This WSJ story cites old research and falsely suggests we aren’t invested in fighting polarization. The reality is we didn’t adopt some of the product suggestions cited because we pursued alternatives we believed are more effective. What’s undeniable is we’ve made significant changes to the way FB works to improve the integrity of our products, such as fundamentally changing News Feed ranking to favor content from friends and family over public content (even if this meant people would use our products less). We reduce distribution of posts that use divisive and polarizing tactics like clickbait, engagement bait, and we’ve become more restrictive when it comes to the types of Groups we recommend to people.

We come to these decisions through rigorous debate where we look at all angles of how our decisions will affect people in different parts of the world - from those with millions of followers to regular people who might not otherwise have a place to be heard. There’s a baseline expectation of the amount of rigor and diligence we apply to new products and it should be expected that we’d regularly evaluate to ensure that our products are as effective as they can be.

We get criticism from all sides of any decision and it motivates us to look at research, our own and external, analyze and pressure test our principles about where we do and don't draw lines on speech. We continue to do and fund research on misinformation and polarization to better understand the impact of our products; in February we announced an additional $2M in funding for independent research on this topic (e.g. https://research.fb.com/blog/2020/02/facebook-misinformation...).

Criticism and scrutiny are always welcome, but using cherry-picked examples to try and negatively portray our intentions is unfortunate.

10 short years ago, nobody could have imagined that huge swathes of the population could have been swayed to accept non-scientific statements as fact because of social media. Now we're struggling to deal with existential threats like climate change because a lot of people get their worldview from Facebook. Algorithms have decided that they fall on one side of the polarization divide and should receive a powerful dose of fake science and denialism ... all because clicks and engagement.

How much exactly do you think Facebook ought to donate to independent researchers? Most tech companies donate ~0$ to such efforts.

That's a horrible example, I don't think that is even remotely comparable to swaying the population into burning down dozens (hundreds?) of cell towers or accusing Bill Gates of starting the coronavirus pandemic.

The core issue here is that the internet allows many, many voices to flourish, and some of these voices speculate attractively but incorrectly (from my viewpoint, at least).

Blaming the platform which allows the voices to spread seems like a bad move, given that the core issue is the people who choose to go along with it.

The only way in which I can assume that FB is responsible for all the alternative theories on their platform is by refusing to accept any agency on the part of FB's users, which I think is probably the wrong idea.

As an example, right now you are promoting a narrative on an internet site holding FB responsible for the behaviour of others. Do your readers have so little agency that they will mindlessly act on your words without reflection?

If so, what differentiates your post from a similar post on FB?

If not, what makes FB different?

These are genuine questions by the way, I'm actually interested in your answers.

I don't idealize the past at all. Too many bad things to write.

However, the internet amped up the level of overall craziness to an unprecedented level. Even the first twenty years, it was much like the regular world, but geekier. But then in a fairly short time all these crazy ideas just started to spread in an incredibly tiny period of time.

I have always been a student of the paranormal and conspiracy theories - as a skeptic. Suddenly random people were spouting all the obscure classics, and brand-new ones appeared every day.

Last year, before COVID, I decided that this was akin to an infectious disease - suddenly people were thrown in with hundreds of thousands of anonymous people, many with bad but infectious ideas.

Before the internet, you acquired most of your delusional ideas at birth from your parents under the guise of religion etc.

Now you could pick up delusional ideas one at a time - more, the presentation gets to evolve because the creators get second-to-second feedback. Call these Vemes for virulent memes perhaps?

Some once-friends of mine clearly have very poor immune systems as they picked up many vemes.

> The only way in which I can assume that FB is responsible for all the alternative theories on their platform is by refusing to accept any agency on the part of FB's users, which I think is probably the wrong idea.

1. Infectious diseases don't work that way!

2. Also, a lot of this is caused by a small number of actual psychopaths who literally just want to cause grief. Allowing a tiny group of people to damage the whole is wrong.

---

Trying to assign agency to the crowd is madness and not backed up by observations of humanity en masse or reading a history book. In such a mob scene, crazies, aggressive people and criminals will always win.

If it's not immediately apparent, pretty much no other medium in history (new or old) had/has the real reach Facebook has now. So taking it out of context and simply defining Facebook as a "new medium" is disingenuous. A firecracker and a bomb only differ in scale, hence the massive difference in how they're seen and treated.

With great power comes great legal and moral responsibility, and greater scrutiny. You can't shrug it off just because others have also done badly at this, especially when nobody else did it badly at such a massive scale.

I wonder what the cell phone generation would think of our pulp paper fake Necronomicons from the 1970s? There was also a book of spells at my local library in the very-white very-evangelical suburbs of Little Rock, AR when I was a kid, too. I liked the one about how to become a werewolf a lot, but didn't really get to the point of going and murdering a dog and painting myself with its blood and boiled fat.

The pearl-clutching about social media is because power has been taken away. Media executives can no longer fancy themselves in control of people's minds, because they no longer have a monopoly on eyeballs via print and TV information.

Worse yet (for them), the user customizable nature of social media feeds mean that they can't even know what people really see.

If people use the internet to make themselves worse that's a failure of people not the internet.

FB has almost every eyeball now. Can you say the same about your fake Necronomicon? Book of spells? The media that controlled your mind?

The last statement is basically one against any form of control or regulation. If people use the x to make themselves worse that's a failure of people not x. Sometimes people need help.

They are a platform rather than a publisher, in my view at least.

For all intents and purposes they should be responsible for everything that happens on the platform regardless of where the content was picked up from. They should have a responsibility but this comes in conflict with their goal to to drive engagement and profits.

Their algorithm curates what people see, shows specific links, and influences opinions. And when you can influence opinions on such a large scale and monetize it we have a conflict of interest and even a weapon. FB and others have proven this in the past. Why do you think the media is regulated so tightly around election time? FB can take even a blog post and push it so aggressively right before elections that they manage to sway opinions but still claim they were just a platform.

Let's put it in terms other than politics...

In the early 1980s a full third of all households in the US watched the TV show "Dallas" every weekend. Was "Dallas" the greatest performance ever made or just the best option out of 3 choices?

If facebook is wading into being a truth-teller, they’re going to run straight into government-media-academia social circles a la Pinker, Chomsky, all the punditry on TV, all the punditry in opinion columns (claims still need fact checking even if the result is an opinion).

Then, how do you deal with framing the presentation of verifiable facts with extremely ominous and sinister tone/hinting? You can do an enormous amount of damage just making untestable, unverifiable implications.

IMHO facebook is gonna get squeezed till they pop over this, either by blatantly having political double standards or by becoming a misinformation-based hellhole. The accessibility of Truth is much harder than people realize, and I don’t even think it’s fair to off load this responsibility onto facebook. People are just strangely ok with believing bullshit.

Most of the west has learnt that we should not penalise drug addicts. We treat the underlying problems that brought about their habitual use. The need to self-medicate disappears.

Like the war on drugs failed, so too shall the war on misinformation. The solution is tending for the human condition that leads one to not only believe, but want to believe, in these fantasies.

The problem is that Facebook's algorithms are directly helping those cults grow by polarising people, as stated in the linked article:

> Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

I'm sure we can all agree that you can't end all cults, but surely actively encouraging their growth is a bad idea.

Similarly, rats and mold flourished long before we started keeping open trash bags in the kitchen.

It's pretty clear that FB is an incredibly fertile breeding ground for such ideas, and that is on them. Not on the ideas.

I hope one day the war on drugs will end - but sadly it is still alive and well in the United States and all over the world.

As for the war on misinformation, we have lost continuously on this one for years in a row, and there's no evidence at all we're succeeding.

For example, if FB comes to be seen as a kind of mind control platform, that could be devastating as national govts decide to step in and put a stop to things. Imagine even a mid-sized country regulating that FB was responsible for tagging any posts that contained not just Covid-19 misinformation but all sorts of misinformation. That sort of thing could be extremely dangerous to FB's business model.

These sorts of risk in my mind would be very high indeed and I would devote a lot of resources to at the very least understand them. $2M is a drop in the bucket for a company with revenues of $70B for addressing such risk.

(Actually I checked and a bucket contains approx 10K drops, so this is actually surprisingly close to being a drop in the bucket).

Facebook's researchers seemed to think otherwise:

> Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for [extremist groups'] growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

If they actually pay their taxes, they all do.

They don't.

Also the article mentions that even though they had they option to reduce it, they actively chose not to. How is this not something that I shod be critical of?

Why is growth above everything else important? What if they disabled the group discovery part? How is that impossible?

Key players like Facebook throwing in the towel because “we don’t see an easy way to stop contributing to problems that are growing in size and can potentially destabilize democracies, world ecosystems, or a few decades from now hunan existence” is not an option.

The problems we have today are growing exponentially in seriousness. Human beings need to learn to get along in ways they never needed to before both due to resource stress and technological powers we never had before.

Facebook’s amplification of many human weaknesses is only one of many risk factors. But I don’t think many young people realize how easily humans have fallen into disasters in the past, which amplified by progress could easily become existential today.

Btw, some tech companies donate a fuckload to open source and other aligned initiatives. Its annoying to see this ignored for the sake of a weak argument.

And this is a part of the problem, right? It's not whataboutism, it's a lesson from history. Your belief in the incorrect expert advice of yesteryear is so strong that even trying to type out the opposite is hard.

At the moment a whole lot of people, of the type who read and post to HN, have decided that disagreeing with "experts" is divisive. The problem is these "experts" aren't really experts by normal definitions, like someone who has a strong track record of correctly understanding and predicting a complex topic. The word is instead being used to mean something more like, "people employed by the government who claim special knowledge". Nutrition is the example chosen here for non-expert experts, because nutrition has been hit hard by the replication crisis. But it's hardly the only field with this problem - basically every medical authority has discredited itself during COVID.

Disagreement with authority is a classic justification for free speech. It is inherently perceived by the ruling classes as "divisive" because that's exactly what it does - it divides people into those disputing their authority and those who don't. You thus can't combat "divisiveness" without simply shutting down all disagreement with the government in all ways.

I'm sorry, but really, there's no reason to believe a word a you say.

You get paid from Facebook, Facebook lied again and again, how on earth do you expect people to take you seriously?

Your job and title is to give FB the optics of caring about integrity, and was invented as part of FB PR in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre.

The amount of cynicism is just mind boggling.

You are welcome to conduct research or fund it. You can even help current research by criticizing their research in its substance, or engage yourself politically (at least by voting) so we can have more and better research about the topic.

It's not the lack of research that's a problem, it's the weaponization of research.

Your posts sound like you believe corporations shouldn't ever do research and worse, that academics don't have any interest in the outcomes of their own work. But that's nonsense, of course they do. They want to publish papers, they want their research findings to be novel and widely cited, they want to build a reputation. They have all kinds of self-interested incentives that act against producing accurate research findings; hence the replication crisis!

How do you think Facebook should deal with this? If Facebook-funded research is suspect and nobody else is able or willing to fund it (why should someone else fund soemthing for Facebooks potential benefit, when Facebook are rich, and if someone else is funding research for Facebooks detriment, then I would say its equally suspect), how should such research be funded then?

How can you show results of the research in a way that you wouldn’t consider as “weaponized”?

I’m not a fan of Facebook and am quite suspicious of them, but I’m also not sure what they can do in this particular situation that we would find satisfactory,

Would be very interesting to learn about these countries where polarization has fallen if you have links to hand.

Although it's trivial to say "I see a lot of polarisation on social media, therefore it's worse than it was", a satellite-view paper like that NBER one gives zero insight into the role of social media, partly because the data isn't provided, but also because it doesn't examine what effects there might be on smaller groups within the population who are, say, heavy social media users.

I think the most useful thing Facebook could do would be to make more information available to researchers, rather than pointing to research which hasn't been able to use data and claim that helps exonerate Facebook.

You state this as a matter of fact. How do you know this?

Even if it were to be true, that people were more polarized in the climate worldview by Facebook and more so to the wrong side than the right side, we all know that climate change is the result of our behaviour the last centuries and that counter efforts has been resisted the last 50 years.

You can reshuffle the deck but the same cards are still inside.

Twitter managed to do it, but FB continues to allow political parties to spread misinformation via the algorithm, and FB profits from it.

So essentially VP of Integrity, your salary is paid for in part by the spread of misinformation. Until you at least ban political ads your integrity is non-existent.

Partners have walked from billions of dollars in shares, its former concience, Alex Stamos, quit after being repeatedly blocked, stymied, subverted, undermined, or backstabbed. And the very label "VP of Integrity" reads as so perfectly Orwellian and ironic that the position negates itself.

Without an ability to fully rope in Zuck directly it is every bit as toothless as it sounds.

Further more just because the role exists doesn't mean it matters. My Org has all sorts of diversity and sustainability managers, and their relevance ends the moment business decisions come into play.

Why I am saying this: it seems you sit backwards on your high horse, criticising those people who for all intents and purposes have very limited insight into the decision making.

Me and my close friends are fed up with Facebook and how obviously it is trying to polarize everyone in this world.

No sympathy for you on my side, and I cann assure you I speak on behalf of my friends too.

Here is an actual example:

> "• Question: How much will we communicate about this? We usually don't want people to game the Feed but this change might hit their pocketbook so my instinct is to be open about this.

> • Answer: Comms is aware and we will be proactive about communicating this. Inside Feed is one channel we can use to do this. The only way this can happen at the domain level is with full transparency and product is aware we can't do this unless we have that."

So the commitee passed the buck and all the transparency is gone. Also there are no names or responsible persons assigned. And by the way, the words "feed", "news feed" or "ranking" appears only once throughout the span of 4 months. I very much doubt there were no decisions in any form throughout those 4 months regarding the news feed.

So overall this looks to me like pixie dust rather than a true representation or involvement in decision making.

Genuine question here.

We have entered an era in which non-state actors like Facebook have power that was once the exclusive domain of governments [1]. Facebook understands this, and justifiably views itself as a quasi-government [2].

I would really like to understand Facebook’s theory of governance. If I want to understand my own government, I can read the Federalist papers. These documents articulate an understanding of history and a positive view of the appropriate role of government in society. I can use these documents to help myself evaluate a particular government action in light of the purpose of government and the risks inherent in concentrated power.

Has Facebook published something like this? I struggle to understand Facebook’s internal view of it’s role in society and its concept of what “doing the right thing” means. Without some clear statement of governing principles, people will naturally gravitate to the view that Facebook is a cynical and sometimes petty [3] profit maximizer.

Without some statement of purpose and principles, it is hard to level criticism in a way that Facebook will find helpful or actionable. We are left to speculate about Facebook's intentions, instead of arguing that a certain outcome is inconsistent with its stated purpose.

[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/blurred-lines-between-state-and-non...

[2] https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/4/9/17214752/zuckerber...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/14/facebooks-security-team-trac...

From the outside looking in, it seems as though you are paid to drink cool-aid and paint FB in a positive light. How does one get to be in your position? What are the qualifications for your job?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

Another commenter noticed this first but the comment is buried at the bottom of the thread. You have to enable showdead to see it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319381

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-copycats-how-facebook-s...

Onavo Protect was removed from the App Store in 2018 for privacy violations, and from Google Play in 2019. Onavo then rebranded to Facebook Research and marketed itself through targeted ads to teenagers on Instagram and Snapchat. Apple revoked Facebook's developer certificate because Onavo was using it to bypass the App Store review process. Three U.S. senators (Richard Blumenthal, Ed Markey, and Mark Warner) criticized Facebook Research for harvesting data from children. Facebook Research was discontinued later that year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

Guy Rosen moved on to be Facebook's VP of Product Management. In 2019, he briefly adopted the "VP of Integrity" title when performing damage control for Facebook's live stream of the Christchurch mosque shootings, and then reverted back to VP of Product Management after he was called out on it.

https://gizmodo.com/facebook-exec-gets-new-title-as-vp-of-in...

The next time Facebook needs a public relations injection, it should consider using someone other than the co-founder of Onavo.

It seems like they knew exactly what they where doing. They want money and I don't believe for a second that the most ethical road is where the money is, you have to be able to say no to money and Facebook clearly shows us time and time again that money has the highest priority.

The highest value seems to be in companies that brand themselves as trustworthy but really isn't. No matter if it is Goldman Sachs, Facebook, Google or Nestle.

FFS

“Let me make some calls.”

You do not get to the position he has at Facebook by having either ethics or morals. Having seen this up close at Facebook HQ I can assure you that everyone at VP level or above there knows what they are doing, knows the long-term consequences, and simply does not care because the paycheck is far too large for simple ethics to enter into the discussion.

The main issue here is people have different ideas of what is ethical. Disagreements arise when countries and increasingly companies exert power of people given to them by those same people.

In my mind, the same problems existed before facebook and expecting facebook to solve them for everyone is rediculous. Even more rediculius is expecting everyone to accept facebook’s solutions.

I think that the fact that the founder/CEO of Onavo is now Facebook's VP of Integrity is entirely consistent with everything else we've read about Facebook over the years.

Amazing..

-- 1984

His title VP of Integrity is not accidental; it can't be.

I hope there are more people at the top with the integrity to stand up for injustice like Tim Bray. I have all the respect in the world for someone who puts their neck on the line for what they believe in. Thank you Tim @tbray

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/business/amazon-tim-bray-...

This seems inherently a political evaluation. What are the criteria and is this driven manually automatically?

If we're talking metrics, the 64% stat cited in the article turns out not to be a good way to measure impact of recommendations on an extremist group. We internally think about things like prevalence of bad recommendations. More on prevalence here - https://about.fb.com/news/2019/05/measuring-prevalence/. I don't have a metric I can share on recommendations specifically but you can see the areas we've shared it for so far here: https://transparency.facebook.com/community-standards-enforc...

The problem is not your intentions. It's clear that you actually want to engage people, given that you're replying actively on this board, even to impolite comments. The problem is the style of communication. It sounds constructed, artificial, developed through a process, like you and a bunch of people are sitting there drafting replies and tweaking until you have something that won't come back later and bite you in the butt. The problem with that strategy is that you end up saying very little of meaning at all.

So maybe to make things more concrete - is there a statistic on measuring the impact of recommendations that you do agree with that you can share?

$2M for independent research. haha, that's really generous of Facebook. You all probably made that in a days worth of misleading political ads you've sold.

One question I have for you mr VP of INTEGRITY... I haven't used FB in over 8 years but I would like the full set of every data point that you have on me, my wife and my kids. Where can I get that? And if I can't, please explain to me why.

I guess you've been drinking so much moneysaurus rex kool aid that you seem to not understand that people just don't believe anything you all say anymore. Your boss can't even give straight answers in front of the government.

Maybe you all should change your tagline to: Facebook, we're working on it.

Business Insider article: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-removes-mention-of-...

Frontline Interview: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/guy-rosen/

Isn’t that the CEO’s job?

So slimy....

And my snarky response is inspired largely by what I would call your diversion of a response. To me reads like you are not acknowledging the real answer: no, as FB VP of Integrity I can't and won't provide the list.

Would that have not been easier?

I'm curious at to what you and others in the 35k you mentioned do?

I didn't read the article, because paywalled.

So you're implying seriously that 35'000 people are actively involved in such decisions? Really?

Let me wager a guess:

A Google search reveals 44'942 Facebook employees as per December 31 2019.

You're implying here that 78% of all your employees are directly involved in such decisions?

Here's my take. 99.998 % (and yes, the number is pulled out of thin air) of those 35000 people are lowly paid contractors sifting through the horrible crap that some of your users post.

Sure, they're working on "safety and security" in the broadest sense, but are sure as shit far away from any such decisions.

The problem is that your entire executive leadership believes it is a five hundred billion dollar platform. They have to, because the investors demand it.

This is the source of all your failings.

You maybe serious about your job, but you work for people that proved they have no moral compass. I'd quit if I were you and actually believe in what you try to accomplish.

Edit: just realized you are the founder of onavo, a spyware bought by facebook. Were you also heading project atlas? Were you responsible for inviting teens to install spyware so you can collect all their data?

The mere fact YOU are chosen as VP of integrity just says it all. When the head of integrity is a spyware peddler... Well....

Yeah, I guess it's a cynical move I should've expected of Facebook.

Emphasis added.

What is that supposed to mean? Would you like a sticker for doing the right thing?

hahahhahahhahahhahahah

You guys are a bunch of clowns.

If you had any integrity, you would delegate this governance back to the captured provinces.

We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us.

What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like.

Instead of being tuned to line the pockets of Facebook, the AI is an agent of your own choosing. Maybe you want it to actually _reduce_ engagement after an hour of mindless browsing.

And not just for Facebook, but every website. Twitter, Instagram, etc. Even websites like Reddit, which are "user moderated", are still ultimately run by Reddit's algorithm and could instead be curated by _your_ agent.

I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse. But can it possibly make them worse than they already are? Are we really saying that an agent built by us, for us, will be worse than an agent built by Facebook for Facebook?

And isn't that how the internet used to be? Back when the scale of the internet wasn't so vast, people just ... skimmed everything themselves and decided what to engage with. So what I'm really driving at is some way to scale that up to what the internet has since become. Some way to build a tiny AI version of yourself that goes out and crawls the internet in ways that you personally can't, and return to you the things you would have wanted to engage with had it been possible for you to read all 1 trillion internet comments per minute.

The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business, they are obligated to fight against user agents or other intermediary systems.

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. Every time you upload some adorable photo of your baby for your friends to ooh and aah over, you're giving Facebook free bait that they then use to trap your friends into looking at ads.

The only thing more insane than blaming users for having self-interest are the people who pretend that Facebook et al. are somehow owed the business model they have, painting ad-blockers as some kind of dangerous society-destabilizing technology instead of the commonsense response to shitty business practices it clearly is.

Something has to pay the bills.

When? Adblock has been free and easy for years now

Now, extensions to block ads are mature on mobile.

On some sites I run, I see 60% blocking on desktop, 10% on mobile. If it hits 60% on mobile as well, then the ads would cease to be profitable.

A quick google says somewhere from 20%-40% use adblockers. 60% sounds high, but depending on the website, I can see it. For example, I bet at least 60% of visitors to gnu.org are blocking ads and/or trackers.

But the tiny Mastodon server I run for myself, with a total user count in the low triple digits, costs about fifty bucks a month, and the users who are willing to pay cover half of that. I could probably get more of them to cover it if I was more aggressive about asking, but I prefer to keep it super low-key. I could also lower those costs if I felt like putting some work into optimizing it.

It’s not my job, it’s a thing I run on the side and put a few hours of technical work into every few months. I ain’t gonna get rich from it but it gives my friends a nice place to chat on the Internet.

I reject the notion that "We all know users won’t pay enough for a subscription service to make a huge profit that makes the VC happy, makes the founder one of the ten richest people in the country etc" because...if you can figure out how to get Grandma to use a federated Mastodon-like service, then you would do just that.

— Suzy <3”

Contrast this with real life hobby groups, and service groups, where you can more easily raise money to cover costs.

There’s a low-key buzz of occasional thanks and favors in my life that I wouldn’t get if I wasn’t doing this, either. And occasionally this connection lets one of my friends help out another who needs it, financially or emotionally, when they wouldn’t even necessarily be contact with each other, much less interested in helping out, without the shared space I’ve created.

I think this is a great experience.

(Total active user count is more like a few dozen, btw.)

I've actually experienced the latter, as I looked for an alternative to Gmail. I just found it hard to justify paying for an email provider, where the only real value add to me is the absence of ads, and not being Gmail. And really, the price is mostly irrelevant. For me to be willing to pay _anything_, it would have to have a really compelling reason to move. The value of not seeing ads is just not that high for me. And I don't think you would say there isn't value in an email provider.

If that argument sounded absurd to you, it's probably because it is. The services are valuable because people ultimately do use them — a lot of them, even. They pay for them indirectly by agreeing to look at ads.

There are loads of services we do not directly pay for, like the fire department and the public library — and yet they are immensely valuable.

I don’t agree that just because people will use a free thing that means it has a lot of value. Note I didn’t say that FB has no value, just that it might not be as valuable as one might think.

Considering most of their value is their messenger platform I don’t think FB is really worth much at all beyond their social graph.

That's a typo on my part — it doesn't change the veracity of the argument.

> I don’t agree that just because people will use a free thing that means it has a lot of value. Note I didn’t say that FB has no value, just that it might not be as valuable as one might think.

Sure, but how do you measure the "true" value? If you can answer that question, you will probably become a billionaire.

> Considering most of their value is their messenger platform I don’t think FB is really worth much at all beyond their social graph.

What are you basing this on? You may only find the messenger platform to be valuable, but how do you know how others perceive the FB platform/product?

Centralized, siloed social networks are only expensive to run because they're centralized. Things were better when the norm was to start a blog instead of using someone else's walled garden.

I'm all for empowering people. But adding personally controlled user agents to Facebook is a fundamentally flawed solution. There is no path for that to succeed because the primary content users will want to filter is ads, and the primary content Facebook needs people to see is ads. Thus user agents are an existential threat to Facebook and since Facebook controls all the content, they will ensure user agents are not allowed.

The core business model does not align Facebook's incentives with user's incentives. You can't fix that at the content level.

Doesn't that assume that there is a better business model?

Do you know of a social media company (or ad company using a product to garner the data, if that helps) that uses that model with a comparable size to Facebook? If not, are there any that are making ground?

Well, it is someone else's website. What do you expect Zuckerberg has his own interests in mind.

In 2020, it is still too difficult for everyone to set up their own website, so they settle for a page on someone else's.

If exchanging content with friends and family (not swaths of the public who visit Facebook - hello advertisers) is the ultimate goal, then there are more efficient ways to to do that without using Zuckerberg's website.

The challenge is to make those easier to set up.

For example, if each group of friends and family were on the same small overlay network they set up themselves, connecting to each other peer-to-peer, it would be much more difficult for advertisers to reach them. Every group of friends and family on a different network instead of every group of friends and family all using the same third party, public website on the same network, the internet.

Naysayers will point to the difficulty setting up such networks. No one outside of salaried programmers paid to do it wants to even attempt to write "user agents" today because the "standard", a ridiculously large set of "features", most of which benefit advertisers not users, is far too complex. What happens when we simplify the "standard"? As an analogy, look at how much easier is is to set up Wireguard, software written more or less by one person, than it is to set up OpenVPN.

The problem is that no one has the incentive to host such a service for free, and users wants the content to be available 24/7. So it's not as simple as just setting up a peer-to-peer network. Users who just use a phone as their primary computer will still want to be able to publish to their millions of followers, and so it wouldn't work to have those millions of people connect directly to this person's device. Maybe you can solve that with a bit-torrent like approach, but the problem gets harder when you include the ability to send messages privately.

You have shifted the discussion from small overlay network for friends and family to large overlay network for "millions of followers".

Those methods of sharing content with "millions of followers" are already available and will no doubt continue to be available.

A small private network is a different idea, with a different purpose. People will always have the choice of using a public network however a small overlay can avoid sending traffic through third party servers, like Facebook's.

There is no requirement that a service has to be "free", or supported by ads. This is something else you injected in the discussion. I use free software to set up overlays, but I have to pay for internet service and hosting. The cost of the "service" is not the setup it is the internet access and hosting.

It's easy for people to point what they don't like about Facebook, but I don't think you are really comprehending why they dominated the social network space to begin with. It's not as easy as making a product that doesn't advertise, if it costs money to use instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

matrix.org is approaching this

If you mean something that can make a splash in the social media space to address the "user agents on Facebook" problem, color me skeptical about the prospect of competing on useful features with the Facebook behemoth while fighting the complexity up and down the stack of making everything decentralized and trying to make it friction-free for casual users to run, with no funding from ads, and starting out at square one on network effects. Yes, Mastodon is a possible counter to this line of argument, but Twitter is so stagnant and their product is so simple that I feel like it's almost a unique case. And for most people the Facebook use case includes being able to find all their real-life contacts; by that measure even Mastodon would fail.

The business of Facebook is not the "comically low" bar of sharing text and images with friends and family. An overlay solution that avoids sending traffic to a third party server is not "competing with Facebook". However it could be used to avoid Facebook which is the point we are discussing here. The fact that only a small number of people actually use a solution does not mean it is a "failure". If the software is relatively small, compiles fast, runs on different OS and architectures, stays available for download and reliably works as intended, then to me it is "successful". The way I evaluate "success" and "failure" of a software is probably different from many commenters/readers.

this is plain and simple fucked up.

The idea that it's okay to be a selfish child with power is tantamount to allowing driving while drunk. Power is deadly, you can just as easily crush a persons life as you could their legs with a car. Don't drive drunk, don't be in power if you can't be a responsible citizen about it.

I believe, with nothing to back this up, that social media would be improved with a better educated population. One that knows and values the basic tenets of critical thinking and debate. No amount of policing will make people smarter or more courteous. People have to choose to be more civil and be more interested in views counter to their own.

>If you have power, you have responsibility: full fucking stop.

No, if you have power you get to decide the rule.

Same as drunk driving, the reason we are not allowing driving while drunk is because the people who are against drunk driving has more power than the people who are pro drunk driving. The side that has more power get to decide what the law is.

Dictators are responsible for the death of millions, even if they make laws that say otherwise.

>Dictators are responsible for the death of millions.

The Dictators very well may believe that their action is the proper responsibility (According to him).

My point is you can't simply ask them to stop by telling them they have responsibility. Both side may view responsibility differently.

Isn't the internet supposed to be every node acting as it's own server and client simultaneously anyways? Is the problem just the inability to truly decentralize discovery, registry, and identity authentication of nodes in the network? Or is the problem that most ISPs don't want people operating services out of their homes or off of their phones?

It works for me and has worked for others. The keyword here that distinguishes this idea from almost every other "peer-to-peer overlay network" project that you can read about is "small". If you limit the size of the network, you can avoid some problems. Most projects you read about aim at the ability to create a single, large network that potentially everyone can join. Open to the public. However using a different approach it is possible to create only small networks that are only open to people you know, e.g., friends, family, co-workers. There are still problems, but there are always going to be some problems. The internet you are using right now has problems. The question is does it work well enough. The small overlay network idea has worked well enough for me that I consider it one of the better ones. It is really impossible to debate these ideas on the internet. Opinions are strong and negativity is even stronger. If you want an answer you need to try things out yourself and draw your own conslusions. No peer-to-peer solution is "perfect" and if you are always looking for the solution with zero negatives and zero limitations, you will never find it. Worse is if you never actually try these solutions, you just read about them. After you try many of them and learn what you like and do not like about the design/implementation, it is easier to chose one idea that works for your use case. Everytime someone starts promoting a peer-to-peer project you can quickly evaluate it, based on what types of designs/implementations have worked for you and which ones didn't. Well, that's my opinion, anyway.

This is patently not true. People were using email for this prior to Facebook's existence, which worked well enough ("Share photos via email! Share videos via email! Here's a funny story from grandma! RSVP to my birthday!") and was painless to set up; in fact, all the people who have Facebooks also have emails! But very few people are doing this anymore as their main mode of communication with friends and family; this kind of activity is now happening on Facebook, where people are happy with the ease that it facilitates. Small networks works fine, but nobody's interested, hence why Facebook is worth billions and billions of dollars and is a large website.

The stated purpose of this forum is intellectual curiosity. There is nothing in bobthepanda's comments that is directed at that stated purpose. Why is he/she arguing about email usage when the quoted sentence refers to setting up websites? This looks like more of the "straw man" argument technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

"no user"? Nope. People buy magazines, that are 90% ads. Subscribe to newsletters. Hunt for coupons. Watch home shopping channels. Etc, etc.

There's large part of population that wants to see ads. Scammy and bad ads? No. Good and relevant ads? A LOT of people do want them. Even tech-folks, who claim that ads are worst thing for humanity. Don't you want to learn about sale for new tech gadgets? Discounts for AWS? Good rent deals?

No, not at all. Ads don't just inform about deals, they also incite you to buy. I don't want to buy just because some random company got the chance to put some psychological manipulation in front of my eyeballs. If I want or need something, I will specifically seek it out. If I don't specifically seek it out, then I probably don't really need it.

If the price (heh) of that is that I miss out on some better deals for stuff that I would otherwise seek out, I'm fully happy eating that cost.

Sometimes we don't know that we have a problem that is easily solvable. As an example, I had no idea that there was an industry to reduce aws spending. One day a marketer made it past my filters and made me aware of an industry that I benefit from today. Just one example of many where marketing is win-win.

On the other hand I agree that there is too much psychological manipulation, unfortunately it exists because it works. Maybe this is where we need to disrupt the industry through a different approach. Just brainstorming, what if we regulated advertising to prohibit emotional/manipulative messages and rely instead on advertising facts?

I'm curious why you don't want to encounter these "manipulations". Is it because of the brainpower it uses to identify them as such? Are you particularly susceptible to giving in to them? Something else? I'm genuinely curious.

Lots of people say this online, I just don't believe them. Visual psychological manipulation works well enough on most people.

No. I want less intrusions on my senses, not more. I buy few things, and ads are irrelevant for the central ones: groceries and utilities are dependent on my place of residence.

If given the choice, I’d welcome with open arms the chance to never see an ad again anywhere, including offline. I’ve never seen an ad with a deal as good as that one, and I doubt I ever will.

Suppose there is a $100 product that produces $110 worth of value for a specific person and costs $50 to produce and deliver to them. To use economics terms, there's a $10 consumer surplus here, and a $50 producer surplus. The consumer willingness to see the ad is proportional to the consumer surplus, while the producer's willingness to pay for ad placement is proportional to producer surplus.

This is a fundamental divergence in interests; because the ad networks are paid by producers, they'll serve the ads that tend to make ad buyers the most money, not the ads that best enrich the viewers' lives.

Anecdotally of course, as one of those tech-folks who's got nothing against good and relevant ads.

Be careful what you wish for. This TED talk[0] on persuasion architectures brings up some interesting moral arguments against this idea. If we generally accept that ad conversion is a metric of an ad's success, how do we handle the situation where people that are susceptible to addictive behaviors like gambling and compulsive shopping are exposed to ads that exploit their condition? Data-driven advertising systems are built particularly well to find and exploit these kinds of people. We already see this a lot in the scam call/email world. Once you fall for one, the amount of inbound traffic you receive from scammers increases dramatically.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI&t=872s

Ads like that used to be common. By your description, it sounds like they died out on their own.

A well targeted ad doesn't need to serve you well, it just needs to convince you to buy; I have a lot of faith in myself and I'd say those are often the same thing, but experiences may differ.

Sure at some scale, marketing becomes a requirement to build your brand for many other purposes and I will also concede that in some cases, like with services that hinge on network effect, marketing is required for the product to even become viable. But most things are not social networks and we would be better served to learn of the product in context with its competition in a less biased setting.

Sure. The thing is: when people are interested in something, they look for it. When I want to buy some games, I open my PS4's store. Any advertising I get there is absolutely fine because I asked for it. I told the software to show me the stuff that's available for me to buy.

The problem is when I open a link to some web page and 80% of my phone's screen turns into advertising noise I didn't ask for and couldn't care less about. I make it a point to delete this noise.

And yes, I know: good luck getting THAT to happen in the US given how badly funded everything else in my list is. If you’re in another country that actually funds public goods maybe this is a thing you could talk to some of your fellow techies about and make a proposal, especially if your country is getting increasingly tired of Facebook?

Alternatively, ground-up local funding of federated social networks might be workable; I run a Mastodon server for myself and a small group of my friends and acquaintances, with the costs pretty much evenly split between myself and the users who have money to spare. It is not without its flaws and problems but it is a thing I can generally keep going with a small investment of my spare time every few months.

B) Companies like Facebook in particular can never be nationalized due to the First & Fourth Amendments, and government being barred from competing with private entities in the private sector.

C) I do agree that Google and Amazon should be tried for anti-trust violations and that Google in particular should be split for violating anti-trust laws against vertical integration across markets.

The brits won't be happy if Google is nationalized into a french public service

Not that you're wrong, but: that's the fucking point!

Advertising delenda est.

You pay for cable. Paying customers are a better audience for ads than deadbeats.

Facebook's purpose of existence is to make money.

Do you have a point? This reads like an unfinished thought.

"mental short circuit" better describes your argument that jumps from "it's possible to both show ads and charge user fees" to "they always will".

You can do that?

How long until those ads crop back up anyway? Instagram should give us some idea on how sponsored content might look in such a system. According to some random site, the average price for a "sponsored" instagram post is $300. You think your friends are above showing you an ad when real money is on the line? Maybe they won't be making that kind of money with very few followers, but when Pizzahut asks you to post an ad in exchange for a free pizza, I think you'll see plenty of takers. Now, granted, at least the people being paid are your friends, instead of Zuck.

And for the small group of people it seems to me that it should be easily self correcting by normal social cues since there’s no network effect to offset it.