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>There's a need for longform journalism, synthesis of information, bias and persuasion. What? It's important that Facebook curates biased information and inten

>There's a need for longform journalism, synthesis of information, bias and persuasion. What? It's important that Facebook curates biased information and intentionally persuasive content for you because you're otherwise unwilling/unable to seek that out yourself? I may have misread this entirely, but I'm pretty sure you can find RSS feeds for most news sources outside of AP/Reuters. Whatever content you'd prefer with any sort political or ideological slant you'd like is freely available outside of Facebook by definition. If RSS isn't available for Breitbart or Daily Beast or KCNA or Patribotics or whatever, surely there must be an easy way to consume that outside of the Facebook platform?

basch 6y ago
I absolutely said biased and opinionated journalism is important. On one hand, you can have a story that says "3 people cut their grass today" and on the other hand you can have a story that says "3 people cut their grass today, their reason for doing so, and why you should join them in grass cutting unity." The latter is much more important to a functioning democracy than the former. The crucial part you missed is: >It's hard to consume just that without also consuming the daily noise. RSS is filled with noise. It's filled with stories that are stories because space needed to be filled, that capture your attention for the sake of capturing your attention, not to educate you on things you "need to know." The whole point of something like Facebook's algorithm is to identify a signal from noise. It is very hard to consume the news without consuming noise, and that is an opportunity for Facebook to actually do something morally right (as opposed to agnostic) and identify what is important for people to learn. That by definition is going to involve a level of bias. Its going to involve them going against everything they believe in, NOT using engagement data to rank content, something I dont think their organization is really capable of. Drudge tells you "heres what important to know for the day." Techmeme tells you "heres what important to know for the day." Wikipedia Current Events tells you "heres what important to know for the day." Reddit and Facebook tell you "heres what the most people with short attention spans clicked on today." The world needs better aggregation of important stories.

basch 6y ago

I absolutely said biased and opinionated journalism is important. On one hand, you can have a story that says "3 people cut their grass today" and on the other hand you can have a story that says "3 people cut their grass today, their reason for doing so, and why you should join them in grass cutting unity." The latter is much more important to a functioning democracy than the former. The crucial part you missed is: >It's hard to consume just that without also consuming the daily noise. RSS is filled with noise. It's filled with stories that are stories because space needed to be filled, that capture your attention for the sake of capturing your attention, not to educate you on things you "need to know." The whole point of something like Facebook's algorithm is to identify a signal from noise. It is very hard to consume the news without consuming noise, and that is an opportunity for Facebook to actually do something morally right (as opposed to agnostic) and identify what is important for people to learn. That by definition is going to involve a level of bias. Its going to involve them going against everything they believe in, NOT using engagement data to rank content, something I dont think their organization is really capable of. Drudge tells you "heres what important to know for the day." Techmeme tells you "heres what important to know for the day." Wikipedia Current Events tells you "heres what important to know for the day." Reddit and Facebook tell you "heres what the most people with short attention spans clicked on today." The world needs better aggregation of important stories.