31–40 of 152 posts
"The Algorithm" or "Its Zuckerberg's fault" etc are all simplistic, comforting narratives to distract from the horrifying truth. The Clickfarm bots and fake account NPCs have collectively achieved an emergent intelligence. We humans aren't the majority of our social networks anymore, and we don't have any idea what it is the bots are pushing for. The people we want to hold accountable for this mess are being run over…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When corporations hide facts we call them immoral, and when they publish the facts we are scratching our heads? Facebook does a lot of internal research which to me seems to be coming from a good place. Doing that research carries a lot of risk for them; e.g. the recent 'whistleblowers' mainly leaked that exact research reports. But instead of giving Facebook credit for even doing that, we always take a negative appr…
Yeah I also find it surprising that people are shocked that Facebook have internal studies into e.g. whether instagram causes depression in teenage girls (answer: inconclusive), like they’re a bad company for investigating whether their products have negative effects on people…
A while back I was trying to get twitter followers. I experimented with a few different strategies - quick reactions to big accounts I agreed with or disagreed with, saying what I thought people wanted to hear, saying what I thought would be controversial hot takes, tweeting about everything trending, etc. I basically got no traction. I was getting low tens of thousands of impressions a month according to the twitter…
This is exactly what my teenage cousins used to do (maybe not twitter maybe snaphat?) but with one tweak- they'd go through following people, and then once they'd followed they unfollow them again so now it looked like they were following you but you weren't following them back.
I can't help but think it's not a coincidence that Facebook decides to produce a content report that lists the top 20 most viewed items and it just so happens that the top 20 items are inexplicably spam. Either facebook is enitrely dominated by spam (possible) or facebook figured out they could just boost a few items to make sure anything embarassing doens't make the short list.
I greatly enjoyed this sentence: > The one mystery we weren’t able to figure out is why any sane person working at Facebook would feel comfortable publishing a content report that admitted that the most viral publisher on its platform this year was a barely active drop-shipping scam page full of stolen video content run by an LLC that doesn’t even exist anymore.
Well, perhaps whoever generated this report was simply reporting the truth and not trying to fabricate or distort the truth in order to make Facebook look better? The fact that the author of the linked article apparently just presumes that they would do so and "[can't] figure out" why they wouldn't says a lot about their own integrity.
I greatly enjoyed this sentence: > The one mystery we weren’t able to figure out is why any sane person working at Facebook would feel comfortable publishing a content report that admitted that the most viral publisher on its platform this year was a barely active drop-shipping scam page full of stolen video content run by an LLC that doesn’t even exist anymore.
Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so here it is: Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in charge of what is being reported, which is not sane. Like, imagine if your friend was slowly poisoning himself by flavoring his food with lead for a month. Even if he is honest with you about what he’s been doing, it’s still not a sane situation. If anything it’s less sane to be seemingly…
Did a bit of sprucing up the page, dropped a few links, and it did get on the front page for a few months, with AdSense paying me several thousands dollars a month while it lasted. The page itself wasn't a scam per se, but it was roughly 1000 medium-effort words on the topic I wrote in a day, along with a few original photos that took another day, and a couple of inline AdSense ads.
It didn't deserve to be on the first page of results. I guess the "kingmaker" thing still exists where big tech decides who today's winner is, and doesn't always get it right.
I greatly enjoyed this sentence: > The one mystery we weren’t able to figure out is why any sane person working at Facebook would feel comfortable publishing a content report that admitted that the most viral publisher on its platform this year was a barely active drop-shipping scam page full of stolen video content run by an LLC that doesn’t even exist anymore.
Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so here it is: Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in charge of what is being reported, which is not sane. Like, imagine if your friend was slowly poisoning himself by flavoring his food with lead for a month. Even if he is honest with you about what he’s been doing, it’s still not a sane situation. If anything it’s less sane to be seemingly…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so here it is: Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in charge of what is being reported, which is not sane. Like, imagine if your friend was slowly poisoning himself by flavoring his food with lead for a month. Even if he is honest with you about what he’s been doing, it’s still not a sane situation. If anything it’s less sane to be seemingly…
It's more complicated than that. Facebook is a company. People in different parts of the company do different things, have different motivations, etc. One cannot look at a large organization as an individual. I tried to come up with a more apt analogy... but analogies are awful here.