Every since I read The Circle stuff like this seems to ring true.
I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
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Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
#52I'd love to be able to hit the reset button on my FB profile, undo all the profiling they've done on me and start again. Same thing for Google. What does it look like to be a vanilla user?
You can turn off "private results" in your google search preferences. https://www.google.com/preferences
I turned off "private results" a long time ago and my results are still customized...
Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
#53Confirmation bias bubbles like a social media feed like this are atrophying the debate muscles of our society. When we don't actively participate in two-sided discussions we lose the empathy and scope of how so few things are really black and white. I wish there were more discussion venues where the quality of your participation was based on the value to the discussion, not as to whether or not you supported what tha…
You won't get anywhere by pinning the blame on the medium. Freedom of association allows birds of a feather to flock together and make sport of the other side.
People seek social groups that make them feel good and avoid ones that make them feel insecure. They especially avoid places where they are made to feel stupid. So they tend to prefer places where their beliefs are confirmed and maybe they can get away with calling someone else stupid.
What you are fighting is as natural as water flowing downhill: animals seeking comfort. You have to overwhelm gravity itself to turn the flow uphill.
There is no lack of good discussion venues. There are only too few people who prefer them. How can any such venue attract the masses out of their comfortable, partisan clubhouses?
Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
#54This article has reminded me of how astoundingly ahead of his time Andy Warhol was.
Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
#55I was thinking of a way to destroy my facebook account because you can't actually delete it, this is pretty much it, like everything. Also I guess you could check-in every where at once all the time. I didn't think about the collateral damage it could cause to others, which is to bombard your "friend's feeds". This is also interesting because, well you can destory facebook in this manner. If enough people are peeing…
That's what worries me about Facebook too, about being able to destroy someone else's experience in this way. Of course you can hide posts from users but Facebook's algorithm should be able to intervene when things get "out of control".
A few months ago Facebook shared it would rank news higher, maybe this is the result about why Huffington posts were ranked so high.
Interesting experiment. Tweaking Facebooks algorithm is an ongoing process.
Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
A VPN + Incognito should be enough. Not to truly anonymize you, but probably enough to disable the personalization layers. It doesn't make economic sense to waste engineering hours and computing time trying to show ads to the 0.0001% of paranoid users, which are likely blocking them anyway, even if the data is there. Of course, there's no such thing as the vanilla user. You'll still be targeted on generic features (l…
I don't get why people recommend VPNs so much. I never bothered to look for a free one because I didn't think it'd have a decent speed and all ports opened, but doesn't Tor basically do the job?
Free ones probably suck, but even a very cheap (<$50/year) VPN will be much faster than TOR.
Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
#57So if you like everything on Facebook, the result is political extremism and the most insipid pop culture trash. What frightens me is what if this has nothing to do with Facebook, but is instead about human nature? Does this also describe what happens to a person's life when they stop caring, when they are no longer motivated to put forth the effort to be discerning, when they give up trying to make anything but the…
"So if you like everything on Facebook, the result is political extremism and the most insipid pop culture trash."
Bear in mind that "extremism" is the expected result of any reasonable algorithm that you abuse like this. If you like X, the algorithm will focus around X. If you like everything the algorithm suggests, you'll end up liking a "bigger target", and it will start suggesting stuff yet further away from your original starting point, until eventually you've "liked" everything. This is deliberately engineering a scenario in which Facebook will feed one a set of things that all seem "extreme" on some metric or other, be it "political", "pop culture insipid", or anything else, because they are all "extremely" far away from your starting point.
You are also engineering a scenario in which you are receiving "everything", so you will end up experiencing this proportional to raw volume within the segments of the interest graph that you've transitively explored. We can't eliminate the possibility that he's missing large chunks of the graph in his transitive exploration. A massive anime fan or somebody else big into niches and staying away from politics who starts doing this may end up with a very different experience. (In fact I'd suspect that it's decent odds that why the author ended up with "extreme politics" in the first place is that he probably had a pre-existing politics seed set of likes, which then "fuzzed" into the full set of political views while not getting into niches like anime or figurine collection.)
As a story it's interesting, but I'm not sure it reveals stuff about society so much as it reveals a very fuzzy picture of the author.
Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
#58Nice. This is the post I needed to read, as I am on one-week fasting from Facebook (in fact, I am fasting from all kinds of email/group, facebook interactions). It is hard work, but much needed. I tend to believe, as humans in this age and time, we are losing our fundamental ability to delay gratification.
HN sucks more time than FB for me :/
If it makes you feel any better, the time you spend on HN is infinitely more productive. :)
Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
#59Nice. This is the post I needed to read, as I am on one-week fasting from Facebook (in fact, I am fasting from all kinds of email/group, facebook interactions). It is hard work, but much needed. I tend to believe, as humans in this age and time, we are losing our fundamental ability to delay gratification.
HN sucks more time than FB for me :/
It's a far more symbiotic relationship tho...
Re: I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
#60Could someone please put 'Liked' in the HN title in quotes so it makes grammatical sense.
As it stands, the title makes it sounds as if someone tried Facebook for two days and was happy with what they saw. (I know this is the original title, but that doesn't make it correct.)