251–260 of 261 posts
All the comments refer to being findable to strangers and stalkers by phone number but that’s not the case.
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> in favor of a transparent society I suggest you read The Transparent Society by Byung-Chul Han. It’s a brutal 50-page indictment of the hypercult of transparency and its effects on the human soul, on the political discourse, and on traditional values like truth and beauty. Might change your view on the costs of transparency.
Isn't the premise of that book that privacy is a deep human need, and that its erosion goes against our intent? I would argue that the next generation coming up will have little to no _need_ for privacy. When you grow up with nanny cams in your bedroom, privacy per se isn't even valued, let alone met with an expectation.
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The issue would be safeguarding.
There's no problem what name the school has you on the books for. There's no reason what they have on file/police checks is the same name presented on office doors, emails and to parents. We do this all the time for students that can't/won't use their legal names in school for a number of reasons.
There are quite a few lines of work where this might not be a bad idea. E.g. also Police and government employees in general.
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Overall, the vast majority of similar reports are completely irrelevant, partial or non-sensical. Happy to give details but the most common pattern is the same person demanding that Facebook regulate speech in one sentence and being outraged that Facebook feels allowed to regulate speech before that sentence is over. Most journalists who write about Facebook are deemed as “having no idea what they are talking about”.…
this is the only piece of information that is “User only” and that visibility option was removed because it used to lead to abuses This seems critically relevant to the issue at hand - can you explain it in a little more detail please?
When I was working there, I’ve worked on custom visibility option (things like lists of friends, a feature that hardly anyone used; home city, languages had been occasional “Smart lists”). Those options were unsupported or become discontinued in some cases. There was a significant mental load to have more visibility options than ‘Friends‘ and ‘Public’, and very few reasons (as in: active users) to support more. One option that I felt really corresponded to a lot of people’s need was “Friends except Acquaintances”: ‘Acquaintances’ had become a really good shorthand for “drama-prone” relations. Yes, you are friends with them, they can see some activity from you, just not everything. They have no reason to think you’ve excluded them. It was discontinued and I never figured out why.
I can imagine the “Only me” option being changed because of someone, either working on an easier audience selector or trying to make bad-behaviour-detection faster, might overlook the need to have some information on the site not shared with your friends. The impact of visibility option on every aspect of the site is nightmarishly complicated, and genuinely hard to keep in mind to think about clearly. I’ve dedicated a decade to that, and I struggled. People who are officially very smart (Math Olympiad laureates, Mensa-type: not that those are proof of social smart, but they should understand formal reasoning really well) struggled. If you include blockages, it gets really hairy. If you include bad actor and impersonation, you will lose your sanity. The alternative that I suggested (that information is probably what hackers would look for, so hide it even from an authenticated user) is probably more likely, given the overall privacy-conscious of the company. In that case, that information changes status even more.
I’m not saying that kind of blatant or casual disregard for nuanced privacy control is not bad. God knows I raised hell before I joined the company and after about list support, and more. I even convinced a friend to join because he made a great tool to manage your list of friends. He joined the company before me, helped me a lot internally — but never even mentioned his tool to anyone internally because there was no appetite for it, inside or outside the company. Just to tell you how much: do you remember the fiasco that was Google Plus Circles? Well, after _that_ blew up, I had low expectations. This was lower.
The company moved to Groups, non-friends contextual entities, and that was I think a lot better in many ways.
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Overall, the vast majority of similar reports are completely irrelevant, partial or non-sensical. Happy to give details but the most common pattern is the same person demanding that Facebook regulate speech in one sentence and being outraged that Facebook feels allowed to regulate speech before that sentence is over. Most journalists who write about Facebook are deemed as “having no idea what they are talking about”.…
Thanks a lot for an opportunity to look into the world of Facebook employee, that was really interesting and I feel that I do understand it better now. However, I wonder if you'd agree that maybe the main reason for Facebook problems is their desire to overconnect the social graph basically. All those moderation problems wouldn't be there if the newsfeed stayed simple chronological summary of updates by their friends…
Yes, because Facebook would not be a usable service. This is not a joke: raw feed is really bad. Unusable. Spam-folder on steroids bad. If you care about the Facebook employees mindset: “My News Feed should be chronological” is about three times worse than “I’m just looking for a technical co-founder, I’m an ideas guy” to the HN crowd.
> Reddit AFAIK doesn't have problems as huge as Facebook's, and the reason for that is that communities tend to moderate themselves pretty well,
Reddit has significant efforts into massaging their own feeds. It’s less visible, but quite significant, mainly around abuses from large coordinated groups. They’ve talked about it extensively. They have fewer issues because a subreddit community has clear values (_News_ value immediacy; _Politics_ controversy; _WritingPrompt_ values long comments more than total Upvotes) which allows them to tailor their algorithm per context rather than per person. Well, they do that too, but it’s significantly messier. This part is hidden because there’s a lot more than you can see on Reddit, so you see a lot of good things, no matter the order. There is less good content from your friends simply because you don’t have a million of them, so your Facebook News Feed is a lot more sensitive to clues. Reddit also has a lot more input information with upvotes; people really don’t understand their feed would become massively better if they click on Like — including professionals who build recommendation engines for a living and complain about not having good data.
Finally, if you think that Reddit is a welcoming community without issues, I can easily guess your gender. That’s a big part of what Facebook empowers.
> interpersonal connections between real-life friends and families (what Facebook sold to its audience and the way it keeps the users on the platform) barely need any moderation at all
This is not true: anti-vaxxers (and before them, MLM) are a massive hindrance to their family; usually, they get ignored now, but being able to hide them (and dynamically detect problematic posts from important, non-MLM updates) is a key feature of the News Feed. The most common, and occasionally biggest pain-points that we’ve measured have been where friends and family merged, from your lame dad barging in a Let’s-go-to-the-club thread to gay people still in the closet liking posts about flamboyant things.
What you might be trying to say is that there is a real problem in merging all your aspects of life into one context. That’s definitely true. Without going into drama-prone topics, I speak several languages and that was not taken into account at all when I joined; my cousin routinely complained that she didn’t understand why I wrote in English “all the time”. There was some progress (thanks in very small part to my impulse) there.
Raising consciousness around those issues was part of what I did more generally. One effective and clear solution for that was Groups, that finally, for the last two years, got their place in the sun with a dedicated, empathic team in _Engagement_, rather than be a subsidiary of Pages that where a subsidiary of Ads. I don’t have internal knowledge but from public communications from Facebook management, I’m guessing they are growing much faster than Reddit, with a similar product.
> generating massive revenues.
Not really. The family stuff is great because if gets people to post more: they feel like they can share if they see similar things in their feed. That’s empowering people which Facebook believes in as a core value, but it’s not making much money. If Facebook wanted to print dollars, they’d go full Video.
The money comes from basic stuff: age, gender, location, family status (age of children) and interests; language, too: you’d be shocked to see how many ads are shown to people who just can’t read them. The money comes for “Custom audience” which is essentially Upload the emails of your users, and we’ll find them on Facebook, and “Similar audience” which is an augmentation of that, and let you advertise to those groups separately. That you love sharing lame puns with your uncle, or photos playing with your nephews isn’t going to attract anyone’s crazy CPA. If you click on ads about nappies, that‘s a really good signal though.
Honestly, Facebook is eating other people’s lunch in ads because they get very basic things right: separate your customers from non-customers. They don’t advertise for diamond rings next to an article about the war in Congo, like the NYTimes does, or for stilettos to burly football players. They remember which ads work for you, and show more of that. In my case, I’m in the market for a nice leather bag: Facebook knows that and shows me a lot of that. They are certainly making more than the average $50 by helping me general a list of a dozen nice options for my birthday.
Marketing (outside, possibly of political advertising) hasn’t really moved to crazy Orwellian stuff at scale. If, one day, posting landscape in black-and-white is correlated to you liking yogurt, maybe… but for now, it’s probably easier to ask your local supermarket.
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Overall, the vast majority of similar reports are completely irrelevant, partial or non-sensical. Happy to give details but the most common pattern is the same person demanding that Facebook regulate speech in one sentence and being outraged that Facebook feels allowed to regulate speech before that sentence is over. Most journalists who write about Facebook are deemed as “having no idea what they are talking about”.…
Regarding the media issues, it seems that Facebook is also being used as a convenient scapegoat: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo... , often by reporters who don't even understand the issues they're nominally covering, or who seem to have made up their minds about the system before starting to write.
- Facebook employees consider that Cambridge Analytica was caught, abused their power, lied under oath and was never able to leverage Facebook Custom Audience anyway; short of using Police forces (and Facebook really should not have that kind of power) there wasn’t much that Facebook could have done more;
- As a consequence of that, there was a movement to control abusive pages in politics, and everyone was claiming for a clamp-down. It took 24 hours for Facebook to ask for ID for the moderators of all large political pages, because they realised that any of those could be GRU operatives, and 5 minutes for everyone to find this deeply objectionable. :facepalm:
- Apps sending their user’s actions to Facebook Analytics when those actions are Heartbeats, blood pressure, migraine and Period time: Facebook employees consider that Analytics is a service for people to target their own users based on their own classification. There are some possible issues with it (the classic being ethnic discrimination for real estate) but no one at Facebook cares about your period. Facebook could enforce more strongly that the apps communicate with their users about the Analytics tool, but that’s 100% going to blow back around the common theme that Facebook is abusing their power. You’ll have virulent op-ed outraged at how their dare to threaten to de-platform feminist apps about empowering women and their health, and how dare they. I’m happy to bet real money that the people asking for more control will be the same to protest against it, less than a week later.
_Catch-22_ comes to mind.
What will it be tomorrow? We should also make a list so someone can actually see the number of things they do within a year alone.
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well - I did that .... and changed the email address to a dummy account .... and still they send me almost weekly spam to the old address - "Why aren't you using FaceBook? here's a single link you can use to log on without a password" ... these bozos have no concept of security
Sounds like what has been happening to me. Except when I try to login to nuke the thing I get some error message about a database error and can't login. So the Facebook spam about new friend suggestions etc keeps coming. But since I have always marked it as spam it usually goes straight to the spam box.
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Sounds useful. It's unfortunate that google voice still isn't available outside North America. I don't know if that is for technical reasons or for (European/Asian) political reasons. But it sure would have been nice to keep separate numbers the same way it's sometimes necessary to keep separate google accounts.
> But it sure would have been nice to keep separate numbers the same way it's sometimes necessary to keep separate google accounts. In Sweden, you can request a pre-paid SIM be sent to you in the mail[0]. To be fair, it's not entirely a "burner" SIM, as it's associated with your personnummer but it's a lot more convenient than queuing in a shop (if that's not your thing). Maybe your country has a carrier that does th…