen the impact of echo chambers and social confirmation would be much easier and faster. Removing all interaction is one way to do that, though I agree that that's a bit heavy handed and goes against Facebook's incentives.
This seems very lazy on Facebook's part. Rather than employing people who will research and fact-check, they're punting the problem to the users. This whole situation arose because users are very bad at determining which sources are credible. People will believe anything that confirms their biases, and disbelieve anything that doesn't.
Its also a lot cheaper then hiring people.
They don't want to alienate the conservative crowd who basically check in to Facebook ONLY to see the day's new anti-Hillary meme.
I don't know about you guys, but my Grandma clicks on ads at an almost bot like rate.
This seems very lazy on Facebook's part. Rather than employing people who will research and fact-check, they're punting the problem to the users. This whole situation arose because users are very bad at determining which sources are credible. People will believe anything that confirms their biases, and disbelieve anything that doesn't.
The political process is an infinite discussion of what is and is not factual. There is no baseline, single source of truth.
This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these number…
If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education. Should we censor social media, because people are too stupid to deal with it? I don't think so and if you do, you're playing in the hands of corporations who want a cheap work force. Your "solution" isn't a solution, but a hot fix that will cause more damage in the future. It's exactly the shortsighted crap politics are t…
Just as a sort of general, broad response to this sentiment: yes absolutely. I envy your optimism, but the belief amongst the Hacker News set that humans are universally capable of educating their way out from under deeply-rooted biological faults is misguided. You're not going to educate people out of conferring status on the most popular people/stories/posts/etc. You're competing against at least a few hundred thousand years of evolution (and many of these processes go back much, much further than that.) You won't win.
So, yes, absolutely we should be working on ways to acknowledge and route around human foibles, not pretending we can eliminate them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education. I agree, but it's impossible to educate everyone on any subject. I think in this case, people who are experts in the matter, should give a reputation rating on the article. That would be really great. For example, I am no expert in theoretical physics, but I may enjoy an article about it, but how do I know it's not a bu…
>> If I see that Stephen Hawking gave it a 5 star reputable source rating, I "know" I can believe it. People everywhere are going away from this model as "experts" are consistently bribed through various means. There is no good short-term fix. People need to become more educated and adapt. If the argument is that they can't, well, maybe our brains have been defeated entirely by advertising and messaging. It wouldn't…
Now it becomes a battle of which side can marshall more FB users to flag stories of the other side as fake. Which, in turn, results in more views and clicks for FB.