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Doesn't that mean that they're not deciding what to keep feeding us, but rather that we are? Not exactly. Think about fast food. You are genetically programmed

Doesn't that mean that they're not deciding what to keep feeding us, but rather that we are? Not exactly. Think about fast food. You are genetically programmed to enjoy fatty, sugary, salty foods because these were hard to come by back in the day. Now they are easy and companies push them on us, by exploiting this evolutionary development in a harmful way. Similarly all your social instincts like FOMO are baked in, and Facebook targets them ruthlessly.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
> Similarly all your social instincts like FOMO are baked in, and [TV/radio/books] targets them ruthlessly. Are my rephrasings of your statement any less true, or is FB somehow different?
- goatinaboat 5y ago
  Are my rephrasings of your statement any less true, or is FB somehow different? Yes. A TV show has to appeal to a million or 10 million people and the feedback cycle is a season long. It has to stay pretty close to the “average”. There's a limit on how strongly it can pull any lever, and pulling that lever might decrease influence with half the audience as much as it increases it with the other. Whereas Facebook can tweak the experience for a single individual with a hundred feedback loops in a day and when it finds the right level pull it as hard as it can. That’s new.
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    But it doesn't. Have you ever used facebook? Essentially it shows you whatever the highest engagement content is, which is normally a birth, engagement or some other life event. Speaking as someone who develops ML models, there's no way that they are iterating multiple times per day, and it is 100% not tuned to specific users as they have so many. And how are they supposed to measure the impact of the lever? These are not trivial questions, but they are often treated as such in online discourse, which is pretty disappointing.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago

> Similarly all your social instincts like FOMO are baked in, and [TV/radio/books] targets them ruthlessly. Are my rephrasings of your statement any less true, or is FB somehow different?

goatinaboat 5y ago
Are my rephrasings of your statement any less true, or is FB somehow different? Yes. A TV show has to appeal to a million or 10 million people and the feedback cycle is a season long. It has to stay pretty close to the “average”. There's a limit on how strongly it can pull any lever, and pulling that lever might decrease influence with half the audience as much as it increases it with the other. Whereas Facebook can tweak the experience for a single individual with a hundred feedback loops in a day and when it finds the right level pull it as hard as it can. That’s new.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  But it doesn't. Have you ever used facebook? Essentially it shows you whatever the highest engagement content is, which is normally a birth, engagement or some other life event. Speaking as someone who develops ML models, there's no way that they are iterating multiple times per day, and it is 100% not tuned to specific users as they have so many. And how are they supposed to measure the impact of the lever? These are not trivial questions, but they are often treated as such in online discourse, which is pretty disappointing.