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Unfortunately, his solutions are non-starters. Openness and oversight of data and algorithms won't do anything without clear ethical requirements. All it will r
by madrox 5y ago
Unfortunately, his solutions are non-starters. Openness and oversight of data and algorithms won't do anything without clear ethical requirements. All it will really do is slow down iteration. Prioritizing tools to shield against of hateful content is not in the best interest of social media platforms. Sharing is the main mechanism of retention.
As for the offline stuff...we've been trying to do that since before the internet. See how far that's gotten us.
If I had any solution to offer, I'd say it's to use large platform social media to funnel people to smaller communities where most of the real engagement happens (like Discord). We're already seeing it with brands that don't feel like they can reach their whole audience anymore. Politicians can do that too.
- mgraczyk 5y ago> Prioritizing tools to shield against of hateful content is not in the best interest of social media platforms It's well understood that hateful content is harmful to retention. Off the top of my head I can think of at least 3 long term projects at IG that were premised on this. All major social networks prioritize tools to reduce hate because they know that consuming and sharing of hateful content is bad for their bottom line. The problem is that people are hateful and they express hate online. It's no longer the case that social networks are amplifying this pattern in any way.
- madrox 5y agoI'm willing to concede this, but I find it incredible that this is true and yet users have very little control over how their timeline is filtered.
- mgraczyk 5y agoIf you're talking about Facebook or Instagram, users actually have a lot of control! You can snooze or completely remove other users, groups, and pages. You can ask for "less content like this" and FB used ML to show you less of similar things. You can add keyword filters to the comments sections under your posts. You can block users from commenting or from posting in your group. You can even do all of these things with ads as well, including removing ads from certain categories. There aren't power user controls like custom regex filters, but that's because the vast majority of users would not use them, and it's not worth the UI complexity and risk that things like that add.
- renewiltord 5y agoInstagram used to be the perfect social network. You only saw what you followed and there were clear anti-addiction mechanisms: “you’re all finished” and then historical posts if you were at the end; stories being not lit up if you view them; stuff like that. Now at the bottom of my feed is random high engagement stuff. Yeah, dude, I looove photos of space and shit. But I also scroll loop on them. That’s why I trusted Instagram. Now I’ve noticed my behavior is so weird. I go on Instagram and I have a resistance to scroll down because I know there’s scroll bait down there. Don’t even mind ads. Just scroll bait. I think we both know that was an intentional choice to add that at the end.
- fortuna86 5y ago> You can snooze or completely remove other users, groups, and pages. This works until FB/IG/Twitter starts "recommending" more content to your feed to keep you on the platform longer. As far as I know, there's no way to disable this.
- fortuna86 5y ago> It's well understood that hateful content is harmful to retention Not sure how you are defining harmful here, but emotionally charged content designed to upset and anger leads to higher engagement numbers. I would argue that's quite harmful.