Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

> Which is it, guys? How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that it isn’t actively molding user behavior on a massive scale?

Perhaps because it's not the same people in the two different cases? HN is a pretty diverse bunch at this point; I'm sure there are a lot of people here who want FB to be a disinterested publisher, and others who want FB to curate like mad.

> Anecdotally of course, as one of those tech-folks who's got nothing against good and relevant ads.

Be careful what you wish for. This TED talk[0] on persuasion architectures brings up some interesting moral arguments against this idea. If we generally accept that ad conversion is a metric of an ad's success, how do we handle the situation where people that are susceptible to addictive behaviors like gambling and compulsive shopping are exposed to ads that exploit their condition? Data-driven advertising systems are built particularly well to find and exploit these kinds of people. We already see this a lot in the scam call/email world. Once you fall for one, the amount of inbound traffic you receive from scammers increases dramatically.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI&t=872s

It’s hard to tell why automated feeds are treated differently to manual feeds. If a blogger repeated a libellous claim, they could be sued, even if their primary activity was curating other people’s opinions. Why companies that run algorithms that do the same thing at scale get a free pass is hard to fathom. These aren’t dumb pipes, but carefully programmed algorithms, tweaked for generating maximum engagement.

I would suggest that any service that provided a curated feed of content pushed to users, should be treated as a publisher and held liable for the content it promotes. Importantly, “curation” would include spam filtering.

Google News, Facebook and Twitter would all be deemed publishers under this rule. Search engines wouldn’t.

It would probably kill their business models, but that could well be a net gain for humanity.

> This presupposes some kind of universal value function.

Yes: "a majority of HN readers of this comment found it useful / not useful". That's the best you're going to get.

But for the most part, it does actually work. If 80% of people on the site agree that a comment is useful, that's good enough; it's unreasonable to expect any evaluation of subjective matters to be universal.

And that's why moderators will step in and do some manual tweaking if things get very divisive. If that 80% number (that I made up) drops too low, getting too close to 50%, then that means that the discussion just isn't likely to be productive. HN is not a homogeneous group, and sometimes the there isn't a clear majority in agreement.

> Here's what I'll say though about modern forums: they fixed a system that wasn't broken as far as discourse goes. When I was in high school the were forums where responses were ordered in time rather than by popularity

I don't agree with this.

One reason is the lack of threading. phpBB and its contemporaries just had a list of posts, and all replies linearly under each post link. Digging through for the bits you actually care about was a huge pain in the ass, and it's one of the reasons why I never enjoyed fora like that.

The other reason is just scale. I'm not sure how old you are, but I was in HS in the late 90s. Back then the internet was much smaller, not as commercialized, and people generally behaved decently well toward each other. We didn't have the spambots we do today, and every forum site wasn't under constant attack by people who want to destroy online communities just for fun. I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was a lot easier to manage communities back then and keep discourse civil and on-topic, with very few automated tools at hand.

These days it's pretty much impossible to create high quality discussions at any scale without a ranking system. Sure, you see smaller communities of a few hundred, maybe even a thousand, people where these things work sorta like they did 20+ years ago (but I guarantee you the board itself is doing a ton of automated spam filtering to get you there).

HN has... what? Tens of thousands, or likely more than a hundred thousand users. If you enabled showdead in your profile page, you'll see a lot of garbage that gets through the automated filters and ends up flagged out of existence. And even regardless of that, with a community this size, you're going to have enough disagreement on the fundamentals of any complex topic that you're going to get a ton of disagreement. Voting and flagging is far from perfect, but it can help it from devolving into a cesspool of low-effort comments and outright name-calling.

> I'd start with treating users as partners, and not cattle.

What does this mean in practice? How do you treat 2.6 billion people as partners?