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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

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?
- nradov 5y ago
  Facebook does most of their experiments by rolling out changes to a smaller subset of users. The number of guinea pigs is much smaller.
  - yann2 5y ago
    Animal testing is regulated activity. Do you know why?
im_down_w_otp 5y ago
This is my take as well. It's the business model itself that's toxic, or at least predatory, as the necessary outcome of it is to lean as hard as possible on known frailties of human behavior and psychology in order to cultivate advertising placement and revenue. There's no tinkering around the edges of that control loop that's going to fix the problem. What we observe as the deleterious effects on society are in fact systematic (as in, "design failures") faults in the thesis of Facebook's business model.
elliekelly 5y ago
I think another factor is that they’re trying to quickly turn a massive ship that has, for years, self-selected users intent on heading in the direction of outrage and toxicity. The people who are the most “engaged” with the platform are the people who get a dopamine rush from arguing and baiting and instigating. The nice people who just want to see what their friends are up to have either left or significantly scaled back their use. I think that makes any algorithmic “fix” much harder. Or perhaps even impossible. I think the solutions you’ve suggested would have worked had they been implemented five years ago. I’m not so sure they would work today.
- somedude895 5y ago
  Anecdotally this is what I've been seeing over the years. Most of my friends and acquaintances seem to have left Facebook behind and moved to Insta. The people that stayed on FB are mostly those who like to express strong opinions and engage in pointless discussions.
  - akira2501 5y ago
    > engage in pointless discussions. Pointless to some, I'm sure, but if they're that engaged it's meaningful to them. Viewed through that lens, then attempting to externally manipulate and cajole their conversations was never going to have a positive outcome or even impact on the rest of the userbase.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      It feels like this is a core point that's somehow got lost here. There's a lot of assumptions in these discussions that connections and sharing are only good and useful if the results look a certain way. People sharing dog photos: good. Sharing approved mainstream news stories: good. People posting personal politics: bad. People disagreeing with each other: also bad. Etc. But it's a purely subjective take. Maybe our society needs to talk about politics way more than it does. Historically, instead of talking there's often just been fighting, and everyone agrees that talking is far healthier. Facebook's original working assumption was that connecting people and letting them communicate and share is inherently a valuable thing. Is that actually wrong? Clearly, there is enormous demand to discuss politics that was unleashed by the internet, whereas before then only a small number of people had the access to present their opinions to those around them via opt-in channels like TV, the press, etc. Other people had to make do with phone calls. Something once restricted to a very small group is now available to all. Unsurprisingly, the sort of people who feel ill when they see the results are those whose views are the same as those who previously had a monopoly on group communication of various kinds. The ones most engaged are the ones who feel the media ignore their worldviews. It's pretty dangerous to just say, well, if people are arguing about stuff that the establishment wouldn't let them argue about before, then it's "toxic". It's certainly risky to blame social media as the cause rather than merely a symptom of disagreements that would be there anyway. Far better to have "toxic" social media than a revolution!
mhh__ 5y ago
The only time I ever have meaningful interactions on Facebook is in niche groups like meme groups with a few thousand people. Every single one gets banned eventually. My favourite Top Gear meme group has been through I think 6 groups now. Facebooks potential to destroy culture if they throw a hissy fit is dangerous and not being paid attention to.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  >My favourite Top Gear meme group has been through I think 6 groups now. I think I know the one you mean, that group's been through quite a few "Zuckings".
themolecularman 5y ago
Agreed. But I think big tech didn't use their power years ago when advertisers started demanding their ads don't appear next to X, where X is the offensive thing/position/etc. Big tech has power but it folded and immediately started policing when this happened. Instead of a united front each of them caved to advertisers and now the content on each platform must be kosher according to the ethics that the platforms' rulers have.
- nradov 5y ago
  Big tech never had that power versus advertisers. There's no possible scenario where major mass market advertisers like Coca-Cola or Toyota would ever tolerate having their ads displayed on highly offensive content, like say a Facebook group for white supremacists. If the social media companies hadn't imposed stricter content censorship then the advertisers would have simply dropped those channels to protect their brand images.
donmcronald 5y ago
> 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. Would it be fair to say they're trying to increase time spent by existing users on the site? Does Facebook have such a huge number of users there's no growth from building a better product? I personally think the product is awful. I have an account, but I only log in often enough to keep it active. If I had a nice, reverse chronological feed of things posted (not shared) by my friends I would read it. Maybe the subset of people like me is too small to worry about, but there's definitely some of us where the current algorithms work against engagement.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  > Does Facebook have such a huge number of users there's no growth from building a better product? https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly... >How many users does Facebook have? With roughly 2.89 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2021 >MAU: A registered active user who logged in and visited Facebook through the website, mobile app, or Messenger application in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement. It would be physically possible to have better engagement, yes. But they're already the most wildly used website/software platform/media outlet in the history of humanity. Given from how much regulatory attention they're attracting, you could make a solid argument as a PM that it would be better for the company to reduce MAUs and spike user logins. From how Congress is talking, they're not far from just ordering Facebook to be shut down, which will reduce MAU to 0.
bertil 5y ago
Not really: ads have a budget of attention within an envelope that Engagement (the team whose work is described here) is trying to maximise. There’s detailed estimates to how much ads take away but it’s minimised and isolated from that conversation completely. There are many issues, some addressed there; some more nuanced (figuring out that is a good post or comment is genuinely hard with crude metrics because clickbait and flamewars look very much like compelling content); some that I can’t mention publicly. There are non-scalable ideas for solutions (my PhD was around complex network so check Jure Leskovec’s research for ideas like isolating cliques and defining them as meaningful or not). One idea that I’ve floated, but less than I should, and many other have too, but more than they should (or at least not articulated well around this problem of sorting good from bad content to inform the News Feed algorithm): have secret negative and positive reactions per post and comment. The fact that Likes are public makes them performative, both very compelling (it’s who you want your friends to see in you) and counter-productive. But giving people the ability to say: "look, I will comment on every flame bait that I see, because I can’t help myself, but please, remove from from my feed" would have helped argue against what is still a very linear model of weighting acting that are uniformly seen as "engagement". Source: I was the DS looking into those questions in 2015.
foofoo4u 5y ago
Yup, which points out the fundamental problem: Facebook is a product of its incentives. Its incentive is to maximize engagement. Why? Because more engagement equates to more ad revenue. The externalities of this behavior do not align with what society seeks. Therefore, if we wish to fundamentally transform Facebook, then we must change the incentives. The incentives are not going to change on their own. Enough time has passed to demonstrate that the market will not correct for this. This can be deemed a market failure. This means some intervention by the state must be made. I propose that having the platform free should be illegal. Instead, the company should be forced to charge customers a recurring fee, sufficient enough to cover operation costs, and to no longer obtain revenue through advertising. This, I believe, will shift the incentives to produce the behavior we as a society seek. Facebook will no longer optimize for engagement, as that no longer drives revenue, and must instead compete on something else, like quality of experience on the platform. Of course, such policy would have to be applied across the board for all social networks as to not undermine Facebook's existence with a competitor offering the same service for free.
- Foomf 5y ago
  Couldn't a company outside the US just set up a free Facebook competitor then?
  - foofoo4u 5y ago
    True. There is nothing that would prevent a software company within Sweden, let's say, from opening a free Facebook competitor. Given the reality, such a law as I proposed would be seen as unfair from Facebook's perspective. In many ways, I would say I agree with them. To remedy this, the law could be constructed so that it is only illegal within the confines of the United States. In other words, a paid subscription is mandatory within the United States, while it can be offered for free for anyone outside.
naravara 5y ago
The article makes it seem like people at Facebook have ideas on how to potentially thread the needle, but Zuckerberg (and probably a handful of other senior executives) keep putting the kibosh on it. We know there are some people with pretty idiosyncratic political beliefs and unsavory connections on Facebook's board and within its senior executive leadership. It's not hard to imagine that maybe they like it being an engine for stoking outrage and perpetuating disinformation for reasons unrelated to the financials or for any intelligible design/engineering logic. It doesn't even necessarily have to be malicious. They could literally just be blinkered by a weird ideological belief in "absolute" free-speech.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mandevil 5y ago
The Facebook Integrity team agrees with you, Zuck just doesn't want to give up the cash. "Early tests showed how reducing [downstream MSI- the likelihood of creating long chains of reshares] of the algorithm for civic and health information helped reduce the proliferation of false content. Facebook made the change for those categories in the spring of 2020. When Ms. Stepanov presented Mr. Zuckerberg with the integrity team's proposal to expand that change beyond civic and health content -- and a few countries such as Ethiopia and Myanmar where changes were already being made -- Mr. Zuckerberg said he didn't want to pursue it if it reduced user engagement, according to the documents."

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?

nradov 5y ago
Facebook does most of their experiments by rolling out changes to a smaller subset of users. The number of guinea pigs is much smaller.
- yann2 5y ago
  Animal testing is regulated activity. Do you know why?

im_down_w_otp 5y ago

This is my take as well. It's the business model itself that's toxic, or at least predatory, as the necessary outcome of it is to lean as hard as possible on known frailties of human behavior and psychology in order to cultivate advertising placement and revenue. There's no tinkering around the edges of that control loop that's going to fix the problem. What we observe as the deleterious effects on society are in fact systematic (as in, "design failures") faults in the thesis of Facebook's business model.

elliekelly 5y ago

I think another factor is that they’re trying to quickly turn a massive ship that has, for years, self-selected users intent on heading in the direction of outrage and toxicity. The people who are the most “engaged” with the platform are the people who get a dopamine rush from arguing and baiting and instigating. The nice people who just want to see what their friends are up to have either left or significantly scaled back their use. I think that makes any algorithmic “fix” much harder. Or perhaps even impossible. I think the solutions you’ve suggested would have worked had they been implemented five years ago. I’m not so sure they would work today.

somedude895 5y ago
Anecdotally this is what I've been seeing over the years. Most of my friends and acquaintances seem to have left Facebook behind and moved to Insta. The people that stayed on FB are mostly those who like to express strong opinions and engage in pointless discussions.
- akira2501 5y ago
  > engage in pointless discussions. Pointless to some, I'm sure, but if they're that engaged it's meaningful to them. Viewed through that lens, then attempting to externally manipulate and cajole their conversations was never going to have a positive outcome or even impact on the rest of the userbase.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    It feels like this is a core point that's somehow got lost here. There's a lot of assumptions in these discussions that connections and sharing are only good and useful if the results look a certain way. People sharing dog photos: good. Sharing approved mainstream news stories: good. People posting personal politics: bad. People disagreeing with each other: also bad. Etc. But it's a purely subjective take. Maybe our society needs to talk about politics way more than it does. Historically, instead of talking there's often just been fighting, and everyone agrees that talking is far healthier. Facebook's original working assumption was that connecting people and letting them communicate and share is inherently a valuable thing. Is that actually wrong? Clearly, there is enormous demand to discuss politics that was unleashed by the internet, whereas before then only a small number of people had the access to present their opinions to those around them via opt-in channels like TV, the press, etc. Other people had to make do with phone calls. Something once restricted to a very small group is now available to all. Unsurprisingly, the sort of people who feel ill when they see the results are those whose views are the same as those who previously had a monopoly on group communication of various kinds. The ones most engaged are the ones who feel the media ignore their worldviews. It's pretty dangerous to just say, well, if people are arguing about stuff that the establishment wouldn't let them argue about before, then it's "toxic". It's certainly risky to blame social media as the cause rather than merely a symptom of disagreements that would be there anyway. Far better to have "toxic" social media than a revolution!

mhh__ 5y ago

The only time I ever have meaningful interactions on Facebook is in niche groups like meme groups with a few thousand people. Every single one gets banned eventually. My favourite Top Gear meme group has been through I think 6 groups now. Facebooks potential to destroy culture if they throw a hissy fit is dangerous and not being paid attention to.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
>My favourite Top Gear meme group has been through I think 6 groups now. I think I know the one you mean, that group's been through quite a few "Zuckings".

themolecularman 5y ago

Agreed. But I think big tech didn't use their power years ago when advertisers started demanding their ads don't appear next to X, where X is the offensive thing/position/etc. Big tech has power but it folded and immediately started policing when this happened. Instead of a united front each of them caved to advertisers and now the content on each platform must be kosher according to the ethics that the platforms' rulers have.

nradov 5y ago
Big tech never had that power versus advertisers. There's no possible scenario where major mass market advertisers like Coca-Cola or Toyota would ever tolerate having their ads displayed on highly offensive content, like say a Facebook group for white supremacists. If the social media companies hadn't imposed stricter content censorship then the advertisers would have simply dropped those channels to protect their brand images.

donmcronald 5y ago

> 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. Would it be fair to say they're trying to increase time spent by existing users on the site? Does Facebook have such a huge number of users there's no growth from building a better product? I personally think the product is awful. I have an account, but I only log in often enough to keep it active. If I had a nice, reverse chronological feed of things posted (not shared) by my friends I would read it. Maybe the subset of people like me is too small to worry about, but there's definitely some of us where the current algorithms work against engagement.

sbierwagen 5y ago
> Does Facebook have such a huge number of users there's no growth from building a better product? https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly... >How many users does Facebook have? With roughly 2.89 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2021 >MAU: A registered active user who logged in and visited Facebook through the website, mobile app, or Messenger application in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement. It would be physically possible to have better engagement, yes. But they're already the most wildly used website/software platform/media outlet in the history of humanity. Given from how much regulatory attention they're attracting, you could make a solid argument as a PM that it would be better for the company to reduce MAUs and spike user logins. From how Congress is talking, they're not far from just ordering Facebook to be shut down, which will reduce MAU to 0.

bertil 5y ago

Not really: ads have a budget of attention within an envelope that Engagement (the team whose work is described here) is trying to maximise. There’s detailed estimates to how much ads take away but it’s minimised and isolated from that conversation completely. There are many issues, some addressed there; some more nuanced (figuring out that is a good post or comment is genuinely hard with crude metrics because clickbait and flamewars look very much like compelling content); some that I can’t mention publicly. There are non-scalable ideas for solutions (my PhD was around complex network so check Jure Leskovec’s research for ideas like isolating cliques and defining them as meaningful or not). One idea that I’ve floated, but less than I should, and many other have too, but more than they should (or at least not articulated well around this problem of sorting good from bad content to inform the News Feed algorithm): have secret negative and positive reactions per post and comment. The fact that Likes are public makes them performative, both very compelling (it’s who you want your friends to see in you) and counter-productive. But giving people the ability to say: "look, I will comment on every flame bait that I see, because I can’t help myself, but please, remove from from my feed" would have helped argue against what is still a very linear model of weighting acting that are uniformly seen as "engagement". Source: I was the DS looking into those questions in 2015.

foofoo4u 5y ago

Yup, which points out the fundamental problem: Facebook is a product of its incentives. Its incentive is to maximize engagement. Why? Because more engagement equates to more ad revenue. The externalities of this behavior do not align with what society seeks. Therefore, if we wish to fundamentally transform Facebook, then we must change the incentives. The incentives are not going to change on their own. Enough time has passed to demonstrate that the market will not correct for this. This can be deemed a market failure. This means some intervention by the state must be made. I propose that having the platform free should be illegal. Instead, the company should be forced to charge customers a recurring fee, sufficient enough to cover operation costs, and to no longer obtain revenue through advertising. This, I believe, will shift the incentives to produce the behavior we as a society seek. Facebook will no longer optimize for engagement, as that no longer drives revenue, and must instead compete on something else, like quality of experience on the platform. Of course, such policy would have to be applied across the board for all social networks as to not undermine Facebook's existence with a competitor offering the same service for free.

Foomf 5y ago
Couldn't a company outside the US just set up a free Facebook competitor then?
- foofoo4u 5y ago
  True. There is nothing that would prevent a software company within Sweden, let's say, from opening a free Facebook competitor. Given the reality, such a law as I proposed would be seen as unfair from Facebook's perspective. In many ways, I would say I agree with them. To remedy this, the law could be constructed so that it is only illegal within the confines of the United States. In other words, a paid subscription is mandatory within the United States, while it can be offered for free for anyone outside.

naravara 5y ago

The article makes it seem like people at Facebook have ideas on how to potentially thread the needle, but Zuckerberg (and probably a handful of other senior executives) keep putting the kibosh on it. We know there are some people with pretty idiosyncratic political beliefs and unsavory connections on Facebook's board and within its senior executive leadership. It's not hard to imagine that maybe they like it being an engine for stoking outrage and perpetuating disinformation for reasons unrelated to the financials or for any intelligible design/engineering logic. It doesn't even necessarily have to be malicious. They could literally just be blinkered by a weird ideological belief in "absolute" free-speech.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mandevil 5y ago

The Facebook Integrity team agrees with you, Zuck just doesn't want to give up the cash. "Early tests showed how reducing [downstream MSI- the likelihood of creating long chains of reshares] of the algorithm for civic and health information helped reduce the proliferation of false content. Facebook made the change for those categories in the spring of 2020. When Ms. Stepanov presented Mr. Zuckerberg with the integrity team's proposal to expand that change beyond civic and health content -- and a few countries such as Ethiopia and Myanmar where changes were already being made -- Mr. Zuckerberg said he didn't want to pursue it if it reduced user engagement, according to the documents."