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Recently Farcebook has started recommending incredibly toxic anti-SJW shit to me for no apparent reason. Either they turned the "let's incite toxicity" knob to

Recently Farcebook has started recommending incredibly toxic anti-SJW shit to me for no apparent reason. Either they turned the "let's incite toxicity" knob to 11 or somebody is seriously abusing them.

AlexandrB 4y ago
Indeed. By US standards I'm somewhere left of Bernie but I keep getting recommended Jordan Peterson reels on Instagram. Not sure what's going on.
ben_w 4y ago
Possibly, but not the only explanations — my feed is now more than 50% suggested/promoted content, including Fox News Tampa, even though I'm living in a different city in a different state in a different country in a different continent and almost all of my friends are further to the left than even the left-most US Democrat. If I had to guess, the bottom has fallen out of the advertising market and every business reliant on selling adverts is getting desperate.
- noneeeed 4y ago
  The FB feed has become utterly drenched in suggested content, 99% of which is trash. I'm sure they will see some short term bump but I've got to wonder if this is finally the end for them. I'm certainly not bothering to check it any more.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    Facebook still has billions of users. It's just that its hope lies outside of the West
    - lupire 4y ago
      The money isn't outside the West...yet.
- somat 4y ago
  It reminds me of stores, you can get a feel for how well the store is doing by how aggressively they try to shovel the loyalty card on you. See also: magazines, watch the signal to noise ratio plummet as they try to prop up revenue with more and lower quality ads. I get why they do it, they are in a death spiral, desperately trying to find that one thing that will save them, mostly I think it just hastens the end as the bad experience turns people away.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    I always wondered why physical shops offered a much worse experience in many ways than online ones, even taking into account the obviously insurmountable logistical advantage of the latter. I mean you'd expect them to at least try to have better service? The answer of course is that their only choice is to focus on their captive audience (people who can't or won't buy online) and extract as much as possible until the music stops. A similar thing is ironically happening to Netflix
hugh-avherald 4y ago
For me it's mostly Elon Musk-endorsed, government-backed $250k/yr guaranteed return investments in bitcoin.
dekhn 4y ago
Just yesterday, Facebook started including in-stream ads for Creation Research. I'm a scientist who's work on evolution. i also see several other ridiculous ads that have no relevance to me. I think it's more likely the folks running the product machine learning recommendation engines are asleep at the wheel; after all, Mark lost interest in his core product to promote AR, so why would th efolks running the core product care?
- origin_path 4y ago
  Eh, that seems pretty relevant: the ads are about evolution, you work on evolution related stuff. It's just the ad targeting engine doesn't understand that you're going to fundamentally disagree with the concept being advertised. That's probably an edge case though. 99% of the time irrelevance for advertising means you just have no need for the product being advertised, not that it's the polar opposite of your worldview. You probably don't remember the ones that are merely useless, though.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I do expect that recommendation engines should pick up on, and not show me, advertising content that is fundamentally nonscientific (and show those ads to other folks whose profiles are more consistent). It demonstrates that the recommendation algorithm can't differentiate between two clusters that use similar words, but different concept vectors.
    - origin_path 4y ago
      Well, you don't know how it was targeted. Maybe they don't want to sing to the choir so such ads might be targeted at people who are interested in evolution. Still it seems unlikely that the scientific-ness of something can be determined by an AI model at all, let alone just word vectors. What is and isn't science can be hard to rigorously pin down, that's why pseudoscience is problematic in the first place.
      - dekhn 4y ago
20amxn20 4y ago
- cauefcr 4y ago
  Ah yes, the toxicity of "let people be themselves in peace".
  - ben_w 4y ago
    While I have never directly encountered toxic social justice activism (not even an ex's mother whose activism made me realise "Champagne socialist" was more than just a right wing straw-man), there is no cause so pure it cannot attract numpties. There is a video (don't know if it's real, staged, missing context, a one-off, whatever) of of some activists going to a restaurant and apparently cajoling diners to agree with them by using the slogan "silence is violence". (Trouble is with stuff like that, in any cause, it gets amplified by both toxic opponents and socially inept supporters).
    - soundnote 4y ago
      “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” ― Aldous Huxley
    - soundnote 4y ago
      Depending on what you mean by 'directly', it's been fun to see people say people who look like me are "born to not being human" and another (a professor of education, to boot) assigning reading (not as a warning) saying "white people are born human but abused into whiteness". There's a TON of double standards. Asian people want to cater to their own interests? Understandable. Whites would want to do the same? The first question is "who do you hate?" as if that was the only possible motivation. If I went to America they'd call me a colonizer when only 150 years ago my ancestors couldn't even conduct their official business in their native language and some time later huge chunks of them were killed or taken into slavery by Russians - slavic people whose very fucking name means slave because they got oppressed that badly back in the day.

AlexandrB 4y ago

Indeed. By US standards I'm somewhere left of Bernie but I keep getting recommended Jordan Peterson reels on Instagram. Not sure what's going on.

ben_w 4y ago

Possibly, but not the only explanations — my feed is now more than 50% suggested/promoted content, including Fox News Tampa, even though I'm living in a different city in a different state in a different country in a different continent and almost all of my friends are further to the left than even the left-most US Democrat. If I had to guess, the bottom has fallen out of the advertising market and every business reliant on selling adverts is getting desperate.

noneeeed 4y ago
The FB feed has become utterly drenched in suggested content, 99% of which is trash. I'm sure they will see some short term bump but I've got to wonder if this is finally the end for them. I'm certainly not bothering to check it any more.
- Bakary 4y ago
  Facebook still has billions of users. It's just that its hope lies outside of the West
  - lupire 4y ago
    The money isn't outside the West...yet.
somat 4y ago
It reminds me of stores, you can get a feel for how well the store is doing by how aggressively they try to shovel the loyalty card on you. See also: magazines, watch the signal to noise ratio plummet as they try to prop up revenue with more and lower quality ads. I get why they do it, they are in a death spiral, desperately trying to find that one thing that will save them, mostly I think it just hastens the end as the bad experience turns people away.
- Bakary 4y ago
  I always wondered why physical shops offered a much worse experience in many ways than online ones, even taking into account the obviously insurmountable logistical advantage of the latter. I mean you'd expect them to at least try to have better service? The answer of course is that their only choice is to focus on their captive audience (people who can't or won't buy online) and extract as much as possible until the music stops. A similar thing is ironically happening to Netflix

hugh-avherald 4y ago

For me it's mostly Elon Musk-endorsed, government-backed $250k/yr guaranteed return investments in bitcoin.

dekhn 4y ago

Just yesterday, Facebook started including in-stream ads for Creation Research. I'm a scientist who's work on evolution. i also see several other ridiculous ads that have no relevance to me. I think it's more likely the folks running the product machine learning recommendation engines are asleep at the wheel; after all, Mark lost interest in his core product to promote AR, so why would th efolks running the core product care?

origin_path 4y ago
Eh, that seems pretty relevant: the ads are about evolution, you work on evolution related stuff. It's just the ad targeting engine doesn't understand that you're going to fundamentally disagree with the concept being advertised. That's probably an edge case though. 99% of the time irrelevance for advertising means you just have no need for the product being advertised, not that it's the polar opposite of your worldview. You probably don't remember the ones that are merely useless, though.
- dekhn 4y ago
  I do expect that recommendation engines should pick up on, and not show me, advertising content that is fundamentally nonscientific (and show those ads to other folks whose profiles are more consistent). It demonstrates that the recommendation algorithm can't differentiate between two clusters that use similar words, but different concept vectors.
  - origin_path 4y ago
    Well, you don't know how it was targeted. Maybe they don't want to sing to the choir so such ads might be targeted at people who are interested in evolution. Still it seems unlikely that the scientific-ness of something can be determined by an AI model at all, let alone just word vectors. What is and isn't science can be hard to rigorously pin down, that's why pseudoscience is problematic in the first place.
    - dekhn 4y ago

20amxn20 4y ago

cauefcr 4y ago
Ah yes, the toxicity of "let people be themselves in peace".
- ben_w 4y ago
  While I have never directly encountered toxic social justice activism (not even an ex's mother whose activism made me realise "Champagne socialist" was more than just a right wing straw-man), there is no cause so pure it cannot attract numpties. There is a video (don't know if it's real, staged, missing context, a one-off, whatever) of of some activists going to a restaurant and apparently cajoling diners to agree with them by using the slogan "silence is violence". (Trouble is with stuff like that, in any cause, it gets amplified by both toxic opponents and socially inept supporters).
  - soundnote 4y ago
    “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” ― Aldous Huxley
  - soundnote 4y ago
    Depending on what you mean by 'directly', it's been fun to see people say people who look like me are "born to not being human" and another (a professor of education, to boot) assigning reading (not as a warning) saying "white people are born human but abused into whiteness". There's a TON of double standards. Asian people want to cater to their own interests? Understandable. Whites would want to do the same? The first question is "who do you hate?" as if that was the only possible motivation. If I went to America they'd call me a colonizer when only 150 years ago my ancestors couldn't even conduct their official business in their native language and some time later huge chunks of them were killed or taken into slavery by Russians - slavic people whose very fucking name means slave because they got oppressed that badly back in the day.