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I'd dispute the notion that Facebook is optimizing directionlessly. It just turns out when your entire business model is "sell ads", then profitability and popu
by indigochill 9y ago
I'd dispute the notion that Facebook is optimizing directionlessly. It just turns out when your entire business model is "sell ads", then profitability and popularity become synonymous.
I'm very curious if you have a proposal for how to gauge content quality at scale. Back when I majored in journalism, "community engagement" was a massive topic. People wanted to create content that wasn't just "good" in a vacuum, but actually motivated society towards positive change. The theory went that if we reported on social issues in a certain way, perhaps we could influence society for the better. This was even the topic of my capstone project.
In the end, I became disillusioned. My observations contradicted the notion that content quality (news content in my case) matters in either a commercial or social sense when conducted at scale.
In my capstone project, some people volunteered to be interviewed about their volunteer work and their motivations. It was really interesting talking to all of them, but what I found in every case was that these people were motivated by life experiences, not media. I talked to an ex-con who had his life turned around by a books program, so he volunteered with the program when he got out. I also talked to a soccer mom who organized community events for her kids.
This was admittedly a qualitative study on personal anecdotes with a small sample set so it's not hard science. But the hypothesis that content quality is irrelevant at a mass scale seems to hold up in practice.
This also tangentially ties into a hypothesis I have on US presidential elections, which is that once it's down to two candidates, name recognition is all that matters. Every time (I'm aware of) that a president dominated the mass media of the time, he won the election. From FDR on radio to Kennedy on TV to Obama on social media and now Trump who rode on the public obsession with gossiping about every stupid thing he did or said.
Okay, rant over. I am legitimately interested, though, in any ideas for determining content quality at scale just because it seems like an interesting project.
- amoorthy 9y agoWe've written an algorithm that scores news for quality. It's a work-in-progress but you may be interested in checking out our chrome extension at http://www.civikowl.com/ http://www.civikowl.com/
- hackerfromthefu 9y agoHow do you distinguish objective quality from your own biases?
- crdoconnor 9y ago>This also tangentially ties into a hypothesis I have on US presidential elections, which is that once it's down to two candidates, name recognition is all that matters. Every time (I'm aware of) that a president dominated the mass media of the time, he won the election. From FDR on radio to Kennedy on TV to Obama on social media and now Trump who rode on the public obsession with gossiping about every stupid thing he did or said. Makes more sense than blaming Russia and Facebook.
- nickbauman 9y agoWhy would you think the two thesis cannot work together as force-multipliers? If name recognition matters, then why can't Russian troll farms influence an election by hacking what names you recognize most using Facebook?
- crdoconnor 9y agoBecause occam's razor says that the mundane reasons (terrible Democratic candidate, poor economy, Trump's name brand value) are more plausible than sinister conspiracy theories involving unimpressive ad budgets pushed by media orgs who just happen to be large DNC donors.
- uoaei 9y agoOccam's razor applied by neglecting evidence is just bad reasoning.
- crdoconnor 9y agoNot if the evidence is poor.
- walterstucco 9y agoTerrible democratic candidate translates to "she's a woman" From Europe that's what it looked like And that's what fake news and russian trolls pushed And also "she wants war" and now we're getting closer and closer to a new world war Occam says that the most simple solution should be accepted But Occam was an english monk from the 13th century He could not know that hacking the news using money power is easier than spreading a good message through a decent candidate
- dalbasal 9y agoI'm not sure, really. I assume that it would probably be mostly "theory-less" in practice. Google built ways of accessing web page quality. This seems somewhat related. pagerank? amoorthy's project seems to be citation-based. That sounds like a good start, I think. From what I hear, FB are now pretty worried about fake news and other issues relating to the last US elections. I suspect they're also going over a few other big political events where FB played a big role. After seeing it happen at home, it probably feels more real. Brexit. The Syrian protests, later civil war. ISIS. The Turkish coup attempt. FB played a bigger role than any other media in all these. I suspect what they are doing about true fake news is probably spam filtering. What I'd be interested in seeing them try is the stack overflow approach. Have a subjective opinion about what a good contribution to FB is. Design features to promote that kind of content.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoFB makes money from ad impressions. SO loses money. That's why FB is biased toward garbage engaging/enraging content.
- hackerfromthefu 9y agoQuality implies a scale (e.g. the best, at what?) So what you consider quality is probably different that what the (mode) average person considers quality. Perhaps the issue is joe sixpacs are the bulk of the bell curve. Compounding this is most people are also information-overloaded anyway and don't have time for quality. Emotional appeals and manipulation on the other hand are hard to ignore even if you don't really have the time or desire to engage with them ..