Facebook's employees reckon with the social network they've built • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook's employees reckon with the social network they've built

#41

Post by tomrod » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

tehjoker wrote: post #19

tomrod wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People trust the outcome generally, whether they like it or hate it. The folks aren't trusting the inputs. 2020 is not 2016. Polling is suggesting a large shift. That may cause distrust in the outcome itself if the outcome doesn't align to polling due to voter suppression efforts and other possible issues.

Just saying, only ~1/3 of the population votes. These elections are already illegitimate if you believe that they're supposed to express some kind of will of the majority. Additionally, the only areas of real contestation are suburban areas filled with reactionaries and relatively wealthy people. Dems have a lock on cities, Rs have a lock on rural areas. EDIT: Those of you downvoting, I think it's amusing that you th…

All of these presume low shifts in the Overton window, which may or may not currently hold true.

Further, 1/3 of the population voting may be "rational" (folks figure their individual votes don't sway things or are uninformed and don't care to take the time), may be due to suppression (gerrymandering, ID hurdles for non-evident potential problems), or other factors.

Re: Facebook's employees reckon with the social network they've built

#42

Post by paulgb » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #39

This long article doesnt address the most critical point. If employees have an ethical issue with working there, why don't they quit? This isn't a new dillemma. People working for tabacco companies have always been in the same boat.

> This long article doesnt address the most critical point.

> If employees have an ethical issue with working there, why don't they quit?

The article opens with a story of someone who quit.

Re: Facebook's employees reckon with the social network they've built

#43

Post by SaltyLemonZest » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #33

dr_dshiv wrote: post #20

I think the idea is we need diversity in online social media. I'd like to see human editors come back. Here's how Benjamin Franklin dealt with his social media platform: "In the conduct of my newspaper, I carefully excluded all libelling and personal abuse, which is of late years become so disgraceful to our country. Whenever I was solicited to insert anything of that kind, and the writers pleaded, as they generally…

As long as the editors are "our guys" and not any of "their guys"

On the contrary, I regularly read articles and watch videos edited by "their guys". I don't have much interest in listening to people scream on social media, but I'm genuinely happy to learn the perspectives of people who don't think the same way as me.

Re: Facebook's employees reckon with the social network they've built

#44

Post by artfulhippo » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

I loved Max Wang’s point that Facebook has chosen to focus on political engagement over social engagement. Like many people who used FB early, I remember when it was more about friends than allies (and opponents).

Facebook profits massively from the politics of outrage, and for Zuckerberg to claim that Free Speech is a moral imperative is for him to take a Strategy Credit[0]. While I strongly believe that Free Speech is a moral imperative, I don’t believe that Facebook makes decisions on a moral basis.

[0]: https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/

Re: Facebook's employees reckon with the social network they've built

#45

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

montagg wrote: post #32

Nextgrid wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other problem is that the business model of social media is based on generating "engagement" at all costs, so the platforms are built to encourage outrage as it generates lots of engagement, among other addictive behaviors (the infinite "algorithmic" feed for example). Social media was supposed to be a tool that serves people but its current business model encourages it to work against people. There were plenty o…

They certainly fostered toxic behavior. The social interactions we see on social media—even in HN from time to time—are familiar to anyone who frequented forums in the past. The ad-supported business model industrialized it, though.

My point is that in most cases it wasn't the desired behavior, just sometimes tolerated if they were high-profile users with connections with the moderation team and/or otherwise provided valuable contributions.

Re: Facebook's employees reckon with the social network they've built

#46

Post by acdha » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #18

creato wrote: post #7

I feel like all of this debate is painfully missing the point. The problem is not some content moderation policy, the problem is that social media has changed social conversations from small local interactions into monstrous virtual fight clubs between millions of people simultaneously, and where the most extreme opinions are rewarded with the most attention. Boring level headed opinions used to at least have a chanc…

The other problem is that the business model of social media is based on generating "engagement" at all costs, so the platforms are built to encourage outrage as it generates lots of engagement, among other addictive behaviors (the infinite "algorithmic" feed for example). Social media was supposed to be a tool that serves people but its current business model encourages it to work against people. There were plenty o…

> There were plenty of other technologies that could've been used to organize large-scale virtual fight clubs (forums, BBSes, chatrooms, maybe even the telephone) but this didn't happen because nobody actually wanted to foster such toxic behavior.

“Nobody” is leaving out some pretty notorious sources of toxicity (e.g. 4chan). I think a key difference is that these huge platforms dramatically increase the reach of those communities by giving them much better tools, highly-available servers, etc. and in particular mainstreaming them into the same place everyone else is, making it easier to recruit and share outside those communities.

In the forum era, people had to learn about a particular site, learn the community, maybe create an account, etc. to know these existed — now it's just one Facebook share away and there's an advanced “engagement” system ensuring that anyone who likes something widely shared will continue to see other content from the same source without needing to seek it out. Brigading was most noticeable with a wave new of new accounts and there wasn't something like an ML system making that activity drive unrelated users to see it.

Re: Facebook's employees reckon with the social network they've built

#47

Post by AlexandrB » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #22

creato wrote: post #7

I feel like all of this debate is painfully missing the point. The problem is not some content moderation policy, the problem is that social media has changed social conversations from small local interactions into monstrous virtual fight clubs between millions of people simultaneously, and where the most extreme opinions are rewarded with the most attention. Boring level headed opinions used to at least have a chanc…

> I feel like all of this debate is painfully missing the point. Your point also applies to news -- articles these days miss the point by design . You get more clicks by being provocative and hyperbolic. And yellow journalism isn't really new , but its comeback has been triumphant.

That's hardly surprising. Both social media and regular media are now part of the same competition to get more clicks. The whole model of online ad-driven content is rotten and creates the worst incentives.

Re: Facebook's employees reckon with the social network they've built

#48

Post by iamacyborg » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

creato wrote: post #7

I feel like all of this debate is painfully missing the point. The problem is not some content moderation policy, the problem is that social media has changed social conversations from small local interactions into monstrous virtual fight clubs between millions of people simultaneously, and where the most extreme opinions are rewarded with the most attention. Boring level headed opinions used to at least have a chanc…

> where the most extreme opinions are rewarded with the most attention

Which is amusing given that even here we have to deal with an upvote mechanism that boosts posts from strong extreme opinions.

Re: Facebook's employees reckon with the social network they've built

#49

Post by shostack » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

creaghpatr wrote: post #4

tech-historian wrote: post #2

> "Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook's former election ads integrity lead, said the employees’ concerns reflect her experience at the company, which she believes is on a dangerous path heading into the election. > “All of these steps are leading up to a situation where, come November, a portion of Facebook users will not trust the outcome of the election because they have been bombarded with messages on Facebook preparing the…

This is extremely predictable though, because a sizable segment of Facebook users did not trust the outcome of the 2016 election. Why would it be any different in 2020?

But wouldn't these people still exist and not trust the outcome regardless? I wonder what the media consumption of these individuals looks like beyond Facebook.

Re: Facebook's employees reckon with the social network they've built

#50

Post by jerf » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #30

Nextgrid wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other problem is that the business model of social media is based on generating "engagement" at all costs, so the platforms are built to encourage outrage as it generates lots of engagement, among other addictive behaviors (the infinite "algorithmic" feed for example). Social media was supposed to be a tool that serves people but its current business model encourages it to work against people. There were plenty o…

> nobody actually wanted to foster such toxic behavior I think no one realized you could make disgusting amounts of money by fostering it. There have been plenty of flame wars on BBSes and forums, but the tension between "engagement" and "quality" always favored the latter in small, private communities (HN is a good example). However, when it comes to Facebook and Twitter, the former is always favored (due to market…

"BBSes and forums"

Observe flamewars on BBSs and forums tended to drive people away, thus tending to confine them through natural mechanisms. Our current systems encourage and fan them, and by profiting from them, create a system that sustains them indefinitely instead of naturally isolating them to just the people who actively want to participate.

As someone who has a low-grade hobby of kind of keeping track of this sort of thing, I think one of the major challenges of trying to structure communities is all the most powerful drivers of what is going to happen occurs in these low-level decisions that create persistent second-order effects on the community's nature, and this is one of the somewhat unusual cases where the second-order effects utterly dominate the first-order effects. In this case, you can read "first-order effects" as "the things the developers intended to happen", which I think are dominated by the structural effects of decisions that aren't intentional.

If you create a community that literally profits from conflict and flamewar, you'll never be able to fix them by any number of systems you try to add to fix that via first-order effects. The underlying structure is too powerful. Facebook can't be fixed with any amount of "moderation"; the entire structure, from the very foundation, is incapable of supporting a friendly community at scale. Until Facebook stops profiting from engagement, they will never be able to fix their problems with toxicity, no matter how many resources they pour into naively fighting it via direct fixups.

(Now, I have questions about whether a friendly community of the scale of Facebook is even possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146868 . But the fact it may not even be possible does not mean that Facebook is still obviously not that solution.)