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Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

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Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#251

Post by intrasight »

iaml wrote: post #209
intrasight wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like FB less and less - for all the same reasons that others here have posted. It is especially frustrating and vexing to me because I had build a "Facebook clone" about fifteen years ago that had all the features that I would like to have in a social/informational web service. Surely there are other places we can go online that have a better user experience. I am curious what other web sites people are using to do…

There are some clients for mobile devices, but I'm pretty sure if anyone were to make such a skin, and it were to gain any meaningful popularity, facebook would just kill its API access or threaten with legal repercussions because its explicitly forbidden to do this [0]. [0] https://developers.facebook.com/policy

Lots of stuff there. Which one says you can't use the API to build a read-only client? Makes no sense that they would have an API for something which is forbidden.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#252

Post by btilly »

mygo wrote: post #243
nora4 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. A/B testing is like gradient descent which is a greedy algorithm. You move in the direction that locally looks best. Evolution on the other hand allows for suboptimal species to persist for enough time to let them develop their advantage. (In the language of optimization evolution allows you to go past the local optimal and reach global optima by allowing you to move in non-optimal direction -- as l…

Nope. A/B testing depends on what you choose to mutate. The problem is that we humans intentionally change the things. Nature randomly changes the things. You’re not going to get to a global optimum driven by human choice of what to test (only local optima at best) unless the human setting up the tests is some sort of sage.

Do you Nature will eventually hit on a global optimum? If so, that belief is opposed by what biologists know about developmental and evolutionary pathways.

For a trivial and well-known example, there is now no developmental or evolutionary pathway that will lead to a vertebrate eye where the nerves run behind the retina. As a result every last vertebrate has a blind spot where all of the nerves dive through the retina. This makes our eyes less efficient because the nerves block out light.

We're therefore stuck with the first design of the vertebrate eye and can't change it. There is no pathway to the more sensible design of the mollusk eye.

This is but one of many examples. For another one, relative developmental timing of growth is fixed across vertebrates. For example the "hand" grows before the "arm". The result is that pterodactyls, whose wings are entirely hands, could fly from birth. But birds (whose wings are arms) and bats (a mix of the two) can't fly from birth. No matter how desirable an evolutionary trait that may be.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#253

Post by jokermatt999 »

gaius wrote: post #192
jokermatt999 wrote: post #128

Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent? They don't make it easy, and I don't think you can default to it, but I just point all my bookmarks to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr Still though, Facebook could be so much better. The problem is that a profit-driven social media site is always going to have different goals than its users. Free ones seem to never gain traction. Currently, most of my friend gro…

Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent? Do you think most recent really is everything in reverse chronological order, or just a slightly different algorithm?

Naively, yes, yes I did. Dammit Facebook. There's a reason why I changed the settings. I figured it was like browsing the new queue here.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#254

Post by bertil »

bitoneill wrote: post #103
bertil wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like your post is very US-centric and that is a big part of the misunderstanding. Facebook should not be so focused on one country. And they are not: some of the problems were visible for the Brexit and the subsequent parliamentary vote in the UK; they have already addressed some issues with recent the French and the German elections. There certainly are many more elections before November, see: https://en.wik…

> I mean, Facebook even has to consider how to protect the integrity of the Russian election later this year. OK, that was a joke. The day will come during the election, when Putin accuses Facebook of anti-Putin fake news

I would actually be surprised: Putin has the redeeming quality of autocrats, he doesn’t complain about trivial things. He certainly instruments threats, made-up or otherwise, and he might occasionally get people excited over confusing displays of nationalism, like that foreign food strike last year, but the whole message around it was grave.

Saying that a freckled teenager in California can challenge his popularity by writing nonsense on the internet… it’s unbecoming.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#255

Post by Franciscouzo »

btilly wrote: post #252
mygo wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. A/B testing depends on what you choose to mutate. The problem is that we humans intentionally change the things. Nature randomly changes the things. You’re not going to get to a global optimum driven by human choice of what to test (only local optima at best) unless the human setting up the tests is some sort of sage.

Do you Nature will eventually hit on a global optimum? If so, that belief is opposed by what biologists know about developmental and evolutionary pathways. For a trivial and well-known example, there is now no developmental or evolutionary pathway that will lead to a vertebrate eye where the nerves run behind the retina. As a result every last vertebrate has a blind spot where all of the nerves dive through the retin…

Now I wonder, has someone ran A/B tests but instead of using hill climbing for optimizing used simulated annealing?

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#256

Post by iaml »

intrasight wrote: post #251
iaml wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some clients for mobile devices, but I'm pretty sure if anyone were to make such a skin, and it were to gain any meaningful popularity, facebook would just kill its API access or threaten with legal repercussions because its explicitly forbidden to do this [0]. [0] https://developers.facebook.com/policy

Lots of stuff there. Which one says you can't use the API to build a read-only client? Makes no sense that they would have an API for something which is forbidden.

4.1 Add something unique to the community. Don’t replicate core functionality that Facebook already provides. 4.4 Respect the limits we've placed on Facebook functionality.

Read-only client violates 4.1, as it replicates news feed. Changing how news feed is formed is a violation of 4.4.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#257

Post by ridgeguy »

bonniemuffin wrote: post #179
ridgeguy wrote: post #118

It seems like nobody at Facebook is allowed to play the long game. In the long game, quality wins. In the long game, an organization that puts quality of information at top priority persists and becomes a long-lived resource for civilization. Like Google has become a persistent Web search resource, setting aside its short-lived ancillary forays into more clickable, trivial services. So long as Facebook prioritizes vi…

Identifying "quality" content algorithmically seems like a hard problem to me. If Facebook wanted to play the long game by promoting high quality content in the feed, how would you propose they identify it in order to promote it?

Your question is excellent and gets to the heart of the matter.

How could Facebook, in a neutral way, cull crap and promote quality?

I wish I had robust answers. All I have at the moment is opinions.

• Algorithmic methods can't deliver near term solutions. Algorithms embody the biases of their human coders. I doubt we currently know how to algorithmically evaluate inputs for quality in the Facebook or "fake news" context. We need more time and effort to learn how to do this.

• Promoting quality currently requires humans, who are expensive. If Facebook really prioritizes feed quality, we'll see serious hiring. If we don't, then evidence of commitment is lacking.

• I believe (no proof to offer, mainly intuition) quality can eventually be algorithmically determined, but it's a hard problem. It will take years, lots of smart people and $ to figure out how to make it work at scale.

• I don't think Facebook's announced path, which is to solicit those who are arguably more susceptible to "fake news" to be arbitrators of quality, will succeed.

Facebook, like others, is caught between maximizing 90 day quarterly profits and becoming a persistent human resource. I don't envy Zuckerberg at all. I hope he can do the right thing.

We'll see.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#258

Post by mygo »

btilly wrote: post #252
mygo wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. A/B testing depends on what you choose to mutate. The problem is that we humans intentionally change the things. Nature randomly changes the things. You’re not going to get to a global optimum driven by human choice of what to test (only local optima at best) unless the human setting up the tests is some sort of sage.

Do you Nature will eventually hit on a global optimum? If so, that belief is opposed by what biologists know about developmental and evolutionary pathways. For a trivial and well-known example, there is now no developmental or evolutionary pathway that will lead to a vertebrate eye where the nerves run behind the retina. As a result every last vertebrate has a blind spot where all of the nerves dive through the retin…

> Do you think Nature will eventually hit on a global optimum?

No. At least not in the way described. Optimal as considered by whom? Us? We look at something and say this would function better than that, but is something that is optimal perfect? Basic microeconomics shows that perfection is sub-optimal due to the law of diminishing marginal return. Perfection is wasteful and unsustainable. What do we know to be optimal? From what I know, “adequate enough to reproduce” may not be perfect, but it might be brushing up against optimal in its “good enough and no more” / lagom nature. Mollusks have mollusk eyes. Can we know that humans would be better off with mollusk eyes without rewriting our evolutionary lineage for us to be more like mollusks in other imperfect ways?

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#259

Post by underwater »

jsemrau wrote: post #123
underwater wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pages are not counted as a user in their DAU counts.

Sure, but there is a user who is the admin for the page. This "admin" is entirely a bot.

You have a bot that logs in as a regular user? I’d be surprised if that is common, there are APIs for automation that wouldn’t count against DAU. And you would run the risk of getting your admin account blocked.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#260

Post by intrasight »

iaml wrote: post #256
intrasight wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of stuff there. Which one says you can't use the API to build a read-only client? Makes no sense that they would have an API for something which is forbidden.

4.1 Add something unique to the community. Don’t replicate core functionality that Facebook already provides. 4.4 Respect the limits we've placed on Facebook functionality. Read-only client violates 4.1, as it replicates news feed. Changing how news feed is formed is a violation of 4.4.

But it doesn't "replicate" the newsfeed because the newsfeed doesn't show me what I want to see.
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