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Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

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Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#81

Post by dan-robertson »

Marvin_Martian wrote: post #29
dan-robertson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I also find it surprising that people are shocked that Facebook have internal studies into e.g. whether instagram causes depression in teenage girls (answer: inconclusive), like they’re a bad company for investigating whether their products have negative effects on people…

Its more that people are shocked* that facebook communicated to the outside that such problems were nonexistent, despite knowing that this was a lie. *not sure wether shocked is the right term to begin with, it seemed more like indignation to me.

Did they actually know it was a lie? E.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-faceboo...

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#83

Post by MauranKilom »

MrAwesome wrote: post #71
snowwrestler wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so here it is: Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in charge of what is being reported, which is not sane. Like, imagine if your friend was slowly poisoning himself by flavoring his food with lead for a month. Even if he is honest with you about what he’s been doing, it’s still not a sane situation. If anything it’s less sane to be seemingly…

Ex-FB here. My guess is that it's primarily a combination of two factors: 1) Someone / some org was slow to notice that this was happening. 2) Bureaucratic muck slowed resolution down. Even once escalated, there would be a lot of red tape to go through to make the necessary changes to how things are ranked. The people noticing the problem most likely aren't the people able to make changes, the changes would need to b…

Ok, but all that must also be true for the change that originally created this situation. There's all this red tape and large-scale testing and then... nobody actually looks at what hits the #1 spot?

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#84

Post by addingnumbers »

MrAwesome wrote: post #71
snowwrestler wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so here it is: Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in charge of what is being reported, which is not sane. Like, imagine if your friend was slowly poisoning himself by flavoring his food with lead for a month. Even if he is honest with you about what he’s been doing, it’s still not a sane situation. If anything it’s less sane to be seemingly…

Ex-FB here. My guess is that it's primarily a combination of two factors: 1) Someone / some org was slow to notice that this was happening. 2) Bureaucratic muck slowed resolution down. Even once escalated, there would be a lot of red tape to go through to make the necessary changes to how things are ranked. The people noticing the problem most likely aren't the people able to make changes, the changes would need to b…

> Even once escalated, there would be a lot of red tape to go through to make the necessary changes to how things are ranked.

When I write a program that accidentally gradually fills a disk with garbage, I don't wait until I can redesign the program before I delete the garbage.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#85

Post by ffhhj »

I developed software for lottery and casino services, and when I read stories like this the first thing that comes to my mind is this "golden ticket winner" effect that ranking algorithms are designed to generate.

The chances of winning the lottery are so low, but whoever wins will get so much media coverage that everybody believes they can win.

I don't think it's a coincidence that "poor" content makers are on top of the transparency list, it's just the algorithm exploiting this "you can be a winner too" effect.

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#86

Post by kevinmchugh »

rconti wrote: post #27
ALittleLight wrote: post #25

A while back I was trying to get twitter followers. I experimented with a few different strategies - quick reactions to big accounts I agreed with or disagreed with, saying what I thought people wanted to hear, saying what I thought would be controversial hot takes, tweeting about everything trending, etc. I basically got no traction. I was getting low tens of thousands of impressions a month according to the twitter…

> I suspect it has the same weakness as the "follow back" strategy though. Nobody really cares about the account or connects with it or even understands what you're trying to do. These people aren't your followers so much as they are people who like small talk and coalesced around you for a time. But if the entire point is to get impressions so you can sell a product, or whatever, do you are if people don't particula…

Twitter users with 1:1 followers: following are known to be trying to get followers and aren't actually reading posts from those users. It's all circular, a bunch of people juicing each other's follower stats.

They use lists or separate accounts to read the accounts they care about. They have bad engagement on their posts

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#87

Post by seltzered_ »

hirundo wrote: post #5

"Facebook flipped a switch, favoring comments and reactions over shares, and suddenly a food blogger from Utah became the largest publisher in the country, if not the world." While the firehose volume is disproportionate, the direction wasn't random. Whoever is copywriting these messages is an artist, drawing an outstanding number of responses. I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself.…

not trying to make a conspiracy theory, but the Utah association is interesting considering how many lifestyle influencers are supposedly Mormon : https://twitter.com/Karnythia/status/1442840097032921088

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#88

Post by deathanatos »

erulabs wrote: post #30
deathanatos wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself. You feel an urge to react at bizarro twilight zone non-sequitur text posts? I'm sitting here trying to fathom why millions of people would even react to something like that. Like… what was "thumbs up" worthy in any of those?

I mean, you must see the primal appeal - essentially the posts are "haha, who else does {{COMMON_THING}}?!". Millions of people want other people to know they too are just like them. Facebook's algorithm is optimized for engagement - but people aren't desperate to engage - they are desperate to be engaged with .

> I mean, you must see the primal appeal - essentially the posts are "haha, who else does {{COMMON_THING}}?!"

No, and I feel like I'm explaining to the AI what human behavior looks like here. Yes, the sort of meme discussion you quote is fairly common, but it's not just "common thing", it's some sort of shared experience that's probably private; you're not sure if everyone else experiences it, but saying you experience it might sound weird to others, and the (usually unneeded) thoughts of potential embarrassment maybe prevents you from doing so. Until someone does, in such a post, and yeah, those take off as the day's lucky 10000 are all sighing a collective "I'm not weird!" sigh of relief. Eye floaters come to mind as an example.

But … that's not the case here. "Who the heck sleeps with a Fan (sic) and AC on?". Heck, that odd capitalization just makes it even more uncanny valley. Like Zuckerberg really is a robot, and he's just tried a new social subroutine out on me.

Who the heck eats Food?

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#89

Post by aierou »

xmprt wrote: post #78
dan-robertson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I also find it surprising that people are shocked that Facebook have internal studies into e.g. whether instagram causes depression in teenage girls (answer: inconclusive), like they’re a bad company for investigating whether their products have negative effects on people…

The shock is that someone at Meta looked into these studies and decided not to take actions to fix it because it might hurt their revenue.

We are told again and again that correlation is not causation, but we readily ignore this maxim when we are looking for an account that we hope is true. At a time when Facebook is regularly vilified (sometimes deservedly), wanting to believe that its practices have caused teenagers’ mental health to suffer is understandable. But wanting doesn’t make it so.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-faceboo...

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#90

Post by Traster »

jedimastert wrote: post #34
Traster wrote: post #28

I can't help but think it's not a coincidence that Facebook decides to produce a content report that lists the top 20 most viewed items and it just so happens that the top 20 items are inexplicably spam. Either facebook is enitrely dominated by spam (possible) or facebook figured out they could just boost a few items to make sure anything embarassing doens't make the short list.

I mean, at that point they could just drop stuff off of the list they didn't like. Does anyone have independently verifiable data to compare against?

They link to the page - so if someone can say "Hold on, page X only has N likes/shares, page Y has >N likes/shares!" they'd have problems.
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