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A comment on Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive. Parent comment

Re:Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site le... by ardy42 on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @06:06PM (#23316978)
>>> 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 is managing Facebook to maximize the metric he's being evaluated on (profit and wealth), not the value provided to society.

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Re:Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site le... by marcinzm on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @06:18PM (#23317105)
Value to society is subjective and many horrors of the past (and current) were caused by trying to optimize specific definitions of that term.
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Re:Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site le... by TeMPOraL on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @06:43PM (#23317314)
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.

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Re:Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site le... by marcinzm on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @06:59PM (#23317450)
>So it's not like we get to side-step horror-avoidance.

Which is my point. It's easy to say "just force them to optimize for value to society" and then ignore what that really entails in practice. And what giving someone the power to do that tends to cause.

Actually solving the related problems and making things actually better is probably possible but it's messy and hard and complicated.

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Re:Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site le... by int_19h on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @10:56PM (#23318935)
"force them to optimize" doesn't mean putting a gun to somebody's head. But it's clear that the existing socioeconomic arrangements overall incentivize companies, including Facebook, to do a lot of harm while chasing profits. Forcing them to not do so can also mean changing the arrangements to remove the incentives.
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Re:Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site le... by ardy42 on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @07:46PM (#23317794)
> It's easy to say "just force them to optimize for value to society" and then ignore what that really entails in practice. And what giving someone the power to do that tends to cause.

> Actually solving the related problems and making things actually better is probably possible but it's messy and hard and complicated.

What you describe is politics, and it's inescapable.

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Re:Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site le... by solveit on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @08:40PM (#23318200)
> I'd start with treating users as partners, and not cattle.

What does this mean in practice? How do you treat 2.6 billion people as partners?

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