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Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

wsj.com

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Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#461

Post by munificent »

fpgaminer wrote: post #299

You know what the internet needs? User agents. We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us. What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. Instead of being tuned…

The fundamental flaw is this:

The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business, they are obligated to fight against user agents or other intermediary systems.

The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enriching content from your friends and family. They want to show you ads. The good content is just a necessary evil to make you tolerate looking at ads. Every time you upload some adorable photo of your baby for your friends to ooh and aah over, you're giving Facebook free bait that they then use to trap your friends into looking at ads.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#462

Post by mrmonkeyman »

danlugo92 wrote: post #246
supernova87a wrote: post #149

I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Specifically, and more importantly, combined with the human inability to actively decide to not pay attention when things are inconsequential or not yet worth arguing about. Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the…

It's always alien when I read stuff like this. Most of my facebook feed is just memes and selfies. (I'm venezuelan) When facebook as new/trending up years ago there were some political discussions but people quickly figured out it was worthless, how come USAians haven't?

Perhaps you guys should be more engaged with politics..

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#463

Post by api »

zachware wrote: post #376
fpgaminer wrote: post #299

You know what the internet needs? User agents. We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us. What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. Instead of being tuned…

The risk is that it behaves like a reinforcement learning algorithm which essentially rewards itself by making you more predictable, I'd argue that's what curated social networks do today. If you're unpredictable you're a problem. Thus, it makes sense to slowly push you to a pole so you conform to a group's preferences and are easier to predict. A hole in my own argument is that today's networks are incentivized to d…

> So perhaps the problem isn't just the need for agents but for a proper business model where the reward isn't eyeball time as it is today.

I've been on this for years. Free is a lie, and the idea that everything has to be "free as in beer" is a huge reason so many things suck.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#464

Post by munificent »

A few years back, there was a documentary called "The Brainwashing of My Dad" about how Fox News and conservative radio turned a relatively non-political Democrat into an angry, active Republican.

In the past couple of years, I witnessed the same thing happen to my mother, except driven almost entirely by Facebook and its non-stop parade of right-wing pro-Trump racist memes.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#465

Post by SkyBelow »

devonkim wrote: post #446
fpgaminer wrote: post #299

You know what the internet needs? User agents. We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us. What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. Instead of being tuned…

I think transparency matters more. I liked Andrew Yang’s suggestion to require the recommendation algorithms of the largest social networks to be open sourced given how they can shape public discourse and advertising in all mass media is regulated to prevent outright lies from being spread by major institutions (although an individual certainly may do so).

Does that actually work? If they create some complex AI and then show us the trained model, it doesn't really give much insight into the AI doing the recommendation. You could potentially test certain articles to see if it is recommended, but reverse engineering how the AI recommends it would be far more time consuming than updating the AI. As such Facebook would just need to regularly update the AI faster than researchers can determine how it works to hide how their code works. Older versions of the AI would eventually be cracked open (as much as a large matrix of numbers representing a neural network could be), but between it being a trained model with a bunch of numbers and Facebook having a never version I think they'll be able to hide behind "oops there was a problem, but don't worry our training has made the model much better now".

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#467

Post by bufferoverflow »

fpgaminer wrote: post #299

You know what the internet needs? User agents. We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us. What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. Instead of being tuned…

> AI that read every Facebook post

I doubt FB would let you do that. It's "their" content.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#468

Post by shaan1 »

There are more than 1.5 billion users on Facebook. If they are not worried, and want to be misused, why the hell are others so hell bent on bringing down Facebook lol.

If the users really cared, we wouldn't be having this talk.

Also this is the media wanting to bring down the enemy.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#469

Post by ketzu »

abhchand wrote: post #443
fpgaminer wrote: post #299

You know what the internet needs? User agents. We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us. What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. Instead of being tuned…

I like this idea. In response to it just creating more echo chambers: - it can't be worse than now - At minimum, it's an echo chamber of your own creation instead of being manipulated by FB. There's value in that, ethically. - Giving people choice at scale means it will at least improve the situation for some people.

Isn't facebook (and reddit, and twitter) showing you posts by people companies etc. that you decided to follow? (And some ads)?

I am pretty sure things can be worse than right now, pretending like we are in some kind of hell state at the bottom of some well where it can't possibly be worse, seems unrealistic to me.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#470

Post by munificent »

supernova87a wrote: post #149

I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Specifically, and more importantly, combined with the human inability to actively decide to not pay attention when things are inconsequential or not yet worth arguing about. Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the…

> I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect.

I think everyone has a natural human need to feel that they have agency in their community. The need to feel that they participate in the culture that surrounds them and that they can have some affect on the groups that they are members in. The alternative is being a powerless pawn subject to the whims of the herd.

In the US, I think most people lost this feeling with the rise of suburbia, broadcast television, and consumer culture. There are almost no public spheres in the US, no real commons where people come together and participate. The only groups many people are "part" of are really just shows and products that they consume.

Social media tapped into that void. It gave them a place to not just hear but to speak. Or, at least, it gave them the illusion of it. But, really, since everyone wants to feel they have more agency, everyone is trying to change everyone else but no one wants to be changed. And all of this is mostly decoupled from any real mechanism for actual societal change, so it's become just angry shouting into the void.

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