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Tldr: the incentives that govern the platform (gamifying and monetizing attention, as well as prioritizing clicks, shares, ads, and money over quality of inform
by ams6110 8y ago
Tldr: the incentives that govern the platform (gamifying and monetizing attention, as well as prioritizing clicks, shares, ads, and money over quality of information) will largely remain the same.
- dane-pgp 8y agoThank you for the tl;dr. It makes sense that the forces applying to Facebook are largely economic ones. I wonder if someone has attempted a first-principles estimate of the cost per user of running a site with similar levels of interaction as Facebook. Ignoring costs for software development, media hosting, and moderation (none of which are trivial), would it be possible to support just basic text-based social networking with an income stream based solely on displaying unpersonalised ads (and without manipulating which content gets shown to users)? I'm imagining a federated social network, but maybe there are cost savings if you have effectively a monopoly and don't have to interoperate with other sites.
- threeseed 8y agoExcept this isn't true at all. Facebook recently changed their algorithm to deliberately focus on the quality of engagement. It had a material effect on marketers and news organisations so it was pretty significant.