27 ms·

Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier

197 points by tysone 5y ago

the-dude 5y ago
For how long will articles like these hit the FP? When does it stop being news? Will it ever change? I wonder from which year the 'first' of articles like these is.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  Usenet moderation debates? probably before that. Perhaps the "editors" columns of society journals. If i recall, there were some laws about what could be printed shortly after printing presses began to proliferate that went beyond "don't say anything bad about lawmakers or the church" and ventured into early libel/slander by attempting to say "dont be controversial". which is pretty much what everyone is wishing for now, when they're demanding various forms of censorship and filtering performed pre-consumer.
strict9 5y ago
>Company researchers discovered that publishers and political parties were reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism. That tactic produced high levels of comments and reactions that translated into success on Facebook. This is why The Daily Wire and other such outrage aggregators are consistently on Facebook's Top 10. Not coincidentally, it's also been the source of fuel for the anti-vaccine movement that is resulting in overflowing ICUs and well over a thousand deaths per day. Masks, social distancing, vaccines--are a political issue and FB's feed that prioritizes "engagement" (or enragement) causes false medical information to float to the top and get the most comments/shares. FB got more engagement but in the process became the main outlet for medical misinformation.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  And don't get me started on how Twitter consistently pushes those "influencers" on the left to the top of the trending feed. "Duty to Warn", "Palmer Report", "Gravel Institute", "BrooklynDad", and others. In many ways I feel like those smug hot-takes are even more corrosive than what the Daily Wire does.
  - strict9 5y ago
    We are in agreement. "engagement" is a plague that brings out the worst of all sides of the political spectrum. But worse than political rhetoric is the proliferation and promotion of medical misinformation. It's resulting in the deaths of thousands of people who were duped into believing the vaccines are part of some sort of conspiracy and that bogus treatments are the only thing that work.
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      For sure, and as much as I loathe Ben Shapiro's smugness, and by extension, his "news" outlet, I'd be remiss if I didn't also point out how it's happening elsewhere from the other side of the aisle, too.
    - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
      >the proliferation and promotion of medical misinformation. I can see that working both ways. The anti-vax folks are never going to believe the 'get vaccinated or you'll die' sort of rhetoric. Better to use real numbers. There's been enough time and cases to make good estimates. Do masks work very well? What kinds of masks? Where do people actually get COVID (home? bars? schools? hiking in the forest?). What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments? How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful? Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants? There's a shroud of mystery throughout this situation with a need by some people to simply shout down to the masses. None of this is that complicated and medical leadership is some mixture of secretive and incompetent, and I'm not sure what the strongest tendency is.
      - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
        > Do masks work very well? What kinds of masks? Where do people actually get COVID (home? bars? schools? hiking in the forest?). What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments? How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful? Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants? These questions are always asked in bad faith, if they're even asked at all rather than just taking the word of right-wing talking heads at face value. Anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers don't care what the science says and willfully ignore peer-reviewed studies.
- sayonaraman 5y ago
  Exactly, you can probably add Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times to the list. If not for the continuous lies and “outrage engineering” by mainstream media BLM riots wouldn’t have happened and hundreds of small businesses wouldn't have been destroyed in 2020, not to mention all the innocent people injured and killed for fake political cause. Facebook and other social media are definitely partly responsible for the outrage culture and divisiveness plaguing the country. But I assume it’s a difficult problem for algorithms to detect political agenda, as it seems to pervade every aspect of news these days.
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  I'd love to talk to the folks that work at the outrage porn outlets. Are they true believers doing whatever it takes? Actually think they print news? Just in it for the money? How honed is the writing and how is that done? How do advertisers (the point of the exercise after all) respond? How has it all changed over time? How do people become writers, how much of it is done programatically? It's a small thing, but something I'm struck by is how little international news is out there anymore.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.md/GQFLq https://archive.md/GQFLq
maxfurman 5y ago
> Data scientists on that integrity team—whose job is to improve the quality and trustworthiness of content on the platform—worked on a number of potential changes to curb the tendency of the overhauled algorithm to reward outrage and lies. Mr. Zuckerberg resisted some of the proposed fixes, the documents show, because he was worried they might hurt the company’s other objective—making users engage more with Facebook. Delete your facebook account. Zuck and co. are poisoning their users for profit.
- mzkply 5y ago
  Am I in the super-minority if I say I've unfollowed about 80% of my FB friends? I've never seen a political or outrage post in the last 3 years since I just unfollowed everyone but my closest friends and family.
  - VortexDream 5y ago
    I unfollowed everybody, joined a bunch of local special interest groups and met a ton of new people who lived in the same city. Facebook is actually an incredible tool to connect with other people. But the more I saw how FB behaved, the less I wanted to be involved in any way with their business. I ended up deleting my FB account, which even now 3 years later I feel was a huge loss for me. But I just can't do FB anymore knowing how they're driving outrage and political/societal issues in the name of "user engagement". I wish there were some alternative, but there isn't. It genuinely feels like I've cut myself off from modern city life without it and it frustrates me so much.
    - zelphirkalt 5y ago
      It is supposed to make you feel that way. That is on FB's agenda to achieve, in order to bind you to their (dis-)services. Real friends will not require you to use FB and sacrifice your privacy to communicate with them. You might feel a loss, but there are alternative ways of communicating. Get as many friends as possible over to messengers, which are not owned by FB. Give people a call every now and then. Write them SMS, write them e-mail. All of that is better than communication on FB services. Real friends will initiate as well. If you are not on FB, they will have to contact you through other means. If you are not worth the "trouble" or effort in their eyes, then good riddance, you do not need them.
warning26 5y ago
It all comes down to every PM's favorite metric: engagement. When users get into a heated flamewar, that's high-engagement. So you want to do everything you can to ensure that the most possible users get sucked into flamewars. I feel like this should be banned, but it's unclear what the best approach would be. Mandating chronological feed order?
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  MeWe has chronological feed order, and I've found fewer flame wars there. The user base is smaller and possibly more ideologically uniform, though, which may be an alternate explanation.
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    Yes, but small size seems to intrinsically produce nicer platforms. Even within the large platforms, you still get "stick to the small groups/subreddits/pages and folks are nice there". So there's no guarantee a structure that seems to encourage peace will actually work when scaled up.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    The big tent for everyone sites are toxic because people don't interact as closely in real life with people from different groups. We group for a reason. Within those groups common understanding on certain ideas is the connection. With that connection you let down your guard, you can be this side of yourself freely. In a big crowd you have to wear all faces to relate to everyone.
    - badRNG 5y ago
      Anecdotally, I've seen far more polemic and vitriolic posts on so-called alt-tech social media sites compared to even Twitter and Facebook, which are horrendous in this regard. Sites like Gab, Voat, Ruqqus, etc seem to be filled with the absolute most toxic, angry, and hateful discourse imaginable. I've noticed sites that tend to be for something other than "just chatting" tend to do better: many hobby specific forums, HN, hobbyist subreddits, etc. all seem to do better discourse-wise when focused on something specific, but I'm not quite sure why that'd be the case.
at_a_remove 5y ago
Here is the interesting bit: "Mr. Zuckerberg announced he was changing Facebook product managers’ goal from helping people find relevant content to helping them interact more with friends and family." What this did not take into account -- and I suppose it is easy to see in hindsight -- is that the Buzzfeed social justice stuff is proselytized by people you know. We have all heard various people "going no contact" with "toxic" (as in "masculinity") on Facebook and other social media. When people get into social justice, they constantly hammer the people they know about it, doing "call-outs" and "checking privilege." This does not happen to strangers, it happens to people they know ... just like a recent convert to a religion can become an irritant with their newfound beliefs and their attempts to work it into conversation on almost any pretext. Here is another type of example for you: check your various feeds about COVID. One group is "they are killing us with their refusal to vaccinate" and the other is "they are killing us with these vaccines." Nobody is convincing anybody else, it is just yelling across the aisle. More sharing between people you know just means more yelling. Facebook focused on the easy part -- who, upon which they already have a firm grasp -- rather than the hard part, what, namely trying to automate some kind of machine understanding of content. It's the what which is divisive and angry, not the who. My friend's wife shares photos of her garden and her chicken, fine. But she goes on and on and on about COVID, about four-fifths of her posts are about it. I'm already vaccinated, I am tired of hearing about it. And the people who are not vaccinated by now are not going to be convinced by yelling at them constantly, but it sure feels good to yell about the bad people, whoever they are. We saw this all before with the various Christian fears about D&D in the 1980s and the Satanic panics. It's just a new flavor of people yelling at those nearby: friends and family. Now it is mediated by Facebook, Instagram, and the like.
mrweasel 5y ago
One reason why Facebook keeps failing in increasing "meaningful social interaction" could be because they at the same time tries to sell ads. It seems like it would be easy to simply exclude "reshares" from users news feed. They could try to: "Sort by date" and "only posts posted/shared by my friend directly". Personally I think that would remove much of the toxicity. Secondly, simply ban news sites from the platform. Facebook is trying to fix an algorithm that can't possibly work, because it has two opposing jobs, increase time spend on the platform and at the same time it has to downplay the content people engages with the most.
- wheybags 5y ago
  While I'm sure there are some people at fb genuinely trying to "fix" toxicity, overall the issue is that they're not trying to fix it. They want to do the minimum possible to protect their image / bottom line, they don't care if it actually works. Actually fixing toxicity is one way to improve their image, but appearing to try can be good enough.
  - artificial 5y ago
    I think all of the problems they have are earned. They've got, what, 3 billion users? How many 9s (99.99999) effective does the solution need to be to wrangle edge cases? Moderation is an eternal issue.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    It's really difficult to make that kind of change from the rank and file. Once revenue is involved, it's amazing how nervous people get and nobody wants to approve some change that might lose as little as fractions of a percent of the money stream. There has to be a clear, explicit mandate from leadership that acknowledges there will be a revenue hit, and absolves any project members from bad outcomes / or rewards them for participation. I.e. it's hopeless :-)
- yann2 5y ago
  This is a social science experiment with 3 billion guinea pigs. Every time you rerun it, if someone somewhere (and the people connected to them get effected) how many attempts do you get?
rflec028 5y ago
wsj.com is not a trustworthy news source and should not be posted.
- badRNG 5y ago
  Why do you say that? Content here seems pretty reasonable most of the time.
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    WSJ's editorial pages have a long and storied history of supporting conservative positions that are utterly disconnected from reality, for example on climate change or the Iraq war. These are not trivial matters that we should quickly forgive them over.
    - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
      >These are not trivial matters that we should quickly forgive them over. Just imagine the fun you'll have when you start kicking them out of helicopters. The endorphin rush should be incredible.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  You're thinking of their opinion section. The reporting is solid.
  - fortuna86 5y ago
    Which is another argument for scrapping the opinion section of every newspaper, it confuses people. But they keep it for the same reason FB doesn't turn down their own volume, angry people make for better customers.
    - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
      >Which is another argument for scrapping the opinion section of every newspaper, it confuses people. At this point, I'd say that that's the entire newspaper. They operate in the same ad space as Facebook.
MattGaiser 5y ago
Part of the problem is a lot of people enjoy the anger.
- jimt1234 5y ago
  This ^^^!!! People are, or can be, total garbage, especially when they're behind a keyboard and not face-to-face.
  - akira2501 5y ago
    Our evolutionary history is not filled with times of peace and enlightenment. Simply creating the internet and giving to the public wasn't going to change this fundamental equation. The need to judge these people as "garbage" who simply aren't handling technology well is worthy of interest itself.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      It isn't that they aren't handling technology well. It is that a large segment of the population consists of terrible people. Technology is just their latest way of being terrible.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    I can absolutely confirm this, I fell down an unfortunate rabbit hole of posting about politics on Reddit (fairly mainstream politics, but politics nonetheless). There's nothing quite like the dopamine rush of righteous anger, and mixing that with the disinhibition of just being another pseudonym it's quite easy to understand why "enrangement is engagement" is such a powerful and insideous tool to drive people's use of social media. I was a shitehawk and I'm not afraid to admit it. I'd never advocate something as obviously ridiculous as requiring ID to post on social media or the other sort of rubbish people outside of the tech industry come up with to deal with this problem, though I'd also point out that quitting Reddit did wonders for my mental health and generally made me less of an arse. Facebook strikes me as even worse, even more tuned towards pissing you off and preying on that human need to have the last word.
nixpulvis 5y ago
Ugh, WSJ audio playback is a god damn robot.
- mdoms 5y ago
  They're covering all of their Facebook Files reporting on their daily podcast, The Journal. https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal?mod=podcasts_carousel https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal?mod=podcasts_carous...
  - nixpulvis 5y ago
    Awesome, thanks for that. UPDATE: Yea, the point about how those with the most influence on the platform are getting the least moderation was very compelling. So much of the problem really is just how secretive the whole thing is. I understand the nuance, but timely independent (and validated) review seems necessary for high profile cases.
mdoms 5y ago
Is anyone else finding this WSJ reporting a bit overwrought? They got access to some internal documents and decided to make hay while the sun shines, but most of it is frankly not very interesting. WSJ pretty clearly have an axe to grind and are building a narrative in an unbalanced way.
- bertil 5y ago
  I’m very tempted to agree in general, and I’ve seen a lot of bad takes that cured my Gell-Mann amnesia but on this particular take, I think they are sensible. I would know because all this was my job in 2015. It’s partial because it’s based on contained leaks, there’s couple of inaccuracies, but not much more than what your team mates would make. I think the reason why it adds up is that it’s starting from a good point of view: Why is that job hard? There seem to be no easy fixes, why? What the people trying to fix are struggling with? That’s universally a good question to ask anyone and a great way to get a nuanced point of view — far better than the usual outrage at “Why is Facebook so terrible?!” which is best described as scapegoating to make an obvious reference to Thiel’s PhD advisor.
mullingitover 5y ago
My recommendation for making Facebook a healthier place: unfollow everyone and everything. There are scripts that will automate this process for you. Once you have a completely blank slate Facebook feed, you're free. You can proactively look up your friends' activity if you want to, but otherwise you just get the good parts of facebook (like event invites and a chat app) and great meme groups like "This cat is CHONKY" and "Foods with threatening auras."
foofoo4u 5y ago
Excerpts from one of the leaked documents. Disturbing.: > Research conducted in the EU reveals that political parties "feel strongly that the change to the algorithm has forced them to skew negative in their communications on Facebook, with the downstream effect of leading them into more extreme policy positions." For example, in Poland, "one party’s social media management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative and 20% positive, explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm… Many parties, including those that have shifted strongly to the negative, worry about the long-term effects on democracy." We have heard similar feedback from parties in India and Taiwan. > News publishers, too, are concerned about the incentives MSI created. We received direct feedback from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti that his team feels "MSI ranking isn’t actually rewarding content that drives meaningful social interactions. They feel pressure to make bad content or underperform." Peretti related that "when we create meaningful content, it doesn’t get rewarded, "but more sensationalist and divisive content (such as "fad/junky science", "extremely disturbing news", "gross" images, and content exploiting racial divisions) is more successful.
- kordlessagain 5y ago
  Fuck Facebook.
- owl_troupe 5y ago
  > For example, in Poland, "one party’s social media management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative and 20% positive, explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm… Many parties, including those that have shifted strongly to the negative, worry about the long-term effects on democracy." Not only democracy but, eventually, world peace. There are an increasing number of countries turning toward authoritarianism and the effects here could not only polarize political discourse, but also international relations.
- yosito 5y ago
  > the change to the algorithm has forced them to skew negative in their communications on Facebook I suspect that one of the reasons for this is that negative reactions to posts (like anger) actually have a positive effect on engagement. Facebook never really implemented any kind of downvote like other platforms have. Downvotes tend to suppress content that people don't want to see.
bastardoperator 5y ago
The amount of hatred on facebook is staggering. I just group text or call when it comes to friends and family. A lot of us are on discord these days because we want to communicate without all of the noise or drama.
efleurine 5y ago
May be we need two news feeds. One for our friends and one where you see the whole metaverse.
streamofdigits 5y ago
Good luck supporting a $trillion valuation on the basis of a "healthier place". The business of social media platforms is to maximize profit by monetizing their user base. Friedman instructed MBA students that they must pursue this diligently, using any and all legal tricks in the book. Yes sure, as good managers they need to protect long-term shareholder value. They should, in general, want to strike the right balance that will be maximally extractive without incuring uneconomic fines, or unduly damaging the reputation of the platform. With all the top brains in the payroll this is an optimisation problem that seems easy to crack. For as long society thinks this business model is kosher there is really nothing to do about it. If we want to ever turn a page and start worrying about more serious problems we simply need to move on to open source decentralized media.
- owl_troupe 5y ago
  > start worrying about more serious problems I completely agree with your sentiment, but what societal problem isn't currently being made worse by political polarization and misinformation on Facebook? Take your pick: genocide[1], climate change denialism[2], anti-democratic efforts[3], public health misinformation [4], just to name a few. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook-idUSKCN1GO2PN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/08/climate-denial-ads-on-facebook-seen-by-millions-report-finds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/08/climate-... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/facebook-insurrection-was-not-our-fault/619114/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/faceb... [4] https://www.fastcompany.com/90657622/as-the-delta-variant-spreads-vaccine-conspiracy-groups-on-facebook-have-doubled https://www.fastcompany.com/90657622/as-the-delta-variant-sp...
  - streamofdigits 5y ago
    yes, it is my view too that solving the "social media" fiasco is a prerequisite (or at least major facilitator) of all the real and urgent social problems. what I meant to say it is pointless to wait for facebook to fix itself as that cannot be done in the universe these folks are operating in. It would have to be either: i) a heavy (Chinese style) regulatory hammer descenting on them (0% chance in the oligopoly-captured US political system) or ii) any decent person (anyone that thinks there is such a thing as society, has any affinity with humanism and its values, respecting and empowering people as persons) simply abandons them and takes the discussion elsewhere. The critical mass for seeding viable alternatives is much smaller than the bulk of average users
cat199 5y ago
again and again, user-controlled 'knobs' controlling content presentation/filtering would solve many 'platform content' issues, but platform providers consistently remove user control over content moderation instead of simply providing appropriate controls.
workinghard 5y ago
social networks are a cancer. i realized that when its thought to be cool and never used any since then. Good thing is its very easy to get rid of this from one's life.
thrower123 5y ago
Facebook is fundamentally a dead platform, as far as I can tell. I've got over 500 "friends" and I see almost nothing on the news feed, to the point where it remains static aside from the shifting ads, for days at a time. There's a chilling effect at some level with the way that Facebook has a defacto "real name" policy, combined with the fact that it's your real-life family and friends and normies that you are connected with. Only the most disagreeable bother posting outside of the realm of baby pictures and recipes and small-business self-promotion.
- mandevil 5y ago
  Facebook agrees with you, per the article. The article places a lot of the blame on the changes to the algorithms in January 2018, which at the time Zuck portrayed as a sacrifice: "Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down," he wrote on Facebook. "But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too." "Facebook training videos and internal memos show another reason for the change -- the company's growing concern about a decline in user engagement, which typically refers to actions like commenting on or sharing posts.Comments, likes and reshares declined through 2017, while "original broadcast" posts -- the paragraph and photo a person might post when a dog dies -- continued a yearslong decline that no intervention seemed able to stop, according to the internal memos. The fear was that eventually users might stop using Facebook altogether." So they made changes to the algorithm and ended up making things worse, by emphasizing politics, hate-clicks, and arguments. This shows the limits of algorithms: there is a reason that actual news organizations rely on humans to decide on what information to present to you, not some machine learning black-box.
adventured 5y ago
You make Facebook a healthier place by reducing connection and reducing velocity. The things that Facebook will absolutely never be willing to do. You reduce connection and velocity by ending feeds that show you most of everything, and switch to making people manually seek out what they want to get updates on. People will overwhelmingly be inclined to seek out updates and connections that they get enjoyment from, rather than having agitation/reaction/trigger porn shoveled on their heads all day long. Tear down that wall. This would ultimately be labeled as encouraging echo chambers / bubbles. People are typically happiest in their own bubbles, and certainly the majority of the time. That was true 20 years ago. It was true 50 years ago. It will always be true. If you make a very far left liberal type watch nothing but FoxNews as their information source, they will not enjoy it. That person is going to be happiest, by a dramatic margin, in their own bubble, swimming in their own worldview. That isn't a defect of humanity, it's perfectly ok. It's healthy to enjoy swimming in your own beliefs. People will not all agree with each other, what matters is civility, not agreement. Stop being psychotic authoritarians and trying to force people to exist in a way they do not want to, an unnatural way. People want to live in their echo chambers, whatever that chamber happens to be. It's healthy to prefer one's own echo chamber the majority of the time (and yes, it's occasionally also good to step outside of that echo chamber). Stop trying to control them, let them live as they see fit (so long as they are not attempting to harm others), as they are happiest. Stop pushing connections that should not exist. Not all people should be connected. Not all people will get along. Not all people will like each other. Not all people will agree on ideology/beliefs/whatever. That's perfectly ok, it's best that some people are apart, including friends from the distant past who may not like each other in the present. Facebook does the opposite and attempts to drive everyone to be connected, which was more or less their original mission. That's a mission that can only cause strife. A thousand friends? Bullshit. That's fake. That's 950 people that will just largely be annoying at best, with feeds you'll derive very little value from (or negative value). It's obvious what the outcome inherently has to be in quasi forcing so many fake connections.
- vmoore 5y ago
  > switch to making people manually seek out what they want to get updates on Twitter lists have been my go-to solution for a while now. Yes, I still get spammed by 'promoted tweets' but it's a small price to pay for keeping tabs on my interests and also: the interests of others (which is the concerning one). Keeping tabs on the very people you most despise. What is the saying: `Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer`? I do that all day on Twitter.
dang 5y ago
Previous threads on articles in this series: Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28523688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28523688 - Sept 2021 (624 comments) Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121 - Sept 2021 (502 comments)
golemotron 5y ago
People communicate to say things that they think are important. We should not be surprised when a medium that allows more broadcast-level communication becomes dominated by those things rather than "how was your day?" Ads are a canard. The earliest non-ad-driven social networks: USENET, mailing lists etc, had the same problems.
- randcraw 5y ago
  USENET had an entirely different set of users than today's anonymous trolls, which minimized flame-fests. Sure, disagreement drove much conversation on the groups, but it was generally topic-driven and constructive, targeting ideas much more than people. Vitriol back then was the exception rather than the rule. Those groups (aside from alt.*) where denizens crossed the line often added moderation, which usually tamped down the flames. No, I think things are MUCH worse now than USENET ever was.
  - golemotron 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
sharadov 5y ago
Facebook over time became an echo chamber of toxicity, emphasis having moved from banter and sharing pictures between friends in the early days to "shock and awe". Guess who stays and who leaves?
jes 5y ago
Facebook was a really unhealthy place for me. In part because of my own insecurities. I gave it up a year or so ago. Lots of pictures from the last ten years of my life were lost. Which is fine. The last decade has been a huge shitstorm for me. Facebook did leverage my attention seeking and my unhealthy need to be seen as right and smart. I don’t miss it. I think their platform does a lot of damage in the world. Yet I’m sure that many people get value from it as well.
k__ 5y ago
Never understood that debate. FB is almost dead for me in terms of interaction with individuals. A few of my friends post a meme now and then and I look for events. That's it.
standardUser 5y ago
I always feel like people never discuss the elephant in the room, which is that whoever you are, your feed is dictated by the people and pages you have chosen to follow. It doesn't matter what the platform is. If you give people the flexibility to craft their own feed, and they want to craft a feed full of hate and lies and nonsense, how can we ever stop them? Meanwhile, my feed has zero politics and is comprised almost entirely of retro video game stuff, plus a few local NYC groups. I kind of love it!
- benoror 5y ago
  FB should probably make it easier to identify and unsubscribe from those feedback loop silos
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pradn 5y ago
  Twitter has ended up pretty good for me. 1) I set my location to the country Chad so I don't see popular trends that aren't very interesting, or serve as sources of outrage. 2) I use the word-based content filters to omit annoying politicians or topics from my feed. So much more peaceful now that I don't have to see people's outrage at the latest political enfant terrible. 3) I primarily follow primarily historians who make fantastic long threads, film critics I respect, movie/art channels. No crazy politics stuff. Few of my friends are on it so I don't have to see their stuff either. If I want the news, I just read a few major newspapers. It works well enough for me!
- Jensson 5y ago
  Many times people engage in behaviour they know is bad for them. See smoking, alcohol etc. Regulating the entities which makes that bad behaviour possible is a reasonable solution.
- sevilo 5y ago
  It used to be fun when it was just my friends, sure once in the while you get that annoying person who’s trying to live a completely different life on social media but overall funny memes, shitposting with friends, checking in at places. Until Facebook implemented the ultimate evil suggestion feature and brought in news articles then everything went to hell.
croo 5y ago
An ideal social platform should aim for its users to spend the least amount of time behind screen (and the most with each other). Facebook has the opposite aim. This simply cannot align.
midnightGhost 5y ago
Facebook lost at being a social media platform long ago with serving ads and trying to be a social media platform and news media platform at the same time. It just does not work. That seems to be the big issue with people trying to create a social platform. You can't have a social platform that also has ads and news going around like wildfire. Ads ruin the experience and make it feel less "social" and news well just look at Facebook and Twitter and what news sharing has done there. People want to be able to chat and have a feed among their friends and family. Take out all the business, celebrity pages and all other pages. Just have a friends list, chat and a feed. I look back on the AIM days and how simple it was. It was just a friends list, chats and chatrooms based on topics from what I can remember. There weren't any algorithms altering anything. There wasn't all this extra stuff like following or friending businesses, magazines/newspapers, celebrities or anything else. I have no idea why a social platform today needs all this extra garbage like businesses, celebs etc that has nothing to do with being a social platform. I think at that point it just becomes a hub for information and not a place to socialize, chat and share among your friends and family.

197 points by tysone 5y ago

For how long will articles like these hit the FP? When does it stop being news? Will it ever change? I wonder from which year the 'first' of articles like these is.

h2odragon 5y ago
Usenet moderation debates? probably before that. Perhaps the "editors" columns of society journals. If i recall, there were some laws about what could be printed shortly after printing presses began to proliferate that went beyond "don't say anything bad about lawmakers or the church" and ventured into early libel/slander by attempting to say "dont be controversial". which is pretty much what everyone is wishing for now, when they're demanding various forms of censorship and filtering performed pre-consumer.

strict9 5y ago

>Company researchers discovered that publishers and political parties were reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism. That tactic produced high levels of comments and reactions that translated into success on Facebook. This is why The Daily Wire and other such outrage aggregators are consistently on Facebook's Top 10. Not coincidentally, it's also been the source of fuel for the anti-vaccine movement that is resulting in overflowing ICUs and well over a thousand deaths per day. Masks, social distancing, vaccines--are a political issue and FB's feed that prioritizes "engagement" (or enragement) causes false medical information to float to the top and get the most comments/shares. FB got more engagement but in the process became the main outlet for medical misinformation.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
And don't get me started on how Twitter consistently pushes those "influencers" on the left to the top of the trending feed. "Duty to Warn", "Palmer Report", "Gravel Institute", "BrooklynDad", and others. In many ways I feel like those smug hot-takes are even more corrosive than what the Daily Wire does.
- strict9 5y ago
  We are in agreement. "engagement" is a plague that brings out the worst of all sides of the political spectrum. But worse than political rhetoric is the proliferation and promotion of medical misinformation. It's resulting in the deaths of thousands of people who were duped into believing the vaccines are part of some sort of conspiracy and that bogus treatments are the only thing that work.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    For sure, and as much as I loathe Ben Shapiro's smugness, and by extension, his "news" outlet, I'd be remiss if I didn't also point out how it's happening elsewhere from the other side of the aisle, too.
  - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
    >the proliferation and promotion of medical misinformation. I can see that working both ways. The anti-vax folks are never going to believe the 'get vaccinated or you'll die' sort of rhetoric. Better to use real numbers. There's been enough time and cases to make good estimates. Do masks work very well? What kinds of masks? Where do people actually get COVID (home? bars? schools? hiking in the forest?). What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments? How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful? Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants? There's a shroud of mystery throughout this situation with a need by some people to simply shout down to the masses. None of this is that complicated and medical leadership is some mixture of secretive and incompetent, and I'm not sure what the strongest tendency is.
    - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
      > Do masks work very well? What kinds of masks? Where do people actually get COVID (home? bars? schools? hiking in the forest?). What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments? How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful? Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants? These questions are always asked in bad faith, if they're even asked at all rather than just taking the word of right-wing talking heads at face value. Anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers don't care what the science says and willfully ignore peer-reviewed studies.
sayonaraman 5y ago
Exactly, you can probably add Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times to the list. If not for the continuous lies and “outrage engineering” by mainstream media BLM riots wouldn’t have happened and hundreds of small businesses wouldn't have been destroyed in 2020, not to mention all the innocent people injured and killed for fake political cause. Facebook and other social media are definitely partly responsible for the outrage culture and divisiveness plaguing the country. But I assume it’s a difficult problem for algorithms to detect political agenda, as it seems to pervade every aspect of news these days.
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
I'd love to talk to the folks that work at the outrage porn outlets. Are they true believers doing whatever it takes? Actually think they print news? Just in it for the money? How honed is the writing and how is that done? How do advertisers (the point of the exercise after all) respond? How has it all changed over time? How do people become writers, how much of it is done programatically? It's a small thing, but something I'm struck by is how little international news is out there anymore.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.md/GQFLq https://archive.md/GQFLq

maxfurman 5y ago

> Data scientists on that integrity team—whose job is to improve the quality and trustworthiness of content on the platform—worked on a number of potential changes to curb the tendency of the overhauled algorithm to reward outrage and lies. Mr. Zuckerberg resisted some of the proposed fixes, the documents show, because he was worried they might hurt the company’s other objective—making users engage more with Facebook. Delete your facebook account. Zuck and co. are poisoning their users for profit.

mzkply 5y ago
Am I in the super-minority if I say I've unfollowed about 80% of my FB friends? I've never seen a political or outrage post in the last 3 years since I just unfollowed everyone but my closest friends and family.
- VortexDream 5y ago
  I unfollowed everybody, joined a bunch of local special interest groups and met a ton of new people who lived in the same city. Facebook is actually an incredible tool to connect with other people. But the more I saw how FB behaved, the less I wanted to be involved in any way with their business. I ended up deleting my FB account, which even now 3 years later I feel was a huge loss for me. But I just can't do FB anymore knowing how they're driving outrage and political/societal issues in the name of "user engagement". I wish there were some alternative, but there isn't. It genuinely feels like I've cut myself off from modern city life without it and it frustrates me so much.
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago
    It is supposed to make you feel that way. That is on FB's agenda to achieve, in order to bind you to their (dis-)services. Real friends will not require you to use FB and sacrifice your privacy to communicate with them. You might feel a loss, but there are alternative ways of communicating. Get as many friends as possible over to messengers, which are not owned by FB. Give people a call every now and then. Write them SMS, write them e-mail. All of that is better than communication on FB services. Real friends will initiate as well. If you are not on FB, they will have to contact you through other means. If you are not worth the "trouble" or effort in their eyes, then good riddance, you do not need them.

warning26 5y ago

It all comes down to every PM's favorite metric: engagement. When users get into a heated flamewar, that's high-engagement. So you want to do everything you can to ensure that the most possible users get sucked into flamewars. I feel like this should be banned, but it's unclear what the best approach would be. Mandating chronological feed order?

JasonFruit 5y ago
MeWe has chronological feed order, and I've found fewer flame wars there. The user base is smaller and possibly more ideologically uniform, though, which may be an alternate explanation.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Yes, but small size seems to intrinsically produce nicer platforms. Even within the large platforms, you still get "stick to the small groups/subreddits/pages and folks are nice there". So there's no guarantee a structure that seems to encourage peace will actually work when scaled up.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  The big tent for everyone sites are toxic because people don't interact as closely in real life with people from different groups. We group for a reason. Within those groups common understanding on certain ideas is the connection. With that connection you let down your guard, you can be this side of yourself freely. In a big crowd you have to wear all faces to relate to everyone.
  - badRNG 5y ago
    Anecdotally, I've seen far more polemic and vitriolic posts on so-called alt-tech social media sites compared to even Twitter and Facebook, which are horrendous in this regard. Sites like Gab, Voat, Ruqqus, etc seem to be filled with the absolute most toxic, angry, and hateful discourse imaginable. I've noticed sites that tend to be for something other than "just chatting" tend to do better: many hobby specific forums, HN, hobbyist subreddits, etc. all seem to do better discourse-wise when focused on something specific, but I'm not quite sure why that'd be the case.

at_a_remove 5y ago

Here is the interesting bit: "Mr. Zuckerberg announced he was changing Facebook product managers’ goal from helping people find relevant content to helping them interact more with friends and family." What this did not take into account -- and I suppose it is easy to see in hindsight -- is that the Buzzfeed social justice stuff is proselytized by people you know. We have all heard various people "going no contact" with "toxic" (as in "masculinity") on Facebook and other social media. When people get into social justice, they constantly hammer the people they know about it, doing "call-outs" and "checking privilege." This does not happen to strangers, it happens to people they know ... just like a recent convert to a religion can become an irritant with their newfound beliefs and their attempts to work it into conversation on almost any pretext. Here is another type of example for you: check your various feeds about COVID. One group is "they are killing us with their refusal to vaccinate" and the other is "they are killing us with these vaccines." Nobody is convincing anybody else, it is just yelling across the aisle. More sharing between people you know just means more yelling. Facebook focused on the easy part -- who, upon which they already have a firm grasp -- rather than the hard part, what, namely trying to automate some kind of machine understanding of content. It's the what which is divisive and angry, not the who. My friend's wife shares photos of her garden and her chicken, fine. But she goes on and on and on about COVID, about four-fifths of her posts are about it. I'm already vaccinated, I am tired of hearing about it. And the people who are not vaccinated by now are not going to be convinced by yelling at them constantly, but it sure feels good to yell about the bad people, whoever they are. We saw this all before with the various Christian fears about D&D in the 1980s and the Satanic panics. It's just a new flavor of people yelling at those nearby: friends and family. Now it is mediated by Facebook, Instagram, and the like.

mrweasel 5y ago

One reason why Facebook keeps failing in increasing "meaningful social interaction" could be because they at the same time tries to sell ads. It seems like it would be easy to simply exclude "reshares" from users news feed. They could try to: "Sort by date" and "only posts posted/shared by my friend directly". Personally I think that would remove much of the toxicity. Secondly, simply ban news sites from the platform. Facebook is trying to fix an algorithm that can't possibly work, because it has two opposing jobs, increase time spend on the platform and at the same time it has to downplay the content people engages with the most.

wheybags 5y ago
While I'm sure there are some people at fb genuinely trying to "fix" toxicity, overall the issue is that they're not trying to fix it. They want to do the minimum possible to protect their image / bottom line, they don't care if it actually works. Actually fixing toxicity is one way to improve their image, but appearing to try can be good enough.
- artificial 5y ago
  I think all of the problems they have are earned. They've got, what, 3 billion users? How many 9s (99.99999) effective does the solution need to be to wrangle edge cases? Moderation is an eternal issue.
- foobarian 5y ago
  It's really difficult to make that kind of change from the rank and file. Once revenue is involved, it's amazing how nervous people get and nobody wants to approve some change that might lose as little as fractions of a percent of the money stream. There has to be a clear, explicit mandate from leadership that acknowledges there will be a revenue hit, and absolves any project members from bad outcomes / or rewards them for participation. I.e. it's hopeless :-)
yann2 5y ago
This is a social science experiment with 3 billion guinea pigs. Every time you rerun it, if someone somewhere (and the people connected to them get effected) how many attempts do you get?

rflec028 5y ago

wsj.com is not a trustworthy news source and should not be posted.

badRNG 5y ago
Why do you say that? Content here seems pretty reasonable most of the time.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  WSJ's editorial pages have a long and storied history of supporting conservative positions that are utterly disconnected from reality, for example on climate change or the Iraq war. These are not trivial matters that we should quickly forgive them over.
  - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
    >These are not trivial matters that we should quickly forgive them over. Just imagine the fun you'll have when you start kicking them out of helicopters. The endorphin rush should be incredible.
colinmhayes 5y ago
You're thinking of their opinion section. The reporting is solid.
- fortuna86 5y ago
  Which is another argument for scrapping the opinion section of every newspaper, it confuses people. But they keep it for the same reason FB doesn't turn down their own volume, angry people make for better customers.
  - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
    >Which is another argument for scrapping the opinion section of every newspaper, it confuses people. At this point, I'd say that that's the entire newspaper. They operate in the same ad space as Facebook.

MattGaiser 5y ago

Part of the problem is a lot of people enjoy the anger.

jimt1234 5y ago
This ^^^!!! People are, or can be, total garbage, especially when they're behind a keyboard and not face-to-face.
- akira2501 5y ago
  Our evolutionary history is not filled with times of peace and enlightenment. Simply creating the internet and giving to the public wasn't going to change this fundamental equation. The need to judge these people as "garbage" who simply aren't handling technology well is worthy of interest itself.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    It isn't that they aren't handling technology well. It is that a large segment of the population consists of terrible people. Technology is just their latest way of being terrible.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  I can absolutely confirm this, I fell down an unfortunate rabbit hole of posting about politics on Reddit (fairly mainstream politics, but politics nonetheless). There's nothing quite like the dopamine rush of righteous anger, and mixing that with the disinhibition of just being another pseudonym it's quite easy to understand why "enrangement is engagement" is such a powerful and insideous tool to drive people's use of social media. I was a shitehawk and I'm not afraid to admit it. I'd never advocate something as obviously ridiculous as requiring ID to post on social media or the other sort of rubbish people outside of the tech industry come up with to deal with this problem, though I'd also point out that quitting Reddit did wonders for my mental health and generally made me less of an arse. Facebook strikes me as even worse, even more tuned towards pissing you off and preying on that human need to have the last word.

nixpulvis 5y ago

Ugh, WSJ audio playback is a god damn robot.

mdoms 5y ago
They're covering all of their Facebook Files reporting on their daily podcast, The Journal. https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal?mod=podcasts_carousel https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal?mod=podcasts_carous...
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  Awesome, thanks for that. UPDATE: Yea, the point about how those with the most influence on the platform are getting the least moderation was very compelling. So much of the problem really is just how secretive the whole thing is. I understand the nuance, but timely independent (and validated) review seems necessary for high profile cases.

mdoms 5y ago

Is anyone else finding this WSJ reporting a bit overwrought? They got access to some internal documents and decided to make hay while the sun shines, but most of it is frankly not very interesting. WSJ pretty clearly have an axe to grind and are building a narrative in an unbalanced way.

bertil 5y ago
I’m very tempted to agree in general, and I’ve seen a lot of bad takes that cured my Gell-Mann amnesia but on this particular take, I think they are sensible. I would know because all this was my job in 2015. It’s partial because it’s based on contained leaks, there’s couple of inaccuracies, but not much more than what your team mates would make. I think the reason why it adds up is that it’s starting from a good point of view: Why is that job hard? There seem to be no easy fixes, why? What the people trying to fix are struggling with? That’s universally a good question to ask anyone and a great way to get a nuanced point of view — far better than the usual outrage at “Why is Facebook so terrible?!” which is best described as scapegoating to make an obvious reference to Thiel’s PhD advisor.

mullingitover 5y ago

My recommendation for making Facebook a healthier place: unfollow everyone and everything. There are scripts that will automate this process for you. Once you have a completely blank slate Facebook feed, you're free. You can proactively look up your friends' activity if you want to, but otherwise you just get the good parts of facebook (like event invites and a chat app) and great meme groups like "This cat is CHONKY" and "Foods with threatening auras."

foofoo4u 5y ago

Excerpts from one of the leaked documents. Disturbing.: > Research conducted in the EU reveals that political parties "feel strongly that the change to the algorithm has forced them to skew negative in their communications on Facebook, with the downstream effect of leading them into more extreme policy positions." For example, in Poland, "one party’s social media management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative and 20% positive, explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm… Many parties, including those that have shifted strongly to the negative, worry about the long-term effects on democracy." We have heard similar feedback from parties in India and Taiwan. > News publishers, too, are concerned about the incentives MSI created. We received direct feedback from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti that his team feels "MSI ranking isn’t actually rewarding content that drives meaningful social interactions. They feel pressure to make bad content or underperform." Peretti related that "when we create meaningful content, it doesn’t get rewarded, "but more sensationalist and divisive content (such as "fad/junky science", "extremely disturbing news", "gross" images, and content exploiting racial divisions) is more successful.

kordlessagain 5y ago
Fuck Facebook.
owl_troupe 5y ago
> For example, in Poland, "one party’s social media management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative and 20% positive, explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm… Many parties, including those that have shifted strongly to the negative, worry about the long-term effects on democracy." Not only democracy but, eventually, world peace. There are an increasing number of countries turning toward authoritarianism and the effects here could not only polarize political discourse, but also international relations.
yosito 5y ago
> the change to the algorithm has forced them to skew negative in their communications on Facebook I suspect that one of the reasons for this is that negative reactions to posts (like anger) actually have a positive effect on engagement. Facebook never really implemented any kind of downvote like other platforms have. Downvotes tend to suppress content that people don't want to see.

bastardoperator 5y ago

The amount of hatred on facebook is staggering. I just group text or call when it comes to friends and family. A lot of us are on discord these days because we want to communicate without all of the noise or drama.

efleurine 5y ago

May be we need two news feeds. One for our friends and one where you see the whole metaverse.

streamofdigits 5y ago

Good luck supporting a $trillion valuation on the basis of a "healthier place". The business of social media platforms is to maximize profit by monetizing their user base. Friedman instructed MBA students that they must pursue this diligently, using any and all legal tricks in the book. Yes sure, as good managers they need to protect long-term shareholder value. They should, in general, want to strike the right balance that will be maximally extractive without incuring uneconomic fines, or unduly damaging the reputation of the platform. With all the top brains in the payroll this is an optimisation problem that seems easy to crack. For as long society thinks this business model is kosher there is really nothing to do about it. If we want to ever turn a page and start worrying about more serious problems we simply need to move on to open source decentralized media.

owl_troupe 5y ago
> start worrying about more serious problems I completely agree with your sentiment, but what societal problem isn't currently being made worse by political polarization and misinformation on Facebook? Take your pick: genocide[1], climate change denialism[2], anti-democratic efforts[3], public health misinformation [4], just to name a few. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook-idUSKCN1GO2PN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/08/climate-denial-ads-on-facebook-seen-by-millions-report-finds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/08/climate-... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/facebook-insurrection-was-not-our-fault/619114/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/faceb... [4] https://www.fastcompany.com/90657622/as-the-delta-variant-spreads-vaccine-conspiracy-groups-on-facebook-have-doubled https://www.fastcompany.com/90657622/as-the-delta-variant-sp...
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  yes, it is my view too that solving the "social media" fiasco is a prerequisite (or at least major facilitator) of all the real and urgent social problems. what I meant to say it is pointless to wait for facebook to fix itself as that cannot be done in the universe these folks are operating in. It would have to be either: i) a heavy (Chinese style) regulatory hammer descenting on them (0% chance in the oligopoly-captured US political system) or ii) any decent person (anyone that thinks there is such a thing as society, has any affinity with humanism and its values, respecting and empowering people as persons) simply abandons them and takes the discussion elsewhere. The critical mass for seeding viable alternatives is much smaller than the bulk of average users

cat199 5y ago

again and again, user-controlled 'knobs' controlling content presentation/filtering would solve many 'platform content' issues, but platform providers consistently remove user control over content moderation instead of simply providing appropriate controls.

workinghard 5y ago

social networks are a cancer. i realized that when its thought to be cool and never used any since then. Good thing is its very easy to get rid of this from one's life.

thrower123 5y ago

Facebook is fundamentally a dead platform, as far as I can tell. I've got over 500 "friends" and I see almost nothing on the news feed, to the point where it remains static aside from the shifting ads, for days at a time. There's a chilling effect at some level with the way that Facebook has a defacto "real name" policy, combined with the fact that it's your real-life family and friends and normies that you are connected with. Only the most disagreeable bother posting outside of the realm of baby pictures and recipes and small-business self-promotion.

mandevil 5y ago
Facebook agrees with you, per the article. The article places a lot of the blame on the changes to the algorithms in January 2018, which at the time Zuck portrayed as a sacrifice: "Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down," he wrote on Facebook. "But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too." "Facebook training videos and internal memos show another reason for the change -- the company's growing concern about a decline in user engagement, which typically refers to actions like commenting on or sharing posts.Comments, likes and reshares declined through 2017, while "original broadcast" posts -- the paragraph and photo a person might post when a dog dies -- continued a yearslong decline that no intervention seemed able to stop, according to the internal memos. The fear was that eventually users might stop using Facebook altogether." So they made changes to the algorithm and ended up making things worse, by emphasizing politics, hate-clicks, and arguments. This shows the limits of algorithms: there is a reason that actual news organizations rely on humans to decide on what information to present to you, not some machine learning black-box.

adventured 5y ago

You make Facebook a healthier place by reducing connection and reducing velocity. The things that Facebook will absolutely never be willing to do. You reduce connection and velocity by ending feeds that show you most of everything, and switch to making people manually seek out what they want to get updates on. People will overwhelmingly be inclined to seek out updates and connections that they get enjoyment from, rather than having agitation/reaction/trigger porn shoveled on their heads all day long. Tear down that wall. This would ultimately be labeled as encouraging echo chambers / bubbles. People are typically happiest in their own bubbles, and certainly the majority of the time. That was true 20 years ago. It was true 50 years ago. It will always be true. If you make a very far left liberal type watch nothing but FoxNews as their information source, they will not enjoy it. That person is going to be happiest, by a dramatic margin, in their own bubble, swimming in their own worldview. That isn't a defect of humanity, it's perfectly ok. It's healthy to enjoy swimming in your own beliefs. People will not all agree with each other, what matters is civility, not agreement. Stop being psychotic authoritarians and trying to force people to exist in a way they do not want to, an unnatural way. People want to live in their echo chambers, whatever that chamber happens to be. It's healthy to prefer one's own echo chamber the majority of the time (and yes, it's occasionally also good to step outside of that echo chamber). Stop trying to control them, let them live as they see fit (so long as they are not attempting to harm others), as they are happiest. Stop pushing connections that should not exist. Not all people should be connected. Not all people will get along. Not all people will like each other. Not all people will agree on ideology/beliefs/whatever. That's perfectly ok, it's best that some people are apart, including friends from the distant past who may not like each other in the present. Facebook does the opposite and attempts to drive everyone to be connected, which was more or less their original mission. That's a mission that can only cause strife. A thousand friends? Bullshit. That's fake. That's 950 people that will just largely be annoying at best, with feeds you'll derive very little value from (or negative value). It's obvious what the outcome inherently has to be in quasi forcing so many fake connections.

vmoore 5y ago
> switch to making people manually seek out what they want to get updates on Twitter lists have been my go-to solution for a while now. Yes, I still get spammed by 'promoted tweets' but it's a small price to pay for keeping tabs on my interests and also: the interests of others (which is the concerning one). Keeping tabs on the very people you most despise. What is the saying: `Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer`? I do that all day on Twitter.

dang 5y ago

Previous threads on articles in this series: Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls, company documents show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28523688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28523688 - Sept 2021 (624 comments) Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121 - Sept 2021 (502 comments)

golemotron 5y ago

People communicate to say things that they think are important. We should not be surprised when a medium that allows more broadcast-level communication becomes dominated by those things rather than "how was your day?" Ads are a canard. The earliest non-ad-driven social networks: USENET, mailing lists etc, had the same problems.

randcraw 5y ago
USENET had an entirely different set of users than today's anonymous trolls, which minimized flame-fests. Sure, disagreement drove much conversation on the groups, but it was generally topic-driven and constructive, targeting ideas much more than people. Vitriol back then was the exception rather than the rule. Those groups (aside from alt.*) where denizens crossed the line often added moderation, which usually tamped down the flames. No, I think things are MUCH worse now than USENET ever was.
- golemotron 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

sharadov 5y ago

Facebook over time became an echo chamber of toxicity, emphasis having moved from banter and sharing pictures between friends in the early days to "shock and awe". Guess who stays and who leaves?

jes 5y ago

Facebook was a really unhealthy place for me. In part because of my own insecurities. I gave it up a year or so ago. Lots of pictures from the last ten years of my life were lost. Which is fine. The last decade has been a huge shitstorm for me. Facebook did leverage my attention seeking and my unhealthy need to be seen as right and smart. I don’t miss it. I think their platform does a lot of damage in the world. Yet I’m sure that many people get value from it as well.

k__ 5y ago

Never understood that debate. FB is almost dead for me in terms of interaction with individuals. A few of my friends post a meme now and then and I look for events. That's it.

standardUser 5y ago

I always feel like people never discuss the elephant in the room, which is that whoever you are, your feed is dictated by the people and pages you have chosen to follow. It doesn't matter what the platform is. If you give people the flexibility to craft their own feed, and they want to craft a feed full of hate and lies and nonsense, how can we ever stop them? Meanwhile, my feed has zero politics and is comprised almost entirely of retro video game stuff, plus a few local NYC groups. I kind of love it!

benoror 5y ago
FB should probably make it easier to identify and unsubscribe from those feedback loop silos
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pradn 5y ago
Twitter has ended up pretty good for me. 1) I set my location to the country Chad so I don't see popular trends that aren't very interesting, or serve as sources of outrage. 2) I use the word-based content filters to omit annoying politicians or topics from my feed. So much more peaceful now that I don't have to see people's outrage at the latest political enfant terrible. 3) I primarily follow primarily historians who make fantastic long threads, film critics I respect, movie/art channels. No crazy politics stuff. Few of my friends are on it so I don't have to see their stuff either. If I want the news, I just read a few major newspapers. It works well enough for me!
Jensson 5y ago
Many times people engage in behaviour they know is bad for them. See smoking, alcohol etc. Regulating the entities which makes that bad behaviour possible is a reasonable solution.
sevilo 5y ago
It used to be fun when it was just my friends, sure once in the while you get that annoying person who’s trying to live a completely different life on social media but overall funny memes, shitposting with friends, checking in at places. Until Facebook implemented the ultimate evil suggestion feature and brought in news articles then everything went to hell.

croo 5y ago

An ideal social platform should aim for its users to spend the least amount of time behind screen (and the most with each other). Facebook has the opposite aim. This simply cannot align.

midnightGhost 5y ago

Facebook lost at being a social media platform long ago with serving ads and trying to be a social media platform and news media platform at the same time. It just does not work. That seems to be the big issue with people trying to create a social platform. You can't have a social platform that also has ads and news going around like wildfire. Ads ruin the experience and make it feel less "social" and news well just look at Facebook and Twitter and what news sharing has done there. People want to be able to chat and have a feed among their friends and family. Take out all the business, celebrity pages and all other pages. Just have a friends list, chat and a feed. I look back on the AIM days and how simple it was. It was just a friends list, chats and chatrooms based on topics from what I can remember. There weren't any algorithms altering anything. There wasn't all this extra stuff like following or friending businesses, magazines/newspapers, celebrities or anything else. I have no idea why a social platform today needs all this extra garbage like businesses, celebs etc that has nothing to do with being a social platform. I think at that point it just becomes a hub for information and not a place to socialize, chat and share among your friends and family.