10 ms·

With great power comes great responsibility. Companies such as Facebook and the like undoubtedly draw great power from their "social graph"; however, human int

by GuiA 14y ago

With great power comes great responsibility. Companies such as Facebook and the like undoubtedly draw great power from their "social graph"; however, human interactions are subtle, complex, multifaceted and often contradictory. Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph"; it will always lead to situations like that which are, at best, embarrassing, and at worst, dangerous, for whoever is in the system. I don't think it's a matter of doing things the right way or fixing them- trying to put human relationships in a computer system will never reproduce the human experience (however, you may make marketers very happy). The best you can do is complete certain very focused subsets of it in an interesting way. Zuckerberg's views on privacy and openness are laughable, and to be completely expected from someone of his background and world experience. If you think about who the average Facebook employee is, you'd realize that you probably wouldn't want them to be in charge of designing a system meant to model the intricacies of human interaction.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
psbp 14y ago
I hate to flip the script on social networking, but I think google is doing a pretty good job with focusing on exploration and compartmentalization of friends and social groups in +. Maybe something like graph search is their eventual intention, but I really hope their vision is less...disastrous.
corporalagumbo 14y ago
Really? Nothing good? From any algorithm at all? How can you be so sure? Amazon seems to do a pretty good job thinking up new stuff I might like with its algorithms, for one.
- newman314 14y ago
  Try an Amazon account which is shared with family members. Amazon thinks I like electronics, Hello Kitty and bows.
  - corporalagumbo 14y ago
    I've got an arduino-powered robotic bow-gun firing Hello Kitty droid-doll you might be interested in...
  - batiudrami 14y ago
    Well, that's hardly Amazon's fault, it is?
    - incongruity 14y ago
      Never mind that one account used for shopping for a family is a fairly common use case...
      - TeMPOraL 14y ago
        Do you want them to start reading your mind, or stop suggesting stuff altogether?
        koide 14y ago
        They could realize those things are not usually liked by the same person, ask a user if this is a family account and let you define family members and their preferences within that account.
        incongruity 14y ago
        As suggested by another commenter, that's a false dichotomy. I'd argue there's lots of room for innovation and refinement here. Manual or algorithmic identification of family members is one option, but I think there's something more to be gained here by understanding the behavior just a bit more abstractly... Shopping moods? Modes? Targets? Tasks? Something, possibly – but I'm only guessing here. The real power could come from actually working with/doing user research and prototyping. I'd love the chance to work on such a project, actually – I had a chance to work with data from a study on the online shopping habits of mothers a few years ago and there's lots of interesting angles to possibly explore, IMHO.
  - 14y ago
- psbp 14y ago
  I don't think he's saying that at all. The insanity is trying to construct a platform that manifests a person's entire social life. I think there's a harsh combination of conflating business interests and disinterested, contrived people sorting that is potentially very, very bad.
  - corporalagumbo 14y ago
    I'm not sure I follow you. Right now, Facebook knows roughly this much about me: 1) All of the people I have legitimated as Friends. 2) Screeds and screeds of data about the quality of all my connections with those friends (have I hid them from my news-feed? how much do I interact with their posts? how much do I interact with them? talk to them? share with them? stalk them? how much time do I spend in interactions with them? how do the patterns of my interactions change with them (mouse-click patterns, scroll patterns, typing patterns)? do I use different words (different emotions/more formal/informal language/different function word patterns?) 3) People I've stalked but haven't friended 4) Brands, companies, causes, ideas, things from history, all sorts of random shit I've liked (along with similar data to 2)) 5) What sorts of things I click on, how I leave the site and where I go. And certainly more. Etc., etc., etc. Facebook didn't manifest my entire social life. They just built a platform which allowed me to socialise orders of magnitude more efficiently than before, a platform of great benefit to me, and one into which I've poured vast quantities of data (and the amount, quality and variety of the data is only set to increase as we open up more input modalities - eg eye-tracking, gesture-tracking, and biometrics). the data is all there. All facebook is doing is cobbling together some of the most very basic tools one might use to make sense of a subset of that data.
    - psbp 14y ago
      Do any of your family members under 12 have facebook? Imagine the aggregate of all their experiences in a decade or more.
      - corporalagumbo 14y ago
        My little brother and sister had it from 11 and 12 respectively. Yes, it's quite interesting to think about. Anyway, what's your point? By the way, you're discussing this with someone who believes that in the future we will record and utilise orders of magnitude more amount of data about our lives and our planet than we do now, enough to make your eyes water, and furthermore, that we are inexorably fated to do so, and furthermore, that it's a really, really good trend, one which is going to play out in highly unpredictable and surprising ways.
potatolicious 14y ago
> "Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph"" These aren't algorithms. This is a search engine - what you put into it is up to you. It can be anywhere from the silliness seen in the link, to "friends who live in London" before you take a trip. This is just handing people another tool - the uses, and misuses, of said tool are entirely on the users. > " If you think about who the average Facebook employee is, you'd realize that you probably wouldn't want them to be in charge of designing a system meant to model the intricacies of human interaction." A snarky and mean-spirited stereotyping of all nerds as socially inept! How clever.
- psbp 14y ago
  This tool is part of a much larger machine that may actually affect society more than it serves it.
  - corporalagumbo 14y ago
    What exactly do you mean by that?
    - pyre 14y ago
      I assume something like: The social implications (for good or ill) are greater than the immediate, personal benefits are (in aggregate).
    - psbp 14y ago
      I think socialization under the umbrella of a facebook type environment will eventually create predictable and malleable identities which are inherently the consequence of a mix of various societal pressures which are in turn constricted through the lens of the facebook environment. Combine that with facebook's transparent use of corporate cohabitation with people's relationships, and I think you quickly have a society which is much more determined and artificial.
      - corporalagumbo 14y ago
CoffeeDregs 14y ago
Wow. When Graph Searches were announced, I thought "meh, I'm tired of FB...". I never thought to explore what Graph Searches actually meant. And I would never have done so or will do so, but I'm very glad that someone has investigated the system. >it will always lead to situations like that which are [bad] I wonder if there isn't some definition analogous to "Turing complete" for social graphs? i.e. with a sufficiently powerful API, any question can be answered. Just as Turing complete-ness leads to viruses, worms, etc, might "XYZ complete" social networks lead directly and predictably towards A, B and C bad outcomes? >Zuckerberg's views on privacy and openness are laughable Perhaps. I'm not versed in them well enough to know. But I wonder if he isn't a bit Bill-Gates-eyan in his perspective of pushing the border between X-Y quite hard to see what bends and what breaks. For Microsoft, it was Code-Data and, while there were certainly people saying don't mix Code and Data!, people happily used their Excel spreadsheets and we suffered mightily from the resulting viruses. Whereas "viruses" were the unintended consequence of mixing Code-Data, are "outings" the result of mixing Social-Search?
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  Zuckerberg thinks people complain about privacy because they're old-fashioned and scared of the future. He thinks in the future we're all going to be extremely open, share shit all the time, aaaand basically the whole world is going to be one big chat room where people don't really hide things any more. Personally I think he's probably right. It has shades of that old totalitarian argument, 'why should you be worried about privacy if you don't have anything to hide?' but hopefully it'll be a little more... forgiving than that.
  - psbp 14y ago
    Zuckerberg hopes that we're open to facebook* I don't see all this "open" information, because I don't have a facebook account.
  - chunkyslink 14y ago
    > aaaand basically the whole world is going to be one big chat room where people don't really hide things any more. Does this include Corporations and Governments? Or just the users of pathetic chat rooms like Facebook?
achompas 14y ago
Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph"; it will always lead to situations like that which are, at best, embarrassing, and at worst, dangerous, for whoever is in the system. What does this even mean? The "dumb algorithm" here will (a) take a user's query and (b) search that user's friends and public profiles for hits on that query. What's next: shouting about the robots taking over? Lamenting about how we're all losing our humanity and man weren't things better back in the old days? I'm really disappointed this is the top comment on HN's top post. Users identified by Graph Search have public accounts and have willingly entered personal information into Facebook. We go thorough this song-and-dance every year: FB updates security policies, everyone is up in arms, then -- gasp! -- everyone updates their security settings. Facebook has a clear transaction with users: build a profile, get sold as eyeballs to advertisers. If you don't like it, then quit. "With great power comes great responsibility," indeed. People have received numerous warnings about Facebook and privacy, and yet they've chosen to share personal information with everyone they know. At this point the user is responsible for choosing to participate or drop out. Meanwhile, every third HN post includes a commenter, wagging their finger, reminding us in a nasally, know-it-all voice that we're not the customer if we're not paying. Is Graph Search really that shocking to you--to anyone on HN? Why the hell is anyone up in arms about this in 2013, given what we know about social networks?
- derleth 14y ago
  > If you don't like it, then quit. Assuming you're socially allowed to quit Facebook.
  - achompas 14y ago
    It's true that some people (like me) only use Facebook for its usefulness as a social tool. In that case, just strip your account of any serious personal information.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    "Assuming you're socially allowed to quit Facebook." I don't even know what that means. How is it that all of the rest of us managed to quite Facebook and continue to have a relatively vibrant social life. Is it the case that WhatsApp/Viber/SMS/Email are no longer considered effective means of communication to get together?
veemjeem 14y ago
I'm surprised nobody has invoked godwin's law yet; ie searching for "Nazis who live in California".

by GuiA 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

psbp 14y ago

I hate to flip the script on social networking, but I think google is doing a pretty good job with focusing on exploration and compartmentalization of friends and social groups in +. Maybe something like graph search is their eventual intention, but I really hope their vision is less...disastrous.

corporalagumbo 14y ago

Really? Nothing good? From any algorithm at all? How can you be so sure? Amazon seems to do a pretty good job thinking up new stuff I might like with its algorithms, for one.

newman314 14y ago
Try an Amazon account which is shared with family members. Amazon thinks I like electronics, Hello Kitty and bows.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  I've got an arduino-powered robotic bow-gun firing Hello Kitty droid-doll you might be interested in...
- batiudrami 14y ago
  Well, that's hardly Amazon's fault, it is?
  - incongruity 14y ago
    Never mind that one account used for shopping for a family is a fairly common use case...
    - TeMPOraL 14y ago
      Do you want them to start reading your mind, or stop suggesting stuff altogether?
      - koide 14y ago
        They could realize those things are not usually liked by the same person, ask a user if this is a family account and let you define family members and their preferences within that account.
      - incongruity 14y ago
        As suggested by another commenter, that's a false dichotomy. I'd argue there's lots of room for innovation and refinement here. Manual or algorithmic identification of family members is one option, but I think there's something more to be gained here by understanding the behavior just a bit more abstractly... Shopping moods? Modes? Targets? Tasks? Something, possibly – but I'm only guessing here. The real power could come from actually working with/doing user research and prototyping. I'd love the chance to work on such a project, actually – I had a chance to work with data from a study on the online shopping habits of mothers a few years ago and there's lots of interesting angles to possibly explore, IMHO.
- 14y ago
psbp 14y ago
I don't think he's saying that at all. The insanity is trying to construct a platform that manifests a person's entire social life. I think there's a harsh combination of conflating business interests and disinterested, contrived people sorting that is potentially very, very bad.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  I'm not sure I follow you. Right now, Facebook knows roughly this much about me: 1) All of the people I have legitimated as Friends. 2) Screeds and screeds of data about the quality of all my connections with those friends (have I hid them from my news-feed? how much do I interact with their posts? how much do I interact with them? talk to them? share with them? stalk them? how much time do I spend in interactions with them? how do the patterns of my interactions change with them (mouse-click patterns, scroll patterns, typing patterns)? do I use different words (different emotions/more formal/informal language/different function word patterns?) 3) People I've stalked but haven't friended 4) Brands, companies, causes, ideas, things from history, all sorts of random shit I've liked (along with similar data to 2)) 5) What sorts of things I click on, how I leave the site and where I go. And certainly more. Etc., etc., etc. Facebook didn't manifest my entire social life. They just built a platform which allowed me to socialise orders of magnitude more efficiently than before, a platform of great benefit to me, and one into which I've poured vast quantities of data (and the amount, quality and variety of the data is only set to increase as we open up more input modalities - eg eye-tracking, gesture-tracking, and biometrics). the data is all there. All facebook is doing is cobbling together some of the most very basic tools one might use to make sense of a subset of that data.
  - psbp 14y ago
    Do any of your family members under 12 have facebook? Imagine the aggregate of all their experiences in a decade or more.
    - corporalagumbo 14y ago
      My little brother and sister had it from 11 and 12 respectively. Yes, it's quite interesting to think about. Anyway, what's your point? By the way, you're discussing this with someone who believes that in the future we will record and utilise orders of magnitude more amount of data about our lives and our planet than we do now, enough to make your eyes water, and furthermore, that we are inexorably fated to do so, and furthermore, that it's a really, really good trend, one which is going to play out in highly unpredictable and surprising ways.

potatolicious 14y ago

> "Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph"" These aren't algorithms. This is a search engine - what you put into it is up to you. It can be anywhere from the silliness seen in the link, to "friends who live in London" before you take a trip. This is just handing people another tool - the uses, and misuses, of said tool are entirely on the users. > " If you think about who the average Facebook employee is, you'd realize that you probably wouldn't want them to be in charge of designing a system meant to model the intricacies of human interaction." A snarky and mean-spirited stereotyping of all nerds as socially inept! How clever.

psbp 14y ago
This tool is part of a much larger machine that may actually affect society more than it serves it.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  What exactly do you mean by that?
  - pyre 14y ago
    I assume something like: The social implications (for good or ill) are greater than the immediate, personal benefits are (in aggregate).
  - psbp 14y ago
    I think socialization under the umbrella of a facebook type environment will eventually create predictable and malleable identities which are inherently the consequence of a mix of various societal pressures which are in turn constricted through the lens of the facebook environment. Combine that with facebook's transparent use of corporate cohabitation with people's relationships, and I think you quickly have a society which is much more determined and artificial.
    - corporalagumbo 14y ago

CoffeeDregs 14y ago

Wow. When Graph Searches were announced, I thought "meh, I'm tired of FB...". I never thought to explore what Graph Searches actually meant. And I would never have done so or will do so, but I'm very glad that someone has investigated the system. >it will always lead to situations like that which are [bad] I wonder if there isn't some definition analogous to "Turing complete" for social graphs? i.e. with a sufficiently powerful API, any question can be answered. Just as Turing complete-ness leads to viruses, worms, etc, might "XYZ complete" social networks lead directly and predictably towards A, B and C bad outcomes? >Zuckerberg's views on privacy and openness are laughable Perhaps. I'm not versed in them well enough to know. But I wonder if he isn't a bit Bill-Gates-eyan in his perspective of pushing the border between X-Y quite hard to see what bends and what breaks. For Microsoft, it was Code-Data and, while there were certainly people saying don't mix Code and Data!, people happily used their Excel spreadsheets and we suffered mightily from the resulting viruses. Whereas "viruses" were the unintended consequence of mixing Code-Data, are "outings" the result of mixing Social-Search?

corporalagumbo 14y ago
Zuckerberg thinks people complain about privacy because they're old-fashioned and scared of the future. He thinks in the future we're all going to be extremely open, share shit all the time, aaaand basically the whole world is going to be one big chat room where people don't really hide things any more. Personally I think he's probably right. It has shades of that old totalitarian argument, 'why should you be worried about privacy if you don't have anything to hide?' but hopefully it'll be a little more... forgiving than that.
- psbp 14y ago
  Zuckerberg hopes that we're open to facebook* I don't see all this "open" information, because I don't have a facebook account.
- chunkyslink 14y ago
  > aaaand basically the whole world is going to be one big chat room where people don't really hide things any more. Does this include Corporations and Governments? Or just the users of pathetic chat rooms like Facebook?

achompas 14y ago

Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph"; it will always lead to situations like that which are, at best, embarrassing, and at worst, dangerous, for whoever is in the system. What does this even mean? The "dumb algorithm" here will (a) take a user's query and (b) search that user's friends and public profiles for hits on that query. What's next: shouting about the robots taking over? Lamenting about how we're all losing our humanity and man weren't things better back in the old days? I'm really disappointed this is the top comment on HN's top post. Users identified by Graph Search have public accounts and have willingly entered personal information into Facebook. We go thorough this song-and-dance every year: FB updates security policies, everyone is up in arms, then -- gasp! -- everyone updates their security settings. Facebook has a clear transaction with users: build a profile, get sold as eyeballs to advertisers. If you don't like it, then quit. "With great power comes great responsibility," indeed. People have received numerous warnings about Facebook and privacy, and yet they've chosen to share personal information with everyone they know. At this point the user is responsible for choosing to participate or drop out. Meanwhile, every third HN post includes a commenter, wagging their finger, reminding us in a nasally, know-it-all voice that we're not the customer if we're not paying. Is Graph Search really that shocking to you--to anyone on HN? Why the hell is anyone up in arms about this in 2013, given what we know about social networks?

derleth 14y ago
> If you don't like it, then quit. Assuming you're socially allowed to quit Facebook.
- achompas 14y ago
  It's true that some people (like me) only use Facebook for its usefulness as a social tool. In that case, just strip your account of any serious personal information.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  "Assuming you're socially allowed to quit Facebook." I don't even know what that means. How is it that all of the rest of us managed to quite Facebook and continue to have a relatively vibrant social life. Is it the case that WhatsApp/Viber/SMS/Email are no longer considered effective means of communication to get together?

veemjeem 14y ago

I'm surprised nobody has invoked godwin's law yet; ie searching for "Nazis who live in California".