[HN Gopher] Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the si...
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less
divisive
Author : longdefeat
Score : 771 points
Date : 2020-05-26 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| daenz wrote:
| Facebook discovers profitable strategy that news organizations
| have been using for decades.
| forgingahead wrote:
| This is the most relevant comment to this discussion. News orgs
| have been profiting off the same negative elements of human
| society for decades.
| tzs wrote:
| News organizations present a limited, curated view from fact
| checked, verified sources. The information flow is mostly one
| way, from the news organization to me.
|
| A social media news feed might present the same underlying
| story to me, but via some opinion blog that has not fact
| checked it or verified sources. It might also come with
| assorted speculation by the posted, ranging from wild ass to
| outright insane conspiracy theories.
|
| And social media is designed to get me to offer my opinion on
| it, and to see other people's opinion, and for all of us who
| read it to discuss it in a semi-pseudonymous free for all.
|
| The news organization approach is much more effective if the
| goal is to actually inform people about the negative event.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| They even have the same business model, in which users are not
| the customers. If you are Sylvester McMonkey McBean, you do not
| want to place ad impressions in groups of star- and plain-
| bellied sneetches who share an interest in underwater basket
| weaving. You will happily spend to place impressions for star-
| on machines among groups of plain-bellied sneetches, and star-
| off among star-bellied.
| Wohlf wrote:
| Centuries actually:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
| cynusx wrote:
| That sounds right. Fear and conflict drives higher engagement.
| Although it makes business sense to chase higher engagement, I
| wonder how much of people's distrust with Facebook the brand is
| just a reflection of how people feel when engaging the product.
| alkibiades wrote:
| the media really just wants fb to prevent division by only
| allowing a center-left world view.
| majky538 wrote:
| I remember content from friends, then no related content when
| Facebook was testing feed changes and now, it's mostly based on
| meme pictures and group posts. I forgot that there are any
| "friends".
| codermobile wrote:
| You
| astrophysician wrote:
| As a total outsider following this from a distance, I sort of
| feel for Facebook and other social media platforms facing this
| problem -- they've run up against a fundamental issue for which
| there doesn't seem to be any satisfying solution. Misinformation
| and propaganda are rampant on their platforms definitely, and
| echo chambers that reinforce divisive worldviews have probably
| deepened real societal divisions, but how do you actually
| implement a policy to stop this? What is "propaganda"? What is
| "misinformation"? The entire core of Facebook's existence is
| advertising, which means user engagement and reach is the only
| thing that drives your bottom line; they _want_ to drive users to
| Facebook and keep them there, and keep them engaged. They 've
| just happened to discover a universal human truth along the way,
| which is that people _like_ feeling validated, and people _like_
| being a member of a tribe. Facebook is the way it is because
| thats what users _want_ , whether they will admit to it or not.
|
| Anything that Facebook does will be perceived as making a
| political and/or moral statement, which they obviously are trying
| very hard not to do, because as soon as you take a position you
| alienate half of the population (at least in the US). They've
| apparently decided to go the route of burying their heads in the
| sand instead of _trying_ to make things less tribal and divisive,
| which in all honesty is a pretty understandable position to take,
| and yet _even while actively trying not to piss off
| conservatives_ they have still landed in hot water over perceived
| favoritism towards the left. They are damned if they do and
| damned if they don 't.
|
| So honestly, what is the proposed solution here? What would you
| do if you were in Zuckerberg's shoes? Do you campaign for
| regulations that take this issue off of your hands but that let
| the government call the shots somehow? Do you look at your board
| members with a straight face and tell them you're going to tank
| user engagement for some higher, squishy moral purpose for which
| there is no clear payoff?
| fpgaminer wrote:
| You know what the internet needs? User agents.
|
| We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website
| itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide
| which Facebook posts to show us.
|
| What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook
| post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own
| preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like.
|
| Instead of being tuned to line the pockets of Facebook, the AI is
| an agent of your own choosing. Maybe you want it to actually
| _reduce_ engagement after an hour of mindless browsing.
|
| And not just for Facebook, but every website. Twitter, Instagram,
| etc. Even websites like Reddit, which are "user moderated", are
| still ultimately run by Reddit's algorithm and could instead be
| curated by _your_ agent.
|
| I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse.
| But can it possibly make them worse than they already are? Are we
| really saying that an agent built by us, for us, will be worse
| than an agent built by Facebook for Facebook?
|
| And isn't that how the internet used to be? Back when the scale
| of the internet wasn't so vast, people just ... skimmed
| everything themselves and decided what to engage with. So what
| I'm really driving at is some way to scale that up to what the
| internet has since become. Some way to build a tiny AI version of
| yourself that goes out and crawls the internet in ways that you
| personally can't, and return to you the things you would have
| wanted to engage with had it been possible for you to read all 1
| trillion internet comments per minute.
| devonkim wrote:
| I think transparency matters more. I liked Andrew Yang's
| suggestion to require the recommendation algorithms of the
| largest social networks to be open sourced given how they can
| shape public discourse and advertising in all mass media is
| regulated to prevent outright lies from being spread by major
| institutions (although an individual certainly may do so).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Not the recommendation engines. The graph. All the social
| media companies (and indeed Google and others) profit by
| putting up a wall and then allowing people to look at
| individual leaves of a tree behind the wall, 50% of which is
| grown with the help of people's own requests. You go to the
| window, submit your query, and receive a small number of
| leaves.
|
| These companies do provide some value by building the
| infrastructure and so on. But the graph itself is kept
| proprietary, most likely because it is not copyrightable.
| closeparen wrote:
| >advertising in all mass media is regulated to prevent
| outright lies from being spread
|
| _Advertising_ in mass media is regulated. You are very much
| allowed to publish claims that the government would
| characterize as outright lies, you just can 't do it to sell
| a product.
| root_axis wrote:
| Setting aside the concerns about the efficacy of the idea, it
| also seems like an arbitrary encroachment on business
| prerogatives. I think everyone agrees that social media
| companies need more regulation, but mandating technical
| business process directives based on active user totals isn't
| workable, not the least of which because the definition of
| "active user" is highly subjective (especially if there is an
| incentive to get creative about the numbers), but also
| because something like "open source the recommendation
| algorithm" isn't a simple request that can be made on demand,
| especially with the inevitable enfilade of corporate
| lawyering to establish battle lines around the bounds of
| intellectual property that companies would still be allowed
| to control vs that which they would be forced to abdicate to
| the public domain.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Does that actually work? If they create some complex AI and
| then show us the trained model, it doesn't really give much
| insight into the AI doing the recommendation. You could
| potentially test certain articles to see if it is
| recommended, but reverse engineering how the AI recommends it
| would be far more time consuming than updating the AI. As
| such Facebook would just need to regularly update the AI
| faster than researchers can determine how it works to hide
| how their code works. Older versions of the AI would
| eventually be cracked open (as much as a large matrix of
| numbers representing a neural network could be), but between
| it being a trained model with a bunch of numbers and Facebook
| having a never version I think they'll be able to hide behind
| "oops there was a problem, but don't worry our training has
| made the model much better now".
| s1t5 wrote:
| Open sourcing the algorithms (however we define it) does
| absolutely nothing. What use is a neural network
| architecture? Or a trained NN with some weights? Or an
| explanation that says - we measure similar posts by this
| metric and after you click on something we start serving you
| similar posts? None of those things are secret. More
| transparency wouldn't change anything because even if
| completely different algorithms were used, the fundamental
| problems with the platform would be exactly the same.
| banads wrote:
| It's silly to so confidently assert that opening up a
| closed source algorithm to 3rd party analysis will "do
| absolutely nothing". How could you possibly know there is
| nothing unusual in the code without having audited it
| yourself?
|
| Seeing how the sausage gets made certainly can make lots of
| people lose their taste for it.
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| Not a new idea. One example was early marketing of Apache
| Nutch.
| [deleted]
| ssss11 wrote:
| I agree - wasnt the browser intended to be the user agent? And
| counterpoint to some of the replies to you, surely people can
| just pay instead of sites being ad-based, what other industries
| operate in this absurd way? The public must think there's no
| cost to creating software if everythings always free.
| grishka wrote:
| ActivityPub and other federated networks are the answer. They
| do exactly that: if you aren't satisfied with the rules on
| existing servers, you host your own. The network itself is wide
| open, and its control is distributed across many server admins.
| The way the content is presented is of course completely up to
| the software the user is running. Having no financial incentive
| to make UX a dumpster fire visible from space also helps a lot.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| They're not the answer as long as they don't have loads of
| people. The attraction of FB and the like is that almost
| everyone has a FB account, just like almost every public
| figure has a twitter account. The downside of things like
| Mastodon is how do you know what server you want to connect
| to? For a non-technical user it doesn't offer any more
| obvious utility than a FB group.
| grishka wrote:
| There is indeed the problem of discovery that Mastodon
| doesn't feel like addressing. Like, you pick a server, make
| an account and _now what_? There 's no way to bring your
| existing social graph with you. Even if your friends are
| there, you won't ever find them without asking each and
| every one about their username@domain. But I have some
| ideas on fixing that for my fediverse project -- like
| making a DHT out of instance servers, thus making global
| search possible while keeping the whole thing
| decentralized.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I like the line of thinking, but who actually provides the
| agent, and what are their incentives?
|
| This is far from a perfect analogy, but compare it to the
| problem of email spam. People first tried to fight it with
| client-side Bayes keyword filters. It turns out it wasn't
| nearly as simple as that, and to solve a problem that
| complicated, you basically need people working on it full time
| to keep pace.
|
| Ranking and filtering a Facebook feed would have different
| challenges, of course. It's not all about adversaries (though
| there are some); it's also about modeling what you find
| interesting or important. But that's pretty complicated too.
| Your one friend shared a woodworking project and your other
| friend shared travel photos. Which one(s) of those are you
| interested in? And when someone posts political stuff, is that
| something you find interesting, or is it something you prefer
| to keep separate from Facebook? There are a lot of different
| types of things people post, so the scope of figuring out
| what's important is pretty big.
| gscott wrote:
| Facebook figured out how to bring a Usenet flame war to the
| masses and profit from it, job well done!
| meshaneian wrote:
| I like this, and so does my friend Confirmation Bias, who is
| pretty clear that the AI would select completely unbiased
| content relevant to me, not limited by any of the Bias family.
| It would be 100% better than the bias filters in place now,
| because my thoughts and selections are always unbiased, IMHO.
| (FYI: Obviously I'm not being serious. You clearly knew that,
| this notice is for the other person who didn't.)
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| Why would a personal AI which curates your content be any
| "better" than FB's AI which curates your content? Isn't the
| current AI based on what you end up engaging with anyway? If
| you naturally engage in a variety of content across all
| ideological spectrums, than that's what the FB AI is going to
| predict for you. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us engage
| with content which reinforces our existing worldview - which is
| exactly what would happen with a personal AI.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Because an algorithm under your control can be tweaked by
| you. Could be as simple as reordering topics on a list of
| preferences. Facebook's algorithm can't be controlled like
| that. Also, an algorithm you own won't change itself
| unbeknownst to you.
| munificent wrote:
| The fundamental flaw is this:
|
| The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent
| would filter out is _ads_. Since ads are the primary way sites
| stay in business, they are obligated to fight against user
| agents or other intermediary systems.
|
| The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you
| good, enriching content from your friends and family. They want
| to show you ads. The good content is just a necessary evil to
| make you tolerate looking at ads. Every time you upload some
| adorable photo of your baby for your friends to ooh and aah
| over, you're giving Facebook free bait that they then use to
| trap your friends into looking at ads.
| naravara wrote:
| >Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business, they
| are obligated to fight against user agents or other
| intermediary systems.
|
| Not all users hate ads in principle, just in practice. In
| theory, you'd be making the users select ads for relevance
| and not being annoying. But obviously, the site wants to show
| ads based on how much they're paying and "not being annoying"
| only factors in if pushes people off the site entirely.
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| "The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show
| you good, enrishing content from your friends and family."
|
| Well, it is someone else's website. What do you expect
| Zuckerberg has his own interests in mind.
|
| In 2020, it is still too difficult for everyone to set up
| their own website, so they settle for a page on someone
| else's.
|
| If exchanging content with friends and family (not swaths of
| the public who visit Facebook - hello advertisers) is the
| ultimate goal, then there are more efficient ways to to do
| that without using Zuckerberg's website.
|
| The challenge is to make those easier to set up.
|
| For example, if each group of friends and family were on the
| same small overlay network they set up themselves, connecting
| to each other peer-to-peer, it would be much more difficult
| for advertisers to reach them. Every group of friends and
| family on a different network instead of every group of
| friends and family all using the same third party, public
| website on the same network, the internet.
|
| Naysayers will point to the difficulty setting up such
| networks. No one outside of salaried programmers paid to do
| it wants to even attempt to write "user agents" today because
| the "standard", a ridiculously large set of "features", most
| of which benefit advertisers not users, is far too complex.
| What happens when we simplify the "standard"? As an analogy,
| look at how much easier is is to set up Wireguard, software
| written more or less by one person, than it is to set up
| OpenVPN.
| gmax wrote:
| It may not be _that_ hard to set up things for yourself,
| have been toying with something like that for messaging
| https://cweb.gitlab.io/StoneAge.html. The deeper question
| is how to sustain this kind of products and make them
| competitive without comparable funding.
| ggggtez wrote:
| I don't think that "user-agents" are the hard part either.
| At this point, I think any grad student would happily write
| a NN implementation that took various posts as input, and
| returned to you a sorted list based on your preferences
| (with input layers like: bag of words, author, links, time,
| etc, that the user could put more or less weight into just
| by simple upvote/downvote).
|
| The problem is that no one has the incentive to host such a
| service for free, and users wants the content to be
| available 24/7. So it's not as simple as just setting up a
| peer-to-peer network. Users who just use a phone as their
| primary computer will still want to be able to publish to
| their millions of followers, and so it wouldn't work to
| have those millions of people connect directly to this
| person's device. Maybe you can solve that with a bit-
| torrent like approach, but the problem gets harder when you
| include the ability to send messages privately.
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| "Users who just use a phone as their primary computer
| will still want to able to publich to their millions of
| followers, and so it wouldn't work to have these millions
| of people connect directly to this person's device."
|
| You have shifted the discussion from small overlay
| network for friends and family to large overlay network
| for "millions of followers".
|
| Those methods of sharing content with "millions of
| followers" are already available and will no doubt
| continue to be available.
|
| A small private network is a different idea, with a
| different purpose. The only thing it can potentially
| "replace" is using those large public networks to share
| content with small groups of friends and family.
| Nevertheless, people will always have the choice of using
| a public network.
|
| There is no requirement that a service has to be "free",
| or supported by ads. This is something else you injected
| in the discussion. I use free software to set up
| overlays, but I have to pay for internet service and
| hosting. The cost of the "service" is not the setup it is
| the internet access and hosting.
| baq wrote:
| i have a fundamental issue calling a content-curating,
| psychological-experiment-running platform visited by
| hundreds of millions of people daily 'someone else's
| website'. the fact that it is privately owned doesn't
| matter if nation states use it to wage information wars
| against other nation states' citizens. to make matters
| worse, the 'someone else' in question knows about it
| perfectly well and is fine with it because it means he's
| showing more ads.
|
| this is plain and simple fucked up.
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| Well, that is what it is. No one knew a single website
| could grow so large, but it did. Even though there are
| thousands of people working for its owner, when reading
| articles like the OP we are reminded how much control he
| still has over it. No doubt he still thinks of it as his
| personal creation. Of course, "99.99999%" of the content
| is not his. Perhaps most of the people who sign up on
| Facebook are not employed by nation states but just
| ordinary people who want an easy way to stay connected to
| friends and family. Maybe these people should have a
| better way to stay connected than using a public website.
| StandardFuture wrote:
| Excuse my ignorance, but isn't the overlay network setup
| problem one that has problems at almost every level of the
| stack? If there is not any definitive technical problems to
| overcome, why is it not possible to create a mobile app
| that friends and family could use as their own private
| network?
|
| Isn't the internet supposed to be every node acting as it's
| own server and client simultaneously anyways? Is the
| problem just the inability to truly decentralize discovery,
| registry, and identity authentication of nodes in the
| network? Or is the problem that most ISPs don't want people
| operating services out of their homes or off of their
| phones?
| manquer wrote:
| That is how it is today. But does it have to be like that ?
| What is the minimum revenue per user required for service
| like FB to run.
|
| While everyone is sceptical on whether such a service can
| reach critical mass to make financial sense, a brand new FB
| replacement may not be able to do it, However FB itself can
| certainly give that as an option without hurting their
| revenues substantially.
|
| I was sceptical on the value prop for Youtube Premium, I am
| constantly surprised how many people pay for it, if google
| can afford to loose ad money with YT premium, I am sure FB
| can build a financial model around a freemium offering if
| they wanted to.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Minimum doesn't matter, the only question is if it's more
| profitable than the current approach. Facebook makes
| $9/user/quarter. That's every user no matter how little
| they use the site.
|
| The issue however is that the users advertisers care about
| are the ones with disposable income. The users most likely
| to opt out of ads are the ones with disposable income. Thus
| the marginal cost to Facebook from such users is
| significantly more than $9/quarter.
| ardy42 wrote:
| >>> The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to
| show you good, enriching content from your friends and
| family. They want to show you ads. The good content is
| just a necessary evil to make you tolerate looking at
| ads.
|
| >> That is how it is today. But does it have to be like
| that ? What is the minimum revenue per user required for
| service like FB to run.
|
| > Minimum doesn't matter, the only question is if it's
| more profitable than the current approach.
|
| Only if you think strictly inside the box.
|
| The real problem here is one is a misalignment of
| incentives: Zuckerberg managing Facebook to maximize the
| metric he's being evaluated on (profit and wealth), not
| the value provided to society.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Value to society is subjective and many horrors of the
| past (and current) were caused by trying to optimize
| specific definitions of that term.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| And many horrors of the past and present were and are
| caused by optimizing for profits. So it's not like we get
| to side-step horror-avoidance.
|
| I'd start with treating users as partners, and not
| cattle.
| henriquemaia wrote:
| > I am sure FB can build a financial model around a
| freemium offering if they wanted to.
|
| They probably could. As they could also charge you a
| premium and then profit two times on top of you -- with
| your fee and then by selling your data to third parties.
| Why? Because who would know that was happening?
| Corporations have no moral compass dictating their actions.
| The bottom line being what's best for investors.
| KorematsuFred wrote:
| I am happy to pay $10 bucks a month for a facebook like
| service that suggests me engaging, high quality content
| without any promotional content.
|
| I am already getting such service in the form of Android's
| newsfeed feature on pixel. Its google but its pretty good.
| monadic2 wrote:
| > Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business
|
| Flaw? It seems that the point would be to force FB to
| transact with currency rather than a bait-and-switch tactic.
| The site would also be more usable if they were forced to
| change business model.
| panopticon wrote:
| I think another tangential but related issue is with how
| these companies measure success. They measure success by
| engagement, and things that drive the most user engagement
| aren't usually the best for the user.
|
| YouTube has been getting a lot of flack for this recently.
| rockinghigh wrote:
| > The good content is just a necessary evil to make you
| tolerate looking at ads.
|
| You could make the same argument for Google or other online
| web sites relying on ads as the primary source of revenue.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| You can, and if you look at Google's actions long term,
| they do.
| TwoBit wrote:
| Facebook would be perfectly happy to eliminate all ads if
| instead you paid a small or even tiny monthly fee. But you
| won't pay it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| No, they wouldn't, unless advertising gets banned. They'd
| instead accept your payment _and_ find a way to shove ads
| in anyway, in a covert or overt way, just as many paid
| services do, because why leave money on the table?
| rockinghigh wrote:
| YouTube and Spotify went that subscription route and it
| works well. There are no ads.
| ngold wrote:
| Still waiting for that ublock origin web browser.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > The primary content no user wants to see any every user
| agent would filter out is ads.
|
| Not that you're wrong, but: _that 's the fucking point_!
|
| Advertising delenda est.
| arihant wrote:
| Pay for Facebook then. 1.5% of total YouTube users
| subscribe for YT Premium. I love how the smartest minds
| will ignore the most primitive economics. Ads work. For
| everyone. Except deluded.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If everybody paid for facebook, it would have as many
| ads, if not more. That companies would leave money on the
| table with no incentive to do so is a bizarre self-
| justifying myth that people who live off advertising tell
| themselves.
|
| You pay for cable. Paying customers are a better audience
| for ads than deadbeats.
| creato wrote:
| Where did you get that number? That's actually far, far
| higher than I would have thought and quite encouraging...
| jjjensen90 wrote:
| On Feb 4th, Google said there were 20 million Youtube
| Premium users, and I believe the latest estimates put
| Youtube at 2 billion users, which would be a 1%
| subscription rate.
| mikenew wrote:
| It would be interesting to see how they count a "user"
| too. If a good portion of those 2 billion people don't
| use YouTube very much then the % of users who are using
| it regularly and subscribing might be a lot higher.
| [deleted]
| Calamity wrote:
| You know the worst part? I do pay for YT Premium and yet
| Google still finds a way to throw ads at me on Youtube
| videos through videos it suggests via Google Feeds (the
| leftmost screen on a Pixel). I bloody pay for the service
| and yet I am still getting ads on any youtube video I
| play when clicking any youtube suggested video on that
| feed. How annoying do you think that is? When you give in
| and pay, yet you are still getting harassed.
| nsriv wrote:
| I had this issue as well and logging out (in my case,
| switching accounts) wiping Google app cache, and I think
| rebooting to make Pixel Launcher refresh, then logging
| back into the YT Premium subscribed account. Convoluted I
| know, but I think the issue was it wasn't picking up some
| profile variable denoting me as a subscriber. Hope that
| helps!
| a1369209993 wrote:
| I don't use Facebook, and I want it to die. Facebook is
| one of the many, many reasons _why_ advertising must be
| destroyed.
| nabla9 wrote:
| > Pay for Facebook
|
| You can do that?
| Abekkus wrote:
| I paid for youtube for a while, but I did not get a
| different algorithm. It was the same feed of addictive,
| stressful content. I stopped paying once I noticed this.
| monadic2 wrote:
| Compare how much money google can make off ads in a month
| to $15. You're paying for way, way, way more than just
| removing ads and it's obvious
| trisiak wrote:
| That's why you get other benefits that are much harder to
| price in.
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| That does not tell us much. Where can we look at
| YouTube's balnce sheet? There is likely more to YouTube
| as a business than selling ads on YouTube. For one,
| YouTube under Google is like AC Nielson on steroids. The
| combination easily rivals any "smart" TV.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Paid-for Facebook would be a viable business if it wasn't
| competing with free-facebook. It's not ignoring economics
| to think that Facebook is causing significant negative
| externalities that ought to be priced or regulated to
| allow more ethical alternatives to thrive.
| baq wrote:
| free facebook should be regulated out of existence. what
| else is free that is good for you? in big cities you have
| to pay for clean air to breathe already.
| comawhite wrote:
| To be honest, I'd happily pay for YT Premium if Google
| didn't use my data to personalise other results and
| content on the internet. I personally stop using
| products/services that dictate what content is deemed
| "suitable" for my consumption. I'll happily be served
| adverts so long as I'm not getting manipulated.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| I already don't get ads on youtube, so I don't see why I
| should pay for this when I can get all of the benefit
| with none of the expense.
| ggggtez wrote:
| Let's imagine for a moment that a decentralized social
| network actually took off.
|
| How long until those ads crop back up anyway? Instagram
| should give us some idea on how sponsored content might
| look in such a system. According to some random site, the
| average price for a "sponsored" instagram post is $300. You
| think your friends are above showing you an ad when real
| money is on the line? Maybe they won't be making that kind
| of money with very few followers, but when Pizzahut asks
| you to post an ad in exchange for a free pizza, I think
| you'll see plenty of takers. Now, granted, at least the
| people being paid are your friends, instead of Zuck.
| GuiA wrote:
| What you're referring to is splitting the presentation from the
| content. The server (eg Facebook) provides you with the
| content, and your computer/software displays it to your liking
| (ie without ads and spam and algorithmically recommended crap).
|
| There's a lot of history around that split, and the motivation
| for HTML/CSS was about separating presentation from the content
| in many ways. For another example, once upon a time a lot of
| chat services ran over XMPP, and you could chat with a Facebook
| friend from your Google Hangouts account. Of course, both
| Google and Facebook stopped supporting it pretty quickly to
| focus on the "experience" of their own chat software.
|
| The thing is that there is very little money to be made selling
| content, and a lot to be made controlling the presentation. So
| everyone focuses on the latter, and that's why we live in a
| software world of walled gardens that work very hard to not let
| you see your own data.
|
| There is some EU legislation proposal that may make things a
| bit better (social network interop), but given the outsized
| capital and power of internet companies i'm not holding my
| breath.
| Lammy wrote:
| > you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google
| Hangouts account
|
| This was never true. There was an XMPP-speaking endpoint into
| Facebook's proprietary chat system, but it wasn't a S2S XMPP
| implementation and never federated with anything. It was
| useful for using FBChat in Adium or Pidgin, but not for
| talking to GChat XMPP users.
| hesk wrote:
| I don't know about Facebook but Google Talk was federated
| at some point [1].
|
| [1] https://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-
| federation.html
| Lammy wrote:
| Yep, Google's was. They never enabled server-to-server
| TLS, though, so GTalk was effectively cut off from the
| federated XMPP network after May 2014 when that became
| mandatory: https://blog.prosody.im/mandatory-encryption-
| on-xmpp-starts-...
| divbzero wrote:
| RSS is yet another example of separating content from
| presentation.
| drdeadringer wrote:
| I don't see this as a bad thing. I experience this as a
| good thing.
|
| The RSS feeds I subscribe to give me plenty of
| "presentation" or "branding". Logos, written descriptions
| [both short- and long-form], clear names of what I am
| subscribing to, URLs. Just the right amount for me, in
| fact; if I wanted to go to their website(s) for their
| particular buffet of blog posts, featured puff pieces on
| Page Five, twitter mentions, &c I can do that ... or not.
| I'm glad I don't have to if I don't want to, and all of
| these folks are more than able to drop into their RSS feed
| a "Please go here for our tour information with new stuff
| in our online shop" mention just as you are able to go
| straight to some website full of deep-thumping media
| flashing into your senses as you get to where you want to
| go instead of using RSS.
| divbzero wrote:
| Agreed completely. RSS is an example of what content-
| presentation separation could be if we made it more
| prevalent across the web.
|
| There seems to be a steady thread of this sentiment here
| on HN, yet over the years no one has quite cracked this
| nut. Solutions welcome!
| richardw wrote:
| Your friends provide you with the content, not Facebook. You
| only need Facebook now because you don't have a 24/7 agent
| swapping content on your behalf and presenting it how you
| like it.
| liopleurodon wrote:
| bring back rss feeds
|
| then I choose what I read in my reader
| globular-toast wrote:
| > What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every
| Facebook post and then decided what to show you.
|
| So you can read more of what you already agree with? That's
| called living in a bubble. The mind cannot grow in a bubble.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| > _AI that read every Facebook post_
|
| I doubt FB would let you do that. It's "their" content.
| ereyes01 wrote:
| Another early assumption about the internet and computers in
| general is that users were going to exert large amounts of
| control over the software and systems they use. This assumption
| has thus far been apparently invalidated, as people by far
| prefer to be mere consumers of software that are designed to
| make its designers money. Even OSS is largely driven by
| companies who need to run monetized infrastructure, though
| perhaps you don't pay for it directly.
|
| Given that users are generally not interested in exerting a
| high level of sophisticated control over software they use, how
| then is the concept of a user agent AI/filter any different at
| a fundamental level? It probably won't be created and
| maintained as a public benefit in any meaningful way, and users
| will not be programming and tuning the AI as needed to deliver
| the needed accuracy. I don't think AI has yet reached a level
| of sophistication where content as broad a range as what's
| found on the internet (or even just Facebook) can be curated to
| engage the human intellect beyond measuring addictive
| engagement, without significant user intervention.
|
| Hopefully I'm wrong, as I do wish I could engage with something
| like Facebook without having to deal with ads or with content
| curated to get my blood boiling. Sometimes I do wonder how much
| it is Facebook vs. human tendency under the guise of an online
| persona, as both are clearly involved here.
| gjs278 wrote:
| uhh or just show me all the posts in chronological order
| yots wrote:
| It's really not as sophisticated, but these guys[1] created an
| extension that in addition to their main objective of analyzing
| Facebook's algorithm also offers a way to create your own
| Facebook feed. If I got it right, they analyze posts their
| users see, categorize them by topic and then let you create
| your own RSS feed with only the topics you want to see.
|
| It's not clear to me whether you may see posts collected by
| other users or only ones from your own feed and it seems highly
| experimental.
|
| [1] https://facebook.tracking.exposed/
| 2019-nCoV wrote:
| This already exists -- most social media is already curated.
| You only see tweets and posts from those you follow or friend.
| You can already block or ignore any undesirables. This works
| fine for self-curation.
|
| There is no need for holier-than-thou censorship short of legal
| breaches. Good to see FB take this change of direction.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Except when it doesn't.
| 2019-nCoV wrote:
| Such as?
| solarkraft wrote:
| Twitter shows me garbage I don't like, as does YouTube.
| They do this with very little regard for who you follow
| nowadays and give you no say in what types of stuff you
| actually want to be recommended. Sometimes they're nice
| enough to say why they recommend something (which should
| be standard), but most of the time it's just
| infuriatingly stupid.
|
| I'm not against machine curation at all, mind you. I want
| the infrequent poster to have a higher weighed voice and
| such. But I want to be able to control the parameters.
| 2019-nCoV wrote:
| For Twitter use curated lists. This allows you to avoid
| "the algorithm".
|
| You are bemoaning YouTube's discovery process, you need
| not watch what's "Up Next" -- that's your choice.
| janekm wrote:
| Sounds pretty similar to the concept of "software agents" which
| was popular in the mid '90s:
| http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/michael.wooldridge/pubs/iee-re...
|
| Part of the concept was that the agents would actually roam
| onto servers on the internet on your behalf raising complicated
| questions around how to sandbox the agent code (came in useful
| for VPSs and AWS-style lambdas in the end).
| Swizec wrote:
| I tried building this 10 years ago as a startup. Maybe time to
| revisit, the zeitgeist is turning more and more towards this
| and computing power has gotten cheap enough ...
| ralston3 wrote:
| > I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers
| worse.
|
| This.
|
| Also. What incentive does a walled garden even have to allow
| something like this? Put a different way, what incentive does a
| walled garden have to not just block this "user agent"? Because
| the UA would effectively be replacing the walled garden's own
| "algo curated new feed" - except if the user builds their own
| AI bot -- the walled garden can't make money the way they
| currently do.
|
| I think the idea is very interesting. I personally believe
| digital UA's will have a place in the future. But in this
| scenario I couldn't see it working.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| True, but we have ad blockers and they're effective. They're
| effective against the largest, richest companies in the
| world. There are various reasons for that, but at the end of
| the day it remains true that I can use YouTube without ads if
| I choose to. There's clearly a place in the world for pro-
| user curation, even if that's not in FAANG's best interests.
| I think it's antithetical to the Hacker ethos to not pursue
| an idea just because it's bad for mega-corps.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Mega-corps don't stop themselves from pursuing an idea just
| because it's bad for the hoi polloi, so why should we?
| jackandrew wrote:
| We're a small team working in stealth on this exact challenge.
| Shoot me a note if you're interested in hearing more or getting
| involved. itshelikos@gmail.com
| mpfundstein wrote:
| good luck
| Merad wrote:
| I think the overwhelming majority of users don't want to deal
| with this kind of detail. IMO most people would end up using
| some kind of preset that matched their preferred bubble.
| austincheney wrote:
| > What if, instead, you had a personal AI
|
| I was in agreement with you until I read that. People don't
| need to have content dictated to them like mindless drones
| whether it is from social media, bloggers, AI, or whatever.
| Many people prefer that, though, out of laziness. It's like the
| laugh track on sitcoms because people were too stupid or tuned
| out to catch the poorly written jokes even with pausing and
| other unnecessarily directed focus. It's all because you are
| still thinking in terms of content and broadcast. Anybody can
| create content. Off loading that to AI is just more of the same
| but worse.
|
| Instead imagine an online social application experience that is
| fully decentralized without a server in the middle, like a
| telephone conversation. Everybody is a content provider amongst
| their personal contacts. Provided complete decentralization and
| end-to-end encryption imagine how much more immersive your
| online experience can be without the most obvious concerns of
| security and privacy with the web as it is now. You could share
| access to the hardware, file system, copy/paste text/files,
| stream media, and of course original content.
|
| > And isn't that how the internet used to be?
|
| The web is not the internet. When you are so laser focused on
| web content I can see why they are indistinguishable.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I think your suggestion is a bit out of scope for what's
| actually being discussed/not really a solution.
|
| I'm active on the somewhat (not fully) decentralized social
| medium Fediverse (more widely known as Mastodon, but it's
| more than that) and I think a lack of curation is a problem:
| Posts by people who post a lot while I'm active are very
| likely to be seen, those by infrequent posters active while
| I'm not very likely to go unnoticed.
|
| How would your proposed system (that seems a bit utopic and
| vague from that comment, to be honest) deal with that?
| zachware wrote:
| The risk is that it behaves like a reinforcement learning
| algorithm which essentially rewards itself by making you more
| predictable, I'd argue that's what curated social networks do
| today.
|
| If you're unpredictable you're a problem. Thus, it makes sense
| to slowly push you to a pole so you conform to a group's
| preferences and are easier to predict.
|
| A hole in my own argument is that today's networks are
| incentivized to do increase engagement where a neutral agent is
| in most ways not.
|
| So perhaps the problem isn't just the need for agents but for a
| proper business model where the reward isn't eyeball time as it
| is today.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > If you're unpredictable you're a problem.
|
| But you are predictable, even if you think you are
| unpredictable, you are just a bit more adventurous. Algorithm
| can capture that as well. It will be easier for algorithm
| that works on your behalf.
| airstrike wrote:
| Reminded me of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19336754
| solarkraft wrote:
| This makes me think of a talk with an AI-optimistic
| Microsoft sales guy I had a few years ago. His argument was
| essentially the same:"Look, it's no problem to have an AI
| curate everything for you because the algorithm will just
| know what you want, even if your habits are unusual!"
|
| Of course this hasn't happened yet and I doubt it ever
| will. Maybe I'm just insane, but most of the
| recommendations from services I have fed data for hundreds
| of hours (YouTube) are actually repulsive.
| api wrote:
| > So perhaps the problem isn't just the need for agents but
| for a proper business model where the reward isn't eyeball
| time as it is today.
|
| I've been on this for years. Free is a lie, and the idea that
| everything has to be "free as in beer" is a huge reason so
| many things suck.
| abhchand wrote:
| I like this idea.
|
| In response to it just creating more echo chambers:
|
| - it can't be worse than now - At minimum, it's an echo chamber
| of your own creation instead of being manipulated by FB.
| There's value in that, ethically. - Giving people choice at
| scale means it will at least improve the situation for some
| people.
| ketzu wrote:
| Isn't facebook (and reddit, and twitter) showing you posts by
| people companies etc. that you decided to follow? (And some
| ads)?
|
| I am pretty sure things can be worse than right now,
| pretending like we are in some kind of hell state at the
| bottom of some well where it can't possibly be worse, seems
| unrealistic to me.
| notriddle wrote:
| I've seen Twitter pull tweets from an account merely
| because someone I follow follows them. Facebook is the
| same.
|
| I think Reddit sticks strictly to your subscriptions,
| unless you go to /r/all.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| This misses the point. Facebook refuses to look inwardly or
| mess with their core moneymaker, regardless of how it affects
| people. Noone is ever going to sip from the firehose just like
| we'll never again get a simple view of friend's posts sorted by
| creation date.
|
| I think the real problem is Facebook's need to be such a large
| company. They brought this on themselves trying to take over
| the world. Maybe they need a Bell-style breakup
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I've posted a lot over the years about FB being leveraged by
| genocidal regimes and bad actors. While I don't think they
| necessarily pursue such ends, the fact is that social media is a
| battlespace from where real-world aggression can be launched, and
| that renting out platform space to this end has been extremely
| profitable.
|
| Perhaps it has already been posted elsewhere in this very long
| thread, but if not I heartily encourage more ethically minded FB
| employees to leak the presentation in question and indeed
| anything else they consider relevant. At some point it will be
| too late to feel bad about not having done so when it could make
| a difference.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I hate FB as much as the next guy but I think that Facebook is an
| amplifier of other trends.
|
| I think that the underlying issue is the two party system. The
| echo chambers get amplified.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _"Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to
| divisiveness," read a slide from a 2018 presentation. "If left
| unchecked," it warned, Facebook would feed users "more and more
| divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase
| time on the platform."_
|
| According to the article, FB is not taking a passive role in
| this; they're actively trying to exploit people.
| ver_ture wrote:
| The two party system does not affect this discussion.
| Facebook's algos will show you more and more $x content if
| you've liked $x or subscribed to it, and never show you $y
| content since you'd probably not like and engage with $y.
| Doesn't matter how many parties/topics/underlyingIssues there
| are.
|
| If FB were neutral they would show you every FB post, millions
| per second whizzing past your screen, but they can't do this,
| they have to curate a wall for you to slowly scroll through and
| for most revenue, like, share, or comment on.
|
| Therefore, to show you the most content that you will like,
| share, or comment on, they repeat the type ($x) you've already
| liked, creating the echo.
|
| So no, it is not mostly a problem of the underlying issue of
| the two parties, this is entirely about how FB curates your
| wall and simply doesn't show you "the other party"/$y or
| anything deviant/$y of your likes.
|
| Edit: changed political parties to variables to illustrate
| point.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| It is a feedback loop. Politics has become more polarized, I
| believe, because of the need to be "pure" so avoid the wrath of
| the party's highly polarized base.
|
| 30 years ago an R and a D could cut a deal to get things done
| and few people would notice that they compromised by giving a
| little to get a little.
|
| Now when such deals happen the deal makers are branded as
| traitors and RINOs (do people use DINOs too?) and must be
| primaried.
|
| FB encourages polarization because it increases engagement with
| their advertisers, which is useful to FB. The polarized base is
| useful to parties because it motivates them to donate,
| proselytize, and vote. That base polarization leads to
| polarization in candidates, and the division grows.
| LordHumungous wrote:
| > Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in
| vetting proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make
| conversations on the platform more civil were "paternalistic,"
| said people familiar with his comments.
|
| I think Joel was right.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| That isn't a bad thing. We are constantly influenced by design
| and society. It's going to happen. And in Facebook's case, with
| respect to Rush: "If you choose not to decide, you still have
| made a choice". Choosing not to build a user experience that
| disarms unnecessary conflict, or that can limit disinformation,
| is a clear choice.
|
| The idea of designing human interaction and government policy
| with the knowledge of how humans react is not shocking or new.
| Heck, the "Pandemic Playbook" from the CDC continuously
| references group behavior when discussing how to communicate
| facts to the public. For example: If you tell people to stay
| home on day 1, the public may doubt or tune out your advice. So
| what do you do on days 1-3 so that on Day 4, government advice
| is heeded? Get private companies on board, ramp up voluntary
| advice for some time, before letting the big news fall.
|
| If you'd like to learn more, check out Nudge by Cass Sunstein
| [1]. And another book by the same man, specifically covering
| the ethics of governments using the technique. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A5DCALY
|
| [2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01JGME90E
| ironman1478 wrote:
| I don't think this makes sense. It works off of assumptions
| that are clearly untrue. 1. Consequences of language on the
| internet are equal to that in person 2. Networking effects
|
| For 1. If somebody on the street comes up to you and says "hey
| I'm going to come beat up your family." At a bare minimum, the
| cops are being called and it is somewhat taken seriously. On
| the internet though, it is a reality for many people
| (especially women) that there are no consequences for such
| horrible language and communication. Also, people make
| different decisions in real life when it comes to certain types
| of language. I don't just go around swearing like in real life,
| but people are way more offensive on the internet. There are
| physical realities that don't map to the internet, that causes
| different communication patterns on the internet.
|
| For 2. When it comes to spreading disinformation through idiots
| sharing links to each other, the effect is much more pronounced
| than when a conspiracy theorists goes out to a street corner
| and starts shouting ideas at people or has a million signs. Its
| clear in the latter case they might have a few screws loose,
| however in the former, everybody's "opinion" seems equal, but
| we can't use our other senses to vet them and b/c communication
| is slow/unclear on the internet, we also can't have a
| protracted conversation to figure out what their ideas are and
| where they come from (something you can easily do in person).
| This then causes really bad ideas to spread because people have
| lots of connections on facebook and there is no good way of
| vetting people or ideas.
|
| The idea to not be "paternalistic" only makes sense if you
| think that communication in person is equivalent in every way
| to in person communication, which is fundamentally untrue. The
| only reason they don't do this is b/c they don't know how to
| solve this problem for N countries generically and don't want
| to be held liable for a policy that makes sense in country A,
| but not in B and causes potential legal issues.
| megamittens wrote:
| Unless Joel is advocating allowing nudity on the platform then
| he is just blowing smoke. Facebook is inherently paternalistic
| and Joel Kaplan is right-wing hack.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| Honestly, this does give me much more confidence in Facebook's
| internal governance, even if the platform often bows to media
| demands.
|
| Much to the Chagrin of many on HN, Facebook is, and has been a
| fairly open platform to people of all convictions, backgrounds,
| and political stripes. Even if it has been unsteady handed at
| times. This, as well as their sorting algorithm may well be
| contributing to the collapse of institutional trust and
| cultural balkanization of the western world.
|
| To a progressive liberal or political moderate who directly
| benefitted from the economic and technological booms we've
| experience over the last 30 years this is upsetting, because
| the global order (and its associated stability) from-which
| they've benefited, which brought us to where we are is
| disintegrating around us.
|
| To me, hand-wringing about Facebook's relatively hands-off
| approach the political dialogues on their platform is just
| resentment about the loss of a prescribed cultural narrative
| and familiar cultural coalitions, the collapse of-which has
| given every stakeholder in their nation's future an opportunity
| to speak up for their own convictions and interests, in hopes
| that theirs will be the dominant narrative of the new political
| landscape.
|
| I wish these dialogues and factional aggregations were
| occurring on a more federated network. But so far as
| centralized platforms go, I can't think of any company more fit
| (that's not a compliment, but a lament) than Facebook to host
| them.
| skosch wrote:
| > political dialogues
|
| That sounds lovely.
|
| Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-
| theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues,
| botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense
| ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| They're indicative of a collapse of consensus on the part
| of society. It could well be argued that prior to our
| current political era, especially in the US, that the
| political domain was largely constrained to a discourse on
| cultural aesthetics, wherein the Democrats and and
| Republicans argued over trivialities (on a broader
| national, not individual respect) such as abortion,
| marriage, and immigration, while they operated on an
| implicit consensus concerning foreign policy, and had a
| functional stalemate in terms of the size of the state,
| farming out many of their policy decisions to thinktanks,
| corporate donors, and well-established bureaucrats within
| our regulatory bodies
|
| America's role as international security guarantor, its
| trade policies, and its government's role in domestic
| affairs was never really up for debate, and it only really
| changed stepwise in a stochastic manner, responding to
| situations and incentives day-by-day with no conscious
| consideration to the role of America or its state on a
| broader scale.
|
| What we're seeing now, is large portions of the population
| coming to realize that that existing bipartian components
| of the political consensus - which I believe to be a legacy
| of the cold war, no longer serves their cultural or
| economic interests.
|
| This process is naturally fractious, chaotic, sometimes
| violent, and full of dirty tricks, because politics isn't
| just about flavor of the month policies anymore. We're in
| the process of reinventing who we collectively are, and
| what we want to be. As a result, we're running across real,
| fundamentally irreconcilable political and moral
| differences that have been buried for decades, as well as
| confronting the failures and controversies of our past.
|
| Many of those fundamental agreements settle neatly along
| class, racial, and professional boundaries. Others, not so
| much.
|
| Science denial and anti-intellectualism is the natural
| result, because much of science communication has become a
| carrier mechanism for policy prescriptions predicated upon
| society operating under a specific ideological consensus,
| when in fact someone of a different political persuasion
| might objectively consume the scientific data and come to a
| different policy conclusion based on the same data.
|
| For the less educated, who encounter proposals from
| scientists they consider to be politically unworkable, and
| which might rightfully be considered manipulatively framed,
| it is easier to reject entire specialized fields of
| research out of hand than to investigate further and
| attempt to conceive of alternative proposals because they
| lack the tools to engage with the information effectively
| to begin with.
|
| All of this is messy, but it constotutes a real political
| dialogue on the part of society.
| taurath wrote:
| Isn't it preferable to be somewhat paternalistic when you have
| paternal amounts of power over your userbase? Its not like
| giving up the power is on the table.
|
| There is of course the well documented problem of moderation -
| it inevitably turns into an issue of a subset of the users vs
| the moderators. Facebook gets by pretending to be neutral
| "platform providers", but they actively optimize for their
| benefit. They are about as neutral as a bathtub salesperson on
| water heaters.
|
| This whole idea that they don't have control only has the
| ability to stand based on the indifference of its users. I can
| only hope it eventually falls and the next grand experiment in
| mass social interaction is a lot more gentle for society.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I, too, agree. Facebook is just an extension of the open
| society.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Facebook admits to doing large-scale emotional manipulation
| of its users. They published a 'scientific' paper where they
| showed that they tried and succeeded to make 1 group
| depressed (hundreds of thousands of people), and 1 group feel
| happier (also hundreds of thousands of people).
|
| They psychologically manipulate people into depressions, _on
| purpose_.
|
| Facebook is _not_ "just" an extension of open society.
| Facebook is a specific powerful corporation that makes
| immoral decisions to emotionally control their users.
| iliekcomputers wrote:
| Could you link said paper?
| cryptoz wrote:
| There are a lot of sources to read, including follow-up
| papers by other teams that evaluate if Facebook had
| "informed consent" (they did not) to emotionally
| manipulate their users.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+paper+emotionall
| y+m...
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Disagree. It's different to normal society.
|
| Normal society encourages civility by offering the inclusion
| into a needed physically-near social group. Digital society
| deincentises civility by offering a multitude of alternative
| groups.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's localness by homogeneity rather than geography.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| "The East India Trading Company is just an extension of the
| open seas."
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Yes, a company which owns large chunks of India and has a
| well-used private army numbering in the tens of thousands,
| is a great analogy for a social-media company. </s>
|
| The East India Company was responsible, at least in part,
| for tens of millions of deaths in various famines, and to
| equate the two fails both by being ridiculous (Facebook is
| not a private empire with an empire), and trivializes the
| actual damage done by that institution.
| jboog wrote:
| Defenders of the EIC at the time surely said "yeah some
| bad stuff happens but think about the squalor the average
| Indian lived in prior to the Englishman coming in and
| bringing great wealth to their country. Think of the
| untold famine and poverty we're helping ameliorate by
| bringing western Christian ideals and wealth to a
| primitive people.
|
| How DARE you compare some unfortunate incidents of the
| EIC to the human misery that existed before the Brits
| arrived, you're being ridiculous!! "
|
| People have always been able to use motivated reasoning
| to explain away the terrible externalizes of their
| choices when there's a shitload of money on the line.
|
| FB has been a tool to aid genocide, they've contributed
| to incivility in societies throughout the world while
| they're cashing checks but don't want to appear
| "paternalistic" of course so it's fine.
| banads wrote:
| Social media companies have played a primary role in
| overthrowing governments and manipulating elections
| across the world.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| In much of South/South-East Asia, for many people,
| Facebook _is_ the internet. (And remember Facebook Zero?
| Facebook was aware of and tried to engender this).
|
| https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-
| no-id...
|
| A staunch defender of the EITC would claim they were
| "just" engaging in mercantilism and facilitating the
| exchange of goods, and the war and deaths were just
| unfortunate side-effects. Facebook is "just" engaging in
| connecting people and facilitating the exchange of
| information, and stoking violence and racial conflict are
| just unfortunate side-effects.
| badloginagain wrote:
| While I appreciate the invocation of Godwin's law,
| Facebook is absolutely a private empire with an empire;
| in context of modern society.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| You're not going to convince me (or hopefully, anyone)
| that an institution with an army that actually goes about
| the business of conquering and killing people, has any
| moral equivalence with a misguided (and I'm not
| contesting, destructive) social media company.
|
| We can say that things are bad, while at the same time
| admitting that in the past, people did far worse things.
| It's a new, different, less-bad-but-still-bad, thing.
| It's OK.
| tunesmith wrote:
| You have to factor in how the algorithm rewards content that
| drives engagement. _Without_ that, it 's more like an open
| society.
| AgentME wrote:
| >The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the
| presentation says. Worse was Facebook's realization that its
| algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016
| presentation states that "64% of all extremist group joins are
| due to our recommendation tools" and that most of the activity
| came from the platform's "Groups You Should Join" and
| "Discover" algorithms: "Our recommendation systems grow the
| problem."
|
| They're responsible for 64% of extremist group joins. Is trying
| to change that number to 0% paternalistic?
|
| I assume I'm currently not responsible for any extremist group
| joins. Am I being paternalistic by not pushing people toward
| joining extremist groups? Is it only paternalistic if you first
| find yourself responsible for some extremist group joins, and
| then try to lower that number?
| pkilgore wrote:
| Imagine an average level of civility in a society `C`.
|
| Lets say users of your product, due to your product, operate at
| `0.5 C`.
|
| Is changing the product so they operate at a higher `0.75 C` or
| back to `C` "paternalistic"?
|
| Why?
|
| I can see the argument for moving `C` to `1.5 C` as
| paternalistic. But when you're already actively affecting `C`
| in one way, why do we moralize about moving it the other way?
| What makes down OK, but up BAD?
| tdhoot wrote:
| Paternalistic is thinking you are in a position to define C
| and measure it.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| You keep on saying "paternalistic" as if it's a bad thing.
| I left another comment in this subthread suggesting it is
| not.
|
| Yes, some people are wrong and some are right. With
| government, there are basic freedoms that allow people to
| be wrong, and not to be incarcerated or unduly burdened by
| government policing thought.
|
| But society? Facebook? Even government messaging ala "The
| Ad Council"? Yes, absolutely, to hell with disinformation,
| trolls, and toxic platforms.
| deegles wrote:
| Refusing to measure something doesn't make it not exist.
| contemporary343 wrote:
| "If two members of a Facebook group devoted to parenting fought
| about vaccinations, the moderators could establish a temporary
| subgroup to host the argument or limit the frequency of posting
| on the topic to avoid a public flame war."
|
| Most of the suggestions they considered were fairly modest
| product design choices that probably would improve user
| experience. To call these choices paternalistic is a stretch.
|
| Also, the platform is already paternalistic - it polices
| nudity, pornography and a range of other legal content.
| [deleted]
| seemslegit wrote:
| How dare they - that used to be the job of traditional media and
| entertainment.
| casefields wrote:
| Mirror: http://archive.md/YQeJY
| neonate wrote:
| Updated: https://archive.md/FyTDB
| obi1kenobi wrote:
| Wow, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS server sets up a man-in-the-
| middle (broken cert gives it away) and serves a 403 Forbidden
| page when clicking on this link. Verified that 8.8.8.8 works
| fine.
| Defenestresque wrote:
| I don't want to derail the discussion too much either, but
| anyone curious about the reasoning can see this comment
| from CloudFlare [0]
|
| >We don't block archive.is or any other domain via 1.1.1.1.
| Doing so, we believe, would violate the integrity of DNS
| and the privacy and security promises we made to our users
| when we launched the service.
|
| >Archive.is's authoritative DNS servers return bad results
| to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I've proposed we just fix it
| on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would
| violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security
| promises we made to our users when we launched the service.
|
| >The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad
| results to us because we don't pass along the EDNS subnet
| information. This information leaks information about a
| requester's IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of
| users. This is especially problematic as we work to encrypt
| more DNS traffic since the request from Resolver to
| Authoritative DNS is typically unencrypted. We're aware of
| real world examples where nationstate actors have monitored
| EDNS subnet information to track individuals, which was
| part of the motivation for the privacy and security
| policies of 1.1.1.1.
|
| > [snipped the rest]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
| eloff wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's a separate issue, but I've noticed
| 1.1.1.1 sometimes can't resolve my bank. Adding 8.8.8.8
| as an alternate DNS service resolves the issue for me. I
| don't know if it's just balancing the requests or only
| using 8.8.8.8 if the primary fails. I'd like to know the
| answer to that.
| snek wrote:
| False, archive.is serves 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 as A records
| back to people who try to resolve it using cf dns.
| obi1kenobi wrote:
| Posted as a Tell HN, to avoid derailing this post's
| discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315640
| jgunsch wrote:
| I believe like this is due to Archive rejecting Cloudflare,
| not the other way around.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
| waterhouse wrote:
| Interesting. The diff appears to be (a) they changed the
| headline from "Facebook Knows It Encourages Division. Top
| Executives Nixed Solutions." to "Facebook Executives Shut
| Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive", and (b) they
| inserted a video most of the way down the article, captioned
| "In a speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg
| discussed the ways Facebook has tightened controls on who can
| run political ads while still preserving his commitment to
| freedom of speech."
| supernova87a wrote:
| I will make a parenthetical point that the WSJ, while expensive
| to subscribe, is a very high quality news source and worth
| paying for if it's in your budget. There are discounts to be
| found on various sites. And god knows their newsroom needs all
| the subscribers it can get (just like NYT, etc) to stay
| independent of their opinion-page-leaning business model that
| tends to be not so objective (the two are highly separated).
| Luckily they have a lot of business subscribers who keep them
| afloat, but I decided to subscribe years ago and never
| regretted it.
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| Blocked in some countries and worldwide _from_ at least one
| third party DNS provider.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/archive.is
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20200526163314/https://www.wsj.co...
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20200526201849/https://www.wsj.co...
| dilyevsky wrote:
| If you mean cloudflare is blocking it it's actually other way
| around - webarchive blocks cloudflare resolvers
| thepangolino wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's cloudflare being bitchy about not
| receiving some arcane DNS field from archive and therefore
| blocking their requests.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| You're wrong - https://mobile.twitter.com/archiveis/statu
| s/1018691421182791...
| cwperkins wrote:
| I think NYT has set a decent example with how to deal with
| internet comments sections. I like the idea of a US House of
| Representatives type approach to comments where every person in
| the house is given an equal amount of time to address the house
| so you can hear all perspectives.
|
| The way NYT has done this is by introducing "Featured Comments".
| A team at NYT, presumably ideologically diverse, picks insightful
| features to highlight out of all comments. You can still view
| comments sorted by number of recommendations, but they default to
| the Featured Comments.
|
| The web forum I think needs this more than any else is the
| r/politics subreddit of Reddit. Someone please let me know their
| experience, but I don't think the comments on highly upvoted
| content are insightful at all. A lot seek to exacerbate and
| misrepresent which IMO adds fuel to the flames of the flame wars.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The Verge has an unpaywalled story;
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270659/facebook-divisio...
| ENOTTY wrote:
| Here's the paragraph I found most damning. It would make me want
| to assign liability to Facebook.
|
| > The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the
| presentation says. Worse was Facebook's realization that its
| algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016
| presentation states that "64% of all extremist group joins are
| due to our recommendation tools" and that most of the activity
| came from the platform's "Groups You Should Join" and "Discover"
| algorithms: "Our recommendation systems grow the problem."
| inimino wrote:
| Of course, it's hard to assign blame without looking at how
| "extremist groups" are defined and at whether the
| recommendation tools do good as well as harm.
| thrwn_frthr_awy wrote:
| I thought the most interesting part was Mark asking not to be
| bothered with these types of issues in the future. By saying do
| it, but cut it 80%, he sounds like he wants to be able to say
| he made the decision to "reduce" extremism, but without really
| making a change.
| tantalor wrote:
| You are surprised? Here's the mission statement:
|
| > Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build
| community and bring the world closer together. People use
| Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover
| what's going on in the world, and to share and express what
| matters to them.
|
| Encouraging group communication is the primary goal, regardless
| of the consequences.
| razzimatazz wrote:
| It sounds like an honorable goal, doesn't it? But when you
| build a community that becomes simply a place for shared
| anger, you allow that anger to be amplified and seem more
| legitimate.
| ENOTTY wrote:
| It's one thing to enable people to seek out extremist
| communities on their own. It's quite another to build
| recommendation systems that push people towards these
| communities. That's putting a thumb on the scale and that's
| entirely Facebook's doing.
|
| This is one example, and it's quite possibly a poor example
| as it is a partisan example, but Reddit allows The_Donald
| subreddit to remain open, but it has been delisted from
| search, the front page, and Reddit's recommendation systems.
| specialist wrote:
| From the article:
|
| _" Worse was Facebook's realization that its algorithms were
| responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that
| "64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation
| tools" and that most of the activity came from the platform's
| "Groups You Should Join" and "Discover" algorithms: "Our
| recommendation systems grow the problem.""_
|
| Then:
|
| _" In keeping with Facebook's commitment to neutrality, the
| teams decided Facebook shouldn't police people's opinions, stop
| conflict on the platform, or prevent people from forming
| communities."_
|
| Does not compute.
|
| How can they claim to be neutral about the very problem they
| themselves created?
|
| There's _a lot_ of daylight between proactively accelerating
| extremism and censorship. This is not a binary choice.
|
| I'm right alongside Kara Swisher on this topic: Facebook's
| leadership team is apparently incapable of nuance, self
| awareness, or acknowledging culpability.
| mudlus wrote:
| Are we are going to have to wait for a generation to die and for
| millions of lives to be lost (indirectly, say, through a
| demagogue's botched response to a pandemic needlessly leading to
| the infection of millions) before the average person is
| comfortable using a protocol (say, ActivityPub and RSS) instead
| of these parasitic for-profit platforms?
|
| As long as the search for truth is burdened with advertising on
| platforms democracy and freedom are doomed.
|
| If you don't see these things are linked, then you're part of the
| problem.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Well, I can't read the paywalled article, but every solution I've
| ever seen has been to closely control the narrative to match one
| group's preferred spin. If that's what top executives nixed, then
| good for them for having principles.
| jdofaz wrote:
| Maybe divisive content keeps other people engaged but I stopped
| getting enjoyment out of facebook years ago and I avoid it now.
| yumraj wrote:
| I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings
| where some product/feature has harmful effect of
| something/someone but is good for the business of the company.
|
| I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only
| perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of
| people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet,
| just worry about the payroll, convince themselves that what the
| management is selling is a good argument _for_ such product
| /service....
|
| Luckily I've never had to face such a dilemma, but can't be
| envious of those who have faced and come out of it by losing
| either their morals or jobs.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged_
|
| No, but it's not always clear what the ethical choice is. In
| philosophy, this is known as pluralism [1] -- the fact that
| different people have irreconcilable ethical views, with no way
| to find any "truth".
|
| That might seem like a lot of justificatory mumbo-jumbo, but
| there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides. For example,
| did you know that in the postwar 1950's, the _lack_ of
| polarization and divisiveness in American society was seen by
| many as a major problem, because it didn 't provide enough
| voter choice between the two parties? [2]
|
| There are also plenty of ethical arguments that giving people
| what's "good for them", rather than what they want (click on)
| would run counter to their personal autonomy, and therefore
| against their freedom. This is what critics of paternalism
| believe. [3]
|
| Then there's the neoliberal argument that markets always work
| best (absent market failure). That most of human progress over
| the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing
| what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is. In
| that sense, Facebook doing what makes the most money _is_
| ethically right.
|
| I'm not saying I agree with any of these -- in fact, I don't.
|
| But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious
| right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at
| Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely
| believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(political_philosoph...
|
| [2] https://newrepublic.com/article/157599/were-not-polarized-
| en...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalism
| specialist wrote:
| The profit maximizing (shareholder value) argument is fairly
| recent.
|
| At many other times, the concentration of wealth, and
| therefore power, was identified as a problem and actively
| mitigated. For example, the founding fathers of the USA were
| quite anti corporate and actions like the Boston Tea Party
| were explicitly so.
| babesh wrote:
| Nah. The founding fathers were the richest colonists and
| George Washington was the richest of them all. It was some
| rich people opposing richer people overseas that they were
| descended from.
|
| They didn't want concentration of political power but they
| had the economic power. Interestingly the political power
| endangers them because it has the power to take away their
| economic power. That's the real battle still going on
| today.
| specialist wrote:
| How does one disprove the other?
| babesh wrote:
| Because it wasn't concentration of power they were
| concerned with. They were only concerned with
| concentration of power against them (political power
| against their right to profit).
|
| It was a selfish play not a principled one. For example,
| slavery was written into the constitution. How the hell
| does that happen when all men (and no women) were
| supposedly equal?
|
| Not all of them were for slavery but that was the end
| result of the document/of the competing forces at play.
| It institutionalized slavery in the new nation.
|
| Wikipedia
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration
| _of...
|
| "According to those scholars who saw the root of
| Jefferson's thought in Locke's doctrine, Jefferson
| replaced "estate" with "the pursuit of happiness",
| although this does not mean that Jefferson meant the
| "pursuit of happiness" to refer primarily or exclusively
| to property."
|
| What has gradually happened is that personhood has been
| gradually extended to more and more entities (sometimes
| non human).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > For example, did you know that in the postwar 1950's, the
| lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society was
| widely seen as a major problem, because it didn't provide
| enough voter choice between the two parties?
|
| There was not a lack of polarization and divisiveness _in
| American society_.
|
| The divides in American society and politics didn't map well
| to the _two major political parties_ because there was a
| major political realignment in progress and the parties hadn
| 't yet aligned with the divides in society.
|
| The problem was the divide between the major parties not
| being sharp on the issues where there were, in fact, sharp,
| polarizing divides in society, preventing members of the
| public from effectuating their preferences on salient issues
| by voting.
| phkahler wrote:
| So are you saying polarization makes it easier for people
| to vote? It sounds plausible and undesirable.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > So are you saying polarization makes it easier for
| people to vote?
|
| No, I'm saying that the description that polarization was
| absent is wrong.
|
| I'm also saying alignment of the axis of differentiation
| between the major parties in a two-party system and the
| salient divides in society makes it easier for people to
| make meaningful choices, and feel they are doing so, by
| voting.
|
| When there are sharp polarizing social/political divides,
| as there were over many issues in the 1950s, and they are
| not reflected in the divides between the parties (as they
| often weren't in the 1950s), then the government cannot
| represent the people because the people cannot express
| their preferences on important issues by voting.
| not2b wrote:
| In the 50s and 60s, there were really four parties, joined
| into two by coalitions. On the Democratic side, there was a
| social democratic, leftist faction, tensely allied with a
| Southern party (the Dixiecrats). On the Republican side,
| there was a pro-corporate but moderately liberal faction
| (the Rockefeller Republicans) allied with a harder-line
| conservative/liberatarian faction (the Goldwater
| Republicans).
|
| Two things happened in the 60s and early 70s: the Goldwater
| faction largely took power in the Republican Party, and
| because the Democratic Party embraced civil rights, the
| Dixiecrats first flirted with independence (George
| Wallace's campaign) and then gradually switched parties, so
| now we have the oddity that there are people who fly
| Confederate flags but are registered members of the party
| of Lincoln. Many people who would have been Republicans in
| the old days are now the moderate/neoliberal faction in the
| Democratic Party.
|
| So we still have four parties, they were just reshuffled.
| Now the tension in the Democratic Party is between the old
| FDR/LBJ new deal supporters, and their younger socialist
| allies, and the more pro-business neoliberals. On the
| Republican side it's between the business side (they don't
| care much about ideology, they just want to make money) and
| the hard-core conservatives.
| alharith wrote:
| I am sorry to say, this seems like a thoughtful answer but
| there is a lot of nonsense in it is as well.
|
| For example, pluralism doesn't state there is no way to "find
| truth", but that in light of multiple views, to have good
| faith arguments, avoid extremism, and engage in dialog to
| find common ground.
|
| > but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides.
|
| These ethical arguments, however genuine they may be, are not
| equal however, otherwise, you would be falling victim to
| making the false balance fallacy, commonly observed in media
| outlets, or the "both sides" argument we have so unlovingly
| become aware of in recent times. The False balance fallacy
| essentially tosses out gravity, impact, and context.
|
| > That most of human progress over the past couple of
| centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most
| profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is.
|
| Despite the over-simplicity of framing it as companies simply
| doing what is most profitable, this is, in fact, extremely
| intuitive, and has been studied, measured, and observed. I am
| curious what you find unintuitive about it?
|
| > But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious
| right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people
| at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they
| genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not
| accurate.
|
| This view may be true in a vacuum, but it is irrelevant. We
| live in American society, and there is an American ethical
| framework in which Facebook's actions can be viewed as
| unethical. Other countries that have this similar issue have
| their own ethical frameworks in which to deem Facebook's
| actions ethical/unethical.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > American ethical framework in which Facebook's actions
| can be viewed as unethical
|
| I'm curious what you mean by this, because I'd expect the
| American values of independence and free expression to be
| counter to wanting Facebook to actively supress divisive
| discourse. (Yes, I know the first amendment only applies to
| the government; the point is the spirit of the "American
| ethical framework")
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _pluralism doesn 't state there is no way to "find
| truth"_
|
| To the contrary, that is literally what pluralism as a
| philosophical concept says. You can read up on Isaiah
| Berlin's "value pluralism" [1], for example.
|
| > _These ethical arguments, however genuine they may be,
| are not equal however_
|
| On what basis? Again, the entire premise of pluralism
| provides no method for comparison.
|
| > _this is, in fact, extremely intuitive_
|
| Many would disagree. You might enjoy reading [2], which
| explains just how hard it is for citizens to understand it,
| from the point of view of an economics professor.
|
| > _and there is an American ethical framework_
|
| Except there isn't, that's the point. For example,
| Republicans and Democrats obviously believe in deeply
| divergent ethical frameworks. And there's far more
| diversity beyond that. Plus there's no way to say that any
| American ethical framework would even be right -- what if
| it were wrong and needed correction?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_pluralism
|
| [2]
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=999680
| carapace wrote:
| I dunno: the last sentence of the abstract of [2] is:
|
| > A better understanding of voter irrationality advises
| us to rely less on democracy and more on the market.
|
| To my mind this immediately brings up the question of why
| people who are irrational _voters_ would be expected to
| be rational economic actors.
|
| - - - -
|
| ...Ah! I just looked at it again and saw the sub-heading:
| "Cato Institute Policy Analysis Series No. 594"
|
| PLONK!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > For example, pluralism doesn't state there is no way to
| "find truth"
|
| Well, there are lots of different ideas lumped together as
| "pluralism", but most of them not only hold that there is
| no way to find truth on the issues to which they apply, but
| that there is no "truth" to be found.
|
| > We live in American society,
|
| Some of us do, some of us don't.
|
| > and there is an American ethical framework in which
| Facebook's actions can be viewed as unethical.
|
| Sure, but there are many, mutual contradictory and, often
| mutually hostile American ethical frameworks, so that's
| true of virtually every actor's actions, and virtually
| every alternative to those actions.
| pwned1 wrote:
| The Banality of Evil.
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| > some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone
| but is good for the business of the company
|
| If you start with such black-and-white assumptions, you will
| never be able to actually empathize with those people. Nothing
| is that simple when you're close enough to see the details.
|
| Things good for the company should be and frequently are good
| for the people using the product. The same thing can also harm
| the same people, or a different set of people, or the company,
| in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.
|
| There's a whole back and forth about Facebook and political
| divisions. It starts with someone assuming that tech companies
| put people in bubbles and echochambers, assuming they'll only
| be engaged with stuff they agree with. Then you run the
| numbers, and realize that people are far more isolated from
| opposing opinions in real life than they are on the internet,
| you interact with more people online, and they censor
| themselves less. But at the same time, you can change your mind
| about echochambers, and decide that this is a bad thing, being
| exposed to different opinions makes you more entrenched in what
| you actually believe.
|
| It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us but
| at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance than
| that when you experience it up close
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Things good for the company should be and frequently are
| good for the people using the product.
|
| I think there's a misalignment here. In traditional business
| what you said may be generally true (with some striking
| counterexamples like cigarette companies). In internet
| advertising things good for the company should be and
| frequently are good for the company's _customers_. Facebook
| 's users are _not_ its customers, and Facebook is generally
| incentivized to keep users on the site and consuming content
| (and advertising) by any means necessary - regardless of the
| long-term harm it might cause the users.
| clairity wrote:
| yes, it's never simply black-and-white, but you're
| overstating that case, especially with facebook. by now,
| nearly everyone in tech and many adjacent industries (e.g.,
| entertainment) has heard about and probably internalized the
| downsides of facebook, particularly the mechanisms and
| tactics employed to advance facebook at the detriment of
| society at large. it's pretty clear many of those people at
| facebook are avoiding or ignoring inconvenient truths when it
| comes to removing those mechanisms and tactics to the benefit
| of society at large but at the detriment of facebook.
| DSingularity wrote:
| People are more isolated in the real world? Please provide a
| source. Aside from the fact that this is hard to measure now
| that the underlying medium has itself been modified -- I
| would hardly expect this to be the case. Online I am
| connected to those whom I socialize with or am otherwise
| professionally connected to. In the "real world" this
| constraint is largely absent.
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| This is the hardest source I can find, but it only measures
| what happens on Facebook. The numbers do seem higher than
| what I'd expect for IRL conversations, though:
|
| https://research.fb.com/blog/2015/05/exposure-to-diverse-
| inf...
|
| > Online I am connected to those whom I socialize with or
| am otherwise professionally connected to. In the "real
| world" this constraint is largely absent.
|
| This seems entirely backwards to me? Maybe you talk more
| with strangers IRL than online, but I doubt it. I only have
| n=1 (me), but we are talking right now. Who knows where we
| live in relation to each other?
|
| So much of politics is split between urban and rural
| environments. Those groups are defined by where they live,
| so I expect very few conversations in person between the
| two, especially about politics.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Thanks for the link. Reading now. Regarding my reply, I
| was thinking more about social networking apps like
| Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, or linkedin and
| less about hackernews/reddit types. Mainly because I
| think the bulk of social interactions happen there.
| creddit wrote:
| I highly doubt you and I are socially or professionally
| connected and yet here we are.
| _tulpa wrote:
| This connection doesn't mean shit compared to someone you
| see face to face and share experiences with. Yet this
| watered down form of connection seems to have replaced
| the latter, which I think is the fundamental social
| problem of the internet.
| bradlys wrote:
| Does it matter the quality of the connection? The
| argument is about being shown different viewpoints and
| that the internet shows you more than in person.
|
| Is that hard to disagree with? I didn't even know atheism
| was a thing until I was on the Internet. No one in my
| community was an atheist and the media we were provided
| didn't reference it much.
| _tulpa wrote:
| I think quality is almost the only thing that matters.
|
| Personal anecdotes aside, we're mostly terrible at
| dealing with new ideas when they conflict with stuff we
| already know or is close to our identity. Remove the
| human element of the connection and we're even more
| likely to dismiss said conflicting ideas outright as
| stupid (I'll try link to that research). It's not hard to
| imagine how that might lead to strong yet poorly
| justified social division.
| thisiszilff wrote:
| It does seem logical: your in person interactions are
| mediated by your personal relationship with people. Online
| you can come across anything and everything. The in person
| equivalent would be walking by ten or twenty small protests
| set up with megaphones loudly arguing for various things
| you vehemently disagree with.
| visarga wrote:
| > In the "real world" this constraint is largely absent.
|
| In the real world you are connected to people living and
| travelling around you, and that is not necessarily an
| unbiased set of people. It can be quite far from the
| average random group. You're still in a bubble.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > Things good for the company should be and frequently are
| good for the people using the product. The same thing can
| also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or
| the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from
| the good.
|
| > It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us
| but at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance
| than that when you experience it up close
|
| This too needs more nuance. These points even apply to
| outright crime. Legal prohibitions should sometimes be
| expanded in the public interest, because sometimes it
| essentially is the case that something is bad for everyone
| except some small group.
|
| This is reflected in the way data-protection laws now exist
| in many countries, for instance.
| [deleted]
| jhowell wrote:
| I think what happened here is a little different than how you
| describe. For me, it seems they had a hypothesis, found support
| for their hypothesis, then changed its definition for
| speculative motivations with tangible harm.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Almost everyone is ethically challenged, we just need the right
| circumstances for particular expressions to emerge. The people
| who do right and wrong by you might be alternative persons
| under alternative scenarios.
|
| The very poor and very rich are often placed in front of
| ethically interesting bargains, such as a trade of life for
| money, whereas Hacker News has trouble even daring to ballpark
| the dollar value to life -- a middle class aesthetic where one
| has neither the resources nor the desperation to trade in
| flesh.
| ummonk wrote:
| Is it clear that echo chambers and polarized discussion are
| good for the bottom line? I imagine they help with user growth
| and user retention, but would people engaged in these polarized
| echo chambers actually spend more on advertised products?
| kace91 wrote:
| I've been there, obviously not to the level of a facebook board
| member.
|
| IMO the feeling is not really that different from making
| choices as a consumer ("was this shirt made by child labor?",
| "was the animal this meat comes from treated humanely?", etc).
| People tend to turn a blind eye to those questions unless
| something comes up that hits close to home.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying that's justifiable or a good
| mindset to have, just what I think happens.
| qzw wrote:
| I think what an FB exec is trying to decide is more analogous
| to "should we use child labor to make our shirts?" or "should
| we incur higher costs to run a humane farm?"
| brundolf wrote:
| That may apply in many cases, but I don't think an engineer
| or manager at Facebook can use that excuse. They'd have lots
| of other options.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| This kind of thinking, looking behind the veil of money, has
| convinced me to stop using currency altogether, for now, for
| the most part. I still pay for web hosting and domains, I
| still buy bottled water for lack of better options, but for
| anything else like clothes, food, houseware stuff, etc., I've
| stopped buying altogether. Everything you buy carries a huge
| veiled cost of human health and lives, animal and plant
| health and lives, environment damage, habitat loss, and so
| on. I just don't want to be complicit anymore. I wear the
| same clothes, and I pick up the clothes people leave in boxes
| on the street or go to churches. There is a glut of
| consumable goods and the charities are throwing tons of it
| away everyday. Same goes for food, kitchenware, paintings,
| decorations. I've been told my great-grandmother used to say,
| "God gives you a day, and then food for that day." That is
| the approach I have taken. Went for a walk yesterday, found
| two paintings. One of them needed finishing, which I'm happy
| to do. For 3+ years, I have not used any "external" products
| like shampoo, lotion, cream, etc., not even soap, except
| occasionally buying a bar of dr bronners soap (paper wrap)
| and using that for laundry. Almost everything in that
| department, even the "organic" or "natural" or "eco-friendly"
| has a long ingredient list full of what I want to avoid both
| putting on myself, as well as drinking, which is what's going
| to happen if I put them down the drain. Also, all of it fucks
| up the skin biome. I've not had any skin problems since I
| unsubscribed from them. And so on. I know it's not an option
| for everyone, but it's the only option for me, as long as I
| have a choice, to choose this way, and keep pondering how to
| do better every day.
| carapace wrote:
| I just wanted to say that's awesome and you're my hero. :-)
| hackissimo123 wrote:
| Where do you get free food?
| cycloptic wrote:
| It grows in the ground, or around the bones of other
| living creatures.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I live in a city, so mostly from dumpsters. Tons of
| recoverable food is thrown out every day. Way, way more
| than I can figure out what to do it.
|
| I've also gotten more into fasting and eating less, but
| so far, no involuntary fasting has occurred.
|
| I've also become more social, so sometimes others share
| their food with me, even in these difficult times. Yes,
| they bought it with money, and fed the eco-shaver, but I
| think it's still less than if I'd done it myself.
|
| Occasionally, I go to restaurants towards closing time,
| and ask if they have any leftovers they are throwing
| away.
|
| A great book on all this I read on this is called "The
| Scavengers' Manifesto". I learned a lot from meeting
| others on the street and looking through the trash.
|
| I've done a bit of foraging when in wilder areas, and
| I've seen places where people grow most of their food
| themselves, in small communities. I think this is the
| future.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I disagree and think it is significantly different. Facebook
| decision makers have way more agency in the directions their
| company takes than a consumer has in their choice of clothes
| to buy at Target (or wherever).
|
| Shirt consumers don't have much of a choice. They can only
| buy what's for sale (and in their price range). And then, how
| can they be sure if a shirt was or wasn't made by child
| labor? How would an individual consumer's behavior lead to
| ending child labor?
|
| According to the article, Facebook execs understood what the
| product was doing, and, while they have the ability to stop
| it, don't. Maybe I understand what you're saying if we're
| talking engineers/middle managers, but that's a boring
| conversation. The buck has to stop somewhere.
| lol636363 wrote:
| As consumer, you may not be able to stop child labor but
| you can vote with your wallet.
|
| Several of my friends buy clothes from a few vetted brands
| because of exactly this issue.
|
| Then I have another friend who was huge cruise ships fan.
| He encouraged me to go on my first cruise too. But then
| there was a report about mistreatment of cruiseship
| employees, and he is totally against cruiseships now. His
| actions probably won't change anything alone but if enough
| consumers start to act like him, a change may happen.
| wolco wrote:
| Probably will do two things.
|
| If he spends that money locally it helps the community.
|
| Cruise ship will treat employees worse to make up the
| shortfall in cash. The Cruise ships industry needs a tell
| all netflix movie to change things.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I often wonder. Even if people stop buying, the feedback
| signal to a company can be very inefficient.
|
| They might not understand where they went wrong and think
| they need to lower prices or something. Of course, that
| just leads to more pressure on working conditions.
| tinco wrote:
| Are you seriously arguing that consumers can't spend $5
| less on a shirt so that instead of having "BALR." it was
| made under less shitty conditions? Consumers have plenty
| money for t-shirts, they just choose to spend it on fashion
| statements instead of thinking about working conditions of
| people half a planet away.
|
| There's plenty of choice. It's not about choice, it's about
| what's on your mind, and what you put on your mind. If you
| want to look cool, you put the working conditions concern
| off of your mind. If you want to make money, you put the
| division concern off of your mind.
|
| The buck stops at every stop.
|
| edit: did a quick google, first result on a plain white
| t-shirt that's fair trade is $25, first result on
| 'fashionable' plain white t-shirt (by balr or supreme) is
| $60...
| Osiris wrote:
| Basic economic theories require that consumers have full
| information and make rational decisions. Neither of those
| are valid assumptions.
|
| In this case, the vast majority of people don't know if a
| shirt was made with child labor or not. If this
| information was clearly communicated to every consumer
| I'm sure you'd see consumer behavior change to some
| degree.
| whathappenedto wrote:
| I actually feel the opposite. Consumers have the ultimate
| choice -- their choice is not beholden to anyone except
| themselves. Then they can execute their choice
| unilaterally.
|
| A VP or even the CEO is beholden to shareholders, their
| employees, their advertisers, their own ethics, their
| users, various government regulations (and government
| interests that are not laws but what they prefer). So
| almost everything they do is a tradeoff.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| What a cop out. You can't just pass the buck forever. You
| want to bring _shareholders_ into this? Was _exploiting
| the human brain's attraction to divisiveness_ put to a
| vote? What does it matter when Zuckerberg has a
| controlling share of the company [0]? He answers to
| himself.
|
| Facebook spent almost $17MM in lobbying efforts last year
| [1]. I wonder why governments doesn't exactly have an
| eagle eye on this...
|
| The rank and file employees at Facebook have no say about
| this. Tim Bray leaving Amazon to no ill effect shows
| this.
|
| We're talking about Facebook _exploiting the human brain
| to increase time on the platform_. The users have little
| to say about this, and as long as the users are there,
| advertisers have nothing to say to Facebook.
|
| So that leaves Facebook answering to their own ethics.
| Yes. _that 's_ the problem.
|
| 0 - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/082216
| /top-9-...
|
| 1 - https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-
| lobbying/clients/summary...
| FactolSarin wrote:
| A corporation is a device for maximizing profit and
| minimizing ethics. Everyone can say they're behaving
| ethcially. Consumers can say, "Well, all my friends are
| there, I can't quit," and it's true for some people. The
| CEO and other decision-makers can say, "Well, I have to
| do this otherwise the shares go down and I could get
| fired," and they may be right. Shareholders can say, "I'm
| just investing in the most profitable companies, if they
| were doing something bad, it should be illegal," and they
| have a point too.
|
| This is where governments come in. Companies should
| behave ethically, but ultimately we shouldn't just leave
| it up to them. That's why societies have laws. What we
| really need to do is use regulation and penalties to
| force Facebook into ethical behaviour.
|
| Of course, this isn't going to happen because there's no
| political will to do so, generally due to "free speech"
| or "free market" objections.
| whathappenedto wrote:
| This is not passing the buck. It's acknowledging that
| there are many stakeholders involved in a
| company+platform, and that many decisions are about
| making tradeoffs rather than having a "right" answer.
|
| If you always go with the populist vote, like when users
| rioted about the news feed when it was first introduced,
| https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-
| face... then you may be sacrificing the long-term
| viability of your company. This harms employees,
| investors, and eventually the public. Are you saying
| that's not even a consideration at all?
|
| We're not talking about "Facebook exploiting the human
| brain to increase time on the platform". You brought up
| Target and shirts. So we're talking about who has more
| agency, users or executives, in a general manner. That
| consumers generally only need to concern themselves with
| their own ethics, versus the complex entanglement of
| ethics at a company, gives users more agency to make
| choices reflecting their ethics.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| wolco wrote:
| Why couldn't you choose where to buy your shirt. Shirts can
| be made anywhere it should be one of the easiest to find
| multiple venders for.
|
| If you are saying at walmart or another big place they only
| have 4 brands in your price range and how can you tell
| which ones involve child labor. You could research if you
| cared.. by not buying a brand you reduce your risk by 99%.
| Hokusai wrote:
| Boeing 737 MAX killed 346 people. So, it seems that death is
| not a deterrent.
|
| The mails from the case are good to understand the internal
| discussions:
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/10/737-max-sca...
| nickff wrote:
| > "Boeing 737 MAX killed 346 people. So, it seems that death
| is not a deterrent."
|
| I really don't understand your point, unless you're implying
| that there was a meeting where Boeing planned to kill those
| people. I am not an aviation expert, but what happened with
| the MAX seems to be a product of the certification process,
| urgent business needs, systems engineering issues, and bad
| internal communications at Boeing.
|
| I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically
| predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those
| flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had
| executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'.
|
| As an aside, I have seen quotes about the 787, which were
| similar to those in your linked article (mostly with respect
| to production quality issues), yet the 787 has not had
| similar accidents. One problem with working on such huge
| projects is that the line engineers do not understand that
| managers are constantly hearing alarmist 'warnings' which
| don't pan out. If 1% of Boeing staff give false alarms in a
| year, that means there are 1600 false alarms.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Wrong. Boeing engineers raised up concerns that were
| dismissed.
|
| "Frankly right now all my internal warning bells are going
| off," said the email. "And for the first time in my life,
| I'm sorry to say that I'm hesitant about putting my family
| on a Boeing airplane." [1]
|
| [1]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/30/boeing-engineer-raised-
| conce...
| nickff wrote:
| I didn't say that nobody raised concerns, I said:
|
| >>"I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically
| predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those
| flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had
| executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'."
|
| In large projects like the MAX, there are always people
| raising concerns.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _In large projects like the MAX, there are always
| people raising concerns._
|
| Does that mean that people raising concerns can be
| ignored, or does that mean that most large projects only
| get by with luck?
| nickff wrote:
| I think that's a really interesting question, but I think
| the answer is orthogonal to your dichotomy. In my
| experience, very successful projects depend on the great
| managers that know who to listen to in each different
| situation, and they know how people will react in each
| situation.
|
| One of the best examples of this is Dave Lewis, who lead
| the design of the F-4 Phantom II, one of the most
| successful fighter aircraft of all time. He directed the
| structural design team to design for 80% of the required
| ultimate load, because he knew that everyone was
| conservative in their numbers; then the design was
| tested. The structure ended up lighter than comparable
| aircraft, and the Phantom II had phenomenal performance.
|
| It also helps if the managers are good at making
| predictions of their own; Tetlock has written two great
| books about this, including: https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
| i/Superforecasting:_The_Art_and_...
| Hokusai wrote:
| > I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically
| predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those
| flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had
| executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'.
|
| People understand the consequences of what they say. I
| doubt that most people will say that statements out loud,
| even when they know that are true.
|
| But, people knew and money was involved.
|
| * February 2018
|
| "I don't know how to refer to the very very few of us on
| the program who are interested only in truth..."
|
| "Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained
| aircraft? I wouldn't."
|
| "No."
|
| * August 2015
|
| "I just Jedi mind tricked this fools. I should be given
| $1000 every time I take one of these calls. I save this
| company a sick amount of $$$$."
| nickff wrote:
| I have read similar quotes about most modern aircraft
| development programs, yet aviation is quite safe. The
| fact you can find a few alarmists in a company of 160,000
| is rather unsurprising.
|
| Those quotes would be much more convincing if those
| employees put _every_ prediction they ever made on the
| record, not just the ones that turned out to be sort-of
| right in hindsight.
|
| From manager's perspective, you can't listen to everyone
| complaining about being rushed, understaffed, and
| underfunded (, because everyone looking to cover their
| butts in a bureaucracy does all three). On the other
| hand, you have to be on the lookout for credible issues.
| whatever1 wrote:
| You cannot have it both ways. First you claim that no one
| spoke up and then you dismiss the ones who did as
| alarmists
| nickff wrote:
| If someone does not make specific and testable
| predictions which turn out to be right, they are useless
| alarmists. If you want to read about how to assess
| predictors (and improve predictions), I suggest you read:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting:_The_Art_a
| nd_...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I'm a very good forecaster, and skill in this area
| doesn't stem from reflexive dismissal or ability to
| deploy fallacious counter-arguments.
| nickff wrote:
| Would you please point out the fallacy?
| lol636363 wrote:
| Of course, no one planned it. But encouraging or demanding
| to take shortcuts is what caused it.
|
| I have been in software industry for 15 years and this
| happens all the time, being forced to release unfinished
| features, asked to ignore security, backups, etc. I would
| imagine same thing happens in other industries.
| nickff wrote:
| My understanding of the MAX issues is that the issues
| were not really shortcuts, though they might look that
| way in hindsight (because every mistake looks that way in
| hindsight).
|
| From my non-aviation perspective, it looks like they
| basically pieced together a bunch of complex systems,
| with each team making a number of (different) assumptions
| about each system. The systems themselves were influenced
| by FAA requirements to maintain the old certificate,
| which meant that certain desirable changes were
| impossible, so workarounds were devised. The problems
| were due to misunderstandings about how the systems would
| work when assembled, and these issues were not discovered
| and/or communicated. It really seems like a systems
| engineering problem, aggravated by a number of external
| influences (including business reasons and
| certification).
| babesh wrote:
| There is no FAA requirement to maintain the old
| certificate. Boeing and it's customers wanted to do that
| for cost savings.
|
| It is supposedly costly in time and money to acquire a
| new rating but it has been done obviously.
|
| The airlines wanted a single pool of interchangeable
| pilots flying in name interchangeable planes (their
| existing 737s and the 737 MAX). Supposedly one of the
| airlines threatened to take new business to Airbus and
| had penalties written into the contract to make the 737
| MAX fly under the existing certificate.
|
| So it wasn't the old certificate driving these issues, it
| was Boeing and it's customers wanting to maintain the old
| certificate that drove the issues. That is a very large
| difference.
| nickff wrote:
| Perhaps my previous post was vague, but I meant 'FAA
| requirements [of commonality, required to] maintain the
| current certificate'.
|
| The FAA may be in the right or in the wrong, but it has
| made certifying new designs almost prohibitively
| expensive and time-consuming; for evidence of this,
| simply look at the Cessna 172 (still in production on a
| 60-year old certificate), and what happened when
| Bombardier tried to put a new airliner into production.
|
| You're definitely right that the airlines wanted
| interchangeable type ratings for crew, but the issue
| slightly more complicated than you're painting it.
|
| I never argued the old certificate forced the issues, the
| certification system just strongly incentivized
| 'upgrading' the 737. This was one of many causes.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's more that there were several meetings where issues
| were raised that would kill people _if_ they occurred, and
| those in charge decided the risk factors were minimal
| enough that they could execute on the plan.
|
| Nobody planned to kill the astronauts on the Challenger.
| Such a systemic failure to anticipate and manage risk
| correctly is a team effort and heavily incentive-driven.
| Putting incentives in place that reward risk-taking
| increases the odds someone will die.
| babesh wrote:
| More concisely, if you won't do it, then you will be
| replaced by someone who will.
| nickff wrote:
| I think I have a very different understanding of the root
| cause of the o-ring failure on Challenger than you do.
|
| The common understanding seems to be that the managers
| decided to launch when the booster temperature was cold
| (though not necessarily out of limits), and some were
| warning that it may cause some unforeseen issues.
|
| My read is that each limit in the operations manual
| should have been backed by a test to failure, or at least
| a simulation of what would occur if the vehicle was
| operated outside the limits. Such a process allows the
| operators to clearly understand what can go wrong, and
| why the limits are set where they are. This is what they
| did on the SSMEs, but not on the boosters (because they
| thought the boosters were fairly simple).[0]
|
| [0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-
| astronautics/16-...
| umvi wrote:
| > So, it seems that death is not a deterrent.
|
| Well, the tobacco industry is still alive and well, and those
| companies literally peddle death.
| jcims wrote:
| They peddle a high risk product. So do companies that
| manufacture motorcycles and parachutes.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This comparison is flawed in several respects. The most
| obvious is that cigarette companies spent decades
| _intentionally misleading_ the public about the dangers
| of their product. This is not the same as just selling a
| potentially dangerous product, especially one where the
| dangers are so viscerally obvious as with a parachute.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > parachutes
|
| Parachutes kill people? I thought they do the opposite.
| Maybe firearms or alcohol make better examples.
| jcims wrote:
| The habitual use of any of the above will increase your
| chances of untimely death.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| But in the case of parachutes, it's not the device, it's
| the activity. I know it's splitting hairs, but it's
| important, especially when it comes to assigning moral
| responsibility to manufacturers.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you use a parachute one time in case of emergency,
| yes, it is a life saving device that still has a high
| level of risk. However, I believe they were referring to
| the people that choose to parachute for sport/recreation
| rather than emergency situations.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| > I've always wondered how such discussions go in company
| meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of
| something/someone but is good for the business of the company.
|
| I mean, it's one thing if we're talking about something like an
| airbag, where harm can result from normal usage because of a
| design flaw. It's another thing to talk about the Ford Pinto --
| where harm could happen due to accidental misusage.
|
| Does Facebook encourage division? Do ice cream ads encourage
| obesity? Or alcohol ads encourage drunk driving? (I get that
| Facebook's "engagement algorithms" are designed to maximize
| profit, and has a side effect of showing you things that are
| upsetting and frustrating... but that isn't their design. I'm
| no fan of "the algorithm", and don't think they should use it,
| but I think they should be free to.)
|
| In this instance, I don't think it's fair to say Facebook has a
| "harmful effect". The abuse, misuse, and addiction to Facebook
| can be harmful, for sure... but that's not Facebook's fault.
| That's the end user's fault.
|
| Should Facebook come with a warning label, like cigarettes? I
| don't think so. (I also don't think cigarettes should be
| mandated to come with images of people dying of lung cancer
| when alcohol can be sold without images of people with liver
| disease... but I digress.)
|
| Everyone wants to "mitigate harm". But you need to be able to
| separate "harm due to malfunction", "harm due to accidents",
| and "harm due to abuse". This seems to be firmly in the third
| category, which is the least concrete and most "squishy"
| category.
|
| Especially squishy, when "harm" is considered to be people
| saying and/or thinking the wrong things.
| visarga wrote:
| > In this instance, I don't think it's fair to say Facebook
| has a "harmful effect". The abuse, misuse, and addiction to
| Facebook can be harmful, for sure... but that's not
| Facebook's fault. That's the end user's fault.
|
| Yeah, it wasn't me who posted this reply, it was the cells in
| my body. It's their fault... I think complex systems create
| effects that go beyond the individual parts. Facebook is
| running and profiting from such an 'effect' on society.
|
| Their right to freely express their creativity by making the
| feed how they wish should be balanced with the large scale
| (negative) effects that appear in the system.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I'm ethicality challenged if I think the biggest (or at least
| up there) forum of public discourse shouldn't be micromanaged
| like a day care, with "divisive" people sent to time out? Is it
| unthinkable to you that some people value free expression over
| being protected from negativity?
| pacala wrote:
| As actors in the World, we are machines that turns sensor data
| into a linear stream of actions. To the extent the decision
| process in not completely random, there exists a metric that
| ends up maximized by the decision process, sometimes referred
| to as 'god' or even 'God'. The vast majority of economic
| decision processes in the modern economy are driven by one
| metric: money, sometimes referred to as 'Mammon'. A corporation
| is an aggregation of human / computerized actors that work to
| maximize the corporation metric: money earned by said
| corporation.
|
| The discussions are very simple: Course of action A makes us
| X$, course of action B makes us XXX$. Therefore course of
| action B is taken. There is no consideration of other effects
| besides, perhaps, a quantization of risks. Risk of losing the
| 'good guys' facade, counterbalanced by PR expenses, or risk of
| being sued, counterbalanced by legal expenses.
| [deleted]
| DataWorker wrote:
| Nobody thinks they are complicit but in reality we all are.
| Some can accept this while others let the cognitive dissonance
| drive their behavior in convoluted and hard to discern ways.
| Redemption only comes after accepting that we're born of
| original sin. Anybody who supports or uses non-free software
| has worked to finance the amoral tech decision making that
| you're decrying. Even Stallman makes compromises. Welcome to
| modernity.
| truculent wrote:
| You don't apply, don't get hired, or don't get promoted,
| depending on how effective their hiring processes are.
| yumraj wrote:
| That leads me to another question: are there people/companies
| who will not hire someone who has been an employee of FB?
| babesh wrote:
| I have heard someone spouting that but it was all baloney
| since that person supported actions just as bad.
| truculent wrote:
| That seems generally unlikely to me, but it's a big ol'
| world out there so I am sure it has occurred someplace
| gabaix wrote:
| Facebook internal memo by Andrew Bosworth, VP June 18, 2016
|
| _The Ugly
|
| We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to
| talk about the ugly.
|
| We connect people.
|
| That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds
| love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of
| suicide.
|
| So we connect more people
|
| That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life
| by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a
| terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.
|
| And still we connect people.
|
| The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so
| deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more
| often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the
| metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.
|
| That isn't something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our
| stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect
| people. Period.
|
| That's why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the
| questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle
| language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of
| the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will
| likely have to do in China some day. All of it.
|
| The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not
| unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and
| increasingly by different products. The best products don't
| win. The ones everyone use win.
|
| I know a lot of people don't want to hear this. Most of us have
| the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products
| consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we
| got here. If you joined the company because it is doing great
| work, that's why we get to do that great work. We do have great
| products but we still wouldn't be half our size without pushing
| the envelope on growth. Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as
| having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten
| as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo
| tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing.
|
| In almost all of our work, we have to answer hard questions
| about what we believe. We have to justify the metrics and make
| sure they aren't losing out on a bigger picture. But connecting
| people. That's our imperative. Because that's what we do. We
| connect people._
|
| Shortly after the leak Bosworth distanced himself from the
| post. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17178086/facebook-
| growth-...
| brlewis wrote:
| > _Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends
| on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends
| on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news
| feed. Not messenger. Nothing_
|
| Is this certain? The effects of useful features on growth are
| longer term and harder to measure than, for example, placing
| and styling friend suggestions in a way to confuse users into
| thinking they're friend requests.
| nkozyra wrote:
| Even that is very handwave-y. It talks about "connections"
| and events, but not that the algorithm (in the broad,
| commonly-used sense) encourages and incentivizes that which
| builds "engagement."
| rainyMammoth wrote:
| This sounds like complete bullsh*it.
|
| Where does he bring up the subject of Facebook connecting
| people to the level of addiction? With the only goal of
| maximizing screen time (and dopamine) to sell more ads? It's
| not "connecting people", it's "addicting people".
|
| It is as if a 3rd world foodbank for Africa was bragging that
| they feed the world so well that 90% of Africa is now
| overweight, but that's good because they continue to "feed
| people".
| robrenaud wrote:
| I read that discussion as it was happening on the internal
| FB@work. Oh man, there were so many true believers replying
| about how this was so wise and inspiring. As far as I
| remember, no one questioned him. I wish I had posted that in
| a biological context, something that grows without bound or
| care for its environment is cancer. There is Boz arguing that
| Facebook is cancer.
| jcims wrote:
| Cancer is just a specialized case of evolution that in many
| instances is turbocharged by genetic
| instability...essentially the biological form of 'move fast
| and break things'. This results a very adaptive germline
| that handily outcompetes everything constrained by purpose
| while also overcoming novel threats thrown at it by the
| greatest medical minds of our time.
|
| If it didn't kill people that we love we'd marvel at its
| capability.
|
| Is Facebook a 'cancer'? I think it's more of a cultural
| radiological device that exposes the cancer that's already
| there.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I mean, he's not wrong. Facebook sucks because a lot of
| people are not-great human beings, and Facebook just allows
| you to see that. Oops. People might think that peer pressure
| would shame people into better behavior, but the concept of
| shame no longer exists in the post-modern world. Everyone
| feels justified in whatever they believe, and the Covid-19
| situation on the platform couldn't be a more perfect example
| in illustrating the problem.
|
| I say this from first-hand experience. I discovered that
| people I called friends were racist. I now consider those
| friends merely acquaintances, and I have since deleted my
| account. Better to just be ignorant of people's ignorance
| when I can't do anything about it.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only
| perhaps the people in control.
|
| Seems likely that social media as an industry selects more
| strongly for unethical executives, presumably because online
| advertising is the only effective way to monetize social media
| and it is more or less fundamentally unethical. I imagine the
| same effect can be observed among tobacco and fossil energy
| executives--these are industries where there is no ethical
| monetization strategy, at least not one that is in the same
| competitive ballpark as the unethical strategy.
| spaced-out wrote:
| >Seems likely that social media as an industry selects more
| strongly for unethical executives
|
| More so than the fossil fuel industry? Big tobacco? Or the
| pharmaceutical industry? Wallstreet? Clothing/apparel
| manufacturers?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > More so than the fossil fuel industry? Big tobacco?
|
| I already addressed this in my second sentence:
|
| > I imagine the same effect can be observed among tobacco
| and fossil energy executives
|
| No, that wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list of unethical
| industries.
| ptudan wrote:
| Online advertising as a concept is fundamentally unethical? I
| think you're speaking in hyperbole here. Stealing user data
| without consent (or with fake here read this 500 pg legalise
| consent) is unethical for certain.
|
| But a bike blog putting ads for bike saddles on the bottom of
| their page to pay for their server costs and writing staff?
| Hard to see how that's unethical unless you think selling
| anything is unethical.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Online advertising as a concept is fundamentally
| unethical?
|
| No, I meant "online advertising as an industry". It's
| unethical to the extent that it depends on stealing user
| data, which presumably is the overwhelming majority of the
| industry by value (i.e., I'm assuming your privacy-
| respecting bike saddles ads don't account for even 1% of
| the industry's value).
| coliveira wrote:
| The discussions in this article are never shared with
| employees, it is just a matter raised in closed high level
| board meetings. Companies never discuss openly negative
| positions, and if they do it is only to dismiss them.
| standardUser wrote:
| I've been in that situation. I argued as much as I felt I could
| get away with and made the strongest arguments I could against
| unethical behavior. I was eventually forced out. A couple years
| later, the company was investigated by law enforcement and
| subsequently declared bankruptcy.
|
| The people in control were the only ones pushing for the
| unethical actions, but most others were a lot more quiet than I
| was and several stuck around until the bitter end.
| xapata wrote:
| > how such discussions go
|
| In my case, I told my manager about a system design problem
| that would cause a daily annoyance to 100k people, forcing them
| to input their passwords more often than necessary. He said,
| "they'll accept it." I said, "I quit."
| arkades wrote:
| So, I work in healthcare - as a doc, and at various times, as
| an admin in healthcare centers as well as in health insurance.
| I don't know how much of that experience relates to FB's
| behavior, but I have some idea of what it's like to work in a
| field and be either called a hero or a devil, depending on the
| day. I am neither.
|
| Deep breath.
|
| As an industry, we are often doing things that are perceived to
| be evil. I've noticed the following:
|
| 1. Some of that interpretation is just wrong. People from the
| outside tend to have a poor understanding of what we do
| (providers, centers, insurers) and draw conclusions based on
| highly imperfect information. This is compounded by the fact
| that journalists have a terrible comprehension of what we do
| and an incentive to dramatize and oversimplify it - resulting
| in people _reading_ the news and walking away misinformed and
| wrongly feeling like they 're now educated on the topic. This
| happens a lot.
|
| 2. We sometimes do things, or want to do things, that have
| potential harms _and_ potential benefits - e.g., in health
| insurance, I 'd love to have had the ability to twist people's
| arms into coming to get a flu shot. It would have been a huge
| net benefit to their health. It would have been a net reduction
| in our costs. It would have been great! If we'd had the ability
| to ignore patient autonomy and force it, or carrot-and-stick
| it, we probably would have. We would not have conceptualized it
| as "ignoring patient preference," we would have conceptualized
| it as "preventing a bunch of preventable hospitalizations and
| deaths and, for the elderly, permanent consequences of
| hospitalizations." And that would have been true! And would
| have allowed us to not think about the trade-off so much. It's
| not lying to yourself: it's looking at the grey, round-edged
| parts of a cost-benefit analysis and subjectively leaning it in
| your direction. My motivation there isn't even about the money
| - the money just gets it on the radar as something my employer
| would be willing to prioritize.
|
| 3. Resource scarcity. I only have so many resources to
| allocate. One may benefit a patient X; another may benefit them
| 10X. If X benefits my organization and the 10x choice doesn't,
| I'll probably choose X. By itself I'm not choosing to do harm -
| I'm choosing a win/win. Enough decisions like that, in enough
| contexts, probably do give rise to net harm. But the choice
| isn't to do harm.
|
| 4. Not every battle can be a "will I burn my career over this?"
| battle. If I'd ever been faced with a choice that I thought was
| harm > benefit to patients, I would have burnt the house down
| over it. But I haven't. I've been faced with lots of little
| grey questions with uncertain costs and uncertain benefits
| where there was, in fact, benefit, and usually not just to us
| but to the patients too. I imagine that's where most
| organizations go awry: a thousand decisions like this, shaking
| out under the pervasive organizational need for profit. Like a
| million million particles of sand moved by the tide, settling
| out into an overall pattern due to gravity. I think the badness
| is generally an emergent pattern, not a single person choosing
| to do evil, or choosing themselves over causing harm to many.
| I've never been in that position, ever, so either my career is
| highly anomalous, or that's just not how those choices present
| themselves in real life. I suspect it's the latter. (Or, I
| guess, my being amoral is a valid third possibility.)
| Spooky23 wrote:
| People are capable of all sorts of mental gymnastics to keep
| things at arm's length. Bad practice X is because of group Y or
| requirement Z.
| troughway wrote:
| Where do you draw the line?
|
| If the customers are willing to pay a huge markup on a product,
| who are you to tell them wiser?
|
| - youdontchargeenough11 (probably)
| yumraj wrote:
| This is more than just a price markup..
|
| This is more like a pharma company or Monsanto knowing that
| their product kills, but ignore or hide the data and keep
| selling the product.
| troughway wrote:
| Division on FB started out as squabbles between friends and
| relatives.
|
| And yet, here we are.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| People tend to rationalize it as not that ethically challenging
| or by compensating through some other societal benefit.
|
| I knew someone who ran a FB group that devolved into conspiracy
| theories and absurd levels of anger to the point that members
| of the group were lashing out at local politicians.
|
| The group owner liked the power and influence so rationalized
| it as "increasing public engagement in politics." This person
| is otherwise a vegetarian who fosters animals and works in the
| medical field.
| brundolf wrote:
| I think it's mostly denialism (which is cultivated by
| management). This is a great article about it:
| https://newrepublic.com/article/155212/worked-capital-one-fi...
| dahart wrote:
| > I cannot believe that everyone is ethically challenged
|
| Right, so what assumptions are leading to the conclusion that
| this situation can only be caused by everyone being ethically
| challenged? Are ethics shared and absolute enough for the
| answer to this question to be easy or black & white?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
|
| > Luckily I've never had to face such a dilemma
|
| Are you certain about that? I realize you're talking
| specifically about C-level execs debating something in a board
| room, but consider the ways that we all face lesser versions of
| the same dilemma. For example, do you ever consume and/or pay
| money for things that are generally harmful to society?
| Environmental concerns are easy to pick on since more or less
| everything we buy has negative environmental effects... ever
| bought a car? flown on an airplane? Smoked a cigarette or
| enjoyed a backyard fire pit? Bought anything unnecessarily
| wrapped in plastic? It's _really_ hard to make the less harmful
| choice, and a lot of people don't care at all, so by and large
| as a society we put up with the harm in favor of convenience.
| As consumers, we are at least half of the equation that is
| leading to socially harmful products existing. If we didn't
| consume it, the company meetings wouldn't have anything to
| debate.
| toshk wrote:
| From my experience there are very strong currents in a group
| that are very hard to go against as an individual. Only very
| contrarian people will go against the grain in formal meetings
| with high level executives or other individuals with status in
| a group. This is why often big organizations are able to
| produce decisions that the team behind it doesn't agree with
| and that look silly from the outside. Many people in such a
| team will not feel personally responsible because they feel
| like they didn't have any influence on the decision making
| proces, even if they could have said something. There are other
| dynamics at play I think, but this is one of them. (The
| contrarians seem to not survive long in the corporate world)
| sjg007 wrote:
| This dynamic is present in FB the website as well. You find
| clusters or groups of folks who re-amplify a point. It's so
| effective that you can find "Re-Open" rallies in your state
| driven by a shady "gun-rights" nonprofit. Even though polling
| largely supports the lock down and actions taken to curb the
| pandemic. You also find that outside the group people are a
| lot more nuanced and reasonable. It's fascinating. What is
| even more concerning is that a lot of bots drive this
| behavior.
|
| I think the issue is that in the long term it dilutes FB. I
| know many people who don't post on FB, preferring Instagram
| etc... I know these are still FB platforms but it's a big
| shift. So FB will eventually become Usenet and effectively
| non-functional.
|
| There's some type of social network that's between Instagram
| and FB that doesn't exist yet.
| abawany wrote:
| Also, IME, if you do say something, others jump down your
| throat quickly and viciously. I still remember this one
| former cow-orker and his words: 'they debate, they decide, we
| deliver': this project ended up losing the company millions
| and left it as a has-been in ecommerce because people chose
| to accept and support the utter insanity that was going on
| right in front of their faces.
| rewoi wrote:
| As a programmer I am not responsible (and paid) for
| management decisions. It is also not my job to fix toxic
| culture in a company.
| hnruss wrote:
| As management is responsible for bad management decisions,
| so too is the programmer responsible for implementing bad
| decisions.
| analyst74 wrote:
| Not at boardroom level, but I was in a couple meetings in past
| jobs where this happened.
|
| In one case, people had different ideas of what's more
| ethical/user friendly, since we can't resolve those
| disagreements with more arguing, we go with metrics, and
| metrics have no morality.
|
| In another case, everyone agreed that it was slightly shady,
| but it was a highly competitive market and we have to do it to
| stay alive.
|
| On the bright side, if a company ventures too deep into bad
| practices, it will eventually lose trust of the public. Which
| is why the capitalistic world hasn't descended into complete
| madness portrayed in dystopian sci/fi films.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| They quit. The process selects for the most sociopathic because
| the fitness function is heavily weighted towards bringing
| profits in the short term. Ethics are only a consideration to
| the extent that they affect public perception (hence profits)
| or safeguard against litigation ( protecting profits).
| mc32 wrote:
| What kind of harm do you propose is the kind that should have
| pushback?
|
| Movie executives discuss (do they even?) the ramifications of
| their movies which glorify ills? Do they censor violence,
| suicide, etc?
| Hokusai wrote:
| > What kind of harm do you propose is the kind that should
| have pushback?
|
| "Some 700,000 members of the Rohingya community had recently
| fled the country amid a military crackdown and ethnic
| violence. In March, a United Nations investigator said
| Facebook was used to incite violence and hatred against the
| Muslim minority group. The platform, she said, had "turned
| into a beast."" https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-
| report/myanmar-...
| mc32 wrote:
| So why facebook but not movies and TV over the air or
| streamed via other platforms? What, because it comes from
| studios and other sanctioned organs? Are they above
| propaganda and above having agendas?
|
| I'm not saying FB is not culpable, but I'm saying if they
| are, then so are others.
| Hokusai wrote:
| > above having agendas?
|
| Having an agenda is normal and is good. Everybody that
| plans for the future has an agenda. What is wrong is to
| have a "hidden agenda".
|
| A "hidden agenda" is wrong because is a form of
| manipulation. When an organization has a "hidden agenda"
| means that they are lying to achieve a goal that they are
| hiding.
|
| If a movie agenda is to "create awareness of human
| trafficking", and it shows how "human trafficking"
| impacts peoples lives, that is not "hidden" and it is
| actually an agenda that most people supports.
|
| So, to have an agenda is intelligent, needed, common,
| awesome behavior. Stones have no-agenda, rocks have no
| agenda. To have a "hidden agenda" is what should be
| criticized.
|
| Why will anyone think that to have an agenda is bad?
| danharaj wrote:
| Capitalist systems sieve out people whose goals are at odds
| with the accumulation of capital. By the time you get to a
| boardroom, everyone has been tested hundreds of times for their
| loyalty to profit. All deviations are unstable: over a long
| enough period of time they will be replaced or outcompeted.
| dtech wrote:
| Yep, CEO's are sociapaths about 4-10x the normal rate [1] for
| this reason
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/th
| e-p...
| arkades wrote:
| By an arbitrary definition of sociopath invented by a
| researcher that has little to do with the commonly-accepted
| definition of sociopath, who used his broadened definition
| to build his career on the pillar of running around making
| surprising declarations about "sociopaths."
|
| I'm really, really tired of hearing about the "sociopath
| CEO" numbers. They're not real.
| pm90 wrote:
| Not sure why this comment is being downvoted. The people who
| rise through the ranks are exactly the kind unburdened by
| ethical or moral issues that get in the way of the business
| generating revenue. In fact, such folks use their short term
| gains from breaking such implicit expectations to jettison
| themselves ahead of their peers. As such, this kind of
| behavior is incentivized.
|
| Those with such issues either quit or work in non
| controversial parts of the org.
| danharaj wrote:
| When you describe capitalist processes, some people take it
| as if you are making a morally charged argument.
| asveikau wrote:
| I think there is a crowd that kneejerk downvotes ideas
| they interpret as anti-capitalist, without reading the
| argument.
|
| An example: I am not a Marxist. But I think the Marxist
| question of "surplus value" as an ethical question is
| relevant and interesting. I pointed it out on HN a few
| times. Again, without being a Marxist, just
| intellectually curious. Nobody ever asks me if I am
| really a Marxist. I get downvoted pretty severely when I
| point it out. I get an impression that they smell a whiff
| of the opposing sports team and turn negative.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I don't ask people if hey are really Marxists because
| when I have in the past I get accused of "pigeonholing"
| their idea(s)
| danharaj wrote:
| Ugh, such strong language. Please censor it as M*rx or,
| better yet, "literally Satan".
| Avicebron wrote:
| There are very many lucky people who are now fierce
| libertarians on HN these days.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Agreed. And it works between companies as well as between
| people within companies. The system is set up so that only
| those who push the boundaries and exploit externalities can
| compete.
| zelon88 wrote:
| I've typically found my employment via companies who deal with
| a variety of contracts, some of them for weapons or defense
| contractors.
|
| I could go down the rabbit hole of chasing down all those
| contracts and would probably find that many of the products my
| company makes get sold to groups and causes that I don't
| support. But in the end; I've gotta eat.
|
| Do I want to throw away my career which is 99% unrelated to the
| SJW cause I support just because 5% of our products
| _eventually_ get used against that cause. What about the 95% of
| our products which go to worthy causes?
|
| I'll say it again... I just gotta eat, man. What's good for the
| gander is probably good for the goose too.
| eropple wrote:
| Forgive me for the bluntness, but nobody with any set of
| technical skills "gotta eat" by supporting those kinds of
| efforts. I've worked to practice what I preach, too; I've
| consistently worked in do-no-harm jobs. I make rowing
| machines today and the worst you can hang on me from the past
| is that I had a daily-fantasy-sports site for a client for a
| while (which I'm not proud of but it's a pretty venal
| sin)--and I have made more than enough money to do very well
| for myself.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Are all your employment options equally in the moral grey
| area? Or did you just not want to think about it?
|
| Look, do what you want, it's your life. I spent a decade
| working in defense and now I don't. Some times were
| uncomfortable. I hope you keep your eyes open when making
| decisions to avoid some of the discomfort I've felt in the
| work I've done.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Products that may be sold to terrorists include canned beans
| and Toyota trucks. Your situation might actually be less
| morally compromising than the Facebook stuff being discussed,
| because in their case they _are_ the "questionably motivated
| 'freedom fighters,'" (i.e. they're directly doing the morally
| questionable stuff) whereas you're just selling stuff to a
| broad market that may include questionably motivated "freedom
| fighters." It's sort of the difference between selling
| lockpicks that may eventually be used in a burglary or might
| also be used to get Grandma's safe open, versus breaking in
| yourself.
| peruvian wrote:
| If you're working for defense or weapons contracts you're
| supporting the industry that has kept us in the Middle East
| for almost two decades.
|
| I agree that it's often a moral grey zone but in this case
| it's pretty clear. If you're an engineer there's plenty of
| other companies to choose from.
| zelon88 wrote:
| While that is true, I've worked in manufacturing
| environments with high tech equipment. This manufacturing
| equipment is so sensitive it gets covered with tarp during
| dog-and-pony shows. We are using equipment and techniques
| in the USA that other nations could only dream of
| implementing. Why do you think most airplane manufacturers
| are located in the USA? Don't you think an airline would
| buy aircraft engines from China if they could?
|
| Keeping America on the forefront of technology has its
| benefits. If we don't invest in cornering these
| technologies; our adversaries will.
|
| Unfortunately it's the same technology that has kept us in
| the middle east that's also been a forceful deterrent which
| safeguards all Americans.
| [deleted]
| DavidVoid wrote:
| Makes me think of a quote from an old West German anti-napalm
| film "Nicht Loschbares Feuer" ( _The Inextinguishable Fire_ )
| [1].
|
| _" The students of the Harvard University write that I
| should leave the criminal Dow Chemical Company._
|
| _I 'm a chemist. What should I do?_
|
| _If I develop a substance, someone can come and make
| something out of it. It could be good for humanity, or it
| could be bad for humanity._
|
| _Besides napalm, Dow Chemical manufactures 800 other
| products._
|
| _The insecticides that we manufacture help mankind._
|
| _The herbicides that we manufacture scorch this harvest and
| cause him harm. "_
|
| [1] https://vimeo.com/107990231
| minkzilla wrote:
| Are you actively looking for employment elsewhere so that you
| can transition away from supporting harmful causes? Or are
| you using the excuse that you have to eat as a reason not to
| do hard things in your life?
|
| I have used that excuse myself. I'm trying to get better at
| not using it.
| pdkl95 wrote:
| > I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged
|
| The difficult ethical discussion probably never happens. The
| decisions being made in those meetings are usually seen as
| small/inconsequential. The problems caused by those "small"
| decisions are ignored. Eventually those problems become
| normalized allowing another "small" decision to be made. Humans
| seem to be very bad at recognizing how a set of "small"
| decisions eventually add up to major - sometimes shocking[1] -
| consequences that nobody would have approved if asked directly.
| Most of the time, nobody realizes just how deviant their
| situation had become.
|
| For a good explanation of the mechanism underlying the
| normalization of deviance (as an abstract model), I _strongly_
| recommend this[2] short talk by Richard Cook.
|
| [1] https://blog.aopa.org/aopa/2015/12/07/the-normalization-
| of-d...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60 ("Resilience In
| Complex Adaptive Systems")
| dmitrygr wrote:
| I've been there at Google a few times and can imagine exactly
| how this went :/. The one time I can tell about is the blogger
| disaster [1]. The top leadership, spearheaded by chief of legal
| was basically ignoring everyone's logical arguments at the
| meetings, the town halls, etc. We kept coming to the mic and
| telling them that their ideas of what is and isn't sexual are
| arbitrary, as are anyone else's. They said "no, we have experts
| and we have a clear definition" (they didn't). We explained
| that post-facto removing content people wrote is cruel and
| unnecessary. They claimed "nobody would care or miss it". (of
| course they would). We told them that this will hurt
| transgender people, who used to find support in blogs of others
| going through the same life challenges and blogging about it.
| Those blogs would be banned under the policy. They said they
| had data that impact would be minimal. (They had no data).
| Normal rank-and-file people at google all knew the idea was a
| bad one. We fought hard. They scheduled a 8-am townhall and
| announced it the day before at 9pm! We showed up anyways en
| masse! There was a line to the microphone!
|
| They had microphones in the audience. I walked up and directly
| asked for the "data" they claimed to have showing no impact
| will be had. They claimed and I quote "we have no hardcore
| data" (audience was laughing at the word choice given the
| topic). I said that "well, then how can you claim to be making
| a data-driven decision?" Drummond answered that "we know this
| is right and we are sure." The town hall was a waste of time.
| Nothing we said was _heard_ and all they did was recite lines
| at us from the stage that made it look like either they did not
| understand what we had to say, or they were trying very hard to
| appear to not understand. Both sides were talking, but nothing
| we said seemed to change their mind, They came there to deliver
| a policy, not to collect feedback on it, despite claiming this
| was a meeting to _discuss_ it. That was clear.
|
| We did not give up. Google's TGIF was the next day. A number of
| people came there early and lined up and the microphones, ready
| to bring this up again and again. In front of the whole company
| and the CEO as well (Larry and Sergey were not at the town hall
| and claimed to have not heard of the policy until "the ruckus
| started").
|
| I guess they saw the large line of people and relented. Before
| the scheduled TGIF began they announced they will reverse the
| policy.
|
| This was a rare victory, for this sort of a situation. I am
| willing to bet that there are _lots_ of good people at facebook
| who also fought as hard or harder against this. They just
| probably lost. Having seen how this plays out internally, I am
| not surprised, just sad.
|
| To anyone at FB who fought against this, I send you my thanks!
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/23/google-bans-sexually-
| expli...
| miguelmota wrote:
| It's kind of a combination of all the above. Majority of
| employees are working for a paycheck and they don't really care
| what goes on as long as they get paid. If the person is in an
| executive type role then their goal is to increase revenue so
| they convince themselves that it's good for the company.
| thomasjudge wrote:
| This seems very near the moral vacuity of the "just following
| orders" defense
| spaced-out wrote:
| That's perhaps the greatest power of the corporation: it
| allows people to do shitty things without any specific
| person being at fault.
|
| Executives have a "duty" to increase "shareholder value".
| It's not that they necessarily wanted to do X, but their
| hands were tied because the "data" clearly showed that X
| was best for shareholders. Plus, if X was so bad, it's
| really the government's fault for not making it explicitly
| illegal.
|
| Shareholders aren't individuals either, they're mostly
| mutual funds, pension funds, ETFs, etc... that makes
| _algorithmic_ investment decisions. They didn 't ask for X,
| but the funds they invested in will react to not getting X.
| StillBored wrote:
| For the beta roles (because I can't help mapping wolf/pack
| behavior to most corp meetings anymore) about all a person
| can do is mount a weak defense. Which gets ignored by upper
| mgmt as they justify ASPD with a framework that says the
| number one priority is the corporate profit statement.
|
| What percentage of people in these meetings are so wealthy
| they can risk everything over morally gray area decisions
| like this? Further how many can get away with it repeatedly
| should they choose to fight a battle like this?
| eropple wrote:
| Few people in such a meeting are "risk[ing] everything".
|
| I've quit jobs rather than doing sketchy things. For
| people in these industries, there's always a next job.
| StillBored wrote:
| I don't think this is a question of someone doing
| "sketchy" things. Its a question of someone in the room
| questioning a morally questionable action, being
| implemented by a part of the organization as a whole.
| Quiting over it, or whatever likely doesn't even have an
| effect. Someone on the team required to implement it is
| going to follow the bosses orders. This appears to have
| happened a few times with members of the US president's
| cabinet over the past few years.
|
| So, its more a "stay and fight" or "get rolled over and
| threaten/quit" decision. I'm betting most people just
| weigh the monthly mortgage payment against that and they
| raise the issue, but it doesn't get pushed beyond the
| discussion phase. If this goes on long enough, they
| switch jobs, or they become that person that just keeps
| their head down and do what they are told.
| eropple wrote:
| If you're just gonna keep doing it, you're not "staying
| and fighting" at all.
|
| You don't have to be the just-following-orders guy, is
| what I'm saying. Somebody else might--that doesn't have
| to be you, and shouldn't be.
| jkaptur wrote:
| Just so you know, the model of "alpha wolves" is
| considered simplistic and outdated in the study of actual
| wolves. Just one link:
| https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/wolves-fact-and-
| fic....
|
| I've found that when people use "wolf pack" (or "caveman
| times") explanations, what they're actually doing is
| using social models that (surprise!) reflect the culture
| that created them: humans in the twentieth century.
| thoughtstheseus wrote:
| Part of this is a focus on short-term initiatives that are
| easy to measure and repeat. Boiling down billions of software
| decisions to a few KPIs seems short-sighted IMO but hey it
| makes money.
| carapace wrote:
| > I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality (sic)
| challenged...
|
| Why not? Ockham's Razor says to accept the most parsimonious
| explanation, and I think that's it.
|
| I mean look at little kids: they're amoral monsters. If they
| weren't so cute our species would have gone extinct ages ago.
|
| Look at our methods to train ourselves to be better people:
| religions cause wars while "Wolf of Wallstreet" is a big hit.
| ($392 million worldwide.)
|
| Look at our leaders.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| _The Wolf of Wallstreet_ was a scathing critique of
| capitalist excess. To think otherwise is to consider a
| lifestyle where your wife hates you and you crash your car on
| quaaludes because you 've got nothing better going on
| glamorous.
| carapace wrote:
| I didn't see it. All I know about it comes from Christina
| McDowell's open letter:
|
| https://www.laweekly.com/an-open-letter-to-the-makers-of-
| the...
|
| > Your film is a reckless attempt at continuing to pretend
| that these sorts of schemes are entertaining, even as the
| country is reeling from yet another round of Wall Street
| scandals. We want to get lost in what? These phony
| financiers' fun sexcapades and coke binges? Come on, we
| know the truth. This kind of behavior brought America to
| its knees.
|
| My point is that we did find it entertaining to the tune of
| $0.4B, and that doesn't bode well for our general level of
| moral development.
| carapace wrote:
| FWIW I just found this _fascinating_ tangent:
| https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/the-perfect-irony-
| that-t...
|
| > THE PERFECT IRONY THAT 'THE WOLF OF WALL STREET' FILM WAS
| ALSO A REAL-LIFE SCAM
|
| (caps in original)
|
| > How Leo got caught up in a money-laundering scheme that
| screwed the Malaysian people out of billions.
| babesh wrote:
| I have an example. We built a feature that would be good for
| users. However we found out that it would result in lost
| revenue. The decision of whether to keep the feature got
| bounced up management. Eventually we were told to can the
| feature and that the decision was made at the very top. Keeping
| it would have affected quarterly revenues. So no go.
|
| That showed me what kind of company it was. The decision went
| directly against one of the company's supposed core values.
| This was not a small company. Don't work there anymore.
| [deleted]
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| A rather persistent recruiter from FB contacted me recently, and
| given the new WFH scenario there I was almost considering looking
| into it further, despite it probably being a frying-pan-fire
| thing (coming from Google)
|
| But after reading this... yeah, no.
| artche wrote:
| I think most social media discussions have degraded to outrage of
| the week.
|
| I limit myself to instagram stories once a month to broadcast
| that I'm still there to my close friends.
| artemisyna wrote:
| Can someone copy/paste the original text or post a non-paywall
| link?
| blhack wrote:
| IF facebook offered me the option of paying $5/mo to just get API
| access to the things my friends posted, and I could display them
| however I want (LIKE FOR INSTANCE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER!) I
| would happily pay it.
| supernova87a wrote:
| I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that
| Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to
| argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Specifically,
| and more importantly, combined with the human inability to
| actively decide to _not_ pay attention when things are
| inconsequential or not yet worth arguing about.
|
| Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing it
| is the best thing for a group to do. _Not_ more advocacy or
| argument. Time heals many things. No app is going to help you
| take that approach -- and that 's not what technology is going to
| help solve (or is incentivized to solve). Just like telling a TV
| station that's on 24 hours to _not_ cover a small house fire when
| there 's no other news.
|
| People are not good at disengaging from something when that's the
| right thing to calm the situation. And Facebook somehow tapped
| into that human behavior and (inadvertently or purposefully)
| fueled so many things that have caused our country (and others)
| to get derailed from actual progress.
|
| There is no vaccine yet for this.
|
| And not to dump on the Facebook train, since others would have
| come to do it instead. But they sure made a science and business
| of it.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| > some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they
| believe are incorrect
|
| This is perhaps a form of "folk activism" [1]:
|
| > In early human tribes, there were few enough people in each
| social structure such that anyone could change policy. If you
| didn't like how the buffalo meat got divvied up, you could
| propose an alternative, build a coalition around it, and
| actually make it happen. Success required the agreement of tens
| of allies -- yet those same instincts now drive our actions
| when success requires the agreement of tens of millions. When
| we read in the evening paper that we're footing the bill for
| another bailout, we react by complaining to our friends,
| suggesting alternatives, and trying to build coalitions for
| reform. This primal behavior is as good a guide for how to
| effectively reform modern political systems as our instinctive
| taste for sugar and fat is for how to eat nutritiously.
|
| Facebook is a collection of your friends or your "tribe", so
| repeated arguments with your tribe members is what our
| unconscious brain pushes us towards. That coupled with the
| dopamine hit of validation via likes (which is common to other
| online discussion platforms).
|
| [1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-
| friedman/beyon... I don't agree with a lot said here. Only
| linking the definition of folk activism
| devmunchies wrote:
| I call this the "outrage economy". There are several companies
| (facebook, twitter, reddit, youtube, etc) that grew based on
| user activity of varying types. The more bickering and
| polarization, the bigger X Company gets and need to hire more
| employees and get more funding, and that feeds into more
| growth. There is also a secondary economy built on or used by
| these original companies (software tooling, ad software, legal,
| clickbait, etc). We now have a big chunk of the economy feeding
| pointless bickering.
| [deleted]
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| >Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct
| to argue with people who they believe are incorrect.
|
| Maybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online
| "forum" where you get notifications about comments.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _Maybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online
| "forum" where you get notifications about comments._
|
| Facebook influences what you see to a far greater extent than
| a tradition forum did.
| austincheney wrote:
| > There is no vaccine yet for this.
|
| If you realize it's a dumpster fire then delete your account
| and move on with life. If that line of thinking is a challenge
| in absolutely any way the problem is addiction.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction
| empath75 wrote:
| I actually really enjoy having a good argument with random
| people online, but I don't as much enjoy arguing with my
| friends and family. 1) I don't like being mad at or
| contemptious of people I'm close to and 2) they're usually not
| worth the effort of arguing with because they're just cutting
| and pasting stupid shit they found elsewhere and it's
| _exhausting_ to continuously correct the record when they put
| zero effort into copy and pasting it to begin with.
|
| I first purged everyone that posted that stuff from my feed,
| and then eventually quite facebook altogether.
| staysaasy wrote:
| "Time heals many things"
|
| Extremely true, also relevant for work disagreements between
| people who have existing positive relationships. A surprising
| number of disagreements disappear if left on their own for a
| time.
|
| I find that many people with engineering backgrounds (myself
| included) can struggle letting conflicts sit unresolved. I
| suspect that instincts learned debugging code get ported over
| to interpersonal issues, as code bugs almost never disappear if
| simply left to rest.
| LordHumungous wrote:
| Yeah. There's a lot of relief in letting go, accepting that
| other people are outside of your power to control, and just
| practicing acceptance no matter how wrong or annoying or stupid
| you think people are being.
| toohotatopic wrote:
| They tapped into that human behaviour 'as somehow as' hn
| doesn't have an orangered envelope when somebody replies to
| your messages. It's by design and not by coincidence.
|
| There are plenty of vaccines for this, but not in the sense
| that you can apply it to people by force, like you can apply a
| vaccine to babies. Meditation, yoga, religions, sports - there
| are many ways to calm the mind.
| Animats wrote:
| _Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing
| it is the best thing for a group to do._
|
| Then the terrorists win.
|
| That used to be the conventional wisdom on trolls, but there
| are now so many of them. Worse, about half are bots.[1] (Both
| NPR and Fox News have that story, so it's probably correct.)
|
| [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/carnegie-mellon-
| covid-19-twit...
| wfbarks wrote:
| wish that I could actively decide not to pay attention to this
| comment, but I am unable.
| ErikAugust wrote:
| I think it's important to note that Facebook didn't invent any
| of this. They just built the biggest mainstream distribution
| channel to do so. Nothing they ever did in terms of
| facilitating pointless arguments has been all that original
| either.
|
| People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much,
| much longer than Facebook has existed.
|
| Now that said, they know what they have on their hands and how
| it makes them the money. They aren't going to fix it. It is a
| big feature of their product.
| hi_im_miles wrote:
| Part of this is that Facebook makes the opinions of people
| you know but don't really care about highly visible, which I
| think leads to some of the animosity you see on the platform.
| When the person you're confronting is the uncle of someone
| you talked to once back in high school, there's little
| incentive to be kind.
| deathgrips wrote:
| Psychopaths often excuse their behavior by saying that if
| they don't take advantage of others, someone else will do it
| instead.
| puranjay wrote:
| To be fair, people will go to great lengths to argue over
| things they think are wrong. People make alt accounts on
| Reddit and Twitter to do it. Heck, people will even
| navigate 4chan's awful UI and content, fill in captchas,
| just to tell someone that they're wrong.
|
| Facebook could make it harder to post content, but I doubt
| that would make much of a difference
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _think it's important to note that Facebook didn't invent any
| of this_
|
| I think that's literally true. They told their algorithm
| "maximise the time people spend on Facebook" and it
| discovered for itself that sowing strife and discord did
| that.
|
| Facebook's crime is that when this became obvious they
| doubled down on it, because ads.
| specialist wrote:
| Facebook, and others, absolutely innovated with their
| recommendation engines. Enabled by implementing the most
| detailed user profiling to date coupled with machine
| learning.
| cryptoz wrote:
| > I think it's important to note that Facebook didn't invent
| any of this.
|
| I don't agree with that. I very strongly think that Facebook
| did invent a lot of this.
|
| > They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel
| to do so
|
| Scale does matter though. There is a lot in life that is
| legal or moral at small scale but illegal or immoral at large
| scale. Doing things at scale does change the nature of what
| you are doing. There's no 'just' to be had there.
|
| > Nothing they ever did in terms of facilitating pointless
| arguments has been all that original either.
|
| I don't agree with that either. They have even published
| scientific papers, peer-reviewed, to explain their new and
| novel methods of creating emotionally manipulative content
| and algorithms.
|
| > People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web
| much, much longer than Facebook has existed.
|
| I also don't agree with this. Facebook has spent 10+ years
| inventing new ways to rile people up. This stuff _is_ new.
| Yes I know newspapers publish things that are twisted up etc,
| but that 's different, clearly. The readers of the paper are
| not shouting at each other as they read it.
|
| I think it's super dangerous to take this new kind of mass-
| surveillance and mass-scale manipulation and say, welp,
| nothing new here, who cares? I think that's extremely
| dangerous. It opens populations to apathy and lets
| corporations do illegal and immoral things to gain unfair and
| illegal power.
|
| Facebook should not be legally allowed to do all the things
| they are doing. It's invasive, immoral, and novel, the way
| they deceive and manipulate society at large.
| visarga wrote:
| > Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you
| are doing.
|
| "Quantity has a quality of its own"
| stanleydrew wrote:
| > I think it's super dangerous to take this new kind of
| mass-surveillance and mass-scale manipulation and say,
| welp, nothing new here, who cares?
|
| If that's the outcome you're concerned about I think it's
| legitimate. I don't think it's parent's intention to
| encourage apathy though.
|
| However even if unintended, it's a good reminder that we
| should all watch out to not fall into that apathy trap.
| SherlockeHolmes wrote:
| Disclaimer: I don't agree with your conclusions regarding
| general needs and instincts (of human) and that a human possess
| abosolute/built-in/DNA-engrained inabilities (therefore, I do
| believe a human can fly). I also don't agree that Facebook is
| to share much of the blame for the chaotic human zeitgeist
| present today. I do believe a human is highly malleable and
| impressionable, and that these qualities have been exploited
| historically at various scales for various reasons.
|
| "There is no vaccine yet for this."
|
| There may not be any vaccine, but there may be a cure. If we
| change the language used to communicate within a
| setting/platform such as Facebook, possibly by using a subset
| of the language previously used or by adopting a more Formal
| construct.
|
| But Facebook is a virtual neighborhood, with greatly increased
| bandwidth and range. It is difficult or impossible to achieve
| it in their settings.
| mistermann wrote:
| > There is no vaccine yet for this.
|
| There is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence suggesting that
| psychedelics can have a significant impact when used correctly.
| specialist wrote:
| _" There is no vaccine yet for this."_
|
| What would that look like?
|
| Given our current (social) media ecosystem, converting outrage
| into profit (per Chomsky, McLuhan, Postman, and many, many
| others), what does a non-outrage maximizing strategy look like?
|
| I currently favor a slower, calmer discourse. A la both
| Kahnemann's thinking fast vs slow, and McLuhan's hot vs cold
| metaphors.
|
| That means breaking or slowing the feedback loops, removing
| some of the urgency and heat of convos.
|
| Some possible implementation details:
|
| - emphasis on manual moderation, like metafilter, and dang here
| on HN
|
| - waiting periods for replies. or continuing allowing the
| submissions but delay their publication. or treat all posts as
| drafts with a hold period. or HN style throttling. or...?
|
| - only friends can reply publicly.
|
| - hide "likes"
|
| - do something about bots. allow aliases, but all accounts need
| verified real names or ownership.
|
| Sorry, these are just some of misc the proposals I remember. I
| should probably have been cataloguing them.
| Causality1 wrote:
| People do go on Facebook and argue with others, but that's not
| the core of the divisiveness. Rather, people sort themselves
| into opposing groups and spend most of their time talking
| amongst themselves about how good they are and how horrible the
| other group is.
| Vysero wrote:
| Close your eyes, hold your breath and hope the situation
| resolves itself, that's your solution? I don't believe in a:
| "hidden human need/instinct to argue with people". There is
| nothing hidden about human conflict. It is as natural as any
| conflict; as natural as space and time. In fact, without
| conflict evolution can not exist. Obviously, a good portion of
| the arguments being had have the potential of bearing no fruit,
| but I would argue that just as many of them not only should but
| NEED to be had, and are quite productive on the whole.
| mark-r wrote:
| There is definitely such a need, which is why this cartoon is
| one of my favorites of all time: https://xkcd.com/386/
| tstrimple wrote:
| Where do you draw the line between someone on the internet
| "being wrong", and someone on the internet spreading
| dangerous misinformation? Sure, walking away from the first
| is often a good course of action, but what about the
| second?
| mark-r wrote:
| It's often very hard to tell the difference. If I ever
| find myself in doubt, I try to default to walking away.
| Not always successfully.
| pjmorris wrote:
| Same here. I often joke that I should keep this one posted
| at my desk. It helps remind me to walk away.
| ShellfishMeme wrote:
| I always have to think about that one when I had just been
| spending 20 minutes trying to formulate an elaborate
| response to someone's comment, just to proceed to sigh and
| close the thing without posting it. Probably most of the
| time it was for the better too.
| specialist wrote:
| I'm self culling a lot more too. I'd argue those unposted
| drafts are still valuable, if only to help oneself flesh
| out ideas.
| ShellfishMeme wrote:
| I completely agree. Often I don't proceed because the
| point I wanted to make is just not properly defendable at
| that point. But the ideas written down in the process
| don't disappear and at the same time I got a better
| appreciation of the other side's point of view. I'd
| rather hold on to those ideas and evolve them further
| than to get too attached and be forced into a situation
| where I eventually defend my opinions because I moved
| myself into a position where I feel like this is a deep
| personal belief rather than a well defined objective-ish
| argument I tried to make.
| maest wrote:
| That's an interesting thought, for sure. I should point out
| that this doesn't only apply to facebook, but other large
| discussion forums as well: reddit, 4chan, tumblr, twitter etc.
| gimboland wrote:
| And Hacker News!
|
| > some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who
| they believe are incorrect
|
| I've said it before, I'll probably say it again: this place
| is chock full of people just itching to tell you you're wrong
| and why. Don't get me wrong: obviously there's also a hell of
| a lot of great discussion and insightful technical knowhow
| being shared by real experts -- but in my experience I also
| do have to wade through quite a lot of what feels like knee-
| jerk pedantry and point-scoring.
| mywittyname wrote:
| When people here tell you that you're wrong, they tend to
| do it with style.
|
| One time I made a comment about how dividends affect stock
| price and someone spent like 2 hours writing a program in R
| to do some analysis just to prove me wrong.
| mac01021 wrote:
| I, for one, wouldn't have it any other way!
|
| When I'm wrong I want it explained to me why. Even when I'm
| right about something controversial, I want to see the best
| arguments to the contrary.
|
| I don't want people to be less argumentative. I just want a
| higher intellectual caliber than what's generally available
| on facebook or twitter, and HN fits the bill reasonably
| well.
| downerending wrote:
| It's tricky. One has to learn how to disagree without
| being disagreeable.
|
| Or, get your fuck-you billions and people will start
| agreeing with you a lot. :-)
| munificent wrote:
| _> I really didn 't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that
| Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct
| to argue with people who they believe are incorrect._
|
| I think everyone has a natural human need to feel that they
| have agency in their community. The need to feel that they
| participate in the culture that surrounds them and that they
| can have some affect on the groups that they are members in.
| The alternative is being a powerless pawn subject to the whims
| of the herd.
|
| In the US, I think most people _lost_ this feeling with the
| rise of suburbia, broadcast television, and consumer culture.
| There are almost no public spheres in the US, no real commons
| where people come together and participate. The only groups
| many people are "part" of are really just shows and products
| that they consume.
|
| Social media tapped into that void. It gave them a place to not
| just hear but to speak. Or, at least, it gave them the illusion
| of it. But, really, since everyone wants to feel they have more
| agency, everyone is trying to change everyone else but no one
| wants to be changed. And all of this is mostly decoupled from
| any _real_ mechanism for actual societal change, so it 's
| become just angry shouting into the void.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| In my line of work, we need to dig deep and find the root cause
| on anything we 'touch'. I have noticed (since day 1 in this
| line of work) that elaborate, complex truths tire the audience,
| they want something snappy and 'sexy'. I remember a French
| C-suite telling me "make it sexy, you will lose them".
|
| Facebook managed to get this just right: lightweight, sexy (in
| the sense of attractive), easy to believe, easy to understand,
| easy to spread. The word "true" is completely absent on the
| above statement. That generates clicks. That keeps users logged
| in more. That increases "engagement". That increases as
| revenue. Game over.
|
| The masterminds/communications brilliant minds could never get
| so many eyeballs and ears tuned-in with such a low cost before.
|
| I've mentioned before that FB = cancer It gives 1 (ability to
| communicate) and it takes 100.
| maxerickson wrote:
| How does your postulation map to say, anti-vax?
| bentcorner wrote:
| I don't personally think it's productive _for me_ to engage
| with these kind of people but I will definitely support and
| cheer on others doing so:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65aYK0AoMc (NSFW content)
|
| (Personally I get too wound up in internet arguments and it's
| just not a healthy space for my head to be in)
| maxerickson wrote:
| Sure, I don't spend much time yelling at idiots.
|
| The point of my question is that activists tend to talk
| about things, so "shutting up about an issue and not
| discussing it is the best thing for a group to do." won't
| ever actually happen.
| zachware wrote:
| This is quite possibly the most elegant summary of what's wrong
| with how we engage with information through the media/social
| landscape.
|
| We didn't evolve as a species to process this much information,
| or as Yuval Noah Harari calls it in Sapiens, gossip.
| derg wrote:
| In general and not necessarily related to just facebook, but
| one of the best things I've come to learn about myself and the
| world around me is that sometimes the absolute _best_ thing you
| can do for yourself is to just shut up and walk away, even if
| you know in your heart of hearts that you are correct.
| jeffdavis wrote:
| And the corrolary: just because the other party walks away
| from the argument doesn't mean that you are right.
| seek3r00 wrote:
| I agree, as long as you can find time to research and
| understand if you're really correct. This way you avoid
| conflicts but you still learn if you were wrong.
| derg wrote:
| 100%. Some of my biggest learning experiences were when I
| walked away when I thought I was completely, utterly
| correct only to find out a little later that I was actually
| completely wrong!
|
| I say that in the past tense just because it makes in terms
| of what I'm trying to convey but it still routinely happens
| too, and will continue to happen.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think this is generally helpful to keep in mind.
|
| I also think there's an art to deescalation and discussing
| ideas or persuading someone you disagree with to see an
| alternative view (and then giving them space to change their
| mind).
|
| Productive discussion isn't possible with everyone or even
| one individual depending on where they are in their life, but
| I've generally found it works better than expected when you
| can remove your own identity and feelings from it.
|
| It's rarely in the spotlight though because it doesn't get
| retweeted or shared as much as combative arguing that's more
| a performance from each side (with likes and cheering on the
| sidelines).
| pathseeker wrote:
| >I also think there's an art to deescalation and discussing
| ideas or persuading someone you disagree with to see an
| alternative view
|
| This doesn't really work with core views like politics.
| Some of the most polarizing topics are not because the
| opposite side can't see your view, it's because you
| fundamentally disagree on priorities.
|
| Examples:
|
| Anti-abortion people aren't going to be persuaded by yet
| another view on women's rights. They think you're arguing
| to murder babies. The plight of a woman in poverty is not
| going to suddenly make them go, "oh, well then I guess _a
| litte_ murder is okay. "
|
| A libertarian isn't going to be swayed to suddenly think a
| planned economy is a better approach even when presented
| with spectacular market failures. They completely
| understand the failures suck and understand the alternative
| views just fine. Another anecdote is not realistically
| going to alter a belief that central planning is worse
| overall.
| kelnos wrote:
| It's unfortunate you're being downvoted, because I think
| in many ways you're right. People -- especially people
| who hold strong views on divisive issues -- usually will
| not change their minds when presented with new
| evidence[0]. They're swayed by emotional appeals that get
| them to change how they _feel_ about an issue.
|
| Sure, there are exceptions, and some people can be
| dispassionate enough to weigh evidence and change their
| minds, but that is definitely not the norm.
|
| [0] I read a fantastic article on this a year or two ago,
| but can't find it now; will update with an edit if I find
| it before the edit window expires.
| fossuser wrote:
| I disagree on this - I have a more optimistic view of the
| ability for people to change how they think.
|
| You're right that a core belief tied into someone's
| identity is not going to be changed by new evidence,
| unless you can get people to value trying to figure out
| what's true and updating on evidence itself (rather than
| having an 'answer' already and just using motivated
| reasoning to come up with arguments that support their
| 'answer'). This is hard.
|
| I know I've personally gone from someone who made these
| kind of bad reasoning mistakes - the smarter you are the
| more insidious they can be because you're better at being
| a clever arguer and coming up with plausible sounding
| reasons while ignoring or rationalizing contradicting
| evidence. I've worked hard to get better at it (and I
| still am, it's an ongoing process). Yes, this is only a
| sample size of one, but I think it's possible.
|
| I have an optimistic view of the capacity for a person to
| learn how to think better, while simultaneously having a
| pessimistic view of the general public's current ability
| to think rationally. This may seem like a conflict, but
| really it just means that I think it's possible for us to
| be a lot better than we are, while recognizing it's a
| bigger project than just stating the specific evidence
| available for any specific argument.
|
| People have to be willing to consider why they believe
| what they believe, and be honest about the potential to
| change their mind based on new information that
| contradicts what they believe to be true.
|
| I think that's the goal we have to work toward first.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> unless you can get people to value trying to figure
| out what 's true and updating on evidence itself_
|
| What evidence could you give to disprove the belief that
| abortion is murder? The belief is not a claim about
| evidence; it's a claim about priorities, as the GP said.
| Or, if you like, about what actions count as belonging to
| what categories.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| A more interesting question is why is abortion
| consistently used as a tribal issue in US politics.
|
| _Of course_ there is an underlying difference of
| opinion, and of course it matters to those on both sides.
|
| But it matters because the media have done an
| exceptionally good job of herding people into different
| camps - by focusing on a small and standardised
| collection of divisive issues and amplifying the rhetoric
| around them.
|
| Does someone benefit from these divisions, and from the
| loss of civility and civic cohesion they create, and
| perhaps also from the implied promotion of violent
| oppositional defiant subjectivity over rational argument
| that powers them?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> A more interesting question is why is abortion
| consistently used as a tribal issue in US politics._
|
| I think a factor here is that the US pushes the
| boundaries of what it really takes to have a free country
| with a diverse population more than other countries do.
|
| Other countries--or at least other developed countries--
| have a more homogeneous population than the US has, and
| also do not have the same tradition of skepticism about
| and distrust of government that the US has. Also other
| countries do not have quite the same Constitutional
| provision for the free exercise of religion that the US
| has.
|
| A less homogeneous population means there is a wider
| range of traditions that people are brought up with. That
| creates a lack of common ground about a lot of things.
| For example, I'm not aware of any other developed country
| that has a significant population of young earth
| creationists.
|
| A tradition of skepticism about and distrust of
| government means that people are less willing to accept a
| legal rule that conflicts with their personal
| convictions, and more willing to complain about it
| publicly (or indeed to take even more drastic action).
| Note that this applies to both sides of the abortion
| debate: to extreme pro-lifers who feel that any abortion
| at all is wrong, and to extreme pro-choicers who feel
| that any restriction on abortion at all is wrong. Current
| US law and jurisprudence is actually not close to either
| of those extremes, so both extremes have plenty of
| reason, in their view, to complain.
|
| The Constitutional protection of free exercise of
| religion means that "personal convictions", if they are
| backed by a religious tradition, carry a lot more weight.
| This is most obvious in the US on the anti-abortion side
| of the debate.
|
| _> Does someone benefit from these divisions_
|
| I think someone taking political advantage of divisions
| within the population can happen in any country, but it
| might well be true that the US, for the reasons I
| described above, presents more opportunities for it to
| happen.
| fossuser wrote:
| See my other comment for how I think about/tackle
| abortion specifically:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315552
| pdonis wrote:
| I see it, I'll respond further there.
| evolve2k wrote:
| Damn. I ended up caught up in peoples reponses to the
| abortion debate question and totally forgot my disgust of
| Facebook which was top of mine as I started reading the
| comments. Ironically it confirms the article and how
| Facebook can keep distracting from focus on itself by
| having platform users head down rabit hole after rabit
| hole in an attempt to satiate their flawed human desire
| to be right all the time.
|
| Woah!
| darkengine wrote:
| Sadly, I think you are right. All reasoning starts with
| postulates that you cannot prove. For ethics and
| politics, these axioms are our emotions and values. Two
| people who have a different set of values can't have a
| logical argument because they're using entirely different
| systems of reason.
| visarga wrote:
| That's a learned behaviour - to ignore opposing
| arguments. They train themselves to counter arguments
| they don't like with their own prefabricated arguments,
| learned from the mass media.
|
| Like, for example: politician X is corrupt, he was caught
| taking bribes. Counter: everyone is stealing, at least
| his party gives our group more benefits than the other
| party.
| majewsky wrote:
| "Everyone is stealing" is actually a rational counter
| when grounded in sufficient truth. It's depressing, sure,
| but it _can_ be rational.
| cataphract wrote:
| Studies on persuading people out of prejudice do exist
| (see e.g. https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~broockma/kalla_br
| oockman_reduc... ). The problem is that the approaches
| are not as emotionally satisfying as just affirming your
| moral superiority and calling people bigots, so not many
| people do it (though some do, search for "deep
| canvasing").
|
| Abortion is tricky because once you recognize the life of
| the embryo as a value to protect it's difficult to have
| it come as less compelling than a right to bodily
| autonomy. Still, most anti-abortion people would still
| carve out a lot of exceptions (rape, genetic problems,
| danger to the mother's life and so on). Most people
| recognize that the even right to life is not absolute
| (another example: they would agree it would be unlawful
| to refuse to obey an order in time of war that would
| almost certainly result in a soldier's death).
| fossuser wrote:
| I think abortion is a lot easier when you frame the
| argument around suffering.
|
| I think part of the problem with abortion is the left
| argues that "it is not a life" which is generally a weak
| argument. It's better to accept/concede that you are
| ending life, but doing so without suffering before
| there's a neural net that can recognize anything - I
| think that's the important bit (and why third trimester
| abortions are banned anyway).
|
| The push back then tends to be that life itself is sacred
| and can never be ended (suffering is not relevant), but
| this is generally not truly believed by the people making
| the argument so it's easy to point out their
| contradictory support for the death penalty. They then
| usually say there's a difference between innocent life
| and people who've committed crimes at which point you're
| back to negotiating conditions and suffering seems like a
| pretty good condition to use.
|
| [Edit] It's also a messier issue because I think a
| component of the debate is shaming women for sex. That
| they should be forced to have their baby as some sort of
| penance for having sex. Obviously this is largely unsaid
| in favor of more palatable arguments, but if it's the
| true driver then it's hard to even start because you're
| not addressing the true motivation (which may not even be
| fully realized by the person arguing).
| pdonis wrote:
| _> It 's better to accept/concede that you are ending
| life, but doing so without suffering before there's a
| neural net that can recognize anything_
|
| First, this assumes that such a "neural net" is required
| for suffering. I personally don't have a problem with
| that, but making an ironclad scientific case for it is
| going to be very difficult, since we don't understand
| _how_ "neural nets" actually produce suffering even in
| the case of humans with fully developed brains.
|
| Second, by this criterion, it's not just third trimester
| abortions that should be banned, but abortions at any
| time after the "neural net" develops. That's a lot
| earlier than our current jurisprudence draws the line
| (neural activity can be detected in the brain of a fetus
| at about six weeks, vs. viability at roughly 24 weeks as
| more or less the current jurisprudence line), which means
| that our current jurisprudence is allowing a lot of
| suffering by this criterion.
|
| So I'm not sure this framing actually makes the argument
| any easier.
| fossuser wrote:
| Thanks - I think that's a fair criticism and I don't know
| enough to really comment further.
| neutronicus wrote:
| > I think part of the problem with abortion is the left
| argues that "it is not a life"
|
| I don't think this is accurate. Getting a typical pro-
| choice person to discuss the fetus at all, much less
| whether it can be called alive, takes some serious
| cornering (I am pro-choice, to be clear).
| fossuser wrote:
| Sure, but diverting the question from the topic where
| your point is weakest is just misdirection and isn't very
| persuasive.
|
| There are a lot of good reasons other than this one to
| support pro-choice, but those reasons will be irrelevant
| to someone who views 'abortion as murder'. You have to
| put yourself in their position and reason about it like
| they would, then think about what is the best argument
| from their position.
|
| Basically steel-manning their side and then tackling the
| best argument head on.
|
| I think this is where really interesting discussions
| happen and where minds can change, otherwise you end up
| just discussing the same tired points without making any
| progress.
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| You guys are doing it right now.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Suffering matters - of the mother. The death in hospital
| of a woman who was denied an abortion was the catalyst
| for the successful campaign in Ireland to get the
| constitution changed to permit abortion.
|
| #repealthe8th
| throwaway441 wrote:
| > I think abortion is a lot easier when you frame the
| argument around suffering.
|
| Really? I think it becomes much more difficult. It
| invites arguments for infanticide (see the 2013 Giubilini
| paper on after-birth abortion for a famous example of
| this). The same arguments concerning a woman who is not
| able to take care of a child apply equally well after
| birth if suffering is the only consideration, because
| it's entirely possible to end the life of the baby in a
| painless manner. As someone who is pro-life, I've
| generally found the suffering angle to be the least
| compelling of the pro-choice counterarguments.
| fossuser wrote:
| I do think you're right that there's an extra element
| beyond just suffering (otherwise you can argue that
| killing infants instantly is okay if they don't notice
| and they're not yet self-aware).
|
| I think it's a mixture of suffering and having a neural
| network formed enough for ...something? I have an
| intuitive feeling that it's wrong to kill infants before
| they're self-aware even if 'done painlessly', but I don't
| feel that way about a blastocyst or a fetus without a
| sufficiently formed neural network that can suffer.
|
| I recognize this isn't perfectly consistent though and I
| don't have a great answer for why.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Studies on persuading people out of prejudice_
|
| The GP is not talking about prejudice; he's talking about
| a genuine difference in priorities. Calling that
| "prejudice" implies that one of those choices of
| priorities is simply wrong; it ignores the possibility
| that there is no one "right" choice of priorities.
| afthonos wrote:
| I think the argument doesn't suffer if you replace
| "prejudice" with "strongly held beliefs". The human mind
| doesn't have a secret truth-o-meter, so from the inside,
| prejudice and strongly held beliefs are
| indistinguishable. The fact that some people hold a
| belief strongly is itself proof that that belief _can_ be
| held, and therefore that people can be convinced to hold
| it.
|
| Basically, a technique that works to convince people away
| from prejudice over and above what presenting them with
| truth does should be applicable to any belief.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I think the argument doesn't suffer if you replace
| "prejudice" with "strongly held beliefs"._
|
| Yes, it does, because the post I originally responded to
| said "persuading people out of" these beliefs. How is
| that justified if the beliefs are not known to be wrong?
| "Prejudice" implies that the beliefs _are_ known to be
| wrong, so it 's justified to try to persuade people out
| of them. "Strongly held beliefs" does not carry the same
| implication.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _The fact that some people hold a belief strongly is
| itself proof that that belief can be held, and therefore
| that people can be convinced to hold it._
|
| The fact that I'm tall is proof that people can be tall.
| But not that you can become tall.
|
| In general people have the opinions they need to have to
| feel good about themselves. That's hard to change.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think "priorities" is a pretty good way of framing it,
| at least when considering the abortion debate. I'm pro-
| choice, but I don't consider my position to be any kind
| of moral right; I just believe that in this situation,
| the priority should go to the mother and her wishes, not
| the fetus. I don't think that giving priority to the
| fetus is inherently illogical or wrong, it's just not the
| choice I'd make.
|
| The problem that I have, though, is that I don't believe
| that many pro-life advocates look at it that way; instead
| of thinking about what's best for the people around the
| potential baby, they resort to religious or strictly
| emotional arguments in support of their views[0], which I
| will never consider persuasive.
|
| The cut-off point is entirely up to society's consensus.
| You could go to the extreme and say that vasectomies (or
| even male masturbation) and tubal ligations are murder,
| because they destroy germ cells that could turn into
| children eventually. Some religions prohibit birth
| control of any kind. Many people aren't comfortable with
| the morning-after pill. Some people are fine with an
| abortion up to N weeks, but not after.
|
| And that's what I find sad about arguments on this topic:
| people have drawn their line in the sand, and they
| believe that they are right, any other option is wrong,
| and that they must impose their rightness on everyone
| else, regardless of any disagreement in beliefs.
|
| As a result, I just tend to not get into arguments about
| this, as I don't think it's worth the blood-pressure
| increase to engage a pro-life advocate in discussion.
|
| [0] I may be wrong about this; I frankly do not have many
| (any?) pro-choice friends, so I only know what I read,
| and that may be a case of me just hearing the loudest
| voices, not the most representative ones.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I frankly do not have many (any?) pro-choice friends_
|
| Did you mean to say "pro-life" here?
| paublyrne wrote:
| You're right on an individual level, but when you
| extrapolate a less argumentative approach and encourage
| curiosity rather than beligerence I do believe society
| overall is amenable to change. On a macro scale it works.
| I'm loath to point to abortion specifically as in the
| example as it's a devisive issue but Ireland which voted
| to allow abortion two years ago in a landslide referendum
| is an example of society changing its views as a whole,
| even while some individuals in that society remain
| immovable.
| wuliwong wrote:
| From my own experience, I've had many many many
| conversations regarding topics like this that haven't
| changed my views in any substantial way. BUT, I have had
| a handful that did and those are so valuable that I think
| they it IS worth banging our heads into each other's
| walls most of the time for these rare moments.
| seneca wrote:
| Yep, I think you're dead on. There are competing and
| diametrically opposed values out there, and in many cases
| both can be fairly argued in favor of. For example
| fairness vs freedom. No amount of shouting about the
| details will convince someone who primarily values
| fairness that freedom is more important, and the
| arguments are largely pointless unless the participants
| are genuinely seeking to examine the ideas, which is
| rarely ever the case online.
|
| I think people understand that at a very base level, and
| that's why online arguments are often really more of a
| performance to score points with your side, or to take
| shots at the other side. Rarely is anyone actually
| attempting to convince or learn, they're just playing out
| some weird tribal warfare ritual and dressing it up as
| debate.
|
| As the larger thread here suggests, the best move in this
| game is simply not to play it.
| mrbungie wrote:
| Well, your reply is being 'deescalated' via downvotes.
| That shows how open people are to thoughts that defy
| their values and/or world model.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| It's being downvoted because it's an example of exactly
| the behaviour it's purportedly opposing.
| wdb wrote:
| Personally, I think most of the persuasive related research
| is not done through public research (universities, public
| funding) but more through corporate or military (?)
| research. I can even imagine that there is obtained
| knowledge being used to help persuade the public for
| political gain. Which the wider public or public
| universities aren't being shared and is oblivious to the
| public and the wider science community.
|
| Guess, it sounds bit like a tin hats theory but I can
| imagine the above is the happening at the moment.
| dillonmckay wrote:
| The 'other' NLP - neurolinguistic programming.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-
| linguistic_programming
| intended wrote:
| To be honest, I pay a lot of attention to the research
| coming out, and there's not be much which is
| counterintuitive. All of it builds off of stuff we've
| seen from the days of eternal September.
|
| Generalist subs/topics collect junk. Directed subs have
| more focus and are healthier in defending crap.
| artificial wrote:
| Unfortunately social media sock puppets were so hot last
| decade:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-
| spy-op...
| [deleted]
| 12xo wrote:
| A big reason why old people speak less...
| datalus wrote:
| I learned this lesson recently, and I am sure I will continue
| to learn this lesson in the future as I've already learned it
| in the past. Just in many different contexts and ways!
| brewdad wrote:
| I've gotten better, over time, at typing my heated, emotional
| response to someone online and then hitting Cancel or the
| back button and not posting.
|
| Sometimes I do hit the Reply button though. I still have room
| for self-improvement. :-)
| accountinhn wrote:
| I do this a lot, especially in Reddit. Trick I learned is I
| use my notepad now to type the reply, then wait for an hour
| and post it. This helped with few things:
|
| 1. Slowly improving in checking for typos
|
| 2. Reading something after a break helps framing my point
| better and helps remove the heated emotion from the text
|
| 3. I also don't save the comment, so I have to spend time
| searching for it. This further helps in filtering the
| topics that I don't care about
|
| 4. Using services while not logged in, basically be a
| lurker
| ok_coo wrote:
| This is the point I got to when I realized I should no
| longer have an account and I just went ahead and deleted
| it.
|
| For about 6 months after, I thought I would reactivate and
| jump back in but it's been years now and I'm 100% sure it
| was a life improvement.
| specialist wrote:
| Not gonna like. u/dang has had to scold me a few times.
|
| Improvement takes time.
|
| We certainly need more and better role models.
| dghughes wrote:
| I've been doing that more recently too. I say to myself do
| I really want to do this? Or why am I getting involved in
| this? Especially Twitter where you can't unselect yourself
| from a conversation.
|
| My new mantra is the saying, "not my circus, not my
| monkeys".
| SNosTrAnDbLe wrote:
| This! It always helps me to take time out and paste what
| you have on a different notepad and come back to it. Only
| hit send if it still makes sense.
| [deleted]
| razzimatazz wrote:
| You are on to something. I interpret it as it is fantastic
| fun/addictive/dopamine-short-term-win to argue or discuss with
| someone. Especially if you can afford the hangover that outrage
| might lead to.
|
| Face to face with people I know or at least recognize as human,
| not a bot, educated or at least not cartoon-hick-personality -
| Arguments can be great, because of the ability to see when to
| pull back and stop something from escalating. We are all human
| after all.
|
| In internet-powered discussion, where numbers of people
| observing can be huge, and every username can feel inhuman or
| maybe even just trolling in an attempt to create a stupid
| argument - that Argument gets painful. But the dopamine hit is
| still there...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > And Facebook somehow tapped into that human behavior and
| (inadvertently or purposefully)
|
| It's not just that they tapped into it, it's the entire mission
| statement in a sense. 'to connect the world' if you want to
| treat it like a sort of network science basically means to
| lower the distance between individuals so much that you've
| reduced the whole world to a small world network. There's no
| inhibition in this system, it's like an organism on every
| stimulant you can imagine.
|
| Everything spreads too fast and there's no authority to shut
| anything down that breaks, so the result is pretty much
| unmitigated chaos.
|
| The vaccine is the thing people complain about all the time,
| the much maligned 'filter bubbles', which is really just to say
| splitting these networks into groups that can actually work
| productively together and keeping them away from others that
| make them want to bash their heads in.
| ckastner wrote:
| > _I really didn 't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that
| Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct
| to argue with people who they believe are incorrect._
|
| Hidden human need/instinct to argue, period. These arguments
| aren't intellectual debates, it's people getting pissed off at
| something, and venting their rage towards the other side.
|
| It's odd how addictive rage can be. But that's not a new
| phenomenon. Tabloids have been exploiting this for decades
| before Facebook.
| tbabb wrote:
| I really don't like the "it can't be helped" attitude about
| what Facebook has become.
|
| They made a _choice_ to throw gasoline on the flames of these
| aspects of human behavior. Few people seem to realize that
| Facebook _could_ have been a force for good, if they had made
| different choices or had more integrity when it comes to the
| design and vision of their platform.
|
| The way that things happened is not they only possible way they
| _could_ have happened, and resigning to the current state as
| "inevitable", to me, reeks of an incredible lack of
| imagination.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I am not sure I can agree. Facebook did not change in any
| significant way. It still serves as a platform to boost your
| message. It is, at best, simply a reflection of the human
| condition. The previous example was the internet and some of
| the revelations it brought about us as a species. FB just
| focused it as much as it could.
|
| Force for good. I do not want to sound like this, but how, in
| your vision, that would look like? This is a real question.
| tbabb wrote:
| It could have been a platform that enlightens, informs, and
| uplifts people instead of exploiting attention and anger,
| and profiting from misinformation.
|
| You can make money by making people feel good instead of
| bad. You can be rotten.com, or you can be Pixar. You have a
| choice. An organization with integrity will look at not
| just how much money they're immediately making, but whether
| they're pushing the world towards better or worse. A hands-
| off attitude of "it's not my problem that people like this
| sh*t" is not integrity, it's a rationalization for greed.
|
| You can make choices that result in making less than the
| absolute maximum amount of cash you can get your hands on,
| in service of building a product/experience/brand with
| value and goodwill of its own. There are countless examples
| of this in other places-- just look at any company that
| builds its reputation based on quality. Each of these
| brands could make their products for cheaper and lower
| quality, and make more immediate profit, at the (much
| larger) long-term cost of destroying the brand, the
| customer goodwill, and the market advantage. Defending
| against such short-term greediness is uphill work, but it's
| both the enlightened and profitable thing to do.
|
| Instead of actively amplifying memes and misinformation,
| they could have chosen to build features supporting
| community and/or expert moderation. They built an algorithm
| that optimizes purely for attention, but they could have
| made something that accounts for quality; paying attention
| to patterns in good and bad sources of information, and
| reliable/unreliable discriminating tastes in the community.
| The emphasis on quality and reliability of content was the
| pitch for Quora, for example, and they did much better at
| that task than Facebook. Which is not surprising, because
| Facebook seems to clearly not be trying to optimize for
| this at all. Wikipedia and StackOverflow are also two huge
| success stories of community/expert moderation. It works if
| you actually prioritize it.
|
| They could have chosen to hire journalists, editors, and
| artists to produce and vet high-quality content to drive
| people to the platform, and step responsibly and
| effectively into the media void that was created when
| newspapers began to collapse. An analogy for this would be
| the way that Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and friends have created
| a new boom and golden age of content creation to fill the
| void left by the dying medium of broadcast TV. There could
| have been something like this for print, and Facebook was
| well positioned for it.
|
| [Jaron Lanier](https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_w
| e_need_to_remake...) has lots of ideas about how to make an
| internet that isn't hostile toward its own users. One of
| his revolutionary ideas: Charge people money for services
| instead of siphoning their data and their attention in ways
| that hurt them.
|
| There are a zillion directions they could have gone.
| [deleted]
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| > I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that
| Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct
| to argue with people who they believe are incorrect.
|
| Funny, years ago, around the Aurora shooting in Colorado, it
| was Facebook that made me recognize this behaviour in myself.
|
| It's why I left the platform.
|
| Also, obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/
| danlugo92 wrote:
| It's always alien when I read stuff like this.
|
| Most of my facebook feed is just memes and selfies.
|
| (I'm venezuelan)
|
| When facebook as new/trending up years ago there were some
| political discussions but people quickly figured out it was
| worthless, how come USAians haven't?
| vharuck wrote:
| Being angry over politics is a pastime in the USA. Not sure
| why this happens in some countries and less so in others.
| razzimatazz wrote:
| In NZ, we follow along behind the USA in most things, so
| getting angry over politics is growing and growing. I see
| it as a hobby, growing in popularity. But also a hobby you
| can discourage those you know from getting into, and if the
| social momentum pulls us away from it then the hobby
| doesn't take hold.
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| Perhaps you guys should be more engaged with politics..
| Kaze404 wrote:
| I had the same realization recently, and deleted my Twitter
| account in favor of a new one where I only follow people I know
| in real life.
|
| That worked great for a couple of weeks, but now I log on
| Twitter and half of my feed is tweets of people I don't know or
| follow, with the worst, most infuriatingly stupid hot takes. No
| wonder they have literally hundreds of thousands of likes. The
| platform is built around this "content".
| jbay808 wrote:
| I'm no fan of Facebook. But for what it's worth, back when I was
| still using it in ~2010, it helped me learn a lot about the
| worldviews of people on the opposite end of the political
| spectrum who I rarely if ever interacted with in person. The
| mechanism for this was Facebook Groups - I'd hang out in climate
| change denial groups talking to denialists and asking them
| questions. And although it didn't change my mind and I didn't
| change theirs, I (and my, err, opponents) both actually learned a
| lot and came to see the other side as more honest and less
| irrational/evil than we once thought.
|
| I don't know if Facebook still serves this purpose today.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| It's less like that anymore. Group raids involving post
| reporting became a huge issue a while back, so most political
| pages use membership application questions requiring you to
| positively affirm or signal in-group association before
| joining. Nothing prevents you from lying to get into a group,
| but it's oddly effective as a mechanism for preventing partisan
| opponents from engaging in any dialogue.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Ah, good to know.
|
| This is why we can't have nice things.
| karmelapple wrote:
| I think a big part of the shift of interactions over the last
| 5 - 10 years is the communication platform (Facebook, in this
| case) bringing in new users who had zero experience debating
| in a text-only format. It's probably inevitable, unless the
| platform tries to educate and heavily police new users on
| what proper behavior is.
|
| Facebook was incentivized to grow as fast as possible.
| Comments and discussion was one of many vectors for growing;
| photos, news, and silly images was just as important. The
| quality of all that wasn't as important as the content coming
| from people you know and trust.
|
| Contrast that with a community like HN, where quality of
| comments and content is much more important, since you have
| little to no trust for almost all people submitting content.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Can't read the article, but I've seen a lot of my friends
| unfriend other people that have political opinions that differ
| from theirs. And the ever so popular post "If you disagree with
| _thing xyz_ let me know know so I can unfriend you! "
|
| This isn't Facebook's doing. People self-select monocultures.
| hadtodoit wrote:
| Why does facebook need to do anything about this? People have
| been disagreeing with each other violently or otherwise for as
| long as humans have existed. Do they think they can do anything
| about this?
| kgin wrote:
| There has never been a mechanism whereby everyone can be
| against everyone else about everything.
|
| When my high school english teacher and my aunt are arguing
| about politics and they've never met each other, it's clear
| this is a new development in human conflict.
| knzhou wrote:
| The degree to which "damned if you do, damned if you don't" is in
| effect here is remarkable. If Facebook literally removes
| anything, then HN is outraged because it's censorship,
| paternalism, all that. But if Facebook _does not adopt an
| actively paternalistic attitude where it shows people content
| that they deem is "good for them"_ , then that's outrageous too.
| Both complaints predictably rocket to the top of HN.
|
| Which is it, guys? How can you simultaneously be outraged that
| Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and
| horrified that it _isn't_ actively molding user behavior on a
| massive scale?
|
| There's an amusing comment from a Facebook employee downthread
| asking: if division is caused by showing people opposing
| political opinions, should we try to stop that to reduce
| division, or should we do nothing, to avoid forming filter
| bubbles? Predictably, every single reply condemns him as evil for
| not realizing one of the options is obviously right, but they're
| split exactly 50/50 on what that right course of action is.
| closeparen wrote:
| If Facebook followed some deterministic algorithm like "show
| all content from friends, in chronological order" then I don't
| think there would be such loud voices calling for it to also
| solve $social_problem.
|
| But Facebook _does_ exercise editorial control, in the service
| of engagement. It 's fair to ask that this curation consider
| other objectives as well, or at least counterbalance the side-
| effects it's known to have (divisive content is more engaging
| and so is amplified; at least correct it back down to neutral).
| ccktlmazeltov wrote:
| If facebook was following a deterministic algorithm, people
| would complain too.
| DenisM wrote:
| > How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is
| imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that
| it isn't actively molding user behavior on a massive scale?
|
| There is a simple answer to that - HN is not a homogeneous set
| of people; different users have different opinions and express
| them at different times with different intensity.
| knzhou wrote:
| True, but I would have expected at least a _little_ visible
| disagreement. You never see anybody saying "wait a second, I
| think making the filter bubble effect a bit worse is actually
| worth it!" Each individual submission's comments is just full
| throated, unanimous condemnation --- even when adjacent
| comments are directly contradictory. They just don't engage
| with the possibility that deciding what to do might actually
| be hard.
| throwlaplace wrote:
| If this were true you'd have the average opinion filter out -
| naysayers would downvote supporters and vice versa. The truth
| is in fact that hn is hypocritical and becomes outraged for
| the sake of outrage just like every other opinionated group
| (where the raison d etre is to express an opinion rather than
| discourse).
|
| Edit: think hn isn't just about getting attention? Then
| explain to me why responses are ranked? Or even ranked
| without requiring a response? Even Amazon reviews in
| principle require leaving ratings only in good faith (ie
| having engaged with the product). It's obvious and dang and
| whomever could make that a perquisite of voting but they
| wouldn't in a million years. That they haven't proves my
| point.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The Law of Averages isn't actually a law, and everything
| doesn't balance out in the end.
| throwlaplace wrote:
| Lol the law of large numbers (the real name for the law
| of averages) is 100% a law
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
| pessimizer wrote:
| All of HN other than you isn't actually one person arguing with
| themselves. There are a variety of people here with a range of
| opinions, each with different degrees of internal consistency.
| This smacks of the "everybody says all kinds of things, so you
| should just ignore everybody" or the "they're yelling at me
| from the left and from the right, so that's proof I'm doing
| everything correctly" defenses. The second is the moderation
| fallacy; the first might be called the "Argument From
| Sociopathy."
| ccktlmazeltov wrote:
| This 100%, this reminds me of PG's haters post[1].
|
| [1]http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
| neilk wrote:
| Facebook is sometimes in a difficult position. But, with
| respect, I don't think it's correct to say that it's the fault
| of their critics for putting them in a dilemma.
|
| Facebook does not face outrage for "literally remov[ing]
| anything". In the real world, Facebook is removing thousands of
| items every day, maybe tens of thousands. Most of them are
| totally justified. Is HN outraged about that?
|
| Also, keep vs. remove is a false dilemma. Facebook has many
| more options than keeping or removing items. Most of the time,
| it's about what they choose to boost or reward in other ways.
| https://twitter.com/BKCHarvard/status/1263891198068039680
|
| That said, I think you're right that being an effective arbiter
| on planetary speech is a difficult place to be, even for people
| with the best intentions, and FB didn't get where they are
| today by having the best intentions all the time.
|
| But personally, I think that calls into question whether
| Facebook or anything like them should even exist.
| throwlaplace wrote:
| you know what i don't understand? how many people chafe at the
| idea that violent video games create violent people? when i was
| a kid that was the hot-button tech issue. no one puts any stock
| in that right? because it's an inversion of causality - violent
| people gravitate towards violent video games. and before video
| games we had parental advisory on rap albums. no one put any
| stock in that either. how is fb different? why isn't the onus
| on the consumer?
| starpilot wrote:
| You people want less government, but you also want more. Which
| is it, guys?
|
| You could say this about any divisive issue if you lump all
| sides together.
| icelancer wrote:
| I want more government when it helps me and less when it
| doesn't. What's so hard about that? Everyone agrees with me,
| I'm sure.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Personally I don't think Facebook should censor anything except
| spam and posts that break the law like direct threats of
| violence and child abuse. However, I do think they have a
| responsibility when it comes to paid content and the algorithms
| they use to push content on people. Its one thing to have an
| uncensored forum where people might be exposed to things they
| seek out, and entirely another thing for Facebook to choose and
| collate what people are seeing. Once they do that, they share
| responsibility for the content people see, rather than just
| being a platform.
| cityzen wrote:
| The right course of action is to stop using Facebook. That's
| it, very simple. people here being polarized is exactly what
| Facebook wants. Current facebook users are akin to opioid
| addicts... probably found some relief from whatever social pain
| they were feeling that now they have accepted selling their
| privacy for their fix.
|
| I would say I can't wait for the day that Facebook is gone but
| it will be a long time considering the amount of insecure and
| unintelligent people that need a platform like that to avoid
| ever being challenged in the real world.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _The right course of action is to stop using Facebook._
|
| That'd give rise to something akin to a Gresham's Law problem
| [0]. I think we have a civic duty to engage patiently -- and
| politely -- with our friends who hold views we disagree with,
| because (A) they get to vote; (B) angry invective isn't
| persuasive; and (C) social proof is a thing, and sometimes
| people _can_ be persuaded to come around to their friends '
| point of view, eventually. It's a long shot, but worth a
| shot.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
| cityzen wrote:
| So stay on Facebook. Keep in mind that while you're trying
| to patiently and politely engage, Facebook continues to
| build a profile about who you are and how to manipulate
| you. The more you feed it, the more it learns and knows how
| to use yourself against yourself.
|
| In terms of civic duty, this definition of American civic
| duty made me laugh:
|
| Citizenship connects Americans in a nation bound by shared
| values of liberty, equality, and freedom. Being a citizen
| comes with both rights and responsibilities. Civic duty
| embodies these responsibilities. Such civic duties help
| uphold the democratic values of the United States.
|
| The problem with civic duty is that I feel mine is to tell
| people to stop using Facebook... but others... well, they
| are going to show up at a state capital carrying military
| grade weapons because they don't want to wear facemasks in
| a pandemic. Would you like to patiently and politely engage
| with them? I sure as hell wouldn't because they focus more
| on their perception of "rights" while ignoring their
| responsibilities.
|
| My point is that civic duty in America is a pretty
| romanticized concept that is certainly not based in any
| reality in 2020.
|
| When I did use Facebook briefly back before 2012, I found
| it disappointing that my "christian" extended family
| members would send me incredibly hateful memes about how
| Obama was a muslim terrorist or satan in a tan suit. If
| that is civic discourse, no thanks. The one upside is that
| I haven't spoken to them in almost a decade and never plan
| to again.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _others... well, they are going to show up at a state
| capital carrying military grade weapons because they don
| 't want to wear facemasks in a pandemic. Would you like
| to patiently and politely engage with them?_
|
| I have a few friends like that on Facebook, and yes I do
| patiently and politely engage with them -- but on
| occasion I've had to remind them that they aren't the
| only ones who own guns and know how to use them ....
| GordonS wrote:
| I agree, but also from a different angle.
|
| The other day a friend told me about a takeaway place I
| should try. I couldn't find the menu on their website, and my
| friend replied that it was on theirbl Facebook page, and I
| should stop being a luddite.
|
| No, _no_ , dammit! We're literally giving the world wide web
| to a single corporation, and worse, normalising it - to a lot
| of people, Facebook basically _is_ "the internet".
|
| How can this possibility be in the best interest of users? It
| almost feels like the balance has swung too far, and it's
| perilously close to the point of no return...
| cityzen wrote:
| Sometimes you just have to miss out on a good meal.
| ccktlmazeltov wrote:
| Why? It's a great app to keep track of what your friends are
| doing
| lmilcin wrote:
| The problem really is platforms that give people content to
| please them. An algorithm selects content that you are likely to
| agree with or that you have shown previous interest. This only
| causes people to get reinforced in their beliefs and this leads
| to polarization.
|
| For example, when I browse videos on Youtube I will only get
| democratic content (even though I am from Poland). Seems as soon
| as you click on couple entries you get classified and from now on
| you will only be shown videos that are agreeable to you. That
| means lots of Stephen Colbert and no Fox News.
|
| My friend is deeply republican and she will not see any
| democratic content when she gets suggestions.
|
| The problem runs so deep that it is difficult to find new things
| even if I want. I maintain another browser where I am logged off
| to get more varied selection and not just couple topics I have
| been interested with recently.
|
| My point of view on this: this is disaster of gigantic
| proportions. People need to be exposed to conflicting views to be
| able to make their own decisions.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| I think that is not quite right, but the distinction is subtle.
| The algorithm selects the content that you are most likely to
| be engaged with. For most people likely that is the filter
| bubble, and seeing only what they agree with. But for some
| folks, they actively like to have debates (or troll one
| another) and see more content they will not agree with, because
| what they don't agree with gets more engagement. The intent is
| to keep you engaged and active as long as possible on the site,
| and feed whatever drives that behavior.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| This is the exact same behavior I have noticed from YouTube as
| well. I miss the "old" YouTube around 2011, when it was a
| terrific place to discover new and interesting videos. If I
| watched a video on mountain biking, let's say, then the list of
| suggested videos all revolved around that topic. But in today's
| YouTube, the suggested content for the same mountain biking
| video is all unrelated, often extremely polarizing, political
| content. I actually can NO LONGER discover new interesting
| content on YouTube. Like you say, it automatically categorizes
| you based on the very first few videos and that's all you see
| from there on out. That is why I have now configured my browser
| to block all cookies from YouTube. I'm annoyed that I can no
| longer enjoy YouTube logged in, but at least now I feel like
| I've gotten back that "old" YouTube of what it once was. It's a
| whole lot less polarizing now, I feel much better as a result
| of it, and the suggestions are significantly improved.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Exactly. I remember clicking on homepage to get selection of
| new, interesting videos. Now I just get exactly the same
| every time I click. Useless. I would like to discover new
| topics not get rehash of same ones.
| empath75 wrote:
| > The problem really is platforms that give people content to
| please them.
|
| But it doesn't please them -- study after study shows a high
| correlation between depression and anxiety and social media
| use.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Plenty of things don't cure depression. Doesn't make them
| bad.
| sixothree wrote:
| Same goes for non-political content. I often have to log out of
| youtube to find something new and interesting (even though I
| have hundreds of subscriptions).
| dang wrote:
| Sorry for the self-reference outside of a moderation context,
| but I wrote what turned into an entire essay about this last
| night: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. It's
| about how this plays out specifically on HN. Short version:
| it's precisely because this place _is_ less divisive that it
| _feels_ more divisive. In fact, HN is probably the least
| divisive community of its size and scope on the internet (if
| there are others, I 'd like to know which they are), and
| precisely because of this, many people feel that it's among the
| most divisive. The solution to this paradox is that HN is the
| rare case of a large(ish) community that keeps itself in one
| piece instead of breaking into shards or silos. If that's true,
| then although we haven't yet realized it, the HN community is
| actually on the leading edge of the opportunity to learn to be
| different with one another, at least on the internet.
| lmilcin wrote:
| First of all, less divisive environment means you interact
| with people of different opinions which means that few
| interactions will be with exactly like-minded people.
|
| Environments where all people tend to think exactly the same
| are typically extremist in some way, resulting from some kind
| of polarization process that eliminates people that don't
| express opinion at the extreme of spectrum. They are either
| removed forcibly or remove themselves when they get
| dissatisfied.
|
| One way HN stays away from this polarization process is
| because of the discussion topics and the kind of person that
| typically enjoys these discussions. Staying away from
| mainstream politics, religion, etc. and focusing mainly on
| technological trivia means people of very different opinions
| can stay civilized discussing non-divisive topics.
|
| Also it helps that extremist and uncivilized opinions tend to
| be quickly suppressed by the community thanks to vote-
| supported tradition. I have been reading HN from very close
| to start (even though I have created the account much
| further). I think the first users were much more
| VC/development oriented and as new users were coming they
| tend to observe and conform to the tradition.
|
| (I red your piece. I think I figured it out. The users
| actually select themselves on HN though in a different way.
| The people who can't cope with diverse community can't find
| place for themselves, because there is no way to block
| diverse opinion, and in effect remove themselves from here
| and this is what allows HN to survive. The initial conditions
| were people who actually invited diverse opinion which
| allowed this equilibrium).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The thing is that HN is essentially run like singapore - a
| benign-seeming authoritarian dictatorship that shuts down
| conflicts early and is also relatively small and self-
| contained. One thing that doesn't get measured in this
| analysis is the number of people who leave because they find
| that this gives rise to a somewhat toxic environment, as
| malign actors can make hurtful remarks but complaints about
| them are often suppressed. Of course, it tends to average out
| over time and people of opposite political persuasions may
| both feel their views are somewhat suppressed, but this
| largely reactive approach is easily gamed as long as its done
| patiently.
| jeffdavis wrote:
| One of my theories about the success of HN is that we are
| grouped together based on one set of topics (on which we
| largely agree), but we discuss other topics over which we are
| just as divided as the general public.
|
| I believe there is an anchoring effect -- if you are just in
| a discussion where someone helps you understand the RISC-V
| memory model, it feels wrong to go into another thread on the
| same site and unload a string of epithets on someone who
| feels differently than you do about how doctors should get
| paid.
| tfandango wrote:
| This is why I like HN. I am always challenged with different
| points of view on here, and in a non-argumentative way. It's
| just a rational discussion. Often I will see something on FB
| or Twitter that is outrageous to me (by design), but when I
| look it up on HN and find some discussion on the details,
| truth is often more sane than it seems...
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| This isn't necessarily bad all the time. But when content is
| used to form opinions on real world things that actually
| Matter, it definitely becomes a problem.
|
| In other words, Steam, please filter games by my engagement in
| previous games I've played. News organizations, please don't
| filter news by my engagement in previous news.
|
| Facebook's problem is it acts in two worlds: keeping up with
| your friends, and learning important information. If all you
| did was keep up with your friends' lives, filtering content by
| engagement is kind of meh.
|
| Same with youtube. I mostly spend all my time on there watching
| technical talks and video game related stuff. It's pure
| entertainment. So filtering content is fine. But if I also used
| it to get my news, you start to run into problems.
| MrZander wrote:
| That is a really annoying issue I have with YouTube.
|
| I occasionally watch some of the Joe Rogan podcast videos when
| he has a guest I'm interested in. I swear, as soon as I watch
| one JRE video, I am suddenly inundated with suggestions for
| videos with really click-baity and highly politicized topics.
|
| I've actually gotten to the point where I actively avoid videos
| that I want to watch because I know what kind of a response
| YouTube will have. Either that or I open them in incognito
| mode. It's a shame. I wish I could just explicitly define my
| interests rather than YT trying to guess what I want to watch.
| lostmyoldone wrote:
| In the case of Facebook they absolutely do not try to please
| me. They quite literally tries to do the exact opposite of
| everything I would like from my feed.
|
| Chronological with the ability to easily filter who I see, and
| who I post to. On each point capabilities has either been
| removed, hidden, or made worse in some other creative way.
|
| Adding insult to injury, having to periodically figure out
| where they've now hidden the save button for events, or some
| other feature they don't want me to use is always a 'fun'
| exercise.
| bittercynic wrote:
| It doesn't address all of those, but if you visit
| https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions it looks like it's
| still just a reverse chronological list of videos from your
| subscriptions.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Cynically, very few platforms want you to make your own
| decisions.
| alittletooraph wrote:
| I agree with you but this is an incredibly hard problem to
| solve. How are you going to get your friend to engage with
| videos that are in direct opposition to her world views?
| Recommendations are based on what she actually clicks on, how
| long she actually watches the videos, etc.
|
| And from the business perspective, they're trying to reduce the
| likelihood that your friend abandons their platform and goes to
| another one that she feels is more "built for her".
| lmilcin wrote:
| A start would be to recognize that businesses are not allowed
| to exploit this aspect of human nature because the harm is
| too great to justify business opportunity.
| asdff wrote:
| We need to regulate this industry very badly
| jimbob45 wrote:
| It's easy to solve. FB gets to either be a platform for
| content or a curator for content. They can't be both because
| that would be a conflict of interest.
| sbarre wrote:
| Then what's the business model? Who pays for all of it?
|
| I'm not defending a specific approach or solution, but just
| pointing out that at this point, FB is a huge entrenched
| business that makes a lot of money on the status quo, and
| so convincing them to change "for the better" is barking up
| the wrong tree until "for the better" means "more
| profitable".
|
| Splitting the platform and curation means the platform
| needs a revenue stream. If the curator pays the platform,
| then all you're doing is shifting the conflict up a notch,
| not solving it.
| CivBase wrote:
| What really scares me is how many people I know who acknowledge
| that platforms like Facebook and YouTube are designed to create
| echo chambers which tend to distort people's opinions and
| perceptions towards extremes... but still actively engage with
| them without taking any precautions. They know it's bad for
| them, but they keep going back for more.
| scollet wrote:
| Having awareness probably means they can engage in a
| meaningful way. Some degree of maturity and critical thought
| are required to dam up invaluable media. It's something akin
| to junk food; junk media.
| LordFast wrote:
| Social media is an addictive substance and should be controlled.
| End of story.
| [deleted]
| vtail wrote:
| Disclaimer: I started working at FB recently.
|
| Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a
| discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many
| discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for
| each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to
| interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's
| tough to measure it accurately).
|
| One day, your brilliant data scientist trained a model that
| predicts which of the two Elbonian parties a user most likely
| support, as well as whether a comment/article discusses a
| political topic or not. Then a user researcher made a striking
| discovery: supporters of party A interact more strongly with
| posts about party B, and vice versa. A proposal is made to
| artificially reduce the prevalence of opposing party posts in
| someone's feed.
|
| Would you support this proposal as a PM? Why or why not?
| freeAgent wrote:
| That's beside the point, though. The point here is that
| Facebook executives were told by their own employees that the
| algorithms they designed were recommending more and more
| partisan content and de-prioritizing less partisan content
| because it wasn't as engaging. They were also told that this
| was potentially causing social issues. In response, Kaplan/FB
| executives said that changing the algorithm would be too
| paternalistic (ignoring, apparently, that an algorithm that
| silently filters without user knowledge or consent is already
| fundamentally "paternalistic"). Given that Facebook's objective
| is to "bring the world closer together", choosing to support an
| algorithm that drives engagement that actually causes division
| seems a betrayal of its stated goals.
| carapace wrote:
| You voluntarily put yourself in this position with no good way
| of fixing it. No one's _forcing_ Facebook to do what they (and
| now you) do, eh?
|
| My perception of reality is that you and your brilliant data
| scientist are (at best naive and unsuspecting) patronizing
| arrogant jerks who have no business making these decisions for
| your users.
|
| You captured these peasants' minds, now you've got a tiger by
| the tail. The obvious thing to do is let go of the tiger and
| run like hell.
| ForrestN wrote:
| I would take a step back and question the criteria we are using
| to make decisions. "Engagement" in this context is euphemistic.
| This startup is talking about applying engineering to influence
| human behavior in order to make people use their product more,
| presumably because their monetization strategy sells that
| attention or the data generated by it.
|
| If I were the PM I'd suggest a change in business model to
| something that aligns the best interests of users with the best
| interests of the company.
|
| I'd stop measuring "engagement" or algorithmically favoring
| posts that people interact with more. I'd have a conversation
| with my users about what they want to get out of the platform
| that lasts longer than the split second decision to click one
| thing and not another. And I'd prepare to spend massive
| resources on moderation to ensure that my users aren't being
| manipulated by others now that my company has stopped
| manipulating them.
|
| I think the issues of showing content from one side of a
| political divide or the other is much less important than
| showing material from trustworthy sources. The deeper issue,
| which is a very hard problem to solve, is dealing with the
| fundamental asymmetries that come up in political discourse. In
| the US, if you were to block misinformation and propaganda
| you'd disproportionately be blocking right wing material. How
| do you convince users to value truth and integrity even if
| their political leaders don't, and how do you as a platform
| value them even if that means some audiences will reject you?
|
| I don't know how to answer those questions but they do start to
| imply that maybe "news + commenting as a place to spend lots of
| time" isn't the best place to expend energy if you're trying to
| make things better?
| pacala wrote:
| Predicting political preferences is a huge can of worms. Don't
| do it. Have the data scientist delete their model.
| [deleted]
| vtail wrote:
| They did as you say (you are a PM, after all!), and next week
| they rolled out the "likelihood of engagement" model. An
| independent analysis by another team member, familiar with
| the old model, confirmed that it was still mostly driven by
| politics (there is nothing much going on in Elbonia, besides
| politics), but politics was neither the direct objective not
| an explicit factor in the model.
|
| The observed behavior is the same: using the new model, most
| people are still shown highly polarized posts, as indicated
| by subjective assessment of user research professionals.
|
| What should you do now?
| lostmyoldone wrote:
| In regards to a predictive model and privacy/ethics/etc,
| regardless of your objective function and explicit
| parameters a model can only be judged on what it actually
| predicts, thus it is enough to answer the prior question to
| be able to answer this.
|
| This is because of the fact that machine learning models
| are prone to learn quite different things than the
| objective function intended, hence the introduction of
| different intent or structure of the model must be
| disregarded when analysing the results.
|
| To any degree the models predict similarly, they must be
| regarded as similar, but perhaps in a roundabout way.
| pacala wrote:
| I come to grips with:
|
| * The 'engagement' metric leads to toxic outcomes no mater
| what.
|
| * The upper management / board is single mindedly obsessed
| with 'engagement', as a proxy for making money.
|
| * I cannot function in an environment where my personal
| ethics is in direct conflict with the company focus.
|
| Therefore I quit. YMMV.
| dd36 wrote:
| We used newsgroups and message boards long before Facebook.
| They weren't as toxic, I'm assuming due to active
| moderation. The automated or passive or slow moderation is
| perhaps the issue.
| asdff wrote:
| Newsgroups and message boards users of old probably
| aren't very representative of the populations using
| Facebook today.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I think they weren't as toxic because content creators
| didn't realize divisive content drives much more
| engagement. It's not about moderation, it's a paradigm
| shift in the way content is created.
| dkn775 wrote:
| Agreed, as a general rule I shy away from predicting things I
| wouldn't claim expertise in otherwise. This is why consulting
| with subject matter experts is important. Things as innocuous
| as traffic crashes and speeding tickets are a huge world
| unbeknownst to the casual analyst (the field of "Traffic
| Records")
| drchopchop wrote:
| No. Why should the only desirable metric be user engagement?
|
| Is the goal of FB engagement/virality/time-on-site/revenue
| above all else? What does society have to gain, long term, by
| ranking a news feed by items most likely to provoke the
| strongest reaction? How does Facebook's long-term health look,
| 10 years from now, if it hastens the polarization and anti-
| intellectualism of society?
| maest wrote:
| > How does Facebook's long-term health look, 10 years from
| now, if it hastens the polarization and anti-intellectualism
| of society?
|
| Arguably, the PM doesn't care since they have short term
| targets the want to hit and they might not even be with the
| company in a few years' time.
| cj wrote:
| > Is the goal of FB engagement/virality/time-on-site/revenue
| above all else?
|
| Strictly speaking, Facebook is a public company that exists
| only to serve its shareholder's interests. The goal of
| Facebook (as a public company) is to increase stock price.
| That almost often, if not always, means prioritizing revenue
| over all else.
|
| That's the dilemma.
|
| Then again, I believe Mark has control of the board, right?
| (And therefore couldn't be ousted for prioritizing ethical
| business practices over revenue - I could be wrong about
| this)
| freeflight wrote:
| _> Strictly speaking, Facebook is a public company that
| exists only to serve its shareholder 's interests._
|
| That's a very US-centric interpretation, which fits because
| Facebook is a US company.
|
| But it's still reductive to the issue considering how
| Facebook's reach is also far and wide outside the US.
|
| In that context, it's not really that much of an unsolvable
| dilemma, it only appears as such when the notion of
| "shareholder gains above all else" is considered some kind
| of "holy grail thu shall never challenge".
| jointpdf wrote:
| No. To me, all recommendation engines should be:
|
| - _User-configurable and interpretable_ : Enable tuning or re-
| ranking of results, ideally based on the ability to reweight
| model internals in a "fuzzy" way. As an example, see the last
| comment in my history about using convolutional filters on song
| spectrograms to distill hundreds of latent auditory features
| (e.g. Chinese, vocal triads, deep-housey). Imagine being able
| to directly recombine these features, generating a new set of
| recommendations dynamically. Almost all recommendation engines
| fail in this regard--the model feeds the user exactly what the
| model (designer) wants, no more and no less.
|
| - _Encourage serendipity_ : i.e. purposefully select and
| recommend items that the model "thinks" is outside the user's
| wheelhouse (wheelhouse = whatever naturally emerging cluster(s)
| in the data that the user hangs out in, so pluck out examples
| from both nearby and distant clusters). This not only helps
| users break out of local minima, but is healthy for the data
| feedback loop.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I'd just suggest the data scientist was optimizing the wrong
| metrics. People might behave that way, but having frequent
| political arguments is a reason people stop using Facebook
| entirely. It's definitely one of the more common reason people
| unfollow friends.
|
| Very high levels of engagement seems to be a negative indicator
| for social sites. You don't want your users staying up to 2AM
| having arguments on your platform.
| laughinghan wrote:
| If you restrict yourself to 2 bad choices, then you can only
| make bad choices. It doesn't help to label one of them
| "artificial" and imply the other choice isn't artificial.
|
| It is, in fact, not just crude but actually quite _artificial_
| to measure likelihood to interact as a single number, and
| personalize the list of discussions solely or primarily based
| on that single number.
|
| Since your chosen crude and artificial indication turned out to
| be harmful, why double-down on it? Why not seek something
| better? Off the top of my head, potential avenues of
| exploration:
|
| * different kinds of interaction are weighted differently. Some
| could be weighted negatively (e.g. angry reacts)
|
| * [More Like This] / [Fewer Like This] buttons that aren't
| hidden in the [?] menu
|
| * instead of emoji reactions, reactions with explicit editorial
| meaning, e.g. [Agree] [Heartwearming] [Funny] [Adds to
| discussion] [Disagree] [Abusive] [Inaccurate] [Doesn't
| contribute] (this is actually pretty much what Ars Technica's
| comment system does, but it's an optional second step after up-
| or down-voting. What if one of these were the only way to up-
| or down-vote?)
|
| * instead of trying to auto-detect party affiliation, use
| sentiment analysis to try to detect the tone and toxicity of
| the conversation. These could be used to adjusts the weights on
| different kind of interactions, maybe some people share
| divisive things privately but share pleasant things publicly.
| (This seems a little paternalistic, but no more so than
| "artificially" penalizing opposing party affiliation)
|
| * certain kinds of shares could require or encourage
| editorializing reactions ([Funny] [Thoughtful] [Look at this
| idiot])
|
| * Facebook conducted surveys that determined that Upworthy-
| style clickbait sucked, in spite of high engagement, right?
| Surveys like that could be a regular mechanism to determine
| weights on interaction types and content classifiers and
| sentiment analysis. This wouldn't be paternalistic, you
| wouldn't be deciding for people, they'd be deciding for
| themselves
| Osiris wrote:
| I miss the days when my feed wasn't curated at all and just
| sorted by most recent post.
|
| The whole point of having friends and being able to (un)follow
| people is to I can curate my own feed.
|
| I don't use Facebook anymore except for hobby related groups
| like my motorcycling group.
| freeAgent wrote:
| Same. I miss the days of the chronological feed. Facebook's
| algorithms seem to choose a handful of people and groups I'm
| connected to and constantly show me their content and nothing
| else. It's always illuminating when I look someone up after
| wondering what happened to them only to see that they've been
| keeping up with Facebook, but I just don't see any of their
| posts.
| tfandango wrote:
| yesterday, in fact, I saw a post from a family member that
| I really wanted to read, I started but was interrupted.
| When I had a chance to focus again, I re-opened the FB app
| and the post was nowhere to be seen, scrolled up, scrolled
| down, it was gone. I had to search for my family member to
| find it again. Super frustrating, and makes you wonder what
| FB decided you didn't need to see (which I guess is the
| point of this whole thread)...
| ggggtez wrote:
| This is a false choice. The real problem stems from the fact
| that the model rewards engagement at the cost of everything
| else.
|
| Just tweaking one knob doesn't solve the problem. A real
| solution is required, that would likely change the core
| business model, and so no single PM would have the authority to
| actually fix it.
|
| Fake news and polarization are two sides of the same coin.
| seek3r00 wrote:
| No, it would not be my job to decide which discussions should a
| user be driven to.
|
| If a user is driven to political discussions, so be it.
|
| Sure, this is good for the company because it means the user
| will spend more time on the platform, but it is a side effect
| really.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> No, it would not be my job to decide which discussions
| should a user be driven to.
|
| But facebook feels it's their job to drive certain thing to
| users. That's the whole point as far as they can tell. I
| disagree too.
| fach wrote:
| I would think engagement would be a core metric you would be
| measured against in this example. And if that's the case,
| this certainly isn't a side effect.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| As a PM, I'd support it as an A/B test. Show some percentage of
| your users an increased level of posts from the opposite party,
| some others an increased level of posts from their own party,
| and leave the remaining 90% alone. After running that for a
| month or two, see which of those groups is doing better.
|
| They've clearly got something interesting and possibly
| important, but 'interaction strength' is not intrinsically good
| or bad. I would instead ask the researcher to pivot from a
| metric of "interaction strength" to something more closely
| aligned to the value the user derives from their use of your
| product. (Side note: Hopefully, use of your product adds value
| for your users. If your users are better off the less they use
| their platform, that's a serious problem).
|
| Do people interacting with posts from the opposite party come
| away more empathetic and enlightened? If they are predominantly
| shown posts from their own party, does an echo chamber develop
| where they become increasingly radicalized? Does frequent
| exposure to viewpoints they disagree with make people
| depressed? They'll eventually become aware outside of the
| discussion board of what the opposite party is doing, does
| early exposure to those posts make them more accepting, or does
| it make them angry and surprised? Perhaps people become
| fatigued after writing a couple angry diatribes (or the
| original poster becomes depressed after reading that angry
| diatribe) and people quit your platform.
|
| Unfortunately, checking interaction strength through comment
| word counts is easy, while sentiment analysis is really hard.
| Whether doing in-person psych evals or broadly analyzing the
| users' activity feed for life successes or for depression,
| you'll have tons of noise, because very little of those effects
| will come from your discussion board. Fortunately, your
| brilliant data scientist is brilliant, and after your A/B test,
| has tons of data to work with.
| smhinsey wrote:
| This is why the liberal arts are important, because you need
| someone in the room with enough knowledge of the world's
| history to be able to look at this and suggest that maybe given
| the terrible history of pseudo-scientifically sorting people
| into political categories, you should not pursue this tactic
| simply in order to make a buck off of it.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| You don't need liberal arts majors in the boardroom, you need
| a military general in charge at the FTC and FCC.
|
| Can we dispense with the idea that someone employed by
| facebook regardless of their number of history degrees has
| any damn influence on the structural issue here, which is
| that Facebook is a private company whose purpose is to
| mindlessly make as much money for their owners as they can?
|
| The solution here isn't grabbing Mark and sitting him down in
| counselling, it's to have the sovereign, which is the US
| government exercise its authority which it has forgotten how
| to use apparently and reign these companies in.
| majewsky wrote:
| "Thank you for consulting us so extensively. After long
| deliberation, we've decided to move ahead with the
| implementation to meet Q4 targets."
| 1propionyl wrote:
| Agreed. Engineers have an ethical duty to the public. When
| working on software systems that touch on so many facets of
| people's lives, a thorough education in history, philosophy,
| and culture is necessary to make ethical engineering
| decisions. Or, failing that, the willingness to defer to
| those who do have that breadth of knowledge and expertise.
|
| I'm reminded of this article:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/progr.
| ..
|
| "The term is probably a shortening of "software engineer,"
| but its use betrays a secret: "Engineer" is an aspirational
| title in software development. Traditional engineers are
| regulated, certified, and subject to apprenticeship and
| continuing education. Engineering claims an explicit
| responsibility to public safety and reliability, even if it
| doesn't always deliver.
|
| The title "engineer" is cheapened by the tech industry."
|
| "Engineers bear a burden to the public, and their specific
| expertise as designers and builders of bridges or buildings--
| or software--emanates from that responsibility. Only after
| answering this calling does an engineer build anything,
| whether bridges or buildings or software."
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Related, earlier this week on the New Books Network
|
| Cailin O'Connor, "The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs
| Spread" (Yale UP, 2018)
|
| (New Books in Journalism) Duration: 40:00
|
| Published: Wed, 20 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000
|
| Media: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1956686397.mp3 (audio)
|
| Podcast: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/425693571
|
| Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do
| demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even
| fatal, consequences for the people who hold them?
|
| Author page: http://cailinoconnor.com/the-misinformation-age/
|
| Editor's book site:
| https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300234015/misinformation...
|
| Worldcat: https://www.worldcat.org/title/misinformation-age-how-
| false-...
| save_ferris wrote:
| Zuckerberg's invincibility as CEO is nothing short of one of the
| greatest failures of modern capitalism. It's simply astounding
| that such a terrible leader has retained control of what is
| clearly a company out of control. And the market accepts all of
| it while individuals constantly criticize his and Facebook's
| actions.
|
| People always throw around "well stop using Facebook" but that
| clearly isn't a reasonable solution from a scalability
| standpoint. What percentage of those people also hold Facebook
| stock, either directly or through a hedge fund, ETF, etc.? It
| could be more than we think.
|
| At the end of the day, profits don't care about people, and this
| is the consequence we all have to live with.
| [deleted]
| 12xo wrote:
| Attention is the currency of media. Sensationalism is the fuel.
| visarga wrote:
| Very nice two phrases ... I can imagine the rest...
| m12k wrote:
| One man's division is another man's engagement
| ccktlmazeltov wrote:
| flagged because it's behind a paywall
| Fiveplus wrote:
| This entire thread, discussion and the article in focus make me
| so relieved. I'm so proud of my decision to facebook, twitter and
| reddit altogether. There is soooo much less noise in my life. I'm
| finally reading books, enjoying my hobbies while still getting
| what 'I' like from the internet - RSS feeds to give me the latest
| and most popular developments in news without any user generated
| comments. 1-on-1 messaging services to help me stay connected
| with my loved and dear ones and an occasional tour of websites
| like HN and my favorite blogs from the bookmark folder. I do not
| want the reader to assume my model is perfect, it's subjective.
| But that's the point - it is what I make out to be the perfect
| browsing model and intended use-case of internet to me. Another
| minor point, ever since I moved away from reading what 'people'
| have to say in comments, it de cluttered my mind.
|
| The internet is what you make of it. I let it direct how I used
| it, and getting myself away from that grip and 'sucked into'
| environment is a blessing.
| dghughes wrote:
| I wonder what would happen if Facebook and Twitter were shutdown
| for 30 days.
| alzaeem wrote:
| The outrage towards Facebook causing divisiveness is a red
| herring. You want to see divisive content, go to foxnews vs cnn.
| Pretty much the entire media is partisan and biased towards their
| constituents' points of view. For Facebook, it would be nice if
| they stick to showing whatever is posted by a user's friends or
| organizations they like/follow without much curation, but my view
| is that their impact on divisiveness overall is miniscule
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| Everybody who uses Facebook should spend about ten minutes on it.
| Catch up with the important things friends are doing and leave.
|
| Unfortunately, this behavior is not in Facebook's best interest.
| For them, it's Facebook now, Facebook later, Facebook as far as
| the eye can see. Everything is Facebook.
|
| There is a premise to this article that needs to be called out
| and expunged. I have come to the sad conclusion that Facebook is
| a company that should not exist. It's laying waste to huge
| sections of the economy that used to provide valuable,
| informative content, it's in a battle to suck your entire day
| away from you with streaming and other services, and it's premise
| is in direct contradiction to how we know societies evolve. You
| can't start with "how do we fix it" and end up anywhere good.
|
| They're not dummies. There might be a lot of happy-talk, echo
| chamber discussions happening inside the company, but they know
| the score. That's why they're picking political winners and
| losers. I imagine there's a ton of money heading out to both
| parties to provide cover over the next few election cycles.
|
| I think looking back, if we manage to navigate our way through
| this period, it's going to be viewed as a very sad and dark time,
| much like the dark ages. I sincerely hope I am completely wrong
| about all of this.
| munificent wrote:
| A few years back, there was a documentary called "The
| Brainwashing of My Dad" about how Fox News and conservative radio
| turned a relatively non-political Democrat into an angry, active
| Republican.
|
| In the past couple of years, I witnessed the same thing happen to
| my mother, except driven almost entirely by Facebook and its non-
| stop parade of right-wing pro-Trump racist memes.
| renewiltord wrote:
| People always blame Facebook when the existence of Internet
| forums has always led to radicalization of individuals.
| Facebook's crime is making forums accessible to all.
|
| These are just your fellow people. This is how they are in the
| situation that they're in. So be it. Let them speak to others
| like them.
|
| The cost of that is many angry people. The benefit of that is
| that folks like me can find my people. That benefit outweighs the
| cost.
|
| This is just the price of the open society.
| chongli wrote:
| _People always blame Facebook when the existence of Internet
| forums has always led to radicalization of individuals.
| Facebook 's crime is making forums accessible to all._
|
| If it were only that, I would have a hard time assigning blame
| to Facebook. However, it is not only that. Facebook exercises
| editorial control through its recommendation engine. Users
| don't see all posts in chronological order. They see posts
| ranked by Facebook based on invisible and inscrutable
| algorithms that are optimized for engagement.
|
| It just so happens that making people angry is an effective way
| to keep them engaged in your platform. Thus it's not fair to
| call Facebook a neutral party if they're actively foregrounding
| divisive content in order to increase engagement.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to this position. I've heard people say the
| same about YouTube and I don't have a concrete position on
| this.
|
| On one hand, if someone were to tell me "The Mexicans are
| ruining America" and I were to say "Damned right! Who else do
| you know who says these great and grand truths about
| America?" I would expect that person to introduce me to more
| people like them and my radicalization and engagement would
| increase out of my own desire to have more of this thing.
| That aspect of Facebook's recommendation engine just seems
| like a simulation of a request for more like what I want in a
| very obedient manner. That is, the tool is actually
| fulfilling what I am expressing I desire.
|
| On the other hand, the inputs are inscrutable and not clearly
| editable. For instance, suppose I look at myself and say "God
| damn it, some of these things I'm saying are really bigoted.
| I don't want to be like this", I cannot actually self-modify
| because there is no mechanism on Facebook to modify the
| inputs. It'll select for me the content I have these auto-
| preferences for but not the ones I have higher order
| preferences for.
|
| Essentially it's a fridge that always has cake even though I
| want to lose weight.
|
| So, yeah, I'm sympathetic that I cannot alter the weights on
| my recommendation and say "I want to clear your understanding
| of the person I want to be. Stop reinforcing the one I am
| now."
|
| Certainly the recommendation engine is a flaw. I do _like_
| recommendations though and that 's my favourite way of
| browsing YouTube in the background. It's pretty good at music
| discovery. So, perhaps it needs to be only opt-in. Imposed by
| choice rather than by default. It still has to be possible to
| turn it off.
|
| Even then, I'm not sure. This is an ethical question I've
| been thinking about for ages: Is it ethical to allow someone
| to make a choice that could be detrimental and that they
| cannot recover from? What are the parameters around when it
| is ethical? Opting in to recommendations could be a one way
| trap.
| ergl wrote:
| > The cost of that is many angry people. The benefit of that is
| that folks like me can find my people. That benefit outweighs
| the cost.
|
| It outweighs the cost for you. It certainly doesn't for society
| at large.
| asdff wrote:
| The difference is that facebook is unlike a forum. It's not
| actively moderated, and content is bumped according to
| engagement/marketing potential rather than chronologically by
| genuine user interest alone.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Pages are moderated by their creators and you can unfriend
| someone you don't want to see posts from.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Can I get Facebook to show me _all_ posts from someone or
| is that still not possible?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > This is just the price of the open society.
|
| I don't think an open society can be built on top of an
| advertising platform. Facebook is not a neutral party here -
| they control who sees what content at what time with little
| accountability or transparency.
| bookmarkable wrote:
| Perhaps important journalism, but it is behind a paywall, so
| apparently WSJ is satisfied that only their subscribers know this
| information about Facebook.
|
| Meanwhile, Facebook is not behind a paywall, so they can monitor
| the conversations of billions of people despite monthly stories
| that circulate illustrating gross misconduct.
| donohoe wrote:
| Do you work at Facebook? This is reprehensible.
| In essence, Facebook is under fire for making the world
| more divided. Many of its own experts appeared to agree--
| and to believe Facebook could mitigate many of the
| problems. The company chose not to.
|
| Unless you are actively pushing to change it from the inside, you
| should leave now. Take a reasonable amount of time to find a new
| job and leave.
|
| Otherwise you're complicit.
| [deleted]
| neycoda wrote:
| The sad fact is that people choose flavorful news over verifiable
| facts.
| shaan1 wrote:
| There are more than 1.5 billion users on Facebook. If they are
| not worried, and want to be misused, why the hell are others so
| hell bent on bringing down Facebook lol.
|
| If the users really cared, we wouldn't be having this talk.
|
| Also this is the media wanting to bring down the enemy.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Its a new societal urge: the addiction to feeling righteous
| indignance. Endorphin rush, available to anybody with a keyboard.
| Gonna be hard to put that genie back into the bottle.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Facebook and other similar systems reward engagement. Engagement
| happens when people are surprised. Surprise happens when people
| come across new apparent "information". New information is most
| easily propagated through the use of lies.
|
| It follows pretty clearly. If they don't want divisiveness, they
| have to either step away from rewarding engagement, or they have
| to stop people from lying. They're in a bind, except it's society
| that is bearing the cost.
| sneak wrote:
| Do we ask or expect the same of the phone or cable companies?
|
| Why the agenda to (further) censor Facebook and similar?
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Note the voting on your questions as opposed to the engagement
| of the discourse you've started. There are a percentage of
| users who don't like you asking these questions and a
| percentage of them who want to understand what these questions
| mean.
|
| Phone and cable companies do not create polarization because
| they carry ALL data (usually). Services like Facebook, Twitter
| and HN all provide the _ability_ to modify the content, in
| place. This is done with automation (code) and we can expect
| that automation to become more aware moving forward (AI).
|
| This ability to modify content in place by the companies
| produces revenue at the same time it creates the _ability_ for
| some types of divisiveness to form. Humans are divisive, under
| certain conditions, and there isn 't much that can be done
| about it other than education about how to stop being divisive.
|
| Education becomes impossible when the entities controlling the
| channels do so in a way that prevent users changing what type
| of content they see (such as education about how to avoid
| divisiveness), maybe due to the fact it kills revenue.
|
| Worse, the more choice you give users (free, decentralized
| internet anyone?), the more some users will choose to introduce
| behaviors that give way to divisiveness in a given group.
| Trolls using imagery to build propaganda filled stories.
|
| Trolls have taken over the Republican party, if nobody has
| figured this out by now. Note how they use strong imagery to
| glue their never-ending stories together.
|
| It's a no-win situation. The best thing to do is simply walk
| away from it or maybe build a personal search engine AI crawler
| thing that works for just you and only you.
|
| "Here's your content, Boss." "Thanks, Sidekick!"
| smacktoward wrote:
| Phone and cable companies are _extensively_ regulated.
| bitcurious wrote:
| If you mean that Facebook should be regulated as a utility, by
| all means make that argument - I think you'll find broad
| support.
|
| As it is, Facebook is constantly making editorial decisions in
| terms of what content is shown (which posts, in what order,
| with what presentation). Their own research had found that some
| of those editorial decisions have externalities in the form of
| increasing social conflict. Rather than take steps to address
| it, or even research this question more, they wiped their hands
| of it.
| dorkinspace wrote:
| > If you mean that Facebook should be regulated as a utility,
| by all means make that argument - I think you'll find broad
| support.
|
| In this case, would Facebook become compulsory for American
| citizens?
| [deleted]
| rb808 wrote:
| Agreed, if you look at cable news channels these day its all
| about division and fighting.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Phone companies don't set up incentive structures that
| encourage a certain kind of content. Facebook has an
| "algorithmic" feed, likes, and "engagement" metrics that
| rewards certain behaviours and punish others. They are rightly
| being pilloried when these incentives encourage and promote
| constant outrage, conspiracies, and completely fact-free fear
| mongering.
| dleslie wrote:
| This is a thought-provoking answer, and it shows how Facebook
| (and others) are straddling the line between publisher and
| platform.
|
| IMHO, because they do perform curation, both algorithmic and
| manual, they should be considered publishers.
| sneak wrote:
| Seems to me that their argument against censorship should
| be even stronger, then, as editorializing is protected
| expression.
| catalogia wrote:
| > _Phone companies don 't set up incentive structures that
| encourage a certain kind of content._
|
| I'm not convinced of that. Through technical and billing
| means, phones encourage one-on-one conversations while
| discouraging conversations with multiple participants. By
| disincentivizing certain kinds of conversations, they
| disincentivize certain kinds of content. It's hard to say
| exactly what sort of impact this may have on society, but I
| doubt it doesn't have any.
|
| This may be a far cry from Facebook's deliberate algorithmic
| tweaking to manipulate the emotions of their users, but I
| think it's interesting to consider in it's own right.
| tobib wrote:
| My guess is it's because phone or cable companies don't apply
| comparable measures, at least not that I know of. Targeted
| content for example.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| Anyone know a good paywall workaround for wsj?
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Full page screen capture plugin on Chrome plus a community that
| posts to a IPFS node and updates some decentralized search
| thing to be able to find it?
| redorb wrote:
| I've asked the question - what if FB went for bartender rules? No
| politics no religion... sometimes I feel like those are 65% of
| the content.
| contemporary343 wrote:
| Every platform ultimately makes choices in how users engage with
| it, whether that goal is to drive up engagement, ad revenues or
| whatever metric is relevant to them. My general read is that
| Facebook tries to message that they're "neutral" arbiters and
| passive observers of whatever happens on their platform. But they
| aren't, certainly not in effect, and possibly in intent either.
| To preserve existing algorithms is not by definition fair and
| neutral!
|
| And in this instance, choosing not to respond to what its
| internal researchers found is, ultimately, a choice they've made.
| In theory, it's on us as users and consumers to vote with our
| attention and time spent. But given the society-wide effects of a
| platform that a large chunk of humanity uses, it's not clear to
| me that these are merely private choices; these private choices
| by FB executives affect the commonweal.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's pretty laughable for Facebook to claim they're neutral
| when they performed and published[1] research about how
| tweaking their algorithm can affect the mood of their users.
|
| [1]
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
| 1propionyl wrote:
| Even if they hadn't done that, it would still be a laughable
| claim prima facie.
|
| There's something of an analogue to the observer effect: that
| the mere observation of a phenomenon changes the phenomenon.
|
| Facebook can be viewed as an instrument for observing the
| world around us. But it is one that, through being used by
| millions of people and
| personalizing/ranking/filtering/aggregating, affects change
| on the world.
|
| Or to be a little more precise, it structures the way that
| its users affect the world. Which is something of a
| distinction without much difference, consequentially.
| pm90 wrote:
| If the private platform is de facto the primary source of news
| for the majority of the population, this affects the public in
| incredible ways. I don't understand how the US Congress does
| not recognize and regulate this.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
| his [campaign fundraising] depends on his not understanding
| it." - Upton Sinclair (lightly adapted)
| kingkawn wrote:
| The implications of being correct are in for a few tweaks
| ggggtez wrote:
| >Another concern, they and others said, was that some proposed
| changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users
| and publishers, at a time when the company faced accusations from
| the right of political bias.
|
| This is the same thing they were worried about in the lead up to
| the 2016 election when they fired their newsroom for not
| promoting pizzagate and other conspiracies that would be deemed
| as "biased" against conservatives. And they clearly still haven't
| learned anything about why letting engagement algorithms run wild
| is bad for society.
| [deleted]
| beepboopbeep wrote:
| This is why twitter and facebook don't have dislike buttons. By
| removing a quick and easy way of voicing dissent to a point,
| people take to the comments to verbally punish others. For a site
| that is dependent on user engagement,
| anger/outrage/frustration/negativity in general is a gold mine. I
| remember when reddit tried removing the down vote button the
| comments got NASTY. They back-peddled very quickly from that
| decision.
| kisna72 wrote:
| I don't understand why this is a surprise to anyone lol
| kgin wrote:
| There's a difference between suspicion and confirmation
| dafty4 wrote:
| If there is an effort to broker civil and constructive debate,
| isn't division fine?
| noizejoy wrote:
| As once said by Billie Eilish "duh"!
|
| More seriously: Arms dealers are not exactly benefitting from
| facilitating peace making efforts either, so economically this
| makes all the sense in the world to me.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Reddit has the same issues of division and does not do anything
| as a company to sort people. It all comes down to the individuals
| themselves.
|
| Is division really all that new or can we just see it more now?
| thrwn_frthr_awy wrote:
| > Is division really all that new or can we just see it more
| now?
|
| In the article Facebook themselves say measured the increase
| and knew they caused it with their algorithms.
| newacct583 wrote:
| It's a little different. Reddit doesn't choose the content
| presented to users, they allow the community to self-sort into
| community-managed subreddits with their own cultures and
| preferences and voting behavior. In fact reddit only barely
| exerts any control over the selection of subreddit moderators
| (mostly stepping in only to resolve things in extremis).
|
| Facebook's algorithms decide on __everything __in your feed. If
| you aren 't interested in politics on reddit you might never
| see it at all. If Facebook thinks you might be a republican
| (and often that's just a demographic thing coupled with a few
| past clicks on political stories), they will _literally fill
| your screen_ with paid advertising designed to drive your
| political preferences.
|
| The point is that division is visible on Reddit (and
| everywhere), but _driven and encouraged_ by Facebook. And that
| these are different phenomena. I 'm not completely sure I
| agree, but the point isn't as simple as "division exists".
| trekrich wrote:
| they don't want the narrative changing from extreme left to
| center.
| kolbe wrote:
| Funny. I'm sure the Wall Street Journal knows the same thing, but
| reaps profits from it as well.
| im3w1l wrote:
| What can you realistically do? The alternatives as I see it are,
| Riling people up (showing different opinions) Echo-
| chambers (showing same opinion) Sweeping issues under the
| rug (showing neither)
| arbuge wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
| salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
| mmlnkb wrote:
| beser hacker ever
| mmlnkb wrote:
| ,lmlknm
|
| / ,'.mn.?' ml,
|
| //. .'.lm' /
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Nationalize Facebook.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| People are reflexively downvoting you, but actual discussion
| would be nice.
|
| After all, the postal service is in the constitution, so this
| country started with an essential communication service
| nationalized from the outset.
|
| What if Facebook was government funded and supported in the
| same manner, instead of privately advertiser-funded?
| wtfno009887466 wrote:
| ROFL, who's the worse privacy violator, Facebook or the NSA
| ouid wrote:
| Facebook. With absolute certainty.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| NSA's a black box whose sole purpose is the aggregation and
| analysis of any information with potential relevance to US
| national security. It has the capacity to compel or
| infiltrate companies like Facebook to make them cooperate
| with its goals, and data sharing agreements with multiple
| nations. Privacy violation isn't a side-effect of its
| business model, it's its raison d'etre.
|
| I wouldn't dismiss NSA so offhandedly along this metric,
| even if it's ostensibly more constrained along legal
| boundaries.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| why pretend, just roll it all into one
| jimmaswell wrote:
| They decided against paternalistic meddling and let discourse
| happen naturally? That sounds best to me. I don't want Facebook
| to be a school teacher hovering over a lunch table to make sure
| nobody swears. People posting "divisive" content is far
| preferable to the alternative.
| [deleted]
| lostmyoldone wrote:
| It's not people posting divisive content that is the big
| problem, the big problem is divisive content getting all the
| eyeballs, causing people to (due to completely normal human
| psychology) to believe everyone either are completely against
| them, or completely with them, and nothing in between.
|
| Even disregarding anything but mental and physical health, the
| consequences are significant and quite real.
|
| No, they don't need to become the gatekeeper of all "bad
| things"(tm) the same way they protect us from accidentally
| gazing at a terrifying nipple, that would be preposterous, but
| they could probably try a little harder to not act completely
| opposite to their users best interest as often as they do.
|
| Especially when that happens to be a significant fraction of
| all the people on earth, that's probably not too big of an ask?
| banads wrote:
| If FB wanted to "let discourse happen naturally" and not be
| paternalistic, they wouldn't use an opaque, non-chronological
| algorithm to control who gets to see what in such a way that
| primarily benefits FB's bottom line.
|
| What is this alternative you speak of?
| quotemstr wrote:
| Optimizing for engagement does not favor any particular
| viewpoint. The authors of this article are incensed that
| Facebook doesn't engage in more _viewpoint-based_ adjustment
| of the conversation. Favoring or disfavoring a post based on
| the viewpoint it expresses is very different from optimizing
| an algorithm to give a user more of what he wants, whatever
| that is.
| skosch wrote:
| That's a misunderstanding of the problem.
|
| Optimizing for engagement tends to favour _extreme,
| simplistic,_ and _highly emotional_ viewpoints. In other
| words, it caters to human nature. This tendency is harmful
| to rational discourse, regardless of whether or not you
| happen to agree with any given viewpoint.
| JackFr wrote:
| I simply cannot understand the motivation of people who seemingly
| want to be made angry.
|
| I've had friends tell me I'm just buying my head in the sand, but
| I don't think I am. I'm trying my best not to be manipulated into
| a worse emotional state. I don't go on Facebook anymore because I
| realize that objectively time spent on Facebook made me less
| happy.
| mwfunk wrote:
| It just feels like weaponized Usenet from the mid-'90s, or almost
| every popular online forum since then. Multiplayer game
| communities even. They're like tinderboxes for negativity. Very
| small numbers of bad faith actors (griefers, trolls, scammers,
| spammers, or just plain assholes) can trivially derail entire
| communities. Even without people trying to screw everything up,
| plain old human nature, and the nature of electronic
| communications, can make it happen as well. It just takes a
| little longer.
|
| Put another way, each flame begets one or more flames, whereas
| each good comment might get responses but maybe it stands on its
| own. Over time the signal to noise ratio of any forum tends to
| degrade to nothing as the forum becomes more popular because of
| this. Moderation, scoring systems, etc. can ameliorate this but
| in general the less specialized the forum, the worse it is. It's
| like entropy in that it only goes in one direction, it's just a
| matter of time and how much you can push back on it. Bad comments
| beget more bad comments, but good comments don't necessarily
| beget more good comments. And at some point, the ratio of bad
| comments to good comments drives away any potential good
| commenters and the event horizon is crossed and the forum dies.
| Or it lives on as a cesspool for whatever.
|
| The difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs
| comp.os.linux (or whatever) in 1995 is that it's not specialists
| screaming at each other about which distro or programming
| language or OSS license is best (or worst). It's a much wider net
| of far less informed or rational people, encouraged to argue
| about infinitely dumber and less knowable or debatable stuff.
| It's like scammy clickbait, but for arguments rather than clicks.
| The other difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs
| online communities of the past is that Facebook and Twitter make
| money off of it. All this BS fuels "engagement" and keeps larger
| volumes of people posting and therefore revealing themselves to
| trackers and creating a stream of ad views for the platform
| owners. At some point I do think the toxicity of the platforms
| will start costing them users, but that doesn't seem to be
| happening anytime soon.
| geori wrote:
| So Neal Stephenson wrote a book about this - at least the good
| half of the book -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell
|
| It's 20 years in the future where facebook and similar services
| are much, much worse. Wealthy people pay for editors to remove
| misinformation from their feeds. And the country gets bifurcated
| with coastal elites having access to editors and flyover country
| ("Ameristan") has turned into a conspiracy plagued wasteland.
| LogicRiver wrote:
| Facebook thrives on being able to create divides and bias among
| its users, good or bad.
| rdxm wrote:
| said it before, will say it again. FB is a cancer on our society
| and species (moreover social media is the same in this
| dimension). Will end up being the cigarettes/smoking of these
| generations.
|
| I feel sorry for my children growing up with this disastrous
| influence in their lives.
| iamspoilt wrote:
| Link without paywall: http://archive.vn/YQeJY
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| Regulators need to stop giving tech giants a pass on common
| carrier liability. It would solve a lot of problems overnight.
| aantix wrote:
| Sheryl Sandberg wants males to "lean in", assume a more
| cooperative role.
|
| But then she actively supports the most divisive platform in
| history. A perfect dismount in her mental gymnastic routine.
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