I'm very curious if you have a proposal for how to gauge content quality at scale. Back when I majored in journalism, "community engagement" was a massive topic. People wanted to create content that wasn't just "good" in a vacuum, but actually motivated society towards positive change. The theory went that if we reported on social issues in a certain way, perhaps we could influence society for the better. This was even the topic of my capstone project.
In the end, I became disillusioned. My observations contradicted the notion that content quality (news content in my case) matters in either a commercial or social sense when conducted at scale.
In my capstone project, some people volunteered to be interviewed about their volunteer work and their motivations. It was really interesting talking to all of them, but what I found in every case was that these people were motivated by life experiences, not media. I talked to an ex-con who had his life turned around by a books program, so he volunteered with the program when he got out. I also talked to a soccer mom who organized community events for her kids.
This was admittedly a qualitative study on personal anecdotes with a small sample set so it's not hard science. But the hypothesis that content quality is irrelevant at a mass scale seems to hold up in practice.
This also tangentially ties into a hypothesis I have on US presidential elections, which is that once it's down to two candidates, name recognition is all that matters. Every time (I'm aware of) that a president dominated the mass media of the time, he won the election. From FDR on radio to Kennedy on TV to Obama on social media and now Trump who rode on the public obsession with gossiping about every stupid thing he did or said.
Okay, rant over. I am legitimately interested, though, in any ideas for determining content quality at scale just because it seems like an interesting project.
From what I hear, FB are now pretty worried about fake news and other issues relating to the last US elections. I suspect they're also going over a few other big political events where FB played a big role. After seeing it happen at home, it probably feels more real. Brexit. The Syrian protests, later civil war. ISIS. The Turkish coup attempt. FB played a bigger role than any other media in all these.
I suspect what they are doing about true fake news is probably spam filtering.
What I'd be interested in seeing them try is the stack overflow approach. Have a subjective opinion about what a good contribution to FB is. Design features to promote that kind of content.
Makes more sense than blaming Russia and Facebook.
From Europe that's what it looked like
And that's what fake news and russian trolls pushed
And also "she wants war" and now we're getting closer and closer to a new world war
Occam says that the most simple solution should be accepted
But Occam was an english monk from the 13th century
He could not know that hacking the news using money power is easier than spreading a good message through a decent candidate
No, it translates to:
* Obvious corporate shill and corrupt beltway insider - made even more obvious in light of the content of the leaked emails.
* A candidate who had a chequered political career that included dog whistling racists - an event that Trump made massive political capital out of and used to get large portions of a base she was relying upon - black voters - to stay at home.
* A candidate whose approach was to present herself of defender of the status quo at a time of obvious economic distress for most Americans which has never worked, ever.
* And yes, warmonger (that much was obvious from her term as secretary of state)
* A candidate whose strategy to get people to vote for her was to hypocritically either imply or outright state that you were sexist or racist if you considered voting for the other guy. Funnily enough that backfired massively but people (like you) are still flogging that dead horse in what I can only assume is an errant attempt to ensure that Trump wins a second term in office.
The really puzzling part of this whole thing is the number of people on Hacker News who will argue out of one side of their mouth that Facebook ads area a scam that simply don't work and on the other hand that spending what is essentially political pocket change on them will buy you a presidency. Crazy.
[1]https://votesmart.org/candidate/key-votes/55463/hillary-clin...
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So what you consider quality is probably different that what the (mode) average person considers quality. Perhaps the issue is joe sixpacs are the bulk of the bell curve.
Compounding this is most people are also information-overloaded anyway and don't have time for quality. Emotional appeals and manipulation on the other hand are hard to ignore even if you don't really have the time or desire to engage with them ..
Sure. But I think it's analogous to the days of patent medicines. Coca-Cola really did contain cocaine at some point; opium and heroin were also popular ingredients. [1] Did the people making those medicines intentionally set out to sell dangerously addictive substances? I doubt it. They just tried to make their sales graphs go up and to the right, experimenting and copying what worked in other patent medicines.
The only reason things changed is that there was a national outcry. People came to recognize the dangers of addiction. When Coca Cola was created in 1885, it was made from coca leaves and kola nuts. By 1891, they cut the coca content by 90%. They cut it again in 1904, and by 1922 went entirely without. [1, 2] And it wasn't until 1983 that they offered a version without the other addictive stimulant. [3]
I think we're starting to see the beginnings of a similar outcry today. I hope we'll see more of it. But if we want it to have an effect, it will have to happen at a societal level (e.g., the threat of regulation) and an individual level (with more people refusing digital time-sucks like Facebook and Candy Crush). I also think it needs to happen at an interpersonal one; people working on addictive digital products should face social questions, just like somebody making cigarettes would. Because as you say, many of the individuals creating things like Facebook just aren't thinking about these broader issues.
[1] See, e.g. https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-todays-illegal-drugs-were-market...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_New_Organic_Base_in_the_C...
So I believe my comment above is still correct.
It takes some effort to transform one into the other.
One is a medecinal herb (commonly used to fight altitude sickness), still used by Coca-Cola today, the other is a dangerously addictive substance that Coca-Cola used before they understood it's dangers.
Classifying a topic as/as-not viral dreck is, I posit, quite hard. Indulge me a bit here - I primarily come to HN to read about ML/AI/DNN. I mark the ones I like with the favorites button. During my work downtime, I go back to my favorites folder and re-read the topic. For some of the topics such as Word Embeddings, I must have re-read that paper a dozen times. I have actually used the material I learnt from my HN favorites list at my workplace, built it into products, gotten $$ off of it. So stuff like JIT compiler, LibHTTP, Bitcoin Bubble, Nintendo (all the topics trending right now) are viral dreck to me. I don't want this viral dreck. Get it off of HN!
You can see how quickly this sort of reasoning becomes vacuous.
I have an FB account mostly to interact with my extended family. Most of them are in their 70s and 80s. Every single topic they interact with on FB qualifies in my mind as viral dreck. However, by the nature of their comments, they seem to derive much pleasure in engaging with it. Given their age, who am I to deny them their cup of poison. Its not like they are going to get wise on word embeddings at the age of 75. Let them have their viral dreck.
On the “this is hard” point. Yes it is. I’m asserting that every business have a handful of core, hard problems. One of journalism’s is maintaining good quality standards, traditionally using subjective yet fairly well established definitions and methods, like an editor with good taste, formal fact checking, etc.. One of Apple’s hard problems is making consumer tech elegantly simple. The rhetorical click-wheel iPod. Again, there’s a lot of subjective elements that go into this.
How does a FB tackle this? Judging by your favourite HN article, I will forward a guess that you immediately jump to an ML or an algorithmic way of classifying things. On that front, I think FB could get some wins. Is dreck classification all that different from spam classification? Does PG’s “plan for spam” apply here? I would guess that it does for some dreck types. I actually think FB is currently deploying some spam-filter like system to deal with the most onerous “fake news.” Google’s starting point was page rank, a relevance ranking system. Fairly quickly, they added in “quality” ranking to supplement that. This is probably the least monolithic of their core systems. At the same time, SEO came into being and anti-spam became the third plank to google search. Taken together, this is quality classification. The inverse of dreck classification.
I don’t want to overemphasise these things though. FB is one of the best positioned to use “computer science-ish” solutions. But, I think the bigger choices are not at that level. They’re not a choice of technological approaches. It’s more mundane, values, priorities, product culture. Defining what they are and making good content a part of that definition.
HN already has quality built into it. When a feature is released (rarely, after all HN is not even a commercial product) someone makes a decision. Does nesting comments like this encourage dreck, in HN’s case flame wars and quips? Does changing something about moderation improve the quality of discussion? Are the really good, but slower, harder and more technical topics being buried? How do we unbury them? This speaks to your ideal HN.
No one has ever asked and answered such a question about youtube comments, we see the results. I don’t think FB has done enough of this, especially as relates to the high exposure. “viral” content.
The best articulation of the approach (IMO) is Spolsky’s “social UI^” and the early podcasts with him and Atwood. When they were making Stackoverflow, a lot of attention was paid to the type of content/behaviour encouraged by certain product/UI choices. They had an idea of what a good comment, question or answer looks like. They built the product to produce these. It wasn’t just about “more stuff.” They had an opinion about what stuff is valuable.
FB will need to be more programmable, but that’s easier if you start from the Spolsky mentality. Instead of “dreck classifier,” you just need to recognise flame wars, thought bubbles, divisive headlines. You need to decide that a comment by someone who has read an article is more valuable than a comment by someone who has not. The components become more achievable sounding, IMO.
^I wonder if this falls into your “dreck” category, for a little bit of extra irony. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/09/06/its-not-just-usabi...
I think this is a general problem. If Facebook is optimizing for whatever users "Like", as you suggest with the data scientists, it is analagous to a business given customers whatever they ask for.
As Henry Ford is said to have said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse" (or something). You have to find a balance between "the customer is always right" and the fact that you are in a better position to be a domain expert.
They have to balance "what gets people engaged" with "what's good for everybody" and hopefully find an optimal solution for both.
Not sure how accurate it is, but the way Facebook's founding ideas are portrayed in The Social Network definitely screams "exploiting human psychology".
The means - intentional or not - are going to take whatever form necessary to meet the ends.
If there's a surprise here is that its taken Parker et al this wrong to figure this out.
Well sure. I'm sure thousands of employees have very sophisticated and subtle views. But when you average out all of those views, it winds up that the only thing that really matters is getting eyes on ads.
No one needs to be a villain. The subtle views just cancel each other out, and the huge amount of effort fb puts forth regresses to the mean. Get more eyeballs on ads.
We don't? Seems accurate to me.
The game is a product — the company produces it. The players are players — they play the game. The whales are a sub-category of players, so if the players are indeed the product, you'd have to say they're buying themselves. In fact, the game is a product that both paying and non-paying customers consume, in some cases with barely differing experiences.
It's fiction. Yes, inspired by a true story but fiction nonetheless.
You wouldn't base your knowledge about Nikola Tesla on "The Prestige", would you?
I guess you're saying "don't trust movies" and/or "Facebook would never exploit human psychology, that's a made-up fiction." Har har, good one.
Regardless, "fiction inspired by a true story" would presumably have some true elements and some not-true elements. If they were all not-true elements, it would be completely made-up, literally 100% fiction (not based on or inspired by a true story), and anyway I don't think there's any such thing as 100% fiction, no matter how hard people try. Every fiction owes something to the reality it was concocted in.
Therefore the problem becomes knowing which elements are true (facts) and which are not-true (fiction).
Also just read this, coincidentally, about Buzzfeed today: https://www.startups.co/articles/interview-jonah-peretti-co-...
Totally agree.
> ..arrived at through a sort of natural selection process.
I am not so sure. This all well-known stuff and employed methodically. There is an interesting article where a Google design ethicist explains how technology hijacks your mind [1].
TL;DR:
Hijack 1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices. Ask yourself: What’s not on the menu?, Why am I being given these options and not others? Do I know the menu provider’s goals? Is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?
Hijack 2: Make apps behave like Slot Machines - give a variable reward. If you want to maximize addictiveness, link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.
Hijack 3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI). If I convince you that I’m a channel for important information, messages, friendships, or potential sexual opportunities — it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or remove your account — because there is a 1% chance you could be missing something important.
Hijack 4: Social Approval. When you get tagged by my friend, you think s/he made a conscious choice to tag you, when actually s/he just responds to Facebook’s suggestion, not making an independent choice. Thus Facebook controls the multiplier for how often millions of people experience their social approval on the line.
Hijack 5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat). You follow me — it’s rude not to follow you back. When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested c ontacts.
Hijack 6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay
Hijack 7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery. Messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond than messages delivered asynchronously.
Hijack 8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons. When you you want to look up a Facebook event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), so Facebook converts every reason you have for using it, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things. In an ideal world, apps would always give you a direct way to get what you want separately from what they want.
Hijack 9: Inconvenient Choices. Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder. NYTimes.com claims to give you “a free choice” to cancel your digital subscription. But instead of just doing it when you hit “Cancel Subscription,” they force you to call a phone number that’s only open at certain times.
Hijack 10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies. People don’t intuitively forecast the true time cost of a click when it’s presented to them. Sales people use “foot in the door” techniques by asking for a small innocuous request to begin with (“just one click”), and escalating from there (“why don’t you stay awhile?”). Virtually all engagement websites use this trick.
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[1] http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-...
There's a worse version here: some companies will mine various sources of information to get a strong indication that A knows B, suggest to B that they should connect to A in a way that sounds like an invitation from A but isn't, and if B takes the suggestion, send an invitation to A saying that B wants to connect.
So you get credit for effort. Your odds go up with each attempt until you succeed. Rare items though, still Skinner boxes.
Problem is: Quality itself is defined by quantitative measurements. It's not some separate product attribute. If something increases your business KPIs, it is ipso facto higher quality. Motivated only by the imperative to optimize these KPIs, a company will do so, believing that it is continually making the product better. Allowed to run its course, you end up with a Paperclip Maximizer [1].
"A Theory of Mass Culture", Dwight Macdonald. First Published June 1, 1953
https://doi.org/10.1177/039219215300100301
(Available via Sci-Hub: https://sci-hub.ac/10.1177/039219215300100301)
All firms, are in competition.
Media firms must get attention to succeed.
There is more media than any human can consume in a life time.
Therefore, to succeed, you must be the media consumed, instead of someone else.
THis means you want to get peoples attention - at all costs.
This is sufficient to create the situation we have. You can always add some twist to the whole thing, but this is sufficient.
But that is a very narrow view. The New York Times could claim they have proof Trump is an Alien from outer space. For the day, they would win the attention of the world.
But the cost would be their credibility, which would lessen the share of attention they would receive on every day afterward.
So the NYT pursues a strategy of building a customer relationship. And trying to get as much sustained attention as they can over the course of a relationship. They don't purse getting attention AT ALL COSTS on each individual day, and neither should Facebook.
For anyone who thinks this isn't the case it isn't aware of the extent because the paper is paywalled so you can't see how had it is, page back to the debacle where the editorial staff were asking whether it was their job to question politicians' statements, or just "we report, you decide". A lot of people dropped their subscriptions because that's literally the only thing they were subscribing to the NYT for, and the editorial staff were announcing it didn't fit their profit model.
The only readers they have left, are ones who don't mind tuning in to get the DNC agenda for the day. More or less.
I got a free trial, and called to cancel it early (I had to call!), because it's just another tabloid. The only major news source I can stand to read anymore is maybe Reuters? I have to get my news from citizens who comb social media and investigate independently.
And where do you find these citizens? Twitter?
Over the past several decades, a huge number of news papers have gone out of print.
In its place there is an explosion of non-newspapers, which have lower barriers to quality, accuracy, and cost.
The NYT website, as you recall was the first website perhaps aside from the WSJ, which jumped the trend of going free in order to survive.
As an aside - Even prior to the internet, there was sweeping consolidation in the media world. Most news papers could not afford to stay in print or defeat takeovers.
There is an older theory on industrialized economies - that most media firms will eventually be taken over, and therefore be soft on their particular conglomerate and sister firms.
It's that app feature which plays into the "exploitation" part of quick, responsive, immediate.
Anecdatally, I know people who have had long term relationships off of Tinder, some still together. I imagine that people will continue migrating over to Tinder from OKCupid.
Do you own index funds? I do. Which means I have stock in Coke and Pepsi both. But this is stupid because Coke and Pepsi are competitors, so my Coke returns are offset by my Pepsi losses whenever Coke wins and vice versa, right? Actually, no, because the beverage industry still grows in aggregate over time, and in exchange for not having to guess who's going to win the cola wars, I get to collect the benefits of both companies growing the overall market.
In this analogy, I'm match.com and OKCupid and Tinder are Coke and Pepsi.
First, it happens through competition. Good psychology hacks are things like tinder's fast paced swiping. Out of the squillions of dating apps, the one with a good hack won. I think Facebook used an identical hack for its first version, the hot-or-not version. Twitter's basic concept. Snapchat's. Lots of examples. All good "psych-hacks" that formed a core of successful products, arrived at through a sort of natural selection process. I suspect that almost any app which does not "solve a problem" leverages some hack instead.
Second, psych-hackers FB actually employ are not psychlogists. They're data scientists doing split tests. If this works like that, will you like more posts. A/B testing is really behavioural psychology expirementation, weaponized.
I think both of these are quasi-inevitable. But, constant optimization towards viral drek is not.
Where I think FB should be sheepish about is allowing the optimization to go on directionless. The only goals are quantitive. Quality is a foreign concept. No one has asked the question "what should FB be." The answer is simply "popular."
This isn't inevitable. Applied to businesses as a whole, you could replace "popular" with profitable. All businesses are under this imperative. But, that doesn't mean directionless. Businesses can strive to be all sorts of things in addition to (or preferebly as a path to) profitable. FB is itself an example of this.
What I want from FB (and Google) is a recognition that they are media companies, the biggest media companies. After that, they need to start dealing in quality. If you only optimize for quantity of reactions, shares and such while disregarding quality you become a shitty tabloid. No taste. No integrity. Just clickbait.
FB need to ask themselves "is the content (eg news) on FB of good quality?"