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My understanding is that the original goals in the infancy, much like the rest of the internet at the time, explicitly wanted to avoid ads in favor of prioritiz
by nyxtom 9y ago
My understanding is that the original goals in the infancy, much like the rest of the internet at the time, explicitly wanted to avoid ads in favor of prioritizing user experience. Obviously the timeline shifted away from this but most of the internet moved to that. That being said, the psychological impact even without the ads is damaging enough without any sort of intention to encourage self control.
- ace_of_spades 9y agoI believe that the ads play a more central role than you give them credit for. If you are a for-profit company selling something your incentives are aligned in a specific way - you want to do everything you can to maximize sales... If you want to sell ads this means in general you want to understand and be able to target specific users because this seems to be what advertisers are interested in. So FB is designed in a way to maximize that. Now imagine you have a different org not focused on selling ads but actually trying to measure and optimize things like usefulness to the user/city/country/world. It would live in a totally different optimization landscape and look totally different (over time)! FB could be very different from what it is today if different decisions had been made!