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Facebook News is filled with stories too mainstream to do well on the rest of FB
- ForHackernews 6y ago> A few other things I noticed scrolling through: > There are very, very few politics stories What? This is contradicted by the list of top stories given just above! 1. “‘It’s a lot of pain’: George Floyd’s brother tearfully demands police reforms during emotional hearing” (NBC News) 2. “Jon Ossoff wins Georgia’s Democratic Senate primary” (NPR) 3. “Trump will return to campaign trail with rally in Tulsa” (New York Times) 4. “Coronavirus is making a comeback in Arizona” (NBC News) 5. “2020 is the summer of the road trip. Unless you’re black.” (New York Times) 6. “Starbucks is closing up to 400 stores in shift to takeout strategy” (CNN) 7. “Amazon bans police from using its facial recognition technology for the next year” (The Verge) 8. “J. K. Rowling doubles down in what some critics call a ‘transphobic manifesto'” (NBC News) 9. “The protests come for ‘Paw Patrol'” (The New York Times) 10. “Upcoming Nintendo Switch exclusive canceled” (ComicBook.com) 2 & 3 are explicitly political, 1, 5, 7, 8 and 9 are perhaps not about electoral politics, but still focus on hot-button political issues of the day. In what world are these "very few politics" stories?
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- Consultant32452 6y agoWar is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
- WhatIsDukkha 6y agoIn the world of people that finished the author's sentence - """There are very, very few politics stories — almost nothing about the Trump/Biden race, for instance.""" They explicitly bounded what they meant by politics.
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- ForHackernews 6y agoGrammatically "for instance" is a non-restrictive clause in that sentence. It adds information, but it doesn't narrow the meaning of what preceded it.
- surround 6y agoNumber 3 from the Facebook News list is “Trump will return to campaign trail with rally in Tulsa” Whereas the Facebook popular list has nothing explicitly about the Trump/Biden race.
- saltedonion 6y agoThe key question here is how will the recommendation engine behave. If they go down their previous path as using engagement as the sole KPI then it will be no different than news feed. To reestablish trust and shake off the regulatory scrutiny fb will need to nudge people to more mainstream content, at the detriment of engagement.
- curiousllama 6y agoThe issue is if there's two sections, one "very engaging" and one "somewhat engaging," then we won't solve anything. "Very engaging" will far outpace "somewhat engaging" because, well, that's what people want to engage with. I think you're right about the need to shift people but in order to do so, engagement is key. They should maintain engagement as the primary KPI, and instead nudge the content towards less inflammatory. Engagement is, IMO, a primary measure for if they going to be able to reestablish trust.
- jakeogh 6y agoOT-ish: There was just a political story on the FP, about a open letter from a college that starts with B. It disappeared, which makes sense considering that political stuff is strongly down rated on a tech site, so I went into /newest and went back many days looking for the [flagged] and or [dead] item, and I dont see it. So I used the search interface, but it does not show flagged or dead stories, if logged in, is it possible to have the search interface include those too?
- dec0dedab0de 6y agoYou can search and limit to the last 24 hours
- jakeogh 6y agoNo results. The story is very likely flagged or dead, I'm trying to find out of there is a query string to showdead in the search results.
- gurumeditations 6y agoSo clearly from that list, the proliferation of social media is what has led to the radicalization of the right wing.
- Jonanin 6y agoClearly? That's quite a big logical leap you took there. I don't think it's clear at all.
- Gabriel_Martin 6y agoSeems pretty clear to me. Breitbart is an official Facebook news partner last time I checked, what have you seen that contradicts what OP said?
- Touche 6y agoCorrelation != Causation
- Gabriel_Martin 6y agoNot a terribly strong argument against why hosting and platforming reactionary rightwing rags can lead to more radicalization. To quote: "Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."
- charlchi 6y agoWhite supremacist propganda and neonazi recruiting is what causes radicalization. Deplatforming those people is a good idea, yes. Unlike what leftwing youtube and a few researchers from liberal universities would like you to believe though, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Stefan Molyneux and conservative news sites are not radicalising people. There's no evidence for that.
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- austincheney 6y agoWhy on Earth should this be a surprise to anybody? Social media news is really a polite way of saying unsubstantiated rumors, gossip, and bullshit. Tabloids are higher quality stories. The new FB News is journalism, which is about as similar as TikTok videos to Harvard Law textbooks.
- gridlockd 6y ago...except all of the popular stories were from reputable journalist outlets as well. They were simply different stories from those that FB news wanted users to see.
- surround 6y agoPopular news stories on Facebook: mostly right wing. Stories on Facebook news: mostly New York Times. Does the title really fit the article?
- dr_dshiv 6y agoFacebook needs to have separate feeds for politics and news sharing vs original content and family photos. In general, being able to let people filter and control the parameters of the algorithms defining their experience.
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- Super_Jambo 6y agoWhy would they do that? Thanks to network effects they have an effective monopoly & clearly they make more money from their current user hostile design.
- angott 6y agoSure, very good idea, but it will never happen. It would lead to a dramatic drop in user engagement, and ultimately a decrease in revenue.
- dr_dshiv 6y agoWhy would it drop engagement?
- asdff 6y agoYour aunt might post a photo of their kid once a week that you take 5 seconds to see, and you only spend 5 seconds on facebook catching up on the new content for the week rather than spend 5 hours reading your aunt's crazy shared right ring news stories and debating with geriatrics in the comments section.
- saltedonion 6y agoThe reason fb wont do this is because there is so little to show on the friends and family front, it will do nothing but drive users away and solidify its market positioning as a political news reader. To pull off separate feed fb needs to fix trust so people actually posts friends and family content as much as before.
- perl4ever 6y agoYou know what's weird? I discovered that the following link shows my FB feed in chronological order: https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr I thought, oh, great, this is the key to making FB decent again. But after a while of using it, it usually shows almost nothing. Sometimes literally nothing. People are still posting stuff though that I can see with the default view. I almost think I may have triggered some sort of adversarial logic that is trying to force me to use the engagement-driven ordering. Edit: In fairness, it could be that they are hostile to uBlock origin, either deliberately or as emergent behavior. I wouldn't mind ads in principle, normal ads like you used to have in print media, but I often get ones that are very unpleasant if I don't use the blocker.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoI’m not looking for Facebook to be great, just useful enough. And I reckon I’ve got it doing that by only following people and groups that serve my interests and don’t rile me. That means I generally tried to avoid what my individual friends have to say, as it’s mostly the usual things which aren’t really worth engaging with.
- perl4ever 6y agoI find it almost unbearable the way it selects the worst of what everyone posts. I know, it's easy to blame the person and not the algorithm. But I think people underestimate how much manipulating context can warp perceptions and how vulnerable anyone who posts a fair amount is. I get to feeling almost persecuted and then I look at someone's posts in context chronologically and it seems quite normal. Just by selecting a small fraction of posts, there is an illusion of a personality that doesn't exist. Context matters so much. It's not humanly possible to overcome the effect of what you don't see other than by challenging it, going out and looking for a more representative sample.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoYeah, look, I mean, I only follow groups like specific model vehicle owners group for my local state / country and say, in my own context as an example, permaculture and mushroom identification groups, which are usually well moderate to exclude poor behaviour / encourage good behaviour. Having said that, I do see how the most divisive posts and comments get more attention. And fuck Facebook and everyone one of the individuals who work there and enable that.
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- intopieces 6y agoIs that a laughing reaction to George Floyd's brother tearfully calling for police reform? Christ Facebook is even more toxic than I thought it was.
- djaque 6y agoReading through the list of top news stories on Facebook scared me. It is clear that news can't be chosen based on engagement and that Facebook can't change. Related: Wikipedia's current events portal [1] acts like a user sourced news feed which is a pretty good representation of reality. I wonder if you could commercialize a similarly moderated aggregator. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- metrokoi 6y ago>It is clear that news can't be chosen based on engagement and that Facebook can't change. Why can't news be chosen on engagement? That's what people want to read. Must Facebook control what news people are reading? Wikipedia's current event portal may have a more even representation of what events are happening, but Wikipedia also has users that are interested in a wider range of topics. Most people mainly care about sports and politics. Scientific discoveries, economics, and international relations are simply not as interesting to as many people. Why shouldn't Facebook just have news based on engagement and a separate list with equal representation of events from many different topics?
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago>Why can't news be chosen on engagement? Because what most people engage with can't be accurately described as "news". >That's what people want to read. Must Facebook control what news people are reading? Much more likely Facebook is trying to hide from the world just how vapid and dim most of its users are.
- pfraze 6y agoTechnically we can choose news by any metric we want depending on what we want, but I'd prefer the results reflect some combination of accuracy, reputability, importance, and interest. Whatever Facebook's current algorithm is doing, it's not that. > Must Facebook control what news people are reading? No, only what news they promote to their network. I don't care if FB manual curates the list or uses an algorithm, they're involved in the design and so they're making an editorial decision here.
- mhagmajer 6y agoThis is often the case with top social media companies that they deal with a ton of content sponsorship requests.
- mhagmajer 6y agoMost of these requests I would assume would be for the most visited one - the front page
- yters 6y agoIt's funny that mainstream now means what most people don't care about.
- netsharc 6y agoWell, it's what most FB users aren't reading. My theory/hope is that they visit normal news stories outside of Facebook, so when they see the same headline on FB, they think "ah I've read that already". Meanwhile when the user sees a click-baity title on FB, they haven't heard about that on mainstream sites, so they end up clicking on it...
- seesawtron 6y agoSocial Media works by curating content that a user like and building a safe bubble around the user by showing them the content that will positively reinforce their belief systems. Thereby keeping them shielded from views that are challenging or contradictory to their belief systems. Creating a positive reinforcement loop for the user to depend on it even more.
- gentleman11 6y agoPeople still use Facebook for their news? I’ve been off it for 1-2 years and started following some local/national agencies instead. Much more level headed coverage of everything
- daodedickinson 6y agoMainstream is what works well on the rest of FB. Facebook News is the radical propaganda that the people are being snuffed out with.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoWhere people are getting their news from when left on their own: Fox, Fox NPR, NPR CNN Daily Wire Sean Hannity People NBC Newsweek Where FB Editors source stories from: NYT, NYT, NYT NBC, NBC NPR CNN The Verge Comic Book
- nexuist 6y agoThis ignores the impact of advertising and FB's advertising algorithms, which promote stories from Fox etc. onto the feeds of users who otherwise wouldn't see them. Thus I don't think you can say this is an accurate representation of what people do "when left on their own."
- divbzero 6y ago“Engagement” seems to be the key word that doesn’t appear in OP but is mentioned in many sibling comments. This metric is great for driving ad revenue but is irremediably broken for constructive social discourse.
- vxNsr 6y agoI would be blown away if Facebook wasn’t using an algorithm based on what publishers you used the most to show you news. Unless you can set up a 1000 computer clean room study with clean ips and everything and prove that they all get the same news no matter how much they go to one side first there’s no real way to know. So basically what we know is this author likes NYT and the verge
- kukx 6y agoDoes not that mean the mainstream media is no longer mainstream? It is important to get info from multiple sources including left, right, because they all have their biases diverting from the truth and often reality. You cannot simply trust that one side is presenting all the relevant facts.
- acd 6y agoI think social media is bad in the sense that sensational news gets attention. This does mot necessary mean that news that are news worthy get attention.