I don't understand how they think an algorithm can decide better what I want to see than me myself (by adding friend and blocking the ones that irritate me). In the end they lost me as a customer(or... Product :) ) altogether and I assume that's not their end-goal.
I agree with your points, except I believe there is a limited role for algorithms that help users discover new things they might like but not know about. I prefer Spotify's approach, where there's a specific area of the app (a "Discover Weekly" playlist) that gets refreshed but not so often that it becomes a dopamine lever. Although that kind of recommendation algorithm can't seem to handle multifaceted "loves rap but also renaissance music" users' tastes very well yet—in that regard Pandora's separate stations were better.
"Each song [representative of other songs in its group] is analyzed by a musician in a process that takes 20 to 30 minutes per song. Ten percent of songs are analyzed by more than one musician to ensure conformity with the in-house standards and statistical reliability." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project
I think the real downfall was not that they added the timeline, it's that it's impolite to not accept friend requests from e.g. coworkers or relatives that you know but don't really care about.
And then you end up with a news feed full of people you don't care about. I think by the time they added "unfollow" options everybody had moved to WhatsApp where conversations are between 15 people you know quite well rather than 300 people you met once.
I have no idea how they can fix that, or even how they could have prevented it. Google clearly foresaw that problem with their "circles" feature.
This always confuses me. I feel like it's more impolite or disrespectful to be two-faced about this.
What's wrong with telling someone, politely, that you try to curate your social media and restrict it to personal friends and family?
If they get offended, is that not their fault? Should they not respect your boundaries?
Presumably, they don’t think they can decide what you want better than you can. But they think they can decide what will make you engage more, and they’re probably right. The damage is not accidental.
A random feed of micro blogging posts/status that is not random but heavily leans toward resharing led to outrage porn addiction.
;-)
We want to believe that FB is a corporation and therefore must act with a certain economic logic, but within the bounds of what can be optimized for the bottom line, there can often be a huge amount of room for founder neuroses, fantasies, etc. (I mean cmon, Jeff Bezos literally just went to space. And if you like history, remember William Randolph Hearst?)
Drugging people with viral was always the main gig unto itself. It was the core neuroses. Money just happens to be the thing people “universally” care about in middle life, as opposed to university life, but that much is an outgrowth of the neuroses.
I don't think this is a useful way to summarise it. You could say any business' main gig is not making money if you want to (this bank isn't about making money; we just intrinsically love signing people up to financial services!) I don't know if it adds anything, and I think it does subtract.
Facebook was not created to make money. It came about from the era when people thought, just grow really big and figure out how to monetize later. It was not yet established that you could monetize something after making it big (which was a thing in the dot-com bust of 2001). It seems targeted advertising like a given today but back in 2011 (a decade ago, and not long after DoubleClick was bought by Google), this was still being established. It took a long, long time for FB to monetize.
To that end, you need to have been there in the thick of it. Back then it may have seen like it was fun and games. Playing silly “viral” “games” was a big chunk of how people were spending time, back in 2008.
But more than FB’s specific case, founder’s personas can be a bit unappreciated as the guiding hand in what happens with the company. We know that founder disagreements are a large percentage of startup failure. It really come down to the people, and their base impulses. Which is so trite and petty, but sometimes life just is.
Looking at it now, at least to me, it seems obvious that the purpose of facebook has changed from "make money by showing people what their friends are up to" to "keep those dumb fucks as long as possible by whatever means possible to make as much fucking money as possible, everything else be dammed". And this is being generous with their beginning.
Also they send me click-baity emails like "John Doe has posted a status update!"
Heck, they've even started TEXTING me to lure me back.
I'm dreading having to log back in to try to figure out how to get them to stop trying to contact me.
> The biggest difference between deactivating and deleting a Facebook account is that deactivating your Facebook account gives you the flexibility to return whenever you wish, while deleting your account is a permanent action.
From what I remember, reactivation of a deactivated account merely requires logging back in. Which sounds like you did exactly that.
I hear you but I'm past that phase. "They" don't listen. It's not worth my time and energy being angry and going down that rabbit hole to "remind them" (my base anger level is high enough :P). Why? "They" don't have the capacity to listen. It's not in their interest to make their product better for you. You think you can't scroll back and see what you saw just a second ago because it's a really challenging technical problem? You think you can't set your home and work location in google Maps when you have location tracking disabled because it's a really complex problem?
No. They'll listen when they'll get their teeth kicked in by a regulator. I'm just glad that they consistently keep fucking up, even in the face of mounting negative sentiment.
That said, I'm sure people here use Facebook for other reasons, but anecdotally, this is what I'm seeing. Instagram and Facebook aside, the most used app I've found here is WhatsApp, so the society here is deeply integrated into the Facebook web of services
- Hobby / niche groups.
- Hobby/niche and local buy/sell groups
- Alma mater groups
- Family and friends (obviously)
- Local / community groups
Everything else is pretty much noise to me - so I rarely bother to scroll the main feed.
It's been said for a while that facebook is pretty much dead for younger people - which I guess is true. But older people (my parents and grandparents generation) seem to be extremely invested and connected to FB. It seems like many of them use FB from pretty much everything.
And, as some have said, if you live in a smaller town or similar, chances are that the community is also very invested into facebook. In my small hometown (population 2500), facebook is pretty much used for everything.
edit: FWIW - what people use, seems to be very dependent on location. For example, I live in Norway, and I personally don't know a single person that uses WhatsApp - even though it's wildly popular in other countries.
FB also realized this. Because, initially, FB was all about getting posts from friends. I suspect data revealed that this sort of algorithms created pockets of well connected people. Hardly any use to advertisers. So you have the FB that is what it is. A massive cesspool of shit.
It used to be a great communication tool via "Facebook Groups", then people moved to other platforms and our groups lost their critical mass, and all gone silent. In these days I'm just occasionally sharing photos I'm taking with an international group of friends for showing each other nice things.
It also reminds some birthdays to me, so that's nice.
You have to install a browser extension to block politics from your suggested videos.
Twitter is great because they have “blocked words”. I maxed out my 200 words though and have to constantly swap them.
It’s undoubtedly true that they make huge money from hate and divisiveness.
This is not whistleblowing though. They are not breaking laws. And everyone already knows this.
People can choose if they want to work there or not. Just like at a cigarette company or fast food company or pharma company.
If things should be changed, the public should vote to regulate.
But they ain’t doing that. So it’s up to parents to educate their kids about personal responsibility and addiction.
I find that YT actually badly overfits my history; it’s super predictable and narrow.
Sure it’s preferable to falling off the bandwagon into conspiracy, but it doesn’t really “explore” a lot for me
If you browse YouTube with cookies disabled or within a cookie fence, you can see that such manipulation is the default behavior. For a significant percentage of videos, the very first set of suggestions is manipulative. For the others, perhaps the first set of suggestions is not problematic but the suggestions for those videos are where the manipulation starts.
It's nice that you found a way out of it but I'm guessing that's rare.
I personally found that I needed to make an account to get away from the horrendous default recommendations. And allow it to use some data and not clear my cookies etc.
One has to log in to benefit from this, though.
However, most YT advertisements that get served to me are scams the last few months.
How can the public form an opinion if the information they get about it is skewed by the affected companies?
What if their politicians get “donations” from the companies that need regulation, to influence them into not doing so?
Catch-22
When Trump was in power, you had the right wanting to regulate Reddit/Twitter, and the left wanting to regulate Facebook.
I don't think the companies are successfully skewing people in their favor of not being regulated.
Big tech are a necessary evil for most people. Philip Morris' customers don't talk about it being a great company, they just need its product.
People blame big tech a lot though, but what if they did give people visibility and control of their algorithms in terms of what content they want...and if we had more competition...would there be less extremism, or would people just up their own dosage?
In the end it will come down to personal responsibility and education.
Pretty sure you could even call it distortion of competition. I doubt legislation can improve the net much but there is an economic significance for less known artists.
This is unfortunately not the same as a downvote, which is effectively saying "show me more of this, I want to hate its siblings too"
And people's ability to self-restrain varies with mood. They are ready to catch you when your mood dips, or you are in an extremely boring situation.
These whistleblowers are actually arguing for moderating to their political world view. Extremism is on both sides.
Mindfulness/awareness practice sometimes is used as part of OCD treatment as a resource alongside ERP, and mindfulness is broadly useful to people, and might be good for getting away from a negative feed. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31505967/
You don't want to "signal" - you want to "filter". So install FBP and filter out all the stuff you don't want. For me, it made FB like it was a decade ago and thus usable for it's original intent.
>The algorithm picks from those options based on the kind of content you've engaged with the most in the past.
This is the primary reason I stopped using Facebook. I did everything I could to signal I did not wish to see political content - unfollow people, hide posts, even unfriend and block people. Next thing I'd see on the News Feed? The exact same irritating political posts, now from some person I barely even knew. Meanwhile I'd manually look at the profiles of people I actually knew in real life and cared about, and major events I would love to have known about happened in their lives weeks before.