51–60 of 239 posts
This is a frankly awful idea. I do not want Facebook acting as some sort of arbiter of what information is truthful. The cure is worse than the disease.
This is worse than that. Imagine your Trump-supporting extended family voting down CNN news stories as "not credible." Expect mass brigading by The_Donald.
It is a randomised sample of their user base. It will not be possible for any group to gain an advantage.
> “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, wrote in a post on Friday. “We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.” Is this truly ignorance or is it malice?
It's arrogance. Zuck wants to be in control of which sources are seen as trustworthy and which are not, but he doesn't want to actually be on the hook for making these decisions. So he implements a faux-democratic facade, and gets to make the actual calls behind the scenes by tweaking algorithms. He wants to have his cake and eat it too.
They legally, morally and ethically have the right to determine what content their users see. Especially given that we have demonstrated evidence of fake news being disseminated.
The idea that this was supposed to be a democratic process was never claimed nor should it have been expected.
This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these number…
I agree with you, but I'm sure they will never remove those metrics. You might like the extension Facebook Demetricator: http://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator/ Personally I block the entire news feed with uBlock Origin which has made my experience of Facebook tolerable.
Social media is a game and the score is whatever metric is shown. You want to most points for yourself and you only want to participate in popular content in the hopes it will earn you more points.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes absolutely no sense to me. For almost all stories you can work out its popularity just by the number of comments. And you can determine the comment count (-/+ an order of magnitude) just by scrolling through the comments. The accurate number isn't important for most people. None of this will prevent the dissemination of fake news. What will do is (a) not prioritising it and (b) detecting whether it's fake.…
Remove the number of comments. People comment on stories with the most comments and usually reply to the first set of posts because they want their post to be seen, accelerating commenting in that thread. If you want to count comments fine. Most people won’t. FB actually makes this hard to do. Would be fascinating to even try it here on HN. If you hit all the integer counters it would dramatically change the way peop…
Go ahead remove the number of comments. It won't solve the problem Facebook is trying to solve.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is worse than that. Imagine your Bernie-supporting extended family voting down Fox news stories as "not credible." Expect mass brigading by /r/politics.
yeah only one side routinely falls for russian propaganda, downright lies and breitbart.
http://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/examining-trolls-polar...
This matches similar research I saw in the last few days on some other political topic (can’t remember which) were some of the most important and active tweeters were Russian on both sides.
Russia wasn’t trying to get Trump elected (though they HATED Clinton). They were trying to get America to fight with itself and sew division. They did a really good job.
This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these number…
I can't see why that would help.
Remove the counts and people have no external validation for the legitimacy of a piece of content. They actually have to read it. What we have now is a system where someone sees a headline, “Proof Obama birth certificate fake!” With 100k like and 10k comments and they don’t even read it and just comment, “I knew it!”
When you pick up a newspaper you have to actually read it. You can’t just look at the headline and see how many people agree with it before you can form any kind of opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remove the number of comments. People comment on stories with the most comments and usually reply to the first set of posts because they want their post to be seen, accelerating commenting in that thread. If you want to count comments fine. Most people won’t. FB actually makes this hard to do. Would be fascinating to even try it here on HN. If you hit all the integer counters it would dramatically change the way peop…
I just went to a popular article by the New York Times on Facebook. Just by scrolling down through the pages of comments I could determine that it was likely to be a popular article. Go ahead remove the number of comments. It won't solve the problem Facebook is trying to solve.
You would, of course, have to combine this with not just showing it to people who already hold those opinions.
This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these number…
I agree with you, but I'm sure they will never remove those metrics. You might like the extension Facebook Demetricator: http://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator/ Personally I block the entire news feed with uBlock Origin which has made my experience of Facebook tolerable.
I am seriously considering a year without adblock and going out of my way to click as many ads as possible. Blocking is ineffective, it's time to fuck over the metrics
This is a frankly awful idea. I do not want Facebook acting as some sort of arbiter of what information is truthful. The cure is worse than the disease.
This is worse than that. Imagine your Trump-supporting extended family voting down CNN news stories as "not credible." Expect mass brigading by The_Donald.