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I am all for interoperability, and personally I wait for a Facebook API to write your own news feed filters, that will open so much new possibilities. But I am
by zby 7y ago
I am all for interoperability, and personally I wait for a Facebook API to write your own news feed filters, that will open so much new possibilities. But I am afraid that, at least in the beginning, it will only make "hateful, extreme bubbles" worse, because of two things.
The first, most fundamental, is that these bubbles are created not by the business model, but by connectivity alone - we crave extreme content, and now we can get it all time because of https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood. That craving is quite similar to our craving for calories, extreme news are 'high bayesian calories' and used to be useful for quickly updating our Bayesian brains, the problem is that now the probabilities of these news are completely outside of the ranges our brain evolved around.
The second is that if the new commercial Facebook filter startups use the same advertising business model as Facebook then they will do the same engagement maximising as Facebook itself.
- vanderZwan 7y agoThe thing with APIs is that I have a feeling that companies only offer them as a way to externalize costs. They offer an API, someone else builds something with it on their platform for them. Then of course they can tweak the API to make sure only things they want on their platform are being built. Or what also happens is that they wait until a community grows around those many tools other enthusiastic people build on top of the API, and there is enough of an invested userbase that they can remove the less profitable parts bit by bit. This is why I personally think APIs are often moats in disguise.