Facebook insiders have admitted that it is. Mike Allen, Facebook's first president, said this in an interview:
“The thought process was all about, ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’,” he said. “And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments. It’s a social validation feedback loop. … You’re exploiting a vulnerabilty in human psychology.”
So that underscores their general attitude towards user behavior. The 'every once in a while' piece applies to the newsfeed too - it's designed to keep you searching for things you care about, and they carefully mix in things you don't, so that you're never too satisfied or unsatisfied, just constantly craving more.
Source (a slightly clickbaity-looking place, go at your own risk): https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...
He talks about how at the time they really didn't foresee the foreboding future implications of what they were trying to build at the time.
Although I think the reaction continues and we can't tell exactly what's happening even now.
not quite concerned enough to give back the
millions of dollars they earned
Or do you think they should just get rid of the money, K Foundation style, regardless of whether doing so would reverse the effects of the work they did to earn it?
And just like a Slot Machine you are always left wanting to come back to play some more and even if you do your best to quit facebook, you are always being constantly reminded that of its existence everywhere you go.
> This has been the MO of mass entertainment since the gladiators fought the lions.
Absolutely.
Lots of early proto-social media companies were already doing things like that back in the 90s. Like when AOL was king and "You've Got Mail!" was a household catchphrase and featured in their marketing. They knew that people were thrilled to get stuff from other people.
Probably the most obvious and recent antecedent to gamefied social media would be, uh, well, games. There were a few decades of ideas to cherry pick from the game world.
Edit: brevity
Does that give it less weight or more weight? It's hard to see what you were going for here.
That quote reminds me of Louis CK's interview with Conan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c) where he says about mobile phones:
"You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product... and then you die."
There's almost always at least a software developer (or technical person of some sort) calling out "Hey, are you sure we should rank by $X? It will have this edge case in situations $Y and $X?". Usually they get steamrolled by a "product" person who's invented some new terminology for whatever shady shit they are pushing now. "It's just growth hacking" "complimentary contextually relevant ads will improve the user experience".
People know. They always know. They just choose to feign ignorance when they get busted.
There's been hand-wringing about Youtube funnelling users to extremist content, and it always comes to down to "the algorithm" as if there's nothing that can be done about it.
Someone had to choose to implement the algorithm. Someone had to choose the metrics it was optimized to meet. Someone had to go, "Children are being drawn to extremist videos after watching PewDiePie and that's okay."
You enter into the comment section and it's automatically sorted by Controversial. At least that's how I see it.
It's also why Twitter wants to 'curate' your timeline, instead of simply displaying tweets from people you follow in temporal order.
I've given up every platform that forwent the chronological timeline because other feed algorithms are just frustrating, and Twitter is the only one I miss.
I've turned off the "show best tweets first" option, and I stick with using Tweetbot. But, like most people seem to indicate here, about Facebook (which I don't use at all), my continued use hangs by a thread. It wouldn't take much for me to cancel my account. Again.
As far as I can tell, Twitter doesn't hide anything from, instead showing me tweets from people I don't follow.
Other networks I watch, they still do the same thing. On the NHL Network, you'll see a story about a big trade coming up and they will continue to shuffle it down during commercial breaks until its one of the last stories they cover before the end of the broadcast. It's the same thing with highlights. You'll see your team's game in the left hand column like they're about to show the highlights. Come back from a commercial break and suddenly two more stories have shifted above your local team's highlights. Same thing with several ESPN shows like PTI (Pardon the Interruption).
It can be incredibly frustrating to watch sometimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planogram
You always want dairy and fruits/vegetables on opposite sides of the store since they’re perishable, hence they get purchased the most often, and you want people to walk past all the other aisles every time.
If it were all about sales, then I could buy widgets for $100 a unit, sell them for $50 a unit, and call it a success.
Obviously positioning matters too (hence all the garbage food at checkout), but I wouldn't by default assume that this is the case, and especially not the only driver, behind dairy placement.
Except they did in 2011 in response to Google+ by adding Friend Lists, which you can use to filter your News Feed down to stories and news items from just friends in certain lists curated by you. This is still in existence today in 2018.
I disagree with the GGP (I think) about Facebook wanting you to wade throw a river of crap so you stumble on ads. Their ads have been spot on to my interests so far.
I think an onioned version of Google plus circles could help Facebok influence the AI without preventing discovery.
But TBH, had G+ really been a contender at this point? This sounds like the creak of an abandoned house by now.
The killer feature with circles is being able to post different things to different audiences IMHO, which Facebook can't do without different accounts.
And I want it simple and easy to understand and use, even for non-techies, such that it "just works". And a pony.
I have friends who will post photos, and I'll love for FB to detect that they often post single photos, and allow me to subscribe to just those. Even if it means relying on FB's algorithms deciding what posts make the cut.
The same goes for friends who will occasionally post blog-style stuff. While I'd prefer it if they actually blogged, being able to go to their profile and getting a FB-suggested 'type' of post to subscribe to would be peachy.
Other algorithmic suggestions I can imagine: - the friend who consistently posts great links to longer-form journalistic articles - the friend who posts mostly 'funny comics/pics', but actually funny ones - the friend who seems to know half the town and diligently clicks 'interested/going' for events that I am also interested in. - and the above possibly with an option to drill down and get more specific suggestions (I'm sure FB could segment the events at least by a crude party/political dimension. - the family member who posts all sorts of weird crap, but also the interesting family-related updates. It can't be that difficult to detect which of their posts are the family updates (and perhaps there could be a 'suggest category/tag/whatever' feature so that my dad can diligently mark these updates (which I know he would!).
With the above, or even a crude version of it, I could see myself browsing FB quite a bit, and I wouldn't mind the occasional sponsored post (which could be targeted specifically to the feed/mood I'm in).
I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing about all this, but I feel moderately confident that FB is not doing this, not because of particularly good reasons, but because they're stuck in a particular 'mode' and a bit too conservative about it (shortsighted advertising). I can't tell if this is just because they're a big corporation at this point, or because of 'SV incentives', or going public, or whatever else.
I never got the whole circles thing as a unique selling point... like that functionality existed in Facebook beforehand and the reason people didn't use it much is simply because for a personal social media it's not that useful. I've used it maybe a handful of times in 10 years.
I mean I guess maybe because circles are a nicer design concept?
Though let’s be honest here - anything you post on Facebook (or any other social media) you should assume is public, regardless of privacy controls.
No one would directly attempt to be evil, it'd just turn out that way.
“The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.” ― Jean Renoir
There are lots of other sites competing for attention, and to sacrifice a good UX would be shortsighted, especially with all the “FB is dead” comments people have been making the last few years.
"Lard it up with debt, fire down to a skeleton-crew and stop all maintenance" sounds bad, like you're killing the company or something. "Unlocking value", hey, doesn't that sound better?
Similarly, "Let's get rich creating the second-coming of AOL by building a tacky nextgen panopticon" doesn't sound that great. "Creating a community of technical greats to bring people together and foster blah blah blah", while a completely bullshit nothing-statement, seems to shift focus off of the surveillance capitalism. For a bit.
Eventually, though, if you make your living sniffing other peoples' panties, eventually they notice and they take measures to limit your access to their laundry. FB and Google are both blocked entirely by IP at my gateway (along with a bunch of other surveillance shops), and the internet at home is so much nicer than what I see other people putting up with.
Really? Especially a FB PM you mean? Because PMs otherwise have been known to use exactly such techniques and worse:
Some low level PM was tasked with optimizing time-on-site. They had some negative user feedback, but it didn't show up in their low sample UR and segmented rollout. Since they had good results in their primary success metrics and the secondary metrics did not tell a consistent story, they rolled it out to 100%. Any negative feedback from there was chalked up to change aversion among a small segment of users.
See the Sean Parker interview: https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...
Increasing "time spent" means spreading out relevant posts. I'm sure that Facebook is tuned to optimize for some combination of "time spent without drop-off in engagement". This is a "Good" version of the algorithm because it nets them the most revenue, while still fulfilling the need for the larger user base.
It's milkshake marketing[0]. People don't want the most efficient method of content consumption. That's why most "feeds" are no longer chronological. People on Facebook want to scroll around, look at posts, comment on articles, like a few things, etc. for X minutes/day without seeing things they've seen before, and without seeing things that are boring.
The job-to-be-done isn't to consume a certain relevant piece of content, it's to waste time and not get too bored.
[0] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/clay-christensens-milkshake-marke...
The thing to realize is that there's not actually a functional difference between that and the "numbers-driven" guy you describe. Evil isn't just the sadistic maniac; it's the affable businessman who doesn't care, doesn't even consider, whether his product helps people or hurts them, so long as it maximizes profit.
Someone else posted an interview with the former president of Facebook, and it's pretty enlightening: https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...
The milk is still in the back, along with perishable juices. The difference between them and the aisles is that processed foods (frozen dinners, vegetables, snacks, brand name yogurt & cheese, ice cream, breakfasts) are all located near the front of the store, while fresh ones (milk, meat, fish) are located at the back, and perishable-but-non-refrigerated goods (fresh fruits & vegetables) are off to the back & side. So it really seems like a deliberate attempt to put the items you would buy frequently as far away from the door as possible, and make you walk through the goods that you might stock up on on impulse.
I would bet on consumer psychology over logistics here.
Logistics: because then you don't need rear access to the cooler shelves. That's square footage that you can better use in other ways. (In school I worked in a supermarket that put dairy in the beer/soda cooler, and we stocked it from the back.)
Milk is heavy. It's stocked onto shelves slightly angled forward so the remaining stock slides to the front for ease of reach. This need isn't generally applicable, or desireable, for other refrigerated/frozen foods.
Although, maybe that's an argument for putting it by the checkout lines instead, which I suppose are by the entrance. Hm.
And are you sure milk needs to be stocked from behind? Is it at the back of the store because it needs to be stocked from behind - or is it stocked from behind simply because its at the back of the store?
Plus with thing like milk, it is a real pain to push several gallons uphill to put something else in front (ever try to put a milk container back on the sloped shelf? Takes a couple hands and some fidgeting to do it).
The distance from bay to fridge plus fridge to the exit is the same wherever it goes.
For example, in Aldi stores, the milk is usually kept quite near the entrance, along with the kind of things you'd keep in the fridge (butter, cheese, etc) and the bread. In the likes of MS and Waitrose, it's usually somewhere near the side of the store, not too far from the entrance but past the fruit and vegetables. Same sort of deal with Tesco, Sainsburys, etc. Smaller convenience stores are usually just kind of random.
Nah, if you want real exploitative design, note how many shops are designed to draw out your shopping time as much as possible, by having a nice Z pattern that 'encourages' you to trudge through the whole store before ending up at the checkout. I think in that sense, most over here seem to have taken inspiration from the likes of Ikea or Costco more than anything else.
There's also the obvious 'fake sale' dark pattern, as well as the 'move everything round every few weeks to disorientate regular customers' one.
Costco certainly doesn't Costco has aisles, and sections for each major product category. IKEA has a "tour the store" design which is nice for a store you browse because you want something for every section (room in your house). You can go directly where you want if you know what you want.
In the US, Trader Joe's does this.
Edit:
Here's a link to someone asking for help when I guess they started to pull the plug on custom friend feeds:
https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1020258...
Friends List is here apparently:
https://m.facebook.com/help/ipad-app/204737159568794?helpref...
It was nice for keeping my World of Warcraft friends separate from "Family" and "College" and "Highschool" etc. As there were things I'd maybe want 1 group to see, but things I'd rather others didn't.
After ~4 years I just started unfriending people as it was easier then bothering to curate posts for specifics lists, and soon after I just deleted the account as I could SMS-text the people I wanted to chat with easier then bothering with facebook.
You know, I read this, and I thought "gee, Facebook is behaving a bit differently at the moment for me", because the last time I checked it, it showed maybe six posts and a message at the bottom that basically said I need more friends to see more posts.
And then I realized...I installed uBlock Origin the other day and promptly forgot about it, so of course Facebook hates me. It's like the Soup Nazi - no dopamine for you!
I was creeped out recently by how Facebook recommends people I've never met as friends; I've read some things that suggest it may be utilizing GPS data to try to match people in physical proximity, so I have to wonder if the recommendations are from the apartment building I live in.
Why on earth would this be the "point" and what product manager is being paid for this BS.
"If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold."
Mine is set to "All Friends" except "DoNotShow" and there's about 3 people on my "DoNotShow" list.
Have also excluded family for a few posts.
IIRC, Facebook never really promoted those features or tried to make them easy and intuitive to use. Recently they've also made changes to make them less useful.
It's sort of like difference between having a well-designed and usable feature or a similar feature that only exists to check off a checkbox.
I remember Facebook having it first; this blog post (https://jessicavitak.com/2011/09/01/facebooks-circles-how-to...) confirms that.
Groups only. And even those are just an occassional check in.