8 ms·
The problem with Facebook
- artursapek 9y agoI can never take seriously someone explaining something in detail over a long series of tweets. What ever happened to personal websites for god's sake?
- fenwick67 9y agoThe impact is also diminished by the fact that they're complaining about the idea of a powerful social media empire on Twitter.
- Slansitartop 9y ago> The impact is also diminished by the fact that they're complaining about the idea of a powerful social media empire on Twitter. Not really, if twitter is a good platform for him to get his message out, I'm all for it. I also like the irony of using social media platforms to spread ideas that could hasten their downfall. Its sort of like in some martial arts where you exploit the weight and strength of your opponent to defeat them. If you're arguing against social media, social media reaches the exact people you most need to reach.
- beavisthegenius 9y agoNext you'll be asking for a geocities host page. Luddite.
- ihuman 9y agoLike Neocities?
- pavlov 9y agoThe advantage of a tweetstorm is that readers can like/retweet individual paragraphs. This high-granularity feedback can be surprisingly useful data to the writer.
- kristianc 9y agoOn the other hand, it encourages writers to make every individual paragraph as inflammatory as possible (I've never once read a quality newspaper article with "Let that sink in" in it), wilfully encourages paragraphs to be taken out of context, and means that 'readers' get a half-baked thought from the middle of an article dumped in their newstream. This is entirely not how media was meant to be consumed.
- sulam 9y agoLet me summarize it for you, since it's worth taking seriously: 1) Facebook has a view into the opinions and behaviors of the people that use it. Hopefully this statement is not controversial. 2) Facebook also has the ability to influence those opinions and behaviors, by controlling what you see when you use it. This statement may have been controversial at some point, but experiments have been run (by Facebook!) that demonstrate this is true. Put the two together and you have a feedback loop that can be optimized to produce a particular set of opinions and behaviors. To pick an extreme (and extremely obvious) case, if Facebook decides it needs to goose revenue, one way to do that would be to selectively filter in the posts (both ads and non-ads) that reinforce purchasing things through Facebook ads.
- scw 9y agoThis helped me: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/976563870322999296.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/976563870322999296.html
- kawfey 9y agodo they have this but for forum email? I really want my emails from forums, groups and reflectors to look and feel like reddit's threaded replies, instead it's a disorganized mess and always has been for literally 20 years.
- astalwick 9y agohttps://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976783608219279360 https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976783608219279360 He goes on to defend his work at Google, arguing that they're similar on the surface, but Facebook is truly dangerous where Google is not. I'm not sure I agree with that. Google is quite a bit more distributed across products and platforms, so Facebook has a simpler loop centered around the newsfeed. That said, Google can track a user's behaviour across nearly every website on the internet. Facebook can run these "reinforcement learning on a global scale" experiments through its newsfeed. Google, it seems to me, can run them across the web as a whole.
- Jayakumark 9y agoTracking does not seem much to be a problem, Since we all know that we are being recorded by Google and FB. Its when they use the information to Change your beliefs, Behaviour, Ideologies and Thought process it becomes a problem like the author is talking about. Google is not there yet facebook newsfeed already is.
- 908087 9y agoIt's funny because 95% of what he points out about Facebook applies equally to Google.
- petters 9y agoFacebook also tracks users across the web, isn't that what the like buttons are for?
- t3chn0SchO0lbus 9y agoThe Twitter essay is my least favorite thing about the future we live in.
- psychometry 9y agoSeriously. You can set up a blog in under a minute these days. There's no excuse.
- kawfey 9y agothe other sad reality is that on mobile, the number of people who read the tweets is arguably going to be higher than people who click to the blog, and a spam of tweets attracts attention and audience. I can't remember the study, but people are generally rather unlikely to navigate out of an app to read something, hence everything having a built in browser.
- jjrh 9y agoUnfortunately I'm betting a twitter essay gets more eyeballs than it loses.
- antisocial 9y agoI agree with everything. Going by that logic, I think we should all celebrate that Google Plus is not as successful as Facebook. But for all your concerns, Mr.Chollet, what assurances can you give us about Google being not involved in something similar?
- isthatart 9y agoFor my past use Google Plus was far better than FB or Twitter, but I have no illusions about it. Anecdata: https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/i-deleted-facebook-twitter-and-entered-the-invisible-college/ https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/i-deleted-f...
- m_ke 9y agoHe's ignoring the fact that YouTube is as bad if not worse than Facebook. They might demonetize some radical channels but they're still making money on users who get to YouTube through those channels. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html?referer=https://t.co/LLAotgmEoG?amp=1 https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube... https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-patrol.html?referer=https://www-avclub-com.cdn.ampproject.org/ https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube... https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d3w9ja/how-youtubes-algorithm-prioritizes-conspiracy-theories https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d3w9ja/how-youtubes-algo...
- mkrum 9y agoAs someone mentioned in a comment section elsewhere, "It is very easy to sacrifice another person's job."
- kough 9y agoI can't take this genre of tech/opticon commentary seriously when they remove all human agency. Reading this argument, there's an implicit judgement that (1) humans have no choice but to be influenced by Facebook, and (2) other methods of information retrieval are somehow neutral. Sure, I agree that understanding power structures is important – what a novel and interesting point /s.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoHe's not removing all human agency, just some of it. He's right, Facebook has proven that they can influence the emotional state of their users, to try and maintain a notion of complete human agency in the face of that is just wrong.
- ngngngng 9y agoI agree that there is a choice, and I think it unwise to act like there isn't. But I understand approaching the problem as the author did because we seem to be learning that most people (facebook users) really don't care if facebook influences what they see and how they think/feel. It lets them broadcast their lives and see memes, so they're happy.
- astalwick 9y agoIt's not about removing human agency. It's about nudging the aggregate views of a whole population, ever so slightly. Determine what works, reinforce that, repeat algorithmically. He's making the point that Facebook has the ability to apply machine-learning-like reinforcement algorithms to whole populations. You or I, individually, still have agency. Large populations have inertia - they're slow to move - but I'm not sure they have real defense against this kind of manipulation. I guess the real defense here is a diversity of sources (but we all know people who get all of their news from [fox | cnn | facebook | whatever]).
- jonathanyc 9y agoIf you think understanding power structures isn’t novel or interesting, it’s surprising that you think discussions like this “remove all human agency.” Agency doesn’t mean you have the freedom to do whatever, it means you are acting in your own self-interest according to the limitations of your environment and your knowledge. When we acknowledge the agency of people in early states, for example, we are saying that they are taking part in the process of state formation, often to their own benefit, and that it isn’t just one person magically creating a state. We are not saying that they aren’t to blame when they get burned at the stake by that same state because they had the “agency” to just say no.
- minikites 9y agohttps://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976784465245515776 https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976784465245515776 >Essentially nothing about the threat described applies to Google. Nor Amazon. Nor Apple. >It could apply to Twitter, in principle, but in practice it almost entirely doesn't. I don't believe this for one second. Google does the exact same "algorithmic curation" with its search results. Different people get different results based on internal profiles that Google has built: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble. Over time that shift in search result content acts upon people in exactly the same way as the Facebook example he describes.
- evc123 9y agoNah, fchollet just doesn't want pytorch to minimize keras: https://twitter.com/jekbradbury/status/976612114260357120 https://twitter.com/jekbradbury/status/976612114260357120
- fortythirteen 9y agoThe work Chollet is doing at Google is reaching an equally nefarious end. There are studies showing how manipulated search results have the same effects on perception, and YouTube is manipulating their feed in the same ways as Facebook. His analysis is correct, but this: > If you work in AI, please don't help them. Don't play their game. Don't participate in their research ecosystem. Please show some conscience is a clear cut case of the pot calling the kettle black.
- 0majors 9y agoAnd Facebook is selling these capabilities to the higest bidder regardless of their moral or ethical standing.
- spdy 9y agoFor the discussion we have to decouple that he works for Google. But he is right we are at a crossroad and the path that will be taken is clear for me. Manipulating/controlling populations is where the money will go and people will create those tools because those jobs pay well, its that simple. In the next elections we will see deepfakes videos of candidates instantly responding to problems or defaming videos will be put out were you cant judge on the spot if its real or not. The trend of echo chambers will continue as we see it right now. The only thing i can see is education if we look back at the recent history going from only a certain amount of people can who read/write or have access to books to everyone has to learn and has access to libraries. This is the next level. And on the other side we have to fight for our right of privacy and kill some business models on the way. Right now this is for me on the same scale as Atomic / Chemical Weapons.
- throwaway84742 9y agoA Google employee points out a problem with FB that’s also very much a problem with Google. That’s rich. Someone is about to receive a STFU email from HR.
- dblotsky 9y agoI think the nefariousness is overblown. I present to you, a contender: an elementary school curriculum. No AI, and way more influence over basically everything you will hold as truth for decades.
- jphalimi 9y agoIt saddens me that someone that brilliantly summarizing the problems of extensive AI-driven content organization in tech companies does not seem to understand that the company he works for suffer from the same exact problems. The real question I am having reading this thread is: is this guy being very naive, or just dishonest?
- panarky 9y agoWe’re looking at a powerful entity that builds fine-grained psychological profiles of over two billion humans, that runs large-scale behavior manipulation experiments, and that aims at developing the best AI technology the world has ever seen. Personally, it really scares me If you work in AI, please don't help them. Don't play their game. Don't participate in their research ecosystem. Please show some conscience When Facebook does something awful, their defenders rush to say "what about Google, they're even worse!" There's a lot of false equivalence in HN discussions, but these two are not in the same galaxy when it comes to abusing the privacy of their users.
- TACIXAT 9y agoThe problem with social media is that it isn't social. Telling me which article to read isn't social. Showing me someone's status isn't social. Posting a tweet and getting 2 likes is not social. Commenting on HN is probably the closest thing to social because someone might actually interact with me. If you have all this data, make my life more fulfilling. I get more community out of IRC than I do on any of the major social media sites. They are really just media sites.