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Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

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Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#231

Post by nix-zarathustra »

v_london wrote: post #37
rafaelturk wrote: post #24

I'm going to side with FB on this. This law is so bizarre.

It's a law that's either written by media lobbyists or people unfamiliar with technology. Potentially both at the same time. If the news organisations want people to pay for news, they can change to a subscription model and put their content behind a pay wall. Many companies already to this: I myself pay over a hundred pounds a year for the Economist for their excellent reporting. The old establishment needs to under…

>It's a law that's either written by media lobbyists or people unfamiliar with technology.

It's a law written mostly by the ACCC.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#232

Post by jjcm »

I live in Australia and while I'm excited to see less Facebook use, I see a lot of comments saying things like, "good, Facebook monetized an addiction model and this curbs that". While true, the proposed law that has pushed them to do this is incredibly dangerous. The law doesn't just apply to Facebook, it applies to whoever the Treasurer of Australia[0] says it applies to - it isn't metrics/rules based: https://i.imgur.com/7RSqXDJ.png

This means you as a business owner may wake up one day to find that you are now classified as a designated digital platform corporation and are on the hook to now negotiate contracts with every registered news business corporation, AND provide each of them with the secret sauce behind your ranking algos. The only thing that needs to be done to do this is for the Treasurer to file a decision in the Federal Register of Legislation[1]. It's a shocking amount of overreach, lack of visibility to the process, and a single point of failure in the system.

Overall I'm very curious to see how this plays out. Facebook took the nuclear option here, and I highly suspect that news corporations will feel quite a sting from the loss of traffic / platform. I truly feel like Facebook "winning" here and having the law dropped is the lesser of two evils.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasurer_of_Australia

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.au/Browse/Results/ByRegDate/Legi...

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#234

Post by CydeWeys »

tt433 wrote: post #79
CydeWeys wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What they want is for Facebook and Google to be forced to list them, but also forced to pay for the privilege. If they failed to craft or pay for legislation to that end, it was nothing more than a mistake. Such legislation is impossible given that Google/Facebook are not Australian companies. At the end of the day, if the legislation makes their involvement in those countries a net negative for their bottom lines,…

I'm not really sure what you mean by impossible

How would you craft legislation that force Google and Facebook to do business with you under terms that you dictate? Ultimately how can you prevent said companies from pulling out of your country entirely if that's the better option for them?

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#235

Post by TurkishPoptart »

danielheath wrote: post #217
tantalor wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned There's existing a term for people with this view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

You refer to the activists who successfully protected their quality of life by refusing to let someone else use technology to ruin it. An apt comparison.

I'm sorry I have to tell you this, but they were not successful.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#236

Post by threeseed »

Barrin92 wrote: post #226
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. I'm not sure a human-readable algorithm exists for ranking all the web pages in the world based on natural language input. In fact, I'm pretty sure such an algorithm does not, and potentially cannot, exist given the ab…

you don't need any NLP to rank webpages (in fact the entire innovation of Google was that they figured out a way to rank pages completely ignoring that fact). Pagerank works fundamentally by treating the web as a graph and prioritising results based on their connections, that is to say it ranks based on popularity and is agnostic about the content of the actual page. This generally has worked well. On the other hand,…

You've just skipped over the early days of Google where they relied primarily on PageRank and bad actors manipulated it to death.

It's trivial to generate webs of fake, inter-related content and use that specifically to feed incoming links to valuable pages. Or to comment-spam websites so aggressively it ruins them. Or all of the secret deals between high-ranking sites to feed links even though the sites weren't related. There are countless examples of black-hat techniques to break PageRank.

I am sorry but you simply can't build a sustainable search engine without deeply understanding the user intent and the meaning behind the indexed pages.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#237

Post by threeseed »

nostromo wrote: post #110
extropy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publicly disclosing the algorithms would drastically increase the pace of gaming them and resulting in pay to play system where the fanciest SEO wins. Google and Facebook partially relies on the obscurity to keep the fighting the spam battle. IMO we don't have the technology yet to have fully open ranking algorithms that are not quickly broken. To think of it - similar to crypto around WW2.

This isn't as true as it once was. Google's best asset for ranking is their user data. Even if you had the exact algorithm, you couldn't game it without massive amounts of user traffic. (At least not for popular searches.)

No. Their best asset is their deep understanding of what makes a page "good" and the intent behind a search query.

You could get rid of all their user data and it would still be a great search engine.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#238

Post by vladTheInhaler »

Barrin92 wrote: post #226
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. I'm not sure a human-readable algorithm exists for ranking all the web pages in the world based on natural language input. In fact, I'm pretty sure such an algorithm does not, and potentially cannot, exist given the ab…

you don't need any NLP to rank webpages (in fact the entire innovation of Google was that they figured out a way to rank pages completely ignoring that fact). Pagerank works fundamentally by treating the web as a graph and prioritising results based on their connections, that is to say it ranks based on popularity and is agnostic about the content of the actual page. This generally has worked well. On the other hand,…

Pagerank worked fine when it was invented. It's a very elegant algorithm. But in a perfect illustration of Goodhart's law, it fell apart once people realized that they could game it to increase their traffic. Google has been in a constant arms race against unscrupulous SEO practices ever since.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#239

Post by catmanjan »

jjcm wrote: post #232

I live in Australia and while I'm excited to see less Facebook use, I see a lot of comments saying things like, "good, Facebook monetized an addiction model and this curbs that". While true, the proposed law that has pushed them to do this is incredibly dangerous. The law doesn't just apply to Facebook, it applies to whoever the Treasurer of Australia[0] says it applies to - it isn't metrics/rules based: https://i.im…

While that is probably technically true, in reality the Australian government is unlikely to make Australian businesses comply, giving them a competitive advantage - I think this is a protectionist policy, but the right won't admit to that because it goes against their "free market" ideals.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#240

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #226
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. I'm not sure a human-readable algorithm exists for ranking all the web pages in the world based on natural language input. In fact, I'm pretty sure such an algorithm does not, and potentially cannot, exist given the ab…

you don't need any NLP to rank webpages (in fact the entire innovation of Google was that they figured out a way to rank pages completely ignoring that fact). Pagerank works fundamentally by treating the web as a graph and prioritising results based on their connections, that is to say it ranks based on popularity and is agnostic about the content of the actual page. This generally has worked well. On the other hand,…

what is the weather today, Google?

I agree that you don't need NLP to rank webpages (though it certainly helps), but you do need it to parse the kinds of queries given to search engines these days. The days of logical OR and NOT are long gone I'm afraid.

> It's actually fairly straight-forward to build recommender systems on transparent, graph-based algorithms and it gives you the added advantage of not discriminating in strange ways.

I think other commenters have addressed the PageRank issue, but I'd be super interested in papers doing the work you note above.

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