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Facebook seems to be taking a lot of heat these days. But I wonder: what would actually "fix" the platform? As far as I can tell, the only "solution" is getting
by rland 8y ago
Facebook seems to be taking a lot of heat these days. But I wonder: what would actually "fix" the platform? As far as I can tell, the only "solution" is getting rid of Facebook. Obviously, FB doesn't agree. Short of destroying itself (and having a competitor instantly take its place), what should they do?
What can they do?
Proposed solutions to their various problems:
- Make the timeline less addictive, to prevent people overusing it. Won't work, as soon as facebook loses its relevance another, more addictive site will take its place (reddit, instagram). In any case, they've already tried this.
- Introduce moderation, to prevent abuse of the platform. They're already frantically hiring moderators--they cannot find enough people to moderate the platform. And competitors are emerging in any case (whatsapp and other messaging apps)
- Stop collecting data on people. Not going to happen, since they rely on this for revenue. Asking them to do this is like asking someone to violate their survival instinct. This has to happen from some force external to Facebook. And in any case, people's data is valuable, so saying "stop collecting data" is like saying "don't pick up $100 that you find on the ground."
I guess I'm trying to say that this problem is so much bigger than just Facebook. It's a problem with mankind that will prove to be more and more intractable as time goes on, regardless of who is a player and who is pointing fingers.
- padobson 8y agoThey should stop selling advertising and charge for API access to the social graph, both users and app developers. There should be a free tier with the core functionality for users. This will realign Facebook's interests with the interests of their userbase.
- rland 8y agoThat would solve the problem -- but now we are back at square one, because a free competitor will emerge to replace Facebook. There are paid social networks out there. Nobody uses them.
- thekyle 8y agoI don't think this is a good solution. They would be going from metaphorically "selling" user data via ads to literally selling user data.
- QML 8y agoIs moderation on Facebook that large of a problem? I wonder if it’s possible to use the walled garden approach that Apple News does and apply that to Facebook: only distribute globally posts which have been moderated with a person. Moderation for local distribution shouldn’t be needed as people can self moderate at that level. It’ll be a two tier system. Edit: Is it also possible to have better moderation by having an upvote downvote system? That seems to be how communities like Reddit and Hackernews scale.
- rland 8y agoIt's a huge problem in non English speaking countries, like Myanmar. Overtly hateful speech remains up because Facebook cannot find enough people fluent in local languages to moderate. Much more controversially, I think it's a problem in the English speaking world as well. A lot of disinformation could be removed from the platform with human moderators and the will to enforce. But again, even if we wanted to do that, there are big unanswered moral questions.