5 ms·

Nobody actually wants an "uncensored" Facebook. If you went there and your feed were full of spam, porn, and shock videos, you'd stop going.

b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
Alot of projection .. And not much 'me' only 'you'
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Well, I could have written it as "one," but most people find that pretentious.
zdragnar 5y ago
There's a reasonable, substantial difference between not allowing material deemed indecent- porn and gore- and becoming an arbiter of "truth".
- emodendroket 5y ago
  So you say, but is there really? What about hate speech? Should that go there? If not, now we need to decide what is and isn't hate speech, which is itself contentious. And material "deemed indecent" could also be newsworthy, so it's not really simple to apply even this standard. It's a pretty clear trend: every supposed "free speech platform" ends up having to have active content moderation to actually make it a site anybody would want to use, and many of them still languish in obscurity or eventually shut down because it turns out most people don't want to hang out with the people who were too unpleasant for the mainstream sites to want them. Actually, once you start to probe, I think you'll find people disagree in degrees, even though most people consider their lines in the sand clear and commonsensical.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    > So you say, but is there really? Yes. The US has managed fine with exactly such a dichotomy. The reason it’s easy to draw a bright line at obscenity/porn is because you know it when you see it. > What about hate speech? Should that go there? No, but speech inciting violence is pretty easy to recognize. Again, First Amendment jurisprudence has developed clear rules for this.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      It’s not illegal to post shock videos. It’s protected by the first amendment. The same is true of porn, for the most part (while “you know it when you see it” is a suggested standard for obscenity the concept differs greatly from one observer to another — see what answers you get from Los Angeles and Karachi about what’s manifestly obscene and I bet the answers are different). I still don’t think most people want to go to a site overrun with this kind of content.
      - tekknik 5y ago
        Are you really attempting to justify censorship to keep porn off of the site? We’ve had algorithms for years now that can detect nudity. It’s a simple filter that can be added that allows the user to select if they want to see it or not. Much like DDG and Google image search.
        nradov 5y ago
        There's a difference between nudity and porn. Facebook banned the famous "Napalm Girl" photo, and then later un-banned it. Rules appear to be arbitrary and constantly changing. https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/09/10/493454256/with-napalm-girl-facebook-humans-not-algorithms-struggle-to-be-editor https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/09/10/49...
        tekknik 5y ago
        Yea child nudity is going to be a difficult one for all algorithms as they lack context. The only reason that picture is allowed is because of the context. If it were a random naked child in a field it would and should be banned.
13years 5y ago
Censoring that is in your control is filtering. Yes this is needed. Nobody wants censoring that is not in your control.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Quite a few people do want that. Even if they didn't, some content is outright illegal to host, so they can't take an entirely user directed approach even if they wanted.
stickfigure 5y ago
Rubbish. Your feed would be full of whatever your friends post. Unfriending is easy. You see what you want to see.
perl4ever 5y ago
I think a lot of people would prefer a Facebook that showed what your friends post in chronological order, and wistfully say so now and then. I'm not sure, but it might have once been that way, before I used it. There is a string you can append to the URL (?sk=h_chr) to get a chrono view, but it doesn't seem to work well; for instance it doesn't go very far back and it's not clear to me that it's complete. If my friends were posting lots of "spam, porn, and shock videos", I think I'd rather know it, whether or not I could tolerate it.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  A lot of people do say that but I frankly don’t believe them when they say it. It’s well known inside and outside of technology that customer descriptions of their own behavior are often far out of step with reality and I think people would find Facebook less engaging and fun to use if it didn’t tune what it showed them based on their perceived interests and their activity. I would guess most people are friends with people they know but don’t actually want to hear from all that much, and it wouldn’t be ideal to be put in a position to have to remove family members because their posts are boring.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    > It’s well known inside and outside of technology that customer descriptions of their own behavior are often far out of step with reality How do you get from "people may not be reliable witnesses of their own preferences" to "I know their preferences better"? The first doesn't sound that improbable, but the second is a non sequitur, even if a popular one. If it's easy to lie to yourself, doesn't that suggest it's even easier to lie to yourself about what others think? My previous comment suggested multiple reasons why people might not choose the chronological ordering even if they prefer it. Most people surely aren't aware of the trick, and using it limits the number of posts available. It's not clear that it shows all of them within a range either. I myself only use it about half the time, not because I don't want things in order, but because I have the sense that I'm missing something either way. >I think people would find Facebook less engaging and fun to use if it didn’t tune what it showed them based on their perceived interests and their activity I think an important point is that "engaging" is not at all the same thing as "fun to use". Meth is engaging, but in the long run, not that fun. The conflation of the two is useful for apologetics but not necessarily convincing to a lay individual. >it wouldn’t be ideal to be put in a position to have to remove family members because their posts are boring "Boring" sounds like a different sort of thing from "spam, porn, and shock videos". That kind of post does sound more plausible. But Facebook provides controls to filter people if you want, and there is no reason that if they stopped choosing what you see that the user's controls would have to go away. What is the rational argument that Facebook knows which family members of nearly 3 billion people are "boring", though?
amanaplanacanal 5y ago
Yes, that’s exactly the Facebook I want. The one nobody will use.
kortilla 5y ago
Your friends post spam, porn, and shock videos?
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Do you never use features like groups and pages?
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    I mostly don't, but there is still a disconnect here. Who wants to not know the sort of group they belong to? Censoring things that are not acceptable at all is different from censoring (or reordering) things that are determined to be sub-optimal for a particular person to see, that come from members of the group who are not going to be banned. Which is really the topic here?
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      So if you go to a listing of groups, without some active curation, how do you prevent it from being that kind of content, or hate groups, or other undesirable content? The standard gets real blurry real fast.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        >active curation As I contemplate the subject, I think I draw the line between a set of human-understandable rules, enforced by some combination of human and machine partners, versus a set of goals that drive a ruthless optimization process that is opaque. So no, it's not that all "curation" is bad.
raxxorrax 5y ago
Censoring opinions isn't equivalent to removing scam and spam.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I don’t find it very persuasive for people to baldly post “that’s different” when my whole idea is that the line between these things is not so bright as we like to imagine.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    >the line between these things is not so bright as we like to imagine In practice, the line exists, whether or not it's clear to you, it is clear to Facebook, because they already (and always will) act differently depending on their judgment of which side something falls on. There are things that are totally outside the pale, and then there is the practice of curating peoples' feeds amongst the stuff that is allowed. Some people specifically don't like the second thing, even if it would lead to some metric declining.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      So we're not disputing the principle at all but merely arguing over the degrees to which it should be applied. QED.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        What principle? Are you saying you weren't disputing the principle that there are two different kinds of things that people call "censorship", in practice and in theory? It is a difference in kind, not degree. You can have an arbitrary number of rules, enforced by human and machine, for acceptable behavior in a forum. I think that's basically the case on HN or reddit. But if you have an optimizer that filters and reorders things on top of that, then any particular item that is moved or removed is not against any rule. And nobody can really say why, even if they are informed of what happened. The latter thing is what many people, including me, think is terrible, and the distinction is not fuzzy even if you can call it all "censorship" or "curation".

b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago

Alot of projection .. And not much 'me' only 'you'

emodendroket 5y ago
Well, I could have written it as "one," but most people find that pretentious.

zdragnar 5y ago

There's a reasonable, substantial difference between not allowing material deemed indecent- porn and gore- and becoming an arbiter of "truth".

emodendroket 5y ago
So you say, but is there really? What about hate speech? Should that go there? If not, now we need to decide what is and isn't hate speech, which is itself contentious. And material "deemed indecent" could also be newsworthy, so it's not really simple to apply even this standard. It's a pretty clear trend: every supposed "free speech platform" ends up having to have active content moderation to actually make it a site anybody would want to use, and many of them still languish in obscurity or eventually shut down because it turns out most people don't want to hang out with the people who were too unpleasant for the mainstream sites to want them. Actually, once you start to probe, I think you'll find people disagree in degrees, even though most people consider their lines in the sand clear and commonsensical.
- rayiner 5y ago
  > So you say, but is there really? Yes. The US has managed fine with exactly such a dichotomy. The reason it’s easy to draw a bright line at obscenity/porn is because you know it when you see it. > What about hate speech? Should that go there? No, but speech inciting violence is pretty easy to recognize. Again, First Amendment jurisprudence has developed clear rules for this.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    It’s not illegal to post shock videos. It’s protected by the first amendment. The same is true of porn, for the most part (while “you know it when you see it” is a suggested standard for obscenity the concept differs greatly from one observer to another — see what answers you get from Los Angeles and Karachi about what’s manifestly obscene and I bet the answers are different). I still don’t think most people want to go to a site overrun with this kind of content.
    - tekknik 5y ago
      Are you really attempting to justify censorship to keep porn off of the site? We’ve had algorithms for years now that can detect nudity. It’s a simple filter that can be added that allows the user to select if they want to see it or not. Much like DDG and Google image search.
      - nradov 5y ago
        There's a difference between nudity and porn. Facebook banned the famous "Napalm Girl" photo, and then later un-banned it. Rules appear to be arbitrary and constantly changing. https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/09/10/493454256/with-napalm-girl-facebook-humans-not-algorithms-struggle-to-be-editor https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/09/10/49...
        tekknik 5y ago
        Yea child nudity is going to be a difficult one for all algorithms as they lack context. The only reason that picture is allowed is because of the context. If it were a random naked child in a field it would and should be banned.

13years 5y ago

Censoring that is in your control is filtering. Yes this is needed. Nobody wants censoring that is not in your control.

emodendroket 5y ago
Quite a few people do want that. Even if they didn't, some content is outright illegal to host, so they can't take an entirely user directed approach even if they wanted.

stickfigure 5y ago

Rubbish. Your feed would be full of whatever your friends post. Unfriending is easy. You see what you want to see.

perl4ever 5y ago

I think a lot of people would prefer a Facebook that showed what your friends post in chronological order, and wistfully say so now and then. I'm not sure, but it might have once been that way, before I used it. There is a string you can append to the URL (?sk=h_chr) to get a chrono view, but it doesn't seem to work well; for instance it doesn't go very far back and it's not clear to me that it's complete. If my friends were posting lots of "spam, porn, and shock videos", I think I'd rather know it, whether or not I could tolerate it.

emodendroket 5y ago
A lot of people do say that but I frankly don’t believe them when they say it. It’s well known inside and outside of technology that customer descriptions of their own behavior are often far out of step with reality and I think people would find Facebook less engaging and fun to use if it didn’t tune what it showed them based on their perceived interests and their activity. I would guess most people are friends with people they know but don’t actually want to hear from all that much, and it wouldn’t be ideal to be put in a position to have to remove family members because their posts are boring.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  > It’s well known inside and outside of technology that customer descriptions of their own behavior are often far out of step with reality How do you get from "people may not be reliable witnesses of their own preferences" to "I know their preferences better"? The first doesn't sound that improbable, but the second is a non sequitur, even if a popular one. If it's easy to lie to yourself, doesn't that suggest it's even easier to lie to yourself about what others think? My previous comment suggested multiple reasons why people might not choose the chronological ordering even if they prefer it. Most people surely aren't aware of the trick, and using it limits the number of posts available. It's not clear that it shows all of them within a range either. I myself only use it about half the time, not because I don't want things in order, but because I have the sense that I'm missing something either way. >I think people would find Facebook less engaging and fun to use if it didn’t tune what it showed them based on their perceived interests and their activity I think an important point is that "engaging" is not at all the same thing as "fun to use". Meth is engaging, but in the long run, not that fun. The conflation of the two is useful for apologetics but not necessarily convincing to a lay individual. >it wouldn’t be ideal to be put in a position to have to remove family members because their posts are boring "Boring" sounds like a different sort of thing from "spam, porn, and shock videos". That kind of post does sound more plausible. But Facebook provides controls to filter people if you want, and there is no reason that if they stopped choosing what you see that the user's controls would have to go away. What is the rational argument that Facebook knows which family members of nearly 3 billion people are "boring", though?

amanaplanacanal 5y ago

Yes, that’s exactly the Facebook I want. The one nobody will use.

kortilla 5y ago

Your friends post spam, porn, and shock videos?

emodendroket 5y ago
Do you never use features like groups and pages?
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I mostly don't, but there is still a disconnect here. Who wants to not know the sort of group they belong to? Censoring things that are not acceptable at all is different from censoring (or reordering) things that are determined to be sub-optimal for a particular person to see, that come from members of the group who are not going to be banned. Which is really the topic here?
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    So if you go to a listing of groups, without some active curation, how do you prevent it from being that kind of content, or hate groups, or other undesirable content? The standard gets real blurry real fast.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      >active curation As I contemplate the subject, I think I draw the line between a set of human-understandable rules, enforced by some combination of human and machine partners, versus a set of goals that drive a ruthless optimization process that is opaque. So no, it's not that all "curation" is bad.

raxxorrax 5y ago

Censoring opinions isn't equivalent to removing scam and spam.

emodendroket 5y ago
I don’t find it very persuasive for people to baldly post “that’s different” when my whole idea is that the line between these things is not so bright as we like to imagine.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >the line between these things is not so bright as we like to imagine In practice, the line exists, whether or not it's clear to you, it is clear to Facebook, because they already (and always will) act differently depending on their judgment of which side something falls on. There are things that are totally outside the pale, and then there is the practice of curating peoples' feeds amongst the stuff that is allowed. Some people specifically don't like the second thing, even if it would lead to some metric declining.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    So we're not disputing the principle at all but merely arguing over the degrees to which it should be applied. QED.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      What principle? Are you saying you weren't disputing the principle that there are two different kinds of things that people call "censorship", in practice and in theory? It is a difference in kind, not degree. You can have an arbitrary number of rules, enforced by human and machine, for acceptable behavior in a forum. I think that's basically the case on HN or reddit. But if you have an optimizer that filters and reorders things on top of that, then any particular item that is moved or removed is not against any rule. And nobody can really say why, even if they are informed of what happened. The latter thing is what many people, including me, think is terrible, and the distinction is not fuzzy even if you can call it all "censorship" or "curation".