They had a feature that they (as most would) thought would help people engage with each other and express support. Turns out it has unintended consequences. Now rightfully so they are exploring how to get away from that.
Not everything is a nefarious scheme. Sometimes it’s just good old product iteration.
"We are running a limited test where like, reaction, and video view counts are made private across Facebook. We will gather feedback to understand whether this change will improve people’s experiences"
Stating that you are improving the experience doesn't mean you are admitting the current experience is bad.
Not necessarily. If I add chocolate sprinkles to my son's ice cream cone I am improving his experience but ice cream without sprinkles is still pretty good.
"According to her findings, people will still be able to tap to see the full list of people who liked and reacted to a post (and presumably you manually could count from there), but the like count will no longer be shown on the News Feed."
Oh great, so now people have to do just one more step to get the same dopamine rush. I can't see this solving the problem.
It's kind of nice in a way because sources like FB groups are becoming qualitatively easier to trust. Some of my Facebook groups easily rival the best communities / forums I've used for the last decade. So really, in that case no, I don't want to see the 5-10 laughter reactions on a post about a new theory or niche product that is untested. I'm simply there because news about the theory is available from a community I trust (I do trust the membership overall, if not individually).
It'll absolutely make the experience nicer (no one wants to see that Aunt Doreen just "liked" Grandpa Bob's cancer announcement), but I don't know if it will make those who feel bad about likes feel better.
> Oh great, so now people have to do just one more step to get the same dopamine rush.
Friction is useful. Sure, this doesn't solve for some hypothetical influencer types or advertisers getting count data. For the hypothetical teenager who is apparently being made mentally unwell by social media, this probably precludes their putting forth the effort.
Then again I think back to all of those "See Who Viewed Your Page" malware ads from back in my day, and wonder if this isn't one viral app away from being useless.
Who the fuck knows? At least it's an attempt. They can go back to the drawing board if this fails.
It adds friction, but for those who jones for that rush, I don't think it'll be anything but a speed-bump. But it may keep future users from getting hooked. Maybe.
A forum I was on in 2006 had "reputation" which was a proto-like button. It had rules (can only rep a person once in a set period, can't rep more than 10 people a day). The higher the rep you had, the more your repping affected others. Below a threshold you got autobanned (good for keeping out trolls and spammers). At different rep levels you got different messages. These were like medals or badges of honour.
I also realised back then how much I was strangely addicted to it. I would try to be funny just to get rep. I envied those with higher rep than me or who jumped the levels more quickly. Basically, it was toxic for me. It kind of innoculated me against likes a few years later.
One is a fake account pushing misinformation, the other is a real person sharing their succinct, if low signal, opinion. So, not really the same thing. This thread is a dumpster fire for sure, but it's disingenuous of you to try to "both sides" it in this day and age when online discourse is being DDoSed by trolls like OP.
Thinking that "conservative victimization" is "par for the course" is a comment that exists at precisely the same level of discourse as OP. This stance is refuted in literally the same thread (where someone engages in liberal victimization with, "I wish conservatives had an actual reason to feel like victims, because it would that the rest of the country is back on track.").
You keep ignoring the fact that it's a baby account pushing a agenda that's ridiculously off topic. In no way is that the same as someone's biased opinion, no matter how much you try to force that point. Are you seriously not aware that we live in the middle of a misinformation war?
> You keep ignoring the fact that it's a baby account pushing a agenda that's ridiculously off topic.
No, I'm not ignoring that. I am simply not commenting on it, since you did such a good job of calling it out for the bullshit that it is. But the person I was responding to having an established account doesn't make their contribution any higher value. It's the actual comment, not the person making it, that determines the comment's value. And stating, without any evidence, that somehow conservatives claiming victimization is par for the course is about as low value as a comment can get. There's nothing useful or insightful about it. It's lazy, tribal thinking.
> Are you seriously not aware that we live in the middle of a misinformation war?
Part of the misinformation war that you refer to is the left wing using their utter domination of prestige media outlets to marginalize right wing ideas and viewpoints in the popular discourse. The left propagandizes in the articles and the right propagandizes in the comment section and on social media.
> stating, without any evidence, that somehow conservatives claiming victimization is par for the course is about as low value as a comment can get
> the left wing using their utter domination of prestige media outlets to marginalize right wing ideas and viewpoints in the popular discourse
If you can't see the irony here then I can't help you.
Also, the "marginalized right wing ideas" meme is getting old. The only people who are deplatformed are the ones that are inciting hate and spreading literally fake news. Are those the kind of right wing ideas that you're worried about being marginalized, or did you have some examples about the left wing media cabal censoring ideas about how much of a role government should play in society, and how much we should be taxed? Be more specific if you want to be taken seriously.
FWIW, you’re holding my opinions to a higher degree of scrutiny than your own. You’re requiring me to provide evidence and a degree of argumentation and elaboration that you have not required of yourself. For instance, you have claimed that there is a disinformation war and you seem to be implying that it is being perpetrated by the right (which is actually a common trope that is used to marginalize the right wing; “the only reason Trump won is because of the Russians”, etc.). Yet you have not provided any evidence for your position at all; you have merely stated it. That said, here goes:
There are three major national newspapers in the US: NYT, WaPo, and WSJ. The only conservative one, the WSJ, is primarily a business paper and not as widely consumed or influential as the other two. There is only one right wing TV news outlet: Fox News. MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC are all left wing. Every single night time comedy or current events show is left wing (one late night host even referred to Trump’s mouth as “Putin’s cock holster” and is still on the air!). There are almost zero publicly out right wing actors, writers, or musicians. There are no prestigious, top tier national magazines which are right wing (The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, etc.).
Here are marginalized right wing ideas: that large scale low-skill immigration is bad for low-skill workers (marginalized by calling people who believe this racists), that having biological men compete in women’s sports is unfair or that allowing men to use female restrooms because of some unverifiable claim about what is happening in their head is not safe (both marginalized by calling people who believe them transphobes), that business owners should be allowed to not perform services that violate their religious beliefs (marginalized by calling people homophobes).
Do you deny that those ideals stem from hate for others & systemic harm to the various suspect classes you mention?
A common argument I hear is that since right-wing leaders aren't explicitly being racist or sexist or whatever, that we should give them the benefit of the doubt, be charitable. Maybe we're misunderstanding them.
But bad actors subsist on the benefit of the doubt. And the American right-wing has a strong case for being a bad actor against a large swath (arguably the majority) or the American people.
It sounds like you're of the opinion that the only reason for holding right wing views is, essentially, that someone is evil. If that's the case, then you have a truly tragic misunderstanding about the world. This site is not really a great place to dig into this stuff, but if you ever want to talk to a right wing person about what we believe and why, feel free to send me and email and we can have a video or phone call. I won't bite, promise.
I am rico@toasterlovin.com.
andreigheorghe, that invitation extends to you, too.
So you desire that conservatives be victimized while proclaiming that they have no reason to feel like victims? Does your intent to victimize them not count?
All social media is bad imho. For example, people on Instagram only show the good, never the bad. So its a fake reality that people look up to, when in fact its far from the truth. The like button is part of the problem.
People post things they want to talk about. It just happens to be largely links (but not always; for example AskHN).
Let's do a quick test. Do you consider Reddit to be social media? How about Twitter? If you do, then so is Hacker News.
Just because you it happens to be a social media site that you personally like doesn't mean it gets to be in a different category that you consider more holy. Or just because there's no photos or because there's fewer features, doesn't mean it's not social media.
I think I must be part of the "test" bunch... noticed last night I couldn't access the full menu for like option emojis, only click the like button itself on a group post. The counts also seem to be missing as well.
Seems ironic but would be curious to know the actual outcomes of the test. I guess we all agree to participate in their testing when you agree to the terms and sign up for an account.
They should improve their UI, provide a real chronological timeline, stop harvesting user data, create a better way to organize and access historical photos, stop spamming people with phony notices, end deceptive ads and all sun-glass sales, and let ALL friends of users see ALL of their friend's posts again if they really wanted to make people "feel better". ಠ_ಠ
The big problem with a chronological timeline is that it doesn’t scale very well. It can quickly overwhelm you with mostly stuff you aren’t interested in.
I dunno what the solution to this is. How it works now also annoys me because it often hides things/people I would be very interested in. But at the same time I don’t have time to look at everything.
It is a tough problem and no matter what you do there are positives and negatives. No silver bullet.
With a chronological time line you'd still have the ability to unfollow and follow users, which would eventually get you to a manageable chronological list...
Facebook removed chronological order to posts so they can manipulate what is presented to users any time they want.
you can manually tell it to view recent posts first and get what you're looking for
Of course, when you do that, you get overwhelmed with thousands of obnoxious reposted political memes, and if you unfollow the people posting them you miss out on important life events
Facebook lets you make lists of friends and view posts from that list chronologically too, but it only gives a couple days' worth of posts from the lists, so that ends up being pretty useless too
EDIT: I should note that it'll automatically go back to its own evil sorting algorithm pretty often, so you have to keep clicking on "Recent First" again and again
Yeah people don't want to see Facebook improve and become beneficial. They want to see it burn and die.
It's worse now that tech is more about dogmatism as it becomes more popular.
The reality is they have a lot to improve, and they want to improve to keep the business running.
It's good that people are critical of FB and other companies, but many cross the line into a purely emotional state.
Even the rhetoric of Facebook breaking democracy is just a rhetoric. It's a problem with the whole industry.
There are many more Cambridge Analytica companies that don't require data from Facebook to know everything about you. It's good though that CA was a huge news story. I'm hopeful that in the next decade we can figure out these things because it is a huge problem.
Those of us who've been here long enough will remember HN used to show the points for each comment next to the author's name. It would be interesting to know if anyone had collected any metrics relating to this and how it affected the experience.
Personally I remember just after the change was first made I kept automatically looking for the score, as I had been using it for some hueristic for how much I should value the contents of the comment. Removing it made me a lot more critical and also open to potentially less popular ideas.
I do know that greyed out comments still make me automatically think less of them, and I try and make a point of upvoting comments that are downvoted because people disagree with them (rather than troll/spam/bad faith comments).
In my own experience, about half of my greyed out comments are due to saying something against the culture, and the other half are when I say something factually wrong. That's really good compared to most places (lots of subreddits for example) where saying something that doesn't fit the culture is necessary and sufficient for a points penalty.
Well, there are occasional third and fourth categories -- when I got overly political, I was upvoted but still (correctly) got flagged or once or twice that looking back, I was being an asshole.
I seem to recall that pg first posted a poll asking users whether they wanted to keep comment scores. Most said yes, and then he got rid of them anyway. That sticks in my mind because (a) I voted yes and (b) it was a striking example of following something other than immediate user feedback.
63 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadThey had a feature that they (as most would) thought would help people engage with each other and express support. Turns out it has unintended consequences. Now rightfully so they are exploring how to get away from that.
Not everything is a nefarious scheme. Sometimes it’s just good old product iteration.
Stating that you are improving the experience doesn't mean you are admitting the current experience is bad.
Oh great, so now people have to do just one more step to get the same dopamine rush. I can't see this solving the problem.
Friction is useful. Sure, this doesn't solve for some hypothetical influencer types or advertisers getting count data. For the hypothetical teenager who is apparently being made mentally unwell by social media, this probably precludes their putting forth the effort.
Then again I think back to all of those "See Who Viewed Your Page" malware ads from back in my day, and wonder if this isn't one viral app away from being useless.
Who the fuck knows? At least it's an attempt. They can go back to the drawing board if this fails.
I also realised back then how much I was strangely addicted to it. I would try to be funny just to get rep. I envied those with higher rep than me or who jumped the levels more quickly. Basically, it was toxic for me. It kind of innoculated me against likes a few years later.
Designed for government control and psychological warfare.
https://steemit.com/discussion/@boodles17/is-facebook-derviv...
"Both sides" applies here.
No point expecting good faith arguments in a bad faith situation
No, I'm not ignoring that. I am simply not commenting on it, since you did such a good job of calling it out for the bullshit that it is. But the person I was responding to having an established account doesn't make their contribution any higher value. It's the actual comment, not the person making it, that determines the comment's value. And stating, without any evidence, that somehow conservatives claiming victimization is par for the course is about as low value as a comment can get. There's nothing useful or insightful about it. It's lazy, tribal thinking.
> Are you seriously not aware that we live in the middle of a misinformation war?
Part of the misinformation war that you refer to is the left wing using their utter domination of prestige media outlets to marginalize right wing ideas and viewpoints in the popular discourse. The left propagandizes in the articles and the right propagandizes in the comment section and on social media.
> the left wing using their utter domination of prestige media outlets to marginalize right wing ideas and viewpoints in the popular discourse
If you can't see the irony here then I can't help you.
Also, the "marginalized right wing ideas" meme is getting old. The only people who are deplatformed are the ones that are inciting hate and spreading literally fake news. Are those the kind of right wing ideas that you're worried about being marginalized, or did you have some examples about the left wing media cabal censoring ideas about how much of a role government should play in society, and how much we should be taxed? Be more specific if you want to be taken seriously.
There are three major national newspapers in the US: NYT, WaPo, and WSJ. The only conservative one, the WSJ, is primarily a business paper and not as widely consumed or influential as the other two. There is only one right wing TV news outlet: Fox News. MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC are all left wing. Every single night time comedy or current events show is left wing (one late night host even referred to Trump’s mouth as “Putin’s cock holster” and is still on the air!). There are almost zero publicly out right wing actors, writers, or musicians. There are no prestigious, top tier national magazines which are right wing (The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, etc.).
Here are marginalized right wing ideas: that large scale low-skill immigration is bad for low-skill workers (marginalized by calling people who believe this racists), that having biological men compete in women’s sports is unfair or that allowing men to use female restrooms because of some unverifiable claim about what is happening in their head is not safe (both marginalized by calling people who believe them transphobes), that business owners should be allowed to not perform services that violate their religious beliefs (marginalized by calling people homophobes).
A common argument I hear is that since right-wing leaders aren't explicitly being racist or sexist or whatever, that we should give them the benefit of the doubt, be charitable. Maybe we're misunderstanding them.
But bad actors subsist on the benefit of the doubt. And the American right-wing has a strong case for being a bad actor against a large swath (arguably the majority) or the American people.
I am rico@toasterlovin.com.
andreigheorghe, that invitation extends to you, too.
But the right wing as institutionalized in American government has made their bigotry pretty clear in their implemented policies and rhetoric.
I wish conservatives had an actual reason to feel like victims, because it would that the rest of the country is back on track.
Are you really trying to equate the two?
Facebook acknowledges their product is toxic, and is taking steps to make it less so.
If you work for Facebook, how does it feel building a product that is actively hurting people and the societies they live in?
Have you experienced a crisis of faith, or has your insulated world prevented you from actual introspection into what you are a part of?
Tough for people to look in the mirror.
People post things they want to talk about. It just happens to be largely links (but not always; for example AskHN).
Let's do a quick test. Do you consider Reddit to be social media? How about Twitter? If you do, then so is Hacker News.
Just because you it happens to be a social media site that you personally like doesn't mean it gets to be in a different category that you consider more holy. Or just because there's no photos or because there's fewer features, doesn't mean it's not social media.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21085323
I dunno what the solution to this is. How it works now also annoys me because it often hides things/people I would be very interested in. But at the same time I don’t have time to look at everything.
It is a tough problem and no matter what you do there are positives and negatives. No silver bullet.
Facebook removed chronological order to posts so they can manipulate what is presented to users any time they want.
Of course, when you do that, you get overwhelmed with thousands of obnoxious reposted political memes, and if you unfollow the people posting them you miss out on important life events
Facebook lets you make lists of friends and view posts from that list chronologically too, but it only gives a couple days' worth of posts from the lists, so that ends up being pretty useless too
EDIT: I should note that it'll automatically go back to its own evil sorting algorithm pretty often, so you have to keep clicking on "Recent First" again and again
What do you call it when a company recognizes an area for improvement and strives to improve it?
Where I come from that's just good business.
We all need to raise our standards for corporate behavior...
It's worse now that tech is more about dogmatism as it becomes more popular.
The reality is they have a lot to improve, and they want to improve to keep the business running.
It's good that people are critical of FB and other companies, but many cross the line into a purely emotional state.
Even the rhetoric of Facebook breaking democracy is just a rhetoric. It's a problem with the whole industry.
There are many more Cambridge Analytica companies that don't require data from Facebook to know everything about you. It's good though that CA was a huge news story. I'm hopeful that in the next decade we can figure out these things because it is a huge problem.
Personally I remember just after the change was first made I kept automatically looking for the score, as I had been using it for some hueristic for how much I should value the contents of the comment. Removing it made me a lot more critical and also open to potentially less popular ideas.
I do know that greyed out comments still make me automatically think less of them, and I try and make a point of upvoting comments that are downvoted because people disagree with them (rather than troll/spam/bad faith comments).
http://tenyearsago.io/news.ycombinator.com
Wow and as luck would have it. The top story on HN 10 years ago (well actually it’s not updated daily).
“Experiment: No comment score”
http://tenyearsago.io/news.ycombinator.com