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I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
- sosuke 12y agoI'd love to be able to hit the reset button on my FB profile, undo all the profiling they've done on me and start again. Same thing for Google. What does it look like to be a vanilla user?
- ghaff 12y agoWell, with respect to Google search, you can just use an incognito window.
- T-hawk 12y agoOnly up to the limits of Google being able to track you anyway. There's IP address, user agent, and any other HTTP header information your browser leaks.
- icebraining 12y agoA VPN + Incognito should be enough. Not to truly anonymize you, but probably enough to disable the personalization layers. It doesn't make economic sense to waste engineering hours and computing time trying to show ads to the 0.0001% of paranoid users, which are likely blocking them anyway, even if the data is there. Of course, there's no such thing as the vanilla user. You'll still be targeted on generic features (location, browser, OS, etc). A vanilla Linux user in SF is different than a vanilla Windows XP user in London.
- lucb1e 12y agoI don't get why people recommend VPNs so much. I never bothered to look for a free one because I didn't think it'd have a decent speed and all ports opened, but doesn't Tor basically do the job?
- TheCoelacanth 12y agoFree ones probably suck, but even a very cheap (<$50/year) VPN will be much faster than TOR.
- lucb1e 12y agoIt still feels double to pay for an internet connection and then a second time for a VPN, but yeah it might come in handy. Still think I'd go for a VPS instead and, if I need a VPN, just tunnel it through, but that's just me.
- icebraining 12y agoWell, I said VPN has a catch-all for using a remote gateway. I actually use a VPS as well (with sshuttle).
- longb4 12y agoThe EFF has a service called Panopticlick[1] that gives you a sense of how unique your browser looks to the sites you visit. My result: "Within our dataset of several million visitors, only one in 886,262 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours." [1] https://panopticlick.eff.org https://panopticlick.eff.org
- icebraining 12y agoWell, if the rate holds for Google, it means there's 1320 users that look just like you.
- ggreer 12y agoWhile it can be an issue, browser fingerprinting isn't as powerful as the EFF claims. Any change to your user agent (browser updates), plugin list, time zone, or screen size makes Panopticlick think you are a different user.
- willvarfar 12y agoCorrelated with a second or third tracking method such as cookies sent to analytics, ad and fb sites, would it be super sticky?
- willvarfar 12y agoCorrelated with a second or third tracking method such as cookies sent to analytics, ad and fb sites, would it be super sticky?
- Gracana 12y agoYou can turn off "private results" in your google search preferences. https://www.google.com/preferences https://www.google.com/preferences
- NhanH 12y agoJust a very tangential point to the post, but the author mentioned a FB employee trying to connect him with the PR department. Exactly what does FB have in mind in doing that?
- tokenadult 12y agoOne of the jobs of the PR department is to fill in reporters with details about the company's activities.
- eumenides1 12y agoI was thinking of a way to destroy my facebook account because you can't actually delete it, this is pretty much it, like everything. Also I guess you could check-in every where at once all the time. I didn't think about the collateral damage it could cause to others, which is to bombard your "friend's feeds". This is also interesting because, well you can destory facebook in this manner. If enough people are peeing in the pool, people are going to get out. Maybe I should write a greasemonkey script to accomplish just that. Not that I want to destroy facebook, but that if i wanted to destroy my data this would be the way because facebook doesn't give me that option. Also does everyone else think it's creepy when your friends stop using facebook and old "likes" pop up on your feed to make it look like that user hasn't left?
- ecocentrik 12y agoYeah that sounds like creepy facebook. Blowing content tumbleweeds through its digital ghost town. This explains recent likes I've had on stuff I posted 3-4 years ago.
- cottonseed 12y ago> because you can't actually delete it You can. At least, this seemed to work effectively for me: http://deletefacebook.com/ http://deletefacebook.com/
- tokenizerrr 12y agoIt's hidden from public view. They hold on to all of your data, which the page you linked says.
- thathonkey 12y agoSo the steps would be: 1) Obfuscate the private view by liking everything. This raises the signal-to-noise ratio exponentially and surely makes it hard(er) for "them" to characterize you. The longer you do this for, the more effective this strategy will be I would think. 2) Delete from public view.
- skimmas 12y agoit's possible to unlike everything you've ever like isn't it? I'll try that one day.
- pavel_lishin 12y agoI'm sure their database doesn't just store a series of checkmarks, but rather a series of "User liked", "User unliked", etc.
- limaoscarjuliet 12y agoI'm so put off by Facebook that I'm even put off by articles describing how one is put off by Facebook. Full disclosure - I closed my account 2 years ago. Did not miss it even for 10 seconds.
- untog 12y agoHow do you know if someone deleted their Facebook account? Don't worry, they'll tell you.
- artumi-richard 12y agoCould there be a browser plugin to like and share everything as you wander through the web? That would be an interesting way to demonstrate tracking technologies.
- syva 12y agohttp://archive.j-mediaarts.jp/en/festival/2012/entertainment/works/16e_Whatever_Button/ http://archive.j-mediaarts.jp/en/festival/2012/entertainment...
- alok-g 12y agoA quick search reveals: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.auto.like.forfacebook.ippolite.lite&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.auto.like.... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/autolikefbstat/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/autolikefbsta...
- sebkomianos 12y agoThis made me think about creating a second profile on facebook, adding myself as a friend and liking whatever I post on my original - just to find out what "advertising value and quality" I create. Anyone got any ideas on how to automatise this?
- gcr 12y agoI'd be surprised if they didn't flag your second account as just spam and ignored it completely.
- sebkomianos 12y agoI don't care about them, it'd be interesting to find out only out of personal curiosity.
- rotten 12y agoI tried this (not automated). It was nice to have someone actually read and like my posts. I quickly found I was pretty boring however and so got tired of myself and stopped doing it after a while. Sometimes it was fun to set up a joke in a back and forth comment thread with myself though. I still log in as my alter ego every now and then to see what my profile looks like from someone else's perspective.
- webwanderings 12y agoNice. This is the post I needed to read, as I am on one-week fasting from Facebook (in fact, I am fasting from all kinds of email/group, facebook interactions). It is hard work, but much needed. I tend to believe, as humans in this age and time, we are losing our fundamental ability to delay gratification.
- tlarkworthy 12y agoHN sucks more time than FB for me :/
- enraged_camel 12y agoIf it makes you feel any better, the time you spend on HN is infinitely more productive. :)
- zem 12y ago0/0 is "undefined" rather than "infinity" (:
- Jgrubb 12y agoIt's a far more symbiotic relationship tho...
- mirkules 12y agoSame here. I decided to remove myself from FB altogether (inspired by 99 days of freedom). It's been 3 weeks so far[1] and it's amazing how after the first day Facebook started sending me two emails per day, along the lines of "you are missing important posts from your friends" and "you have 8 pending notifications". It instantly reminded me of Zynga's tactics to try to suck you into a game and paying for content. [1] I made ONE exception- my close friend was missing for 24 hrs, left his wallet and phone at home, his parents freaked out so I reached out to all his friends on Facebook. This tells me I only need one feature Facebook has to offer - access to my own social network. Somehow we conditioned ourselves to only share Facebook information but not phone numbers or emails or any other means of communication. If Facebook suddenly went away I would lose 3/4 of my contacts. That's a scary thought.
- protonfish 12y agoSo if you like everything on Facebook, the result is political extremism and the most insipid pop culture trash. What frightens me is what if this has nothing to do with Facebook, but is instead about human nature? Does this also describe what happens to a person's life when they stop caring, when they are no longer motivated to put forth the effort to be discerning, when they give up trying to make anything but the easiest and most immediate choices?
- carterehsmith 12y agoIn this case, it does have to do with Facebook. To quote the article: " By the end of day one, I noticed that on mobile, my feed was almost completely devoid of human content. I was only presented with the chance to like stories from various websites, and various other ads. Yet on the desktop—while it’s still mostly branded content—I continue to see things from my friends. On that little bitty screen, where real-estate is so valuable, Facebook’s robots decided that the way to keep my attention is by hiding the people and only showing me the stuff that other machines have pumped out. Weird. "
- cbovis 12y agoThe comments people put on those kind of posts scare me more than the posts themselves! I think you can tell a lot about what's wrong with our society and the root of a lot of our problems from internet comments..
- pavel_lishin 12y agoI don't think it's telling us what most people would rather hear - I think it's more likely that it shows us exactly who is trying to yell loudest.
- protonfish 12y agoBut working backward, if we see somebody who is into political extremism, it could hint at the behavior that lead them there. What if the members of radical hate groups are not aggressive idealists, but people whose spirits have been crushed, have low self-confidence, or are afraid to go against those that yell the loudest. Actually, that does not sound surprising at all.
- phillmv 12y agoFrom the TFA, >Also, as I went to bed, I remember thinking “Ah, crap. I have to like something about Gaza,” as I hit the Like button on a post with a pro-Israel message. >By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to the right. [...] >Rachel Maddow, Raw Story, Mother Jones, Daily Kos and all sort of other leftie stuff was interspersed with items that are so far to the right I’m nearly afraid to like them for fear of ending up on some sort of watch list. [...] >While I expected that what I saw might change, what I never expected was the impact my behavior would have on my friends’ feeds. This article has so much modern anxiety in a nutshell. We have the pervasive surveillance society, and having our behaviour affected by algorithms. What this really highlights, to me, is the extent to which Facebook exerts editorial control over the news that you're subjected to. This has all sorts of other effects on how media dollars are spent and as a result the shape of discourse - I'm immediately reminded of http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/05/22/facebook_s_mike_hudack_rants_about_the_media_why_won_t_anybody_do_something.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/05/22/facebook_s_mi... This is not to say that there haven't _always_ been pernicious incentives at work; but before you could at least question those incentives and motivations instead of shrugging, and pointing to there's an unexplainable, mysteriously biased, support vector machine et al pulling strings.
- fit2rule 12y agoThink about it. This is an article, with its own 'share on Facebook' icon, entirely about a single persons interaction with a mechanized society, highly intricate and well and truly operating under the constraints of its totalitarian designers. Its not like we vote for Facebook features; that privilege is reserved for those with money to spend, making money, and it is an exclusive club indeed. Particularly given that those who attend to "Facebook habits", i.e. members of that church, are not in control. At all. So yeah, count "survive a dystopian dilemna" on the list of things that are now well and truly DONE.
- Houshalter 12y agoGood god, this reads like a parody. There is no totalitarian conspiracy to manipulate your facebook feed. You are not in a dystopia. Having users vote for features of a popular website is unreasonable. If you like everything a recommendation algorithm feeds you, of course you are going to get shit recommendations. Your like data is no longer correlated with your actual preferences at all. It's an interesting experiment, but people are projecting their own fears and opinions onto the result.
- ChikkaChiChi 12y agoConfirmation bias bubbles like a social media feed like this are atrophying the debate muscles of our society. When we don't actively participate in two-sided discussions we lose the empathy and scope of how so few things are really black and white. I wish there were more discussion venues where the quality of your participation was based on the value to the discussion, not as to whether or not you supported what that person said.
- Tyrannosaurs 12y agoHaven't confirmation bias and information bubbles always been the way though? Historically you lived in a place which - through economics and upbringing - was full of people who were a lot like you. You worked in a job where your colleagues were - through reasons of education and geography - a lot like you. Where you found people disagreeable generally you'd avoid them if you had the chance. You chose the newspaper you liked and the news show you felt most comfortable with on TV or radio. We've always put ourselves in information bubbles, this isn't anything to do with the internet, the internet is merely recreating what we already had. The only difference is that with the internet it's a larger wasted opportunity because there is so much more information out there you might subject yourself to.
- joshrivers 12y agoYou only say that because you keep reading the news stories about confirmation bias,
- skeltoac 12y agoYou won't get anywhere by pinning the blame on the medium. Freedom of association allows birds of a feather to flock together and make sport of the other side. People seek social groups that make them feel good and avoid ones that make them feel insecure. They especially avoid places where they are made to feel stupid. So they tend to prefer places where their beliefs are confirmed and maybe they can get away with calling someone else stupid. What you are fighting is as natural as water flowing downhill: animals seeking comfort. You have to overwhelm gravity itself to turn the flow uphill. There is no lack of good discussion venues. There are only too few people who prefer them. How can any such venue attract the masses out of their comfortable, partisan clubhouses?
- milge 12y agoThe only winning move is not to play. Or in this case like/post.
- coldcode 12y agoI never like anything except my friends, anywhere. Of course Facebook gleans stuff from that as well. I would pay to have a site where all you could do is interact with friends posts/photos/movies with zero commercial features but we all know FB would kill such a thing in its infancy.
- milge 12y agoThat's been tried before. App.net was that way. The downside is it would have to be a paid service, because how else would you fund something like that?
- uberdog 12y agoI did sort of the opposite. I would click on "don't want to see this" for any link to an external site. It took a few days, but now pretty much all I see is updates from friends.
- lucb1e 12y agoI do the same. Changed all settings I possibly could and unfollowed (while still remaining friends) a few people, and my news feed is now basically exactly what I want to see. It still hides some news events, like I found out that someone got their driving exam months after everyone else did, but that's the algorithm's fault and it's a lesson that you can't expect all friends to see everything you post. These modifications might also cause me to spend less time on my news feed because all the garbage is filtered out, so Facebook might at some point decide that it hurts them and disable these modification options, but then I'll probably just stop using Facebook's news feed altogether. I mostly use FB for groups and chats anyway. Just like with Youtube when they started showing what friends liked, I unfriended everyone and kept subscriptions.
- stevebot 12y agoInteresting read. wonder what would happen if they added a dislike button.
- duderific 12y agoI think it would not be used much other than to dislike a brand status update. It could create bad feelings in your Facebook community if you disliked someone's status update. Probably why they never have added the dislike button; it could sow flame wars -- "Hey, why did you dislike my update?" -- kind of like on HN when someone gets a bunch of downvotes.
- PaulHoule 12y agoSomebody still uses Facebook, film at 11.
- flippyhead 12y agoEvery since I read The Circle stuff like this seems to ring true.
- po 12y agoThis article has reminded me of how astoundingly ahead of his time Andy Warhol was.
- scoot 12y agoCould someone please put 'Liked' in the HN title in quotes so it makes grammatical sense. As it stands, the title makes it sounds as if someone tried Facebook for two days and was happy with what they saw. (I know this is the original title, but that doesn't make it correct.)
- dang 12y agoOk.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- donbronson 12y agoSo, that's what the bots see in Facebook. Doesn't that mean that bots are consuming most of the ads?
- viniciosbarros 12y agothis could be some kind of metaphor? =D it starts with a simple but very humanist text, about everybody should like everybody, but this all ends with the statement that after he had liked everything, he got with nothing that he really likes. This could be the same with our relationship with people, where if you dont stand for your principles you could get around with people you don't appreciate.
- snowwrestler 12y agoThere's going to be a lot of Facebook bashing in this thread, but I'm going to posit that this response from the Facebook software is not unexpected or even wrong, because the author is purposefully playing against the assumptions built into Facebook algorithms. Most people rarely "like" branded or advertising content on Facebook. So Facebook has tuned their algorithms to be very sensitive to the few data inputs it receives per person. Now, here is a person flooding it with input. I am not surprised that the result is crazy deluge of branded content. It's like taking a carefully balanced lever and pushing real hard on one end. The other end is going to move a lot. > I kept thinking Facebook would rate-limit me, but instead it grew increasingly ravenous. Why would they build in a rate limit? The vast, vast majority of the time, the level of input is very low. To build in a rate-limiting system would be pointless gold-plating. The rarity of this sort of flood is obvious from the fact that a human being at Facebook noticed the level of activity and contacted the author. That is an incredibly high bar at Facebook, which prides itself on automating everything.
- zem 12y agoi have yet to meet anyone who wants the things they've 'liked' to show up in their friends feeds. it's a purely user-hostile feature that facebook insists upon because it drives their engagement numbers up.
- seizethecheese 12y agoUser hostile? If displaying liked content to friends increases engagement, what's wrong about that? What would a feed that wasn't optimized for engagement look like? Facebook would already be a dinosaur in that case. People go to Facebook to see the most relevant and engaging content, what your friends like seems like a great source for this!
- zem 12y agoit's user-hostile insofar as no one wants their likes showing up in their friends' feeds. from a consumption point of view it makes little difference; you see content and interact with it. note that there is absolutely no way to opt out of this feature.