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The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

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Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#251
post #210

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And the lesson here would be not to get involved with Ayrveda.

Or more specifically, not pour random fluids into your butt for some mystical health benefit. Only for pleasure.

Actually I would recommend it. It's quite nice :-)

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#252

I find a lot of sites feel like they're overtuning their recommendation engines, to the detriment of using the site. YouTube is particularly bad for this - given the years of history and somewhat regular viewing of the site, I feel like it should have a relatively good idea of what I'm interested in. Instead, the YouTube homepage seems myopically focused on the last 5-10 videos I watched.

I've moved pretty much all my music listening to YouTube due to simple convenience of easily being able to generate whole genre playlists based on one song.

But because the playlists are dynamic, YouTube keeps on shoving songs from other playlists (and genres) into each other, trying to generate a "perfect playlist" and in the process making all the playlists sound very similar with no more genre distinctions except for the first couple of songs.

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#253

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Dude it's a wallet not a coach purse.

I have multiple wallets. I have one I take on business trips that contains my work ID, American Express, business cards, etc. All stuff I normally don't carry with me. I have an everyday wallet with cash and my bank card and stuff I need everyday. And if I'm dressing up, I don't want to ruin the lines of my suit so I have a far slimmer wallet that just has my ID and space for one credit card. I mean I'm not accessori…

That's great, but you're the only person in America who does that.

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#254
I haven't found Facebook to be very good at recommending things. They often don't seem to be able to tell what people are interested in, and they don't really let users control who they're posting to. For example, they should make it easier to just post to people who live in the same city...

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#255
I'm pretty sure they're using a machine learning algorithm, and it's determining the way to handle your post. Can someone who understands the ML algorithms better than I explain how this would interact with the feature weights? I'd be curious as to how we think that would play out.

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#256

I'd like Facebook to have an option to see all posts, without filtering, just as they're posted. It's not hard, it's a simple UX, but it's just not there.

They used to do that. They had two different news feeds, one with their algorithm and one that was just a real-time feed. Then they scrapped the real-time feed in favor of their algorithm-based feed. It's not that the real-time was hard to do, it's that the algorithm is more easily monetized.

Yup. It was a huge deal in, what, 2008, when they did this? Almost as big as when they got rid of curated content and turned everyone's link-able "interests" into weird generic "likes" (it was a really strange period for at least a few months as I recall).

For awhile you could switch back every time you logged in, manually, to a chronological news feed.

Instagram was one of the last holdouts but they switched a year or two ago.

Twitter is amazingly bad at this. It takes screenfuls of junk on mobile to get to the chronological stuff.

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#257
post #46

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Would you please not post unsubstantive comments here? If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.

Im sorry dang. its become a bit of a dirty habit to throw shade on FB whenever it comes up. I hate it with a passion. My goal is to get as many people to question their usage of FB and if it really enhances their lives. Ill try to be more constructive with my comments.

Judged by this thread, I enjoy Facebook posts far more than your comments.

Ergo, in my opinion, Facebook is the signal and your posts are the noise.

I know it's not fair to compare a couple of 'activist' comments to an entire social network, but I felt it was worth pointing out that this style of "content" is more destructive to many audiences than Facebook is.

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#258
post #247

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Buy a Dyson vacuum cleaner on Amazon... For the next several weeks Amazon thinks I've taken up the popular hobby of collecting vacuum cleaners

I once clicked on a 'russian bride' google ad for a laugh, quite a while back. Google still puts lots of russian and filipino bride ads into my 'bubble' to this day...

You can remove "mistakes" like that from your Google history pretty easily.

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube is definitely over-weighing the last few videos. Then again, it's likely optimized for a different market segment. Especially with how many children are given tablets. Like, brief intense fascination with many subjects in general is genuinely hard to optimize for, especially when a huge portion of your market has long-lasting intense fascination with a few subjects.

YouTube would rather you fall into a trance of continuing your recent viewing habits rather than providing a personalized library. It just makes better business sense.

What doesn't make good business sense is filling my feed with videos I've already seen!

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#260
I'm not a machine learning expert, but isn't this an easily solved problem?

Similar to TF/IDF, where you mitigate common words by dividing by their overall frequency, you should be able to divide the weight of any particular "like" by the frequency of likes between the two people. That way a genuine expression of interest by an acquaintance is weighted far higher than a relative or close friend that reflexively likes everything you post.

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