8 ms·

None of this would be important if social media gave us what they originally sold us: See updates from your friends, family, and people you want to see updates

None of this would be important if social media gave us what they originally sold us: See updates from your friends, family, and people you want to see updates from, in chronological order, rather than based upon weird engagement algorithms and privacy-destroying ad networks.

save_ferris 6y ago
If only Facebook chose to make less money... Seriously though, their choices to run the platform the way they have were fundamentally shaped by profit and the stock market. The type of corporate moderation you’re suggesting doesn’t exist.
- MaysonL 6y ago
  Well – Craigslist and Wikipedia come to mind as counter-examples but it is rare.
  - danbmil99 6y ago
    Just for the record, Craigslist is a for-profit company and makes quite a lot of money. Very different from Wikipedia
    - m463 6y ago
      > Craigslist is a for-profit company and makes quite a lot of money. I thought they just made a modest amount of money. However I believe their benefit to society is significantly higher than fb just because of R number 2. (of "reduce, reuse, recycle")
      - save_ferris 6y ago
        They grossed $694M in 2016, according to Wikipedia[0]. I think Craigslist benefits from a transparent business model that doesn’t rely on capturing and manipulating consumer data. They charge for job ads, which is a pretty straightforward model. Contrast that with the miasmic, tailored advertising business that Facebook has created. Craigslist isn’t necessarily leaving money on the table, they just operate a more transparent business that’s more closely aligned with the public good. It’s still not realistic to expect companies to not try to maximize their earnings potential, that’s like asking your favorite football team to score fewer touchdowns. Facebook as a business is fundamentally misaligned with the public good. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist
        duskwuff 6y ago
        They charge for a couple other things, FWIW, but it's mostly commercial postings and certain other big-ticket listings (cars, real estate, services). https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees
  - geofft 6y ago
    Yeah, I think that saying that people are forced to optimize for profit and harm society in the process diminishes their personal agency. Even if you're starting a new venture, you have a lot of choice in how you do it. Wikipedia and Craigslist are great examples. Craigslist is for-profit, and Wikipedia was originally a project of Bomis, a "web portal" (those words meant things 20 years ago) that tried various things to be profitable and had a good amount of success with softcore pornography. Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying, "You know the press has this idea that I am a porn king. I really wasn't a king of anything, frankly, you know? Because at the time, when we looked at it, we were just like, 'Okay, well, this is what our customers will want, let's follow this.'" And even he, the guy peddling pictures of naked women on the internet because it's what his customers supposedly wanted, ended up spinning off Wikipedia as a non-profit and winding down Bomis. When you decide to make a company that values profits above all else, it's a choice. You cannot attribute the moral impact of that decision to the invisible hand of the market - the invisible hand cannot reach out and grab things that weren't given to it.
    - newen 6y ago
      This is like a tragedy of the commons situation where there are massive, life changing incentives for people to break the commons. You can’t run a society where you hope that all individuals will be good.
Consultant32452 6y ago
Why would they give up control of the world by doing something silly like that? Think about how much political influence Twitter has based solely on which tweets they show the President and corporate press. Consider how much untraced in-kind donations these companies can make by tweaking which news stories you see. The crazy thing about it is these things can be tweaked by humans, but it's largely controlled by AI now, which no one person will completely understand what's happening in any of these systems. We're in the early stages of AI controlling the global political future and it will tend to create whatever kind of future generates the most clicks. It's kind of like the game Universal Paperclips, except with clicks/rage/ads.
- throwaway13337 6y ago
  This needs to be more understood by the population. Our world-destroying-AI paperclip maximizer is here. It's called a "news feed". The thing that gets the most clicks is outrage, as the AI has discovered. We're setting people against each-other in a more and more efficient fashion. The result has been clear since the Arab Spring. Good things don't come from helping people hate each-other in the most efficient way possible. Banning AI-driven-click-maximizing news feeds would be a healthy start. Right now, they're doing serious damage to our world.
  - meowface 6y ago
    We are, but the blame has to be shared, too. In many cases the algorithm is being reinforced by your and everyone's actions. It may not even necessarily be specifically trying to prioritize polarizing content: that just might be the content you engage with the most, and the algorithm blindly follows your whims and preference. I've used YouTube for many hours per day for several years. I've almost never seen a single thing appear on my home page that was polarizing or even clickbaity. The very rare times I do (always after I watch something that's kind of adjacent), I just click "Not interested" and I never see it or anything like it again. It's done a pretty good job of predicting what I would and wouldn't be interested in. Same with Twitter. I just unfollow anyone I find tweeting polarizing or charged things. My Twitter feed looks pretty close to the HN front page. Many people crave these things, whether they want to or even realize it. I think it's going to be this way for a very long time.
skybrian 6y ago
Blaming viral content on bad algorithms is naive. All that’s needed for fake content to spread everywhere unchecked are a few bad actors, group messages, and forwarding (the reshare button). In some cases this results in genocide [1]. No fancy algorithms are necessary to get exponential spread of rumors. Friends and family will spread any memes that confirm their biases themselves. To prevent this from happening, it has to be actively suppressed, or at least there needs to be something slowing it down so it dies off. A hands-off attitude isn’t going to do it. [1] https://gizmodo.com/facebook-still-working-on-the-whole-genocide-thing-1835734695 https://gizmodo.com/facebook-still-working-on-the-whole-geno...
- cageface 6y ago
  I think this is a good point. Recommendation algorithms exacerbate the problem but they're not the whole story. I don't see how you solve this problem without eliminating the virality that's at the heart of these platforms' profitability. They have a strong vested interest in not fixing it.
hash872 6y ago
What I've long wondered is- would it really be that hard/expensive to build an open source social media alternative that does exactly that? Updates & photos from friends & family, in chronological order, and little else. Social media has been around for a while now, I have to imagine that most of the hard problems around a customized feed and so on have been solved. Probably some idealistic ex-FB and IG engineers would join on, so we'd have their domain expertise. I bet some prominent, wealthy anti-FB types could kick in some seed money to get it off the ground. It could be set up as a non-profit, B corp or foundation of some sort.... You could run non-targeted display ads for brand advertising to help cover costs, with the added lure for advertisers that the site would be brand-friendly because it's non-controversial. Of course it wouldn't have sophisticated features like photo tagging and such, and probably wouldn't be Hip And Cool for Gen Z, but it could be a functional bare-bones Facebook replacement. You'd have probably have to disable virality features, and maybe linking to external news sites just to prevent your racist uncle from posting Breitbart links, I don't know. Would that really be so hard? Or do the servers, hosting, security and moderation costs just scale exponentially after some threshold of say 10 million users or what have you? Supposedly Instagram was running with a very small team when Facebook acquired them
- Clubber 6y ago
  Building the app is trivial, building the network of users is the hard part.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    The users are already fragmented and / or using multiple social networking platforms / apps. Maybe you only need to have some tiny fraction on board to make it worth the effort?
- ByteJockey 6y ago
  Based on a quick glance at the fediverse sites, I think you're looking for friendica. Link for the curious: https://friendi.ca/ https://friendi.ca/
- amelius 6y ago
stiglitz 6y ago
They didn’t sell it to you, is the thing.
actuator 6y ago
I think recommended order has its own place. If I go to a social media platform after a week and my friends have posted about 200 posts since then, will I be interested in every post equally? Isn't it better to give me what I will probably like at the top part of the list.
toeget 6y ago
This is exactly what I'm getting from twitter. My feed are the latest updates shared by the people I follow. I don't see clickbait, I don't see outrage, I have a curated feed aligned with my interests. It's true that about once in a couple of months Twitter decides to switch the order of tweets from the latest to the most recommended, but that's easily fixed in two clicks. The moment twitter removes the option to see the feed in chronological order is the moment I delete twitter.
sriku 6y ago
On a slight tangent ... the one thing about HN that lets me breathe is that the links that turn up are the same for everyone on the planet and is not "personalized". If it were, I'd be gone in a jiffy. Maybe we should rename "personalization" to something with a -ve connotation - perhaps "bubblification"? "narcissization"? "comfortzoned"?
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  Spoonification
  - sriku 6y ago
    Ah yes! Let's just call it the "spoon feed".
- tareqak 6y ago
  Snowflakified
- rapnie 6y ago
  "Sheepified"
RandallBrown 6y ago
Facebook had this but everyone decided to friend every person they ever came into contact with, leading to an unmanageable stream of nonsense. Then they introduced the algorithmic feed and it became more manageable. I personally was fine curating my feed and only friending people I wanted to follow, but that's just not how it came to work socially and culturally.
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
If people were willing to pay, "privacy-destroying ad networks" which need to be fed by "weird engagement algorithms" wouldn't be necessary, but people demonstrably won't. Ergo...
ChrisLomont 6y ago
>See updates from your friends, family, and people you want to see updates from Those same people are often the ones sending misinformation and creating the problems. How do you allow people to post updates and not allow them to spread misinformation that damages society?

save_ferris 6y ago

If only Facebook chose to make less money... Seriously though, their choices to run the platform the way they have were fundamentally shaped by profit and the stock market. The type of corporate moderation you’re suggesting doesn’t exist.

MaysonL 6y ago
Well – Craigslist and Wikipedia come to mind as counter-examples but it is rare.
- danbmil99 6y ago
  Just for the record, Craigslist is a for-profit company and makes quite a lot of money. Very different from Wikipedia
  - m463 6y ago
    > Craigslist is a for-profit company and makes quite a lot of money. I thought they just made a modest amount of money. However I believe their benefit to society is significantly higher than fb just because of R number 2. (of "reduce, reuse, recycle")
    - save_ferris 6y ago
      They grossed $694M in 2016, according to Wikipedia[0]. I think Craigslist benefits from a transparent business model that doesn’t rely on capturing and manipulating consumer data. They charge for job ads, which is a pretty straightforward model. Contrast that with the miasmic, tailored advertising business that Facebook has created. Craigslist isn’t necessarily leaving money on the table, they just operate a more transparent business that’s more closely aligned with the public good. It’s still not realistic to expect companies to not try to maximize their earnings potential, that’s like asking your favorite football team to score fewer touchdowns. Facebook as a business is fundamentally misaligned with the public good. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist
      - duskwuff 6y ago
        They charge for a couple other things, FWIW, but it's mostly commercial postings and certain other big-ticket listings (cars, real estate, services). https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees
- geofft 6y ago
  Yeah, I think that saying that people are forced to optimize for profit and harm society in the process diminishes their personal agency. Even if you're starting a new venture, you have a lot of choice in how you do it. Wikipedia and Craigslist are great examples. Craigslist is for-profit, and Wikipedia was originally a project of Bomis, a "web portal" (those words meant things 20 years ago) that tried various things to be profitable and had a good amount of success with softcore pornography. Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying, "You know the press has this idea that I am a porn king. I really wasn't a king of anything, frankly, you know? Because at the time, when we looked at it, we were just like, 'Okay, well, this is what our customers will want, let's follow this.'" And even he, the guy peddling pictures of naked women on the internet because it's what his customers supposedly wanted, ended up spinning off Wikipedia as a non-profit and winding down Bomis. When you decide to make a company that values profits above all else, it's a choice. You cannot attribute the moral impact of that decision to the invisible hand of the market - the invisible hand cannot reach out and grab things that weren't given to it.
  - newen 6y ago
    This is like a tragedy of the commons situation where there are massive, life changing incentives for people to break the commons. You can’t run a society where you hope that all individuals will be good.

Consultant32452 6y ago

Why would they give up control of the world by doing something silly like that? Think about how much political influence Twitter has based solely on which tweets they show the President and corporate press. Consider how much untraced in-kind donations these companies can make by tweaking which news stories you see. The crazy thing about it is these things can be tweaked by humans, but it's largely controlled by AI now, which no one person will completely understand what's happening in any of these systems. We're in the early stages of AI controlling the global political future and it will tend to create whatever kind of future generates the most clicks. It's kind of like the game Universal Paperclips, except with clicks/rage/ads.

throwaway13337 6y ago
This needs to be more understood by the population. Our world-destroying-AI paperclip maximizer is here. It's called a "news feed". The thing that gets the most clicks is outrage, as the AI has discovered. We're setting people against each-other in a more and more efficient fashion. The result has been clear since the Arab Spring. Good things don't come from helping people hate each-other in the most efficient way possible. Banning AI-driven-click-maximizing news feeds would be a healthy start. Right now, they're doing serious damage to our world.
- meowface 6y ago
  We are, but the blame has to be shared, too. In many cases the algorithm is being reinforced by your and everyone's actions. It may not even necessarily be specifically trying to prioritize polarizing content: that just might be the content you engage with the most, and the algorithm blindly follows your whims and preference. I've used YouTube for many hours per day for several years. I've almost never seen a single thing appear on my home page that was polarizing or even clickbaity. The very rare times I do (always after I watch something that's kind of adjacent), I just click "Not interested" and I never see it or anything like it again. It's done a pretty good job of predicting what I would and wouldn't be interested in. Same with Twitter. I just unfollow anyone I find tweeting polarizing or charged things. My Twitter feed looks pretty close to the HN front page. Many people crave these things, whether they want to or even realize it. I think it's going to be this way for a very long time.

skybrian 6y ago

Blaming viral content on bad algorithms is naive. All that’s needed for fake content to spread everywhere unchecked are a few bad actors, group messages, and forwarding (the reshare button). In some cases this results in genocide [1]. No fancy algorithms are necessary to get exponential spread of rumors. Friends and family will spread any memes that confirm their biases themselves. To prevent this from happening, it has to be actively suppressed, or at least there needs to be something slowing it down so it dies off. A hands-off attitude isn’t going to do it. [1] https://gizmodo.com/facebook-still-working-on-the-whole-genocide-thing-1835734695 https://gizmodo.com/facebook-still-working-on-the-whole-geno...

cageface 6y ago
I think this is a good point. Recommendation algorithms exacerbate the problem but they're not the whole story. I don't see how you solve this problem without eliminating the virality that's at the heart of these platforms' profitability. They have a strong vested interest in not fixing it.

hash872 6y ago

What I've long wondered is- would it really be that hard/expensive to build an open source social media alternative that does exactly that? Updates & photos from friends & family, in chronological order, and little else. Social media has been around for a while now, I have to imagine that most of the hard problems around a customized feed and so on have been solved. Probably some idealistic ex-FB and IG engineers would join on, so we'd have their domain expertise. I bet some prominent, wealthy anti-FB types could kick in some seed money to get it off the ground. It could be set up as a non-profit, B corp or foundation of some sort.... You could run non-targeted display ads for brand advertising to help cover costs, with the added lure for advertisers that the site would be brand-friendly because it's non-controversial. Of course it wouldn't have sophisticated features like photo tagging and such, and probably wouldn't be Hip And Cool for Gen Z, but it could be a functional bare-bones Facebook replacement. You'd have probably have to disable virality features, and maybe linking to external news sites just to prevent your racist uncle from posting Breitbart links, I don't know. Would that really be so hard? Or do the servers, hosting, security and moderation costs just scale exponentially after some threshold of say 10 million users or what have you? Supposedly Instagram was running with a very small team when Facebook acquired them

Clubber 6y ago
Building the app is trivial, building the network of users is the hard part.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  The users are already fragmented and / or using multiple social networking platforms / apps. Maybe you only need to have some tiny fraction on board to make it worth the effort?
ByteJockey 6y ago
Based on a quick glance at the fediverse sites, I think you're looking for friendica. Link for the curious: https://friendi.ca/ https://friendi.ca/
amelius 6y ago

stiglitz 6y ago

They didn’t sell it to you, is the thing.

actuator 6y ago

I think recommended order has its own place. If I go to a social media platform after a week and my friends have posted about 200 posts since then, will I be interested in every post equally? Isn't it better to give me what I will probably like at the top part of the list.

toeget 6y ago

This is exactly what I'm getting from twitter. My feed are the latest updates shared by the people I follow. I don't see clickbait, I don't see outrage, I have a curated feed aligned with my interests. It's true that about once in a couple of months Twitter decides to switch the order of tweets from the latest to the most recommended, but that's easily fixed in two clicks. The moment twitter removes the option to see the feed in chronological order is the moment I delete twitter.

sriku 6y ago

On a slight tangent ... the one thing about HN that lets me breathe is that the links that turn up are the same for everyone on the planet and is not "personalized". If it were, I'd be gone in a jiffy. Maybe we should rename "personalization" to something with a -ve connotation - perhaps "bubblification"? "narcissization"? "comfortzoned"?

dwaltrip 6y ago
Spoonification
- sriku 6y ago
  Ah yes! Let's just call it the "spoon feed".
tareqak 6y ago
Snowflakified
rapnie 6y ago
"Sheepified"

RandallBrown 6y ago

Facebook had this but everyone decided to friend every person they ever came into contact with, leading to an unmanageable stream of nonsense. Then they introduced the algorithmic feed and it became more manageable. I personally was fine curating my feed and only friending people I wanted to follow, but that's just not how it came to work socially and culturally.

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

If people were willing to pay, "privacy-destroying ad networks" which need to be fed by "weird engagement algorithms" wouldn't be necessary, but people demonstrably won't. Ergo...

ChrisLomont 6y ago

>See updates from your friends, family, and people you want to see updates from Those same people are often the ones sending misinformation and creating the problems. How do you allow people to post updates and not allow them to spread misinformation that damages society?