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Depressed people without a life outside Facebook are Facebook's whales, whether it admits it or not. Endlessly clicking through content, viewing ads, and bumpi
by ethbr0 4y ago
Depressed people without a life outside Facebook are Facebook's whales, whether it admits it or not.
Endlessly clicking through content, viewing ads, and bumping engagement numbers up.
Ergo, any systemic effort to boost engagement will eventually encourage actions with the end result of "Make more people depressed, so they consume more Facebook."
It's a crime that we don't regulate engagement methods at a government level. We should have started with anything targeted at children, but ultimately established some rules of the road for adults too.
- agumonkey 4y agoMakes me wonder how much metrics are skewed. Views from people in this state are not views from someone a bit more balanced and happy. Yet society likes to throw bland numbers around.
- ethbr0 4y agoI would love to see a frequency distribution for Facebook's engagement metrics...
- curiousllama 4y agoI mean it’s probably just a power law distribution, right?
- ethbr0 4y agoI'm sure it started that way, but they've been tweaking their drivers for 15+ years at this point. That's time enough for them to skew their userbase's behavior if they could. And given the amount of money they've thrown at staff, I wouldn't bet against them having shifted it in their favor.