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Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

theatlantic.com

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Re: Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

#41

Post by phalangion »

dymk wrote: post #39
wufufufu wrote: post #15

If any Facebook employees are reading this, there's a really annoying "feature" that will show a list of suggested friends to add to a private group. I've accidentally added people to private groups by accidentally clicking a single time while scrolling. Imagine being in an AA group or HIV support group and adding your coworker to it on accident. Please change this.

It's really easy to complain about this, but it's very hard to actually come up with a solution. Did you have any suggestions how cases like this could be detected?

Maybe make it a two-step process to add people to a group. Sure, show the list of friends to suggest, but make the "adding friends" page separate, so if you accidentally click, you're still a step away from adding someone.

Re: Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

#42

Post by themarkn »

dymk wrote: post #39
wufufufu wrote: post #15

If any Facebook employees are reading this, there's a really annoying "feature" that will show a list of suggested friends to add to a private group. I've accidentally added people to private groups by accidentally clicking a single time while scrolling. Imagine being in an AA group or HIV support group and adding your coworker to it on accident. Please change this.

It's really easy to complain about this, but it's very hard to actually come up with a solution. Did you have any suggestions how cases like this could be detected?

Just jumping in here, but if detecting accidental triggering of irreversible actions is a challenge, maybe the overall approach is problematic. You could, though, temporarily introduce a confirmation step and see what % of users choose to cancel rather than confirm their invitations or something like that. The chance of a random tap on a face that Facebook (not the user) chose to put on a screen seems to guarantee there will be some accidental invitations no matter what, since accidental taps happen.

Re: Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

#43

Post by teleclimber »

code_duck wrote: post #23

“For example, according to Lewis, the algorithm might keep showing a post whose question has been answered. And it might deprioritize posts from new members that don’t get much engagement—ensuring they get even less engagement in a form of algorithmic ghosting.” Essentially the flaw with facebook’s entire system of selecting posts. When I recently posted on Facebook to my 2000 friends, the only people to react were m…

The secondary effect of this is that some people post less to fb. I hate the feeling of seeing a post I made get near-zero engagement, even from close friends, because some algorithm decided it wasn't worthy. The result is I post less, and many of my friends post less, if at all. The result is FB absolutely stinks at keeping me connected to those I care about.

Re: Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

#44

Post by DINKDINK »

phalangion wrote: post #41
dymk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really easy to complain about this, but it's very hard to actually come up with a solution. Did you have any suggestions how cases like this could be detected?

Maybe make it a two-step process to add people to a group. Sure, show the list of friends to suggest, but make the "adding friends" page separate, so if you accidentally click, you're still a step away from adding someone.

Product people are going to hate that friction, just add an undo invite button

Re: Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

#45

Post by Scoundreller »

wufufufu wrote: post #15

If any Facebook employees are reading this, there's a really annoying "feature" that will show a list of suggested friends to add to a private group. I've accidentally added people to private groups by accidentally clicking a single time while scrolling. Imagine being in an AA group or HIV support group and adding your coworker to it on accident. Please change this.

Possibly FB’s algo thinks they are alcoholics or have HIV and would like the group?

Anyway, it should be easy to block that element client-side.

Re: Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

#46

Post by tokai »

village-idiot wrote: post #9

Anecdote, but it sure seems to me that the need for emotional support groups has skyrocketed within my lifetime. I’m sure all the members of these groups are legitimate (I’m not making a “snowflake” argument) but what in the hell is going on?

The rate of death by suicide have been going down since the 40s.[0] I think it is a huge mistake to interpret rising opportunities for emotional support as some mental issue epidemic. People have had it awful since the dawn of time, and I see it as a very positive sign that we are talking about it openly now.

[0]https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/39/6/1464/736597

Re: Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

#47

Post by rock_hard »

seandougall wrote: post #40
xefer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm curious: have you tried removing details from your Facebook ad preferences? On the desktop website go to: Settings | Ads | Your Interests. There is a huge ontology of various subjects that have been algorithmically assigned to you. If you remove these, I believe ads targeted to those interests should go away. I periodically just sweep them all clean so I have no interests. I get very few ads and those that I g…

It’s pretty good that they allow you to do that now, but it can’t retroactively remove those interests from the personal data they’ve already sold about you. So it fixes the smaller issue of what ads Facebook serves, but doesn’t address the larger issue of privacy.

FB doesn’t sell your data though, never has!

What they sell is the ability to target you based on it. But the data never leaves FBs servers!

So if you remove the tags from your settings, advertisers won’t be able to target you with them anymore

Re: Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

#48

Post by rock_hard »

xefer wrote: post #19
bad_user wrote: post #6

I joined a group for T2 diabetes at some point because I have a stubborn friend that doesn’t want to receive proper treatment and I basically wanted to ask about available options. Next thing I know is that Facebook started giving me ads for diabetics. Having such an influential company know about your illnesses and sell that to advertisers or healthcare insurance agencies or credit agencies or god knows what else is…

So I'm curious: have you tried removing details from your Facebook ad preferences? On the desktop website go to: Settings | Ads | Your Interests. There is a huge ontology of various subjects that have been algorithmically assigned to you. If you remove these, I believe ads targeted to those interests should go away. I periodically just sweep them all clean so I have no interests. I get very few ads and those that I g…

You can actually find out why you are seeing a particular ad bt clicking on the three dots on the upper right, there is a menu item called “why am I seeing this” which will tell you how the advertisers is targeting you.

It also gives you the ability to hide ads like that in the future

Re: Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

#49

Post by hateful »

dymk wrote: post #39
wufufufu wrote: post #15

If any Facebook employees are reading this, there's a really annoying "feature" that will show a list of suggested friends to add to a private group. I've accidentally added people to private groups by accidentally clicking a single time while scrolling. Imagine being in an AA group or HIV support group and adding your coworker to it on accident. Please change this.

It's really easy to complain about this, but it's very hard to actually come up with a solution. Did you have any suggestions how cases like this could be detected?

An option in the group settings that says "show friend suggestions in the group".

Done.

Re: Facebook Is Full of Emotional-Support Groups

#50

Post by harryh »

bad_user wrote: post #6

I joined a group for T2 diabetes at some point because I have a stubborn friend that doesn’t want to receive proper treatment and I basically wanted to ask about available options. Next thing I know is that Facebook started giving me ads for diabetics. Having such an influential company know about your illnesses and sell that to advertisers or healthcare insurance agencies or credit agencies or god knows what else is…

Showing you ads for diabetics is not the same thing as selling your information to those advertisers.

The advertisers don't get a list of the people that see their ads.

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