4 ms·

> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. Full disclosure: I work for Meta, but not on ranking, and my opinions are my own. Edit: this isn

> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. Full disclosure: I work for Meta, but not on ranking, and my opinions are my own. Edit: this isn't specific to Meta; it's common to all content platforms. This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude. There are leaked state secrets the public should know. There's hate speech (laws vary by country). Sexual material (laws vary). Nudity (laws and customs vary). Then there's libel (which is hard and slow to prove). That's just on the legal side. That's what you're calling for, but that's hard enough. I have no idea how Kiwi Farms and 4chan do it. Then there's ranking. Maybe the posts are there if you know where to look, but realistically, you'll never see them. People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

mcny 3y ago
> but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people. Just having the option to not see anything I am not explicitly following and always seeing posts in reverse chronological order would be nice. Right now I barely ever go to Facebook because my timeline is a mess. I've manually unfollowed all my friends and yet the spam comes through.
- tylerchurch 3y ago
  > I've manually unfollowed all my friends and yet the spam comes through. If you've unfollowed everyone what do you expect to see?
  - j-bos 3y ago
    Not the one you're replying to but I unfollow all, but a couple people.
  - noitpmeder 3y ago
    ... nothing?
  - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
    I expect if you unfollowed everyone for it to show absolutely nothing, leaving a "consider following these people" prompt. And otherwise when I reach the end of new content, show me a "you reached the end of your unread content, consider following these people to add more". Having a clear "you are caught up" point probably isn't positive for engagement metrics so I understand why they don't do it but I'd rather the app be oriented towards UX than to be oriented towards engagement metrics.
HashThis 3y ago
What you are effectively saying is "people in Meta will decide to be on one political side or the other. They will pick one political side to lose. They will sort/rank to be effectively censored (not scene in common usage). Pretend that can't be escaped". It can be escaped. Having the power to censor one political side is just too addicting for meta to use the self-control to not abuse that power. That is what is happening.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  > What you are effectively saying is "people in Meta will decide to be on one political side or the other I'm not saying anything about Meta, but content forums as a whole. I'm also not saying people will even make decisions. Sometimes those running the platform might, sometimes users might, sometimes users might implicitly decide as recommender systems learn their preferences.
ignoramous 3y ago
> This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude. You're right. Instagram feeds can get quite 4chan esque: https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-instagram-video-algorithm-children-adult-sexual-content-72874155 https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-instagram-video-algorithm-chil... Even so, TFA claims that Meta has figured out a way to suppress pro-Pal content... so clearly, something's up?
wernercd 3y ago
"this doesn't scale" Yet it did fine for years before removing sane options.
calamari4065 3y ago
>People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people. I fail to see how this is a problem. Much less one that necessitates spending billions of dollars developing sorting and recommendation algorithms to solve. Unless your priority is not "show the user what they have explicitly requested to see". Users were perfectly happy when twitter, Facebook, tumblr, MySpace, and literally every other site was a reverse chronological feed. Now that they aren't, we have federated social media with no algorithm, just reverse chronological. People are perfectly happy with it now, same as always. If you follow too many people to keep up with, the problem is that you follow too many people. Users will self regulate. If you give them filtering and sorting tools, they'll use them. It's crazy that we keep reinventing the same solutions and wonder why heaping additional complexity on top of the original idea does nothing but make it worse. You'd figure that someone somewhere would be at least aware of what came before, but apparently not. We're just gonna keep inventing wheels, and keep touting how many more edges this new wheel has compared to the last one until we get back to round and wonder where it all went wrong.
- mgraczyk 3y ago
  I did work on ranking at Meta. The vast majority of people really do not prefer the chronological feed. We validated this by extraordinarily high powered randomized trials, including with surveys. No more than 20% of people preferred a chronological feed in any experiment I saw.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    20% is far from small...
    - mgraczyk 3y ago
      Typically less, depends on the surface.
  - kahnclusions 3y ago
    I mean, yeah, but you could also do a lot of high powered randomized trials about kinds of cookies and learn that 80% of people always prefer eating the cookies with cocaine in them.
octacat 3y ago
Does not scale, sure, if 2 posts are from random people I am not interested in, 2 posts are ads. Repeat. That is the current feed on instagram.
qotgalaxy 3y ago
[dead]
whstl 3y ago
"People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people." That's just rationalizing a business decision. Nobody is saying there should be no algorithmic timeline. If it "doesn't scale" for my own timeline, that's 100% on me. Why take away the decision or "nudge" into the other direction? If the algorithmic timeline really were THAT better, there would be zero need to remove the chronological option or "forget" when the user sets it as an option. People would just use it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jancsika 3y ago
> People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people. People say they want kind, honest car salesmen, but that doesn't scale for the kind of overleveraged floor plans and impulsive, short-term thinking that characterize most dealerships.
tsol 3y ago
This isn't a universal problem though: only Instagram and Facebook have these accusations
oooyay 3y ago
> "People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people." I'm not sure I agree with you. I'm in 40+ IRC channels and multiple networks. I have an IRC Bouncer with playback enabled and my window stops when I log off at the place where I left off. I can easily scroll back to the bottom an see what's current. Same thing goes for Discord and Slack. I have never in my life thought, "wow I wish I could get a summary of all the dumb shit said in ##chat and ##politics in the same place when I come back." Maybe, just maybe, I don't need to know the highlights of everything that's happened since I last logged on?

mcny 3y ago

> but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people. Just having the option to not see anything I am not explicitly following and always seeing posts in reverse chronological order would be nice. Right now I barely ever go to Facebook because my timeline is a mess. I've manually unfollowed all my friends and yet the spam comes through.

tylerchurch 3y ago
> I've manually unfollowed all my friends and yet the spam comes through. If you've unfollowed everyone what do you expect to see?
- j-bos 3y ago
  Not the one you're replying to but I unfollow all, but a couple people.
- noitpmeder 3y ago
  ... nothing?
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  I expect if you unfollowed everyone for it to show absolutely nothing, leaving a "consider following these people" prompt. And otherwise when I reach the end of new content, show me a "you reached the end of your unread content, consider following these people to add more". Having a clear "you are caught up" point probably isn't positive for engagement metrics so I understand why they don't do it but I'd rather the app be oriented towards UX than to be oriented towards engagement metrics.

HashThis 3y ago

What you are effectively saying is "people in Meta will decide to be on one political side or the other. They will pick one political side to lose. They will sort/rank to be effectively censored (not scene in common usage). Pretend that can't be escaped". It can be escaped. Having the power to censor one political side is just too addicting for meta to use the self-control to not abuse that power. That is what is happening.

dehrmann 3y ago
> What you are effectively saying is "people in Meta will decide to be on one political side or the other I'm not saying anything about Meta, but content forums as a whole. I'm also not saying people will even make decisions. Sometimes those running the platform might, sometimes users might, sometimes users might implicitly decide as recommender systems learn their preferences.

ignoramous 3y ago

> This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude. You're right. Instagram feeds can get quite 4chan esque: https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-instagram-video-algorithm-children-adult-sexual-content-72874155 https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-instagram-video-algorithm-chil... Even so, TFA claims that Meta has figured out a way to suppress pro-Pal content... so clearly, something's up?

wernercd 3y ago

"this doesn't scale" Yet it did fine for years before removing sane options.

calamari4065 3y ago

>People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people. I fail to see how this is a problem. Much less one that necessitates spending billions of dollars developing sorting and recommendation algorithms to solve. Unless your priority is not "show the user what they have explicitly requested to see". Users were perfectly happy when twitter, Facebook, tumblr, MySpace, and literally every other site was a reverse chronological feed. Now that they aren't, we have federated social media with no algorithm, just reverse chronological. People are perfectly happy with it now, same as always. If you follow too many people to keep up with, the problem is that you follow too many people. Users will self regulate. If you give them filtering and sorting tools, they'll use them. It's crazy that we keep reinventing the same solutions and wonder why heaping additional complexity on top of the original idea does nothing but make it worse. You'd figure that someone somewhere would be at least aware of what came before, but apparently not. We're just gonna keep inventing wheels, and keep touting how many more edges this new wheel has compared to the last one until we get back to round and wonder where it all went wrong.

mgraczyk 3y ago
I did work on ranking at Meta. The vast majority of people really do not prefer the chronological feed. We validated this by extraordinarily high powered randomized trials, including with surveys. No more than 20% of people preferred a chronological feed in any experiment I saw.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  20% is far from small...
  - mgraczyk 3y ago
    Typically less, depends on the surface.
- kahnclusions 3y ago
  I mean, yeah, but you could also do a lot of high powered randomized trials about kinds of cookies and learn that 80% of people always prefer eating the cookies with cocaine in them.

octacat 3y ago

Does not scale, sure, if 2 posts are from random people I am not interested in, 2 posts are ads. Repeat. That is the current feed on instagram.

qotgalaxy 3y ago

[dead]

whstl 3y ago

"People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people." That's just rationalizing a business decision. Nobody is saying there should be no algorithmic timeline. If it "doesn't scale" for my own timeline, that's 100% on me. Why take away the decision or "nudge" into the other direction? If the algorithmic timeline really were THAT better, there would be zero need to remove the chronological option or "forget" when the user sets it as an option. People would just use it.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jancsika 3y ago

> People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people. People say they want kind, honest car salesmen, but that doesn't scale for the kind of overleveraged floor plans and impulsive, short-term thinking that characterize most dealerships.

tsol 3y ago

This isn't a universal problem though: only Instagram and Facebook have these accusations

oooyay 3y ago

> "People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people." I'm not sure I agree with you. I'm in 40+ IRC channels and multiple networks. I have an IRC Bouncer with playback enabled and my window stops when I log off at the place where I left off. I can easily scroll back to the bottom an see what's current. Same thing goes for Discord and Slack. I have never in my life thought, "wow I wish I could get a summary of all the dumb shit said in ##chat and ##politics in the same place when I come back." Maybe, just maybe, I don't need to know the highlights of everything that's happened since I last logged on?