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How about bringing the same rules to the wider FB? I just want to look at baby pictures and connect with friends. I don't want to be part of a machinery that sp

• drchopchop 6y ago
  I can't see how that is even possible at this point. You'd have to remove groups, pages, public profiles, and sharing, which would wreck the advertising and revenue ecosystem. Or, come up with magical AI which could detect politics/memes/disinformation and remove it instantly after it's been posted.
  • quicklime 6y ago
    I’m sure they could develop a classifier that would catch most (~90%) of political content, and make it opt-in - if people want to see it they can, but it could be hidden by default. This would be my preferred approach, so that I can use it for connecting with people but avoid listening to everyone’s political outrage.
    • londons_explore 6y ago
      You could build this as a browser extension... Call it "de-politics", and have it scan the HTML of popular sites (facebook, twitter, etc) and simply collapse/hide all content matching some filter. I bet a simple keyword filter for names of politicians could catch 90%. I wonder if people would pay for it?
      • davisr 6y ago
        Ah, of course, censoring political discussion is the answer!
        • gfodor 6y ago
          Censoring is when an authority removes content without your consent. Installing something that lets you decide what content to see (or not see) on a site is not censorship.
          • davisr 6y ago
            It is, however, sealing one's self in a chamber of like-minded opinion.
            • bmarquez 6y ago
              That implies Facebook posts are an accurate assessment of opinion, and not whatever the algorithms promoted to increase engagement.
      • lozaning 6y ago
        If you take the time to set it up you can get close using https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/ chrome plugin.
    • gfodor 6y ago
      You could def make this not suck by just making it so facebook automatically 'tagged' content and users can filter out certain tags. Since it'd be public, users could decide for themselves if the tags are reasonable for their filtering needs. But they'll never do it, because ad conversion rates and engagement would likely drop significantly.
    • ardy42 6y ago
      > I’m sure they could develop a classifier that would catch most (~90%) of political content, and make it opt-in - if people want to see it they can, but it could be hidden by default. This would be my preferred approach, so that I can use it for connecting with people but avoid listening to everyone’s political outrage. Eh, I don't really like that idea. For one, it only really addresses the problem of being exposed to content you find unenjoyable. Honestly, sometimes I do wonder if consumer-level broadcast technology is the psychic equivalent of doing something like letting everyone fly planes without any training. It might be better to adopt communication technologies with a little more friction.
    • wnissen 6y ago
      I spent the entire month of September 2016 flagging every single political post, whether it was a news article, friend's status, shared post, whatever, as "See less like this". It was completely ineffective. At the end of the month I was getting seeing just as much politics as before. So I'm not sure they can, or maybe want to. I was giving them all the input they needed to make a good classifier, and it was a lot of work. Maybe classifiers have improved enough in the previous four years.
  • saghm 6y ago
    > You'd have to remove groups, pages, public profiles, and sharing Or they could just not show posts to groups you're not in and from pages and public profiles you don't follow! Allowing something to interject into your newsfeed should be opt-in, but right now it isn't even opt-out, except for not logging on at all. It would also be cool if there were a way to opt-out from seeing shared posts selectively for people on your friends list, e.g. I want to see things that Overly Political Relative posts themselves, but not things that they share from other places. That being said, I deactivated my Facebook account a couple years ago, so I'm no longer a user whose opinion they should theoretically care about anymore.
    • lozaning 6y ago
      I don't really use FB all that much these days, because the people I care to keep up with have largely moved on from it. But when i do log in, I get mostly the experience you want with the https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/ chrome plugin I've spent the time to heavily customize. My timeline shows as strictly chronological, and only text and photos posted by my immediate friends. No groups, ads, publisher's bullshit, promoted things, no trending, no nothing. Just photos and plain text.
      • saghm 6y ago
        Yep, back when I still used Facebook, I used that extension. I think that installing a third-party extension is probably a lot more than the average person knows to do, though. I was mostly making a point that if Facebook finds discussion over politics and the like too divisive for their internal company chat, maybe they should consider what they can do for the rest of us to keep things similarly sane.
  • kelnos 6y ago
    I don't think you need to do that. I think just making the timeline a reverse-chronological firehose, and not filtering any posts out or making any posts more prominent, would do wonders. That's how Facebook used to present the feed. Giving people tools to make sub-lists of certain friends/groups/etc. in order to organize their experience better (on their terms, not at FB's whim) would be great, too.
• Nullabillity 6y ago
  Right, because all societal issues will just go away if we close our eyes and ignore them.
  • thatguy0900 6y ago
    In fairness, for alot of the people here it probably would
  • vyhd 6y ago
    It's more akin to "a virus is less likely to spread if fewer people are in contact with known carriers", a.k.a. deplatforming.
  • ikiris 6y ago
    We could call it Whitebook.
• rsynnott 6y ago
  I'd give that about 10 minutes before someone started claiming that their baby was immune to covid, and then you're right back where you started.
  • thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
    But isn't that only happening because of FB allowing disinformation to spread so easily?
    • dmpk2k 6y ago
      How would you achieve that?
    • dntrkv 6y ago
      Curious how you think it's possible for FB to prevent the spread of disinformation? Everyone likes to pretend like Facebook has the ability to just stop disinformation, when in reality, even defining "disinformation" is basically impossible. Sure, you can bring up examples of blatant lies, but most of the effective disinformation is a lot more subtle and depends on what side of the issues you are on.
      • nindalf 6y ago
        I have seen this question asked many times on such threads but have never seen a workable solution. Usually the response is something like "I'd shut the whole website down" or "I'd employ millions of moderators" or "I'd allow people to only post once a month" or "I would remove sharing links, only baby pictures allowed". Nothing practical. If you respond to any of these with examples of positive speech that would be harmed, there is no response. For example, if you curb political speech, people wouldn't be able to organise political protests. People wouldn't even agree on what should be considered 'political'. For example, is organising a BLM event political? Should it be allowed under the proposed rules? I'm happy to be proven wrong though. Maybe this is the thread where people will make practical suggestions.
        • 6y ago
• kyleee 6y ago
  Simple, just remove humans from the platform
• subsubzero 6y ago
  Totally this, I get having ads injected into the home timeline(gotta keep the lights on!), but inundating people's feeds with 'publisher's stories' showing them news that is blatantly false/overly negative/polarizing and just not wanted for a vast majority of people.
• beamatronic 6y ago
  I want an option to pay a yearly or monthly fee, that lets them still make money, but also protect my privacy.
  • taftster 6y ago
    Ha ha ha, they make too much money on you to allow that. Protecting your privacy can't happen at the platform end, because of the nature of the network itself. And there would be too few people that would pay for this feature, it would limit their ability to grow. Which is ultimately what it's about; the stock price.
• Consultant32452 6y ago
  This is a copy/pasta of a previous post of mine, but I feel it's very fitting here. 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.
  • brian_cloutier 6y ago
    > 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. I hope you take this as kindly as I intend it, but what you're proposing is a conspiracy theory. This is a relatively nice attribute for a theory to have, because it gives you a nice heuristic for deciding whether the theory is true! The likelihood of a conspiracy being true decreases as the number of people with knowledge of the theory and an incentive to report on it increases. To take an extreme example, if the moon landing was faked, tens of thousands of people have somehow held on to that secret. Tens of thousands of people who could gain overnight notoriety by telling their story, and hundreds would have the proof required to gain even more popularity. The fact that nobody has ever broken ranks is a strong sign that the moon landing was not faked. "Twitter and Facebook are secretly tweaking which news stories Trump and the rest of us are seeing" isn't a conspiracy on nearly the same scale as a faked moon landing. It requires some pretty incredible things to be true though. - Maybe every employee knows, and none of them have decided to say anything, despite the large incentives to reveal the secret and win their moment in the limelight. - Maybe not every employee knows, just enough employees know to implement it and hide that implementation from the others. Maybe every employee on the Algorithmic News Feed team knows. I don't know how Twitter and Facebook are structured, the team probably isn't called Algorithmic News Feed, but as one of the more important systems both Facebook and Twitter must dedicate at least a hundred engineers. So, 200 people were quietly chosen for their ideological purity and ability to keep a secret from their peers. These 200 people write code in secret. Somehow they commit lies to the monorepo and apply private patches to the code before deploys. The SREs must also be in on it, because those private patches will still show up in traces and their bugs will show up as errors. All of this happens inside Facebook, a company notorious for employees who speak up and expect transparency. It also happens inside Twitter, a company with such lax controls that until just recently thousands of people could use the internal admin tool to take over any account. I don't know, I guess it's possible? Maybe you have a better idea for how it could be happening, but it just doesn't seem very likely at all.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  And if someone even mentions the idea of creating exactly this service -- baby pictures and friends' contact information can be exported from Facebook and imported into such a service -- a torrent of HN commenters would decry "fail" before they even tried it. Tech bloggers and "journalists" would also inject doubt into the minds of their readers. To get to where you want to go, you would need to ignore the critics. To accomplish what you describe, there is no necessity that every user logs in to the same network. Each network would only need to contain family and friends. Connecting one network to another would be optional. You are not asking to be in a graph with the entire world, to be connected to total strangers. Yet that is precisely what FB is constantly trying to achieve. Every person's information collected in a single database controlled by a single entity. One "social" network for everyone. Hence you are connected to people and companies you do not know, who are not your friends or family. Your behaviour can be studied. The ads, marketing and misinformation can flow freely. (FB == Fish Bowl)
• Kattywumpus 6y ago
  > I don't want to be part of a machinery that spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories. You're swearing off the internet entirely?
  • Talanes 6y ago
    Internet? I can get all of that from the dude sitting in a wheelchair outside my coffee shop. (Pre-Covid, at least. Hope he's doing okay.)
• sevilo 6y ago
  I wonder what happened... the early days of FB you're still somewhat close to your friend circle and therefore most of the content were personal updates. At then at some point Facebook started suggested links, posts that you have not explicitly followed, news articles that may or may not have been verified. Now every time I check the comments under such posts, it's people arguing with each other, and then people share and spread whatever they see from these suggested posts looking to confirm their existing beliefs even more strongly. And then people for some reason started believing they "own" the right to write whatever they desire on their wall, and it's a platform for spreading their political opinions. Just less than 10 years ago, it would've been considered very rude to push your religious or political opinions on to others, especially when it's a professional setting it would've been considered highly unprofessional. But nowadays that line doesn't seem to exist anymore.
  • not2b 6y ago
    Worse: Facebook decides that the "most relevant" comments on such posts are the most inflammatory comments, because their algorithms select for engagement, so they want to show me something that will anger you, so you write an inflammatory reply.
    • Udik 6y ago
      But do they decide? Can they actually read the comment and decide it's inflammatory? Or do they just expose comments that people like to engage with (filtering out only the most obvious insults)?
      • cma 6y ago
        To not expose highly the one they predict to meet their metrics from the get-go would be a big loss to give up, given the small scale of many threads.
• TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Agreed, except maybe with an option to filter out the baby pictures. I never want to see those. Becoming a parent made me want to see them even less (my child is the best and the prettiest and that's all I need). :).
• qppo 6y ago
  I distinctly remember during the 2012 election, my friends began posting political materials extensively. Which makes sense because of the Obama campaign's unprecedented spend on social media. Pre-2012 Facebook was awesome. Now the feed is almost exclusively bullshit from people I don't know.
• throwaway423342 6y ago
  It would hurt engagement.
• Kiro 6y ago
  People use Facebook for different reasons. I use it for Groups and to follow artists but definitely not to see baby pictures.
• jessaustin 6y ago
  I don't want to be part of a machinery... No one has to use Facebook.