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Facebook is cooked

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Re: Facebook is cooked

#751

Post by cruffle_duffle »

jamincan wrote: post #737
decimalenough wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out. No, it gets dumped on pretty much everybody. My Insta consists of travel and food pictures, and the people I follow are friends IRL and a very few travel/food influencers. So my feed consists of friends, travel/food content, dirty jokes thanks to my buddy who keeps sending them, and an ever increasing proportion of ads. But both my "sugges…

I find Facebook and Instagram are both completely polluted by that type of content. Facebook used to be trying to feed me right-wing rage bait and I think actively blocking finally cleared my feed of most of it and now it's all thirst-trap stuff. At least it's figured out I'm gay compared to Instagram.

“right-wing rage bait”

Assuming you mean crap like “school book bans”, climate change denialism, or some dude coal rolling… You realize that is actually bait targeted at you specifically right? It wouldn’t work as bait if it was shit you agreed with! It’s actually left-wing rage bait!

If you were immersed in the “right wing echo chamber” your flavor of rage bait would be about a school introducing a neutral bathroom policy, or some college student struggling to define what a woman is. Every Christmas you’d see articles about cities banning Christmas lights in town hall and Starbucks no longer using Christmas themed cups. It’s all fucking made up nonsense. No real human acts the way these algorithms portray us.

Honestly even ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ are part of the trick. Real people don’t exist on a binary axis. We’re all a weird mess of values and experiences that don’t fit neatly into two boxes. But the algorithm needs two teams, because you can’t sell outrage without an enemy.

The first step to detox is seeing everyone as human not as a contrived label.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#752

Post by davecrawley »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #566
bjt wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation and recommendation are not the same thing.

When you have a feed with a million posts in it, they are. There is no practical difference between removing something and putting it on page 5000 where no one will ever see it, or from the other side, moderating away everything you wouldn't recommend. Likewise, if you have a feed at all, it has to be in some order. Should it show everyone's posts or only people you follow? Should it show posts by popularity or somet…

Early days facebook was simple: 1) You saw posts from all people you were connected to on the platform. 2) In the reverse order they were posted.

I can tell you it was a real p**r when they decided to do an algorithmic recommendation engine - as the experience became way worse. Before I could follow what my buddies were doing, as soon as they made this change the feed became garbage.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#753

Post by fullshark »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #718

Reading through these comments, I really miss Reddit's old default homepage. Sure, you could have your own curated feed, but there was also r/all and everyone seemed to use it, so everyone saw relatively the same thing. It would sadly never work today, but it was great back then.

This sounds like you miss the sense of community reddit used to have, I don't think that would have lasted forever, we were all so naive re: social media 10+ years ago.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#754

Post by ZeroGravitas »

blibble wrote: post #454
javascriptfan69 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely think we will look back at the algorithmic content feed as being on par with leaded gasoline or cigarettes in terms of societal harm. Maybe worse since it is engineered to be as addictive as possible down to an individual level. Then again maybe I'm being too optimistic that it will be fixed before it destroys us.

I think it's worse, cigarettes never threatened democracy the solution is real easy, section 230 should not apply if there's an recommendation algorithm involved treat the company as a traditional publisher because they are, they're editorialising by selecting the content vs, say, the old style facebook wall (a raw feed from user's friends), which should qualify for section 230

You can draw a fairly clear line from the corporate response to cigarettes being regulated through to the strategy for climate change and social media/crypto etc.

The Republicans are basically a coalition of corporate interests that want to get you addicted to stuff that will make you poor and unhealthy, and underling any collective attempt to help.

The previous vice-president claimed cigarettes don't give you cancer and the current president thinks wind turbine and the health problems caused by asbestos are both hoaxes. This is not a coincidence.

The two big times the Supreme Court flexed their powers were to shut down cigarette regulation by the FDA and Obama's Clean Power plan. Again, not a coincidence.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#755

Post by quantified »

shirro wrote: post #336

The algorithm has been given a job todo. First priority on any platform is engagement and a well functioning, complete human being is not going to be engaged by rage bait and hate. They are rare, precious jewels. The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out. It is relentless and escalates until their brains cook. Algorithmic social media is a massive social harm. The people who are in d…

And yet the algorithm has spent the last 3 or more weeks pumping MAGA, county and state Republican party, conservative Christian pages. There's a hand on the dials of "the algorithm"

Re: Facebook is cooked

#757

Post by slibhb »

jedberg wrote: post #204

> So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm? No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago. Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and had the same feed.…

Is it because "Meta identifies you as a male" or because men look longer at sexy pictures of women? I assume Meta has some heuristic to determine how long you look at items in their feed even if you don't click anything.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#758

Post by steve_adams_86 »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #699
grishka wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. What if you're gay though. They have to be able to detect that somehow too

Probably still a relatively small percentage of the total for them to care.

My understanding is that it's likely somewhere around 7.5% for men and women. Including bisexual people brings it closer to 10%. That's based on self-reporting, I think. I'm not sure how significant that would be in Meta's world.

Among men this would only be 3 or 4%. Probably not that significant given how coarse the strategy itself is.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#759

Post by gcanyon »

jedberg wrote: post #204

> So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm? No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago. Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and had the same feed.…

Facebook knows I'm male, and I see things like this very rarely -- on the order of one or two a month. Maybe that's FB ('s algorithm) testing my "defenses": they/it show me something like that as an experiment, and if I ever clicked on it, the floodgates would open.

But I don't, so it doesn't. Or maybe FB knows I'm happily married and that won't work on me in the first place.

Or maybe FB knows I'm a sucker for chess and go puzzles, so they're my equivalent of this?

Re: Facebook is cooked

#760

Post by BorisMelnik »

mbo wrote: post #202

My mother is an international flight attendant in her 60s. I recently caught a glimpse of her Facebook and I was shocked to discover a version of the website that seemed to be the platonic ideal of exactly what all the Facebook PMs intended. Her feed was filled with the photos of her friends and coworkers international trips and holidays, posts in groups for planning activities in her most frequented cities. But I di…

came here to say this also...also on mobile there is a feed that only shows your friends, no "algo." my parents are both on FB and pretty much only interact with their freinds. it is quit beautiful.
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