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Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#221

Post by wutbrodo »

moccachino wrote: post #186
wutbrodo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I get the argument that the brain has flaws that can be manipulated to some degree, and I think it is seriously worth considering, but HN has really jumped the shark when it comes to these conversations. To hear this forum tell it, everybody is powerlessly cowering beneath the lash of their electronic devices, completely unable to make any decisions about their usage.

The ugly truth is that while you may be very conscious of how you spend your time online and what you interact with, the majority of people simply is not, and many people are ill-equipped to even understand how they are being manipulated to scroll a bit more, play another game or vote for the wrong candidate.

Sure, that's probably fair. But to be precise, what I'm complaining about is my perception that the tenor of some of these HN conversation is so hysterical that they don't even recognize the _possibility_ of having control over your usage. The idea that Facebook et al are _nothing_ more than a 21st century poison, and that they're impossible to use responsibly, is something I've seen far too often for far too long on this board.

I use drugs (caffeine, alcohol, weed, and a couple others), and do so responsibly, and think that they add some measure of richness to my life. I enjoy well-made desserts, and do so responsibly, mostly avoiding sugar and processed carbs in the rest of my diet, and I'm in great physical health. Both of these have a huge potential for abuse, but the idea that they're 100% terrible and the only possible way to handle them is complete abstinence is absurd.

I use Facebook, but I do so in moderation, I generally don't spend much/any time in the feed, and it adds a dimension of convenience of communication to my life which has helped _enrich_ many friendships instead of damaged them[1]. And yet out of the three examples I've given here, Facebook is the only one for which I frequently see top comments and entire threads with people claiming they can't believe that everyone hasn't figured out that any FB usage is toxic and the only solution is complete abstinence. I just don't get it.

[1] A friend of mine had a traumatic brain injury last year and has been recovering with family in a different city. Since he's not able to have the big bday party up here that he usually has, a couple of weekends from now, 10 of us are flying from three separate parts of the country to celebrate his birthday for a weekend. _All_ of the planning, from convincing his family, to figuring out lodgings, to figuring out the guest list, to figuring out transportation and scheduling for everyone, was done over Facebook Events and Messenger (and Google Sheets).

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#222

Post by abritinthebay »

freehunter wrote: post #82
abritinthebay wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only bad for media companies who use pretty awful tactics to get eyeballs. The trick is really to stop worrying about clicks to your site and focus on good content that people will engage with (share, comment, like, whatever). If it's good content people respond well to it and will seek out your brand. You see the same thing with the savvy companies on Instagram/Snapchat/etc It's only bad if you're essentially a…

Facebook has a metric they use to determine if they're going to show people your post, and it has to do with the first few people who see it. If they see it and don't interact with it, it disappears and no one else will see it. That really reinforces clickbait, but it also makes sure that you absolutely need those first few impressions to really count. Good content doesn't matter if the algorithm keeps it hidden.

That's... an incredible over-simplification of their algorithms. To the point of ridiculousness.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#224

Post by kartickv »

marbletiles wrote: post #196
JasonFruit wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, who are your friends? I regularly interact with people I'm not angry at, even on Facebook.

I have a perfectly lovely set of friends, who often post lovely things. But when I think back to all the “long comments” and “spark conversation” type posts, they’re not lovely. They are politics or other things that spark FB’s equivalent of a flame war. So my fear is that using those things to indicate these posts should be more prominent is going to be a tricky thing for them to get right. Getting a computer to dec…

A "Was that worth it?" button might help distinguish clickbait or angerbait from genuinely worthwhile and fulfilling information. Say you participated in a conversation on FB. When the conversation ends, you might get a notification from FB the next time to log in asking you whether it was good.

Or a news site could have a Was it worth it? button at the end of each story, to help identify clickbait or otherwise low-quality articles. Rather than measuring how many page views each journalist drives, they might measure how many satisfied readers that article had, and reward journalists who write high-quality articles.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#225

Post by ace_of_spades »

thinkloop wrote: post #74
archiepeach wrote: post #45

Good intentions or not, we must remember that history has proven time and time again, when any entity has far too much unchecked power, it is inevitably exploited by bad actors. A user base of two billion users without any real accountability is a scary thing. The only people policing Facebook are Facebook. We would never agree to a having a single dictator who answers to no one, why should Facebook be treated any di…

Because unlike a dictator Facebook has zero real power over your life? It's a site of puppies and horoscopes, you think we should be dealing with them like we do Kim Jong Un? How have we moved so far on the personal responsibility scale. Why aren't people partly responsible for not making better use of their time? Facebook is an "evil echo chamber", "wasting people's lives", "catering to business", etc - ALL THEY DO…

If you want to hear the opposite side of the story, you should listen to an episode of the Dan Harris podcast with Tristan Harris [1]. Tristan is the founder of timewellspent.io which is an organization advocating for changes to the way we measure the success of applications.

The core point is that properties like FB are built to persuade you into doing certain things and we have surprisingly effective techniques for getting the results we want. A major aspect is that even when people notice and reject certain techniques this requires mental effort – over time you are worn down and less likely to make good decisions. At the moment we are fighting an up-hill battle against all the big players on the net – for what? Should it be like this? How do you want live to be? isn’t it worthwhile to strive for creating an environment where as many people as possible are able to thrive and succeed – after all, we all profit from other people making good decisions!

[1] https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/what-is-technology-do... I

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#227

Post by vl »

jp555 wrote: post #105
untog wrote: post #35

I very much hope this isn't just words. The core problem, IMO, is that content that makes us angry, anxious or jealous is a much better driver of clicks than content that makes us happy. I'm sure Facebook knows this. If they really mean it, they'll accept that they will make less money as a result of this change. It would be the right decision in the long term, but the short term will hurt.

Are clicks the majority of revenue for FB? An ad unit that fills a users screen for a few second as they scroll throughout the day every day is super super valuable to brand advertising. I think that’s ~$450 billion of the total ~$500 billion total annual global ad spend. To me browsing the fb feed is a lot like like flipping through tv channels used to be. Brand advertising loved that too. I’d think the More people…

Of course they will make more money from this change:

It turns out that using ML to optimize for immediate engagement has two unintended side-effects: 1) it produces junkier content, 2) it decreases long-term retention. For obvious reasons, building a model to optimize for the long-term engagement is way harder and takes way more time.

While in the long run new model is more profitable (due to increased retention life-long engagement goes up), it decreases immediate engagement metrics. When this happens, major accounts start to call in and ask why now they are getting less for their dollar, thus this preemptive explanation by Mr Zuckerberg.

Then, when the dust settles and prices adjust, increased retention will compound and profits will go up.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#228

Post by vl »

untog wrote: post #35

I very much hope this isn't just words. The core problem, IMO, is that content that makes us angry, anxious or jealous is a much better driver of clicks than content that makes us happy. I'm sure Facebook knows this. If they really mean it, they'll accept that they will make less money as a result of this change. It would be the right decision in the long term, but the short term will hurt.

As I explained here, they will make more money from this change:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16142137

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