9 ms·

I am increasing convinced that all of the harms of social media can be traced back the ML models used to sort and filter user content. The world of pure determi

I am increasing convinced that all of the harms of social media can be traced back the ML models used to sort and filter user content. The world of pure deterministic feeds ordered by date descending never had these problems--things would still "go viral" I guess, but it was humans sharing them deliberately to people they knew. I do not believe this problem can be fixed, nor do the companies involved have the incentive to do so beyond whatever minimal amount is necessary for PR purposes.

rumblerock 5y ago
To take it one step further I'm convinced at this point that the social conundrum presented by Twitter and other social media platforms has extended far beyond the algorithm and the platforms themselves, and into how people interact in general. The reductionist, reactionary mode of thinking now rears its head in my real-world interactions. I wouldn't care as much if people kept that stuff on these social platforms that I spend next to zero time on, but I can't help but roll my eyes when my friends speak in "hot takes" as if I'm handing out certificates for internet points.
- jancsika 5y ago
  > To take it one step further I'm convinced at this point that the social conundrum presented by Twitter and other social media platforms has extended far beyond the algorithm and the platforms themselves, and into how people interact in general. A cryptographer once mentioned attacking the PGP WoT by uploading a shadow WoT that has different keys with the same emails/names and signing-graph structure. Similar to what you note-- the real problems come when some bona fide WoT user fucks up and accidentally signs a key from the shadow graph. Even if it's just a single accidental signature before the shadow WoT is spotted and cleaned up, the admin would probably want to quickly go out of band to actually fix the original WoT at that point-- otherwise perhaps the shadow admin got to the user first. :) (And of course if the shadow graph were uploaded incrementally over a wider period of time, the problems probably become a bigger pain in the ass.) The problem you mention is in the same category. But rather than being hypothetical, it is real and probably as bad an instance as someone could design given current technology. To make the WoT attack above comparable, I'm imagining a Debian user accidentally signing a shadow key, then receiving messages from that key that convince them Debian keyring is in fact the shadow key ring and they should use their permissions to destroy Debian. Edit: and I guess in keeping with the analogy, the purpose of the propaganda emails is to generate as much outrage in the recipient as possible, so that they may spend more time reading the entire email on the off chance they also spend one or two seconds extra looking at the ad in the email signature about a special on a nice pair of designer pants.
  - seventytwo 5y ago
    > To make the WoT attack above comparable, I'm imagining a Debian user accidentally signing a shadow key, then receiving messages from that key that convince them Debian keyring is in fact the shadow key ring and they should use their permissions to destroy Debian. This is actually what’s happening with the partitioning of the information streams in the US. Even if everyone had identical brains, everyone operates on partial information of the world. If you provide left wing material to one group, and right wing material to the other group, they’ll polarize exactly as you’d expect, even being identical people existing in the same world. The problem isn’t balanced across the political spectrum, though - it just so happens that the right wing has a faultier take on reality than the left wing, but there’s no reason that couldn’t flip in the near future.
- seventytwo 5y ago
  That’s probably true. Prior to social media, the social benefit to making pithy, reductionist “takes” was small compared to maintaining in-person relationships in relatively good terms. Now, however, the perceived social benefit of those same takes is huge, as they can go viral online and rack up major internet points. This translates to real life interactions. Those relationships we would have preferred to maintain by keeping our mouths shut are now under attack because we inadvertently use our internet takes IRL. (Just a hypothesis…)
earthboundkid 5y ago
BRB, inventing a time machine to go back and stop Reddit from inventing the up vote button.
- travoc 5y ago
  Upvotes are a long ways from ML content engagement targeting.
  - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
    Indeed. And reddit is one of the angriest social media sites IMO. My suspicion is that FB and Twitter are actually tuning their algorithms to dampen anger nowadays--I'm almost certain Youtube is (with terrific results). I see reddit as a window into what algorithm-free social media looks like. It's not pretty. And reddit is one of the biggest sites, bigger than twitter IIRC. It's not a good influence on society. I actually wish journalists would freak out a little less about Facebook/Youtube's problems and turn a bit more firepower on reddit.
    - earthboundkid 5y ago
      I noticed that YouTube got weird again in the last six months or so after probably four years or so of boring recommendations. Now it’s telling me about Turkish music and other fun stuff instead of just more of the same.
- airstrike 5y ago
  I'm willing to bet $100 reddit didn't invent upvotes.
  - nuclearnice1 5y ago
    A lot of guesses that it was slashdot in 1998 or 1999. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18671747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18671747
tshaddox 5y ago
I suspect that the business model (advertising) is a more fundamental cause.
lemoncucumber 5y ago
Put another way, the problem boils down to companies that only optimize for one variable (shareholder value) relying on algorithms that only optimize for one variable (engagement). Taken together, it results in a lot of negative externalities that get ignored at every level.
- johnsmith4739 5y ago
  I have a sad realisation that "engagement" is more likely "enragement." Humans are activated best by anger. Joy? That is a big deactivator... The algorithmic approach to the feed reminds me a model I work every day with: human perception. Because there is an "algorithm" put between sensory perception and perception/awareness - and because the signal is highly processed - aaand the way processing is done is not available to our conscious awareness - you get all kinds of strange behaviours. Where you cannot control how stimuli are processed and perception formed, you are for all intents and purposes manipulated, or at least denied control. Unfortunately, any SM algo has to fit the same purpose - alter our perceptions and influence our behaviours. Guess I should delete my FB now...
  - gotostatement 5y ago
    > I have a sad realisation that "engagement" is more likely "enragement." Humans are activated best by anger. Joy? That is a big deactivator... This is interesting. Because if you have joy, you might be like "maybe I should just put this FB down and continue enjoying my life." But if something angers you, it activates you to stay on and hold on, instead of taking it easy which can lead to logging off.
- leppr 5y ago
  Put yet another way, the problem boils down to whole continents worth of people relying on one or two companies' proprietary services for their online social life. The web has a platform diversity problem.
omgitsabird 5y ago
> I am increasing convinced that all of the harms of social media can be traced back the ML models used to sort and filter user content. I don't think so. I think most harms of social media can be traced to how the people who actually pay for or make money off the service perceive value.
easterncalculus 5y ago
I agree with this view, because it is ultimately these models which are behind the hyperviral nature of posts now, where they are recommended to people that engage in it, positively or negatively. That whole idea of negative feedback loops is completely independent from explicit human design (these sites were never created to send you things you don't like), and is arguably behind most of what people are complaining about on social media. There are separate features that people debate on (post deletion policies/capabilities, etc) but it is not nearly as widespread as the damage often caused by putting engagement over everything else.
blopker 5y ago
I agree that these companies cannot fix the harm they've caused. However, I have an alternative view point on why. I don't think the ML has much to do with it, although it doesn't help. These companies are just trying to increase their engagement metrics, like how long users are on the site, or how many ads they see on average. This was true before they started using ML, but maybe less obvious. What these companies found was that human nature, in general, gets addicted to outrage and gossip. They are just supplying that to us. It's not very different than tobacco companies. They found an addictive substance, that is not good for us, and are trying to get it out as much as possible. The problem is people 'want' this product, despite its negative effects. That's why these companies can't fix their product. It's like asking "How can we make tobacco healthy?". We can't.
arikrak 5y ago
What about conspiracy theories that spread through WhatsApp? A lot of the harm of social media is because some people spread harmful things and now it's easier for them to do so.
- leppr 5y ago
  Indeed. I think algorithmic social feeds are such a popular scapegoat simply because people don't understand them (since they're black-boxes and the tech is new). The common rhetoric that "harmful messages which trigger engagement are amplified by social media algorithms" is probably correct, but to think this is anything close to the root cause of the spread of "harmful ideas" on social media is ignoring the reality of social networks before algorithmic feeds. Notably, the most popular current examples of places where harmful ideas are spread (4chan, Gab, Parler, ...) are platorms that eschew algorithmic curation entirely. I don't believe hyperlinks to those platforms are being promoted by the mainstream platforms' algorithmic feeds, people find these places by themselves. Social media can be harmful mostly because it facilitates mob mentality once again. Centralized idea distribution platforms (newspapers, television) gave society a rest from undesired mob mentality, but now we have more freedom of association than ever. I suspect the best way to avoid it is to add more artificial curation in between human interactions, not less.
uyt 5y ago
I only know of one site that uses the model you proposed (pure deterministic feeds ordered by date descending) but it's the cesspool of the internet: 4chan
austincheney 5y ago
That is certainly part of the problem, but a bigger earlier problem is voting mechanisms. Voting mechanisms put those algorithms on steroids and increase the potential for echo chambers. Worse than that voting mechanisms reward bad behavior. They discourage replies for fear of lost karma and as a convenience to those can’t be bothered to use words whether for cowardice or ignorance.
bigbonch 5y ago
To add to this I believe the fundamental issue is intent. Deterministic feeds and "organic" virality is trusting purely human intent. Modern algorithms muddy the network of intent and my tin foil hat take is that we're hard-wired to perceive everything as intent from some other human.
marcinjachymiak 5y ago
Personally, I am convinced that all of the harms of social media can be traced back to the Garden of Eden. People just decide to be bad sometimes. The perfect feed algorithm doesn't exist.
contravariant 5y ago
All social media suffer from the twin problems that they need a metric to rank content (as there is too much of it to transmit everything) and that any such metric ceases to be a good metric once it becomes a target.
suketk 5y ago
Yes! Algorithmic feeds are the bane of our society [1]. Ok maybe that's an exaggeration, but only a minor one. They've messed up the incentive systems for the platforms and turned us into passive consumers (rather than creators). [1] suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful
jefftk 5y ago
>The world of pure deterministic feeds ordered by date descending never had these problems--things would still "go viral" I guess, but it was humans sharing them deliberately to people they knew. If one of the harms you're thinking of is spreading misinformation, we saw that before filtered feeds (email forwards) and we still see it with chat. In places where group chat is the primary form of social media you see this problem just as with FB in the US.
- seventytwo 5y ago
  Just like with any other viral spread, the goal isn’t to eliminate the spread, but to reduce the R factor. An argument like yours is the same argument used against wearing masks: “yeah, but it’s not 100% effective!”
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
"Show people what's trending" means "feed the time derivative of the output back into the system -- with positive sign". It's the opposite of damping. It's as though people set out intentionally to, literally, destabilize society.
- iratewizard 5y ago
  But burning down society sees a 37% increase in engagement
joe_the_user 5y ago
I'm pretty sure Facebook never had a non-mystery feed algorithm. Before ML appeared, I'd guess the algorithm was hand-tuned. I haven't heard anyone express a liking for the FB feed algorithm but I remember a commentator mentioning that FB beat all the other social networks of the time because it turned the noise down tremendously. You weren't bombarded by that those people who posted once an hour and that was big for the average user.

rumblerock 5y ago

To take it one step further I'm convinced at this point that the social conundrum presented by Twitter and other social media platforms has extended far beyond the algorithm and the platforms themselves, and into how people interact in general. The reductionist, reactionary mode of thinking now rears its head in my real-world interactions. I wouldn't care as much if people kept that stuff on these social platforms that I spend next to zero time on, but I can't help but roll my eyes when my friends speak in "hot takes" as if I'm handing out certificates for internet points.

jancsika 5y ago
> To take it one step further I'm convinced at this point that the social conundrum presented by Twitter and other social media platforms has extended far beyond the algorithm and the platforms themselves, and into how people interact in general. A cryptographer once mentioned attacking the PGP WoT by uploading a shadow WoT that has different keys with the same emails/names and signing-graph structure. Similar to what you note-- the real problems come when some bona fide WoT user fucks up and accidentally signs a key from the shadow graph. Even if it's just a single accidental signature before the shadow WoT is spotted and cleaned up, the admin would probably want to quickly go out of band to actually fix the original WoT at that point-- otherwise perhaps the shadow admin got to the user first. :) (And of course if the shadow graph were uploaded incrementally over a wider period of time, the problems probably become a bigger pain in the ass.) The problem you mention is in the same category. But rather than being hypothetical, it is real and probably as bad an instance as someone could design given current technology. To make the WoT attack above comparable, I'm imagining a Debian user accidentally signing a shadow key, then receiving messages from that key that convince them Debian keyring is in fact the shadow key ring and they should use their permissions to destroy Debian. Edit: and I guess in keeping with the analogy, the purpose of the propaganda emails is to generate as much outrage in the recipient as possible, so that they may spend more time reading the entire email on the off chance they also spend one or two seconds extra looking at the ad in the email signature about a special on a nice pair of designer pants.
- seventytwo 5y ago
  > To make the WoT attack above comparable, I'm imagining a Debian user accidentally signing a shadow key, then receiving messages from that key that convince them Debian keyring is in fact the shadow key ring and they should use their permissions to destroy Debian. This is actually what’s happening with the partitioning of the information streams in the US. Even if everyone had identical brains, everyone operates on partial information of the world. If you provide left wing material to one group, and right wing material to the other group, they’ll polarize exactly as you’d expect, even being identical people existing in the same world. The problem isn’t balanced across the political spectrum, though - it just so happens that the right wing has a faultier take on reality than the left wing, but there’s no reason that couldn’t flip in the near future.
seventytwo 5y ago
That’s probably true. Prior to social media, the social benefit to making pithy, reductionist “takes” was small compared to maintaining in-person relationships in relatively good terms. Now, however, the perceived social benefit of those same takes is huge, as they can go viral online and rack up major internet points. This translates to real life interactions. Those relationships we would have preferred to maintain by keeping our mouths shut are now under attack because we inadvertently use our internet takes IRL. (Just a hypothesis…)

earthboundkid 5y ago

BRB, inventing a time machine to go back and stop Reddit from inventing the up vote button.

travoc 5y ago
Upvotes are a long ways from ML content engagement targeting.
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  Indeed. And reddit is one of the angriest social media sites IMO. My suspicion is that FB and Twitter are actually tuning their algorithms to dampen anger nowadays--I'm almost certain Youtube is (with terrific results). I see reddit as a window into what algorithm-free social media looks like. It's not pretty. And reddit is one of the biggest sites, bigger than twitter IIRC. It's not a good influence on society. I actually wish journalists would freak out a little less about Facebook/Youtube's problems and turn a bit more firepower on reddit.
  - earthboundkid 5y ago
    I noticed that YouTube got weird again in the last six months or so after probably four years or so of boring recommendations. Now it’s telling me about Turkish music and other fun stuff instead of just more of the same.
airstrike 5y ago
I'm willing to bet $100 reddit didn't invent upvotes.
- nuclearnice1 5y ago
  A lot of guesses that it was slashdot in 1998 or 1999. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18671747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18671747

tshaddox 5y ago

I suspect that the business model (advertising) is a more fundamental cause.

lemoncucumber 5y ago

Put another way, the problem boils down to companies that only optimize for one variable (shareholder value) relying on algorithms that only optimize for one variable (engagement). Taken together, it results in a lot of negative externalities that get ignored at every level.

johnsmith4739 5y ago
I have a sad realisation that "engagement" is more likely "enragement." Humans are activated best by anger. Joy? That is a big deactivator... The algorithmic approach to the feed reminds me a model I work every day with: human perception. Because there is an "algorithm" put between sensory perception and perception/awareness - and because the signal is highly processed - aaand the way processing is done is not available to our conscious awareness - you get all kinds of strange behaviours. Where you cannot control how stimuli are processed and perception formed, you are for all intents and purposes manipulated, or at least denied control. Unfortunately, any SM algo has to fit the same purpose - alter our perceptions and influence our behaviours. Guess I should delete my FB now...
- gotostatement 5y ago
  > I have a sad realisation that "engagement" is more likely "enragement." Humans are activated best by anger. Joy? That is a big deactivator... This is interesting. Because if you have joy, you might be like "maybe I should just put this FB down and continue enjoying my life." But if something angers you, it activates you to stay on and hold on, instead of taking it easy which can lead to logging off.
leppr 5y ago
Put yet another way, the problem boils down to whole continents worth of people relying on one or two companies' proprietary services for their online social life. The web has a platform diversity problem.

omgitsabird 5y ago

> I am increasing convinced that all of the harms of social media can be traced back the ML models used to sort and filter user content. I don't think so. I think most harms of social media can be traced to how the people who actually pay for or make money off the service perceive value.

easterncalculus 5y ago

I agree with this view, because it is ultimately these models which are behind the hyperviral nature of posts now, where they are recommended to people that engage in it, positively or negatively. That whole idea of negative feedback loops is completely independent from explicit human design (these sites were never created to send you things you don't like), and is arguably behind most of what people are complaining about on social media. There are separate features that people debate on (post deletion policies/capabilities, etc) but it is not nearly as widespread as the damage often caused by putting engagement over everything else.

blopker 5y ago

I agree that these companies cannot fix the harm they've caused. However, I have an alternative view point on why. I don't think the ML has much to do with it, although it doesn't help. These companies are just trying to increase their engagement metrics, like how long users are on the site, or how many ads they see on average. This was true before they started using ML, but maybe less obvious. What these companies found was that human nature, in general, gets addicted to outrage and gossip. They are just supplying that to us. It's not very different than tobacco companies. They found an addictive substance, that is not good for us, and are trying to get it out as much as possible. The problem is people 'want' this product, despite its negative effects. That's why these companies can't fix their product. It's like asking "How can we make tobacco healthy?". We can't.

arikrak 5y ago

What about conspiracy theories that spread through WhatsApp? A lot of the harm of social media is because some people spread harmful things and now it's easier for them to do so.

leppr 5y ago
Indeed. I think algorithmic social feeds are such a popular scapegoat simply because people don't understand them (since they're black-boxes and the tech is new). The common rhetoric that "harmful messages which trigger engagement are amplified by social media algorithms" is probably correct, but to think this is anything close to the root cause of the spread of "harmful ideas" on social media is ignoring the reality of social networks before algorithmic feeds. Notably, the most popular current examples of places where harmful ideas are spread (4chan, Gab, Parler, ...) are platorms that eschew algorithmic curation entirely. I don't believe hyperlinks to those platforms are being promoted by the mainstream platforms' algorithmic feeds, people find these places by themselves. Social media can be harmful mostly because it facilitates mob mentality once again. Centralized idea distribution platforms (newspapers, television) gave society a rest from undesired mob mentality, but now we have more freedom of association than ever. I suspect the best way to avoid it is to add more artificial curation in between human interactions, not less.

uyt 5y ago

I only know of one site that uses the model you proposed (pure deterministic feeds ordered by date descending) but it's the cesspool of the internet: 4chan

austincheney 5y ago

That is certainly part of the problem, but a bigger earlier problem is voting mechanisms. Voting mechanisms put those algorithms on steroids and increase the potential for echo chambers. Worse than that voting mechanisms reward bad behavior. They discourage replies for fear of lost karma and as a convenience to those can’t be bothered to use words whether for cowardice or ignorance.

bigbonch 5y ago

To add to this I believe the fundamental issue is intent. Deterministic feeds and "organic" virality is trusting purely human intent. Modern algorithms muddy the network of intent and my tin foil hat take is that we're hard-wired to perceive everything as intent from some other human.

marcinjachymiak 5y ago

Personally, I am convinced that all of the harms of social media can be traced back to the Garden of Eden. People just decide to be bad sometimes. The perfect feed algorithm doesn't exist.

contravariant 5y ago

All social media suffer from the twin problems that they need a metric to rank content (as there is too much of it to transmit everything) and that any such metric ceases to be a good metric once it becomes a target.

suketk 5y ago

Yes! Algorithmic feeds are the bane of our society [1]. Ok maybe that's an exaggeration, but only a minor one. They've messed up the incentive systems for the platforms and turned us into passive consumers (rather than creators). [1] suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful

jefftk 5y ago

>The world of pure deterministic feeds ordered by date descending never had these problems--things would still "go viral" I guess, but it was humans sharing them deliberately to people they knew. If one of the harms you're thinking of is spreading misinformation, we saw that before filtered feeds (email forwards) and we still see it with chat. In places where group chat is the primary form of social media you see this problem just as with FB in the US.

seventytwo 5y ago
Just like with any other viral spread, the goal isn’t to eliminate the spread, but to reduce the R factor. An argument like yours is the same argument used against wearing masks: “yeah, but it’s not 100% effective!”

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago

"Show people what's trending" means "feed the time derivative of the output back into the system -- with positive sign". It's the opposite of damping. It's as though people set out intentionally to, literally, destabilize society.

iratewizard 5y ago
But burning down society sees a 37% increase in engagement

joe_the_user 5y ago

I'm pretty sure Facebook never had a non-mystery feed algorithm. Before ML appeared, I'd guess the algorithm was hand-tuned. I haven't heard anyone express a liking for the FB feed algorithm but I remember a commentator mentioning that FB beat all the other social networks of the time because it turned the noise down tremendously. You weren't bombarded by that those people who posted once an hour and that was big for the average user.