Comment by calgoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calgoo | Hacker News Reader

"When you log in to Facebook, we use the power of machine learning to provide you with unique, personalized experiences. Machine learning models are part of ranking and personalizing News Feed stories, filtering out offensive content, highlighting trending topics, ranking search results, and much more."

So, everything that i hate about FB is related to the AI.

Ranking and Personalizing: Horrible ranking results and the "personalized" results that they push into my feed have nothing to do with me, my interests and is not something i would ever want in my social feed. Its almost as bad as their advertising results (which im guessing is based on the same AI).

Offensive Content: I could not give 2 f@@@@ about this, but i guess some people don't like strong language or pictures (only point that i see as acceptable use of the AI for now).

Trending Topics: FB, you are not Twitter, please stop trying to copy them. If i want trending topics I'll go to Twitter. My Facebook is a way to contact people i have not talked to in months.

Search results etc: What search??? Facebook as a search engine now? Or are you talking about the BS do you know John? You should know john! - FB: If I have not added John, it might mean i dont want to talk to John cause he is an a@@. Until your AI learns to detect aholes then please switch off this crap.

I know its a rant, but Im so tired of services trying to fill my feeds with crap, and also the crap BS about AI saving / ending the world. It might create nice cool articles for the news, and buzzwords in the bubble out west. We can only hope that Winter will not come this time, and we can advance far enough that AI becomes an actual useful product for more then spam filters, and detecting if John went to the same school as me.

* John is an invented person based on people i know. * Swearing is blocked as I'm not sure what people prefer on here. * Yes, I know AI is advancing a lot, and I'm a big supporter. I just don't like how its used, and how the PR makes it look like its the 7th wonder of the world.

You are probably a person who has been online for a long time, and seen a lot. You have expectations that are not similar to the majority of FB users. They are mostly young people, or poor, or from poor countries who only have a cheap Android phone, no laptop, don't know what Twitter is and they discover Facebook for the first time. They find uses for it without having any expectations (like, "If i want trending topics I'll go to Twitter").

You probably use FB for one hour per month because it's the most convenient way to catch up with your friends and family and they spend 4 hours per day because for them the internet is Facebook. FB uses statistics to become better for them, not for you.

I must be in his same bucket. All I see our either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump posts. It all seems very polarized to me. Back when I first got on the internet, it was through dial-up modems. I would browse around on gopher and everyone chatted on IRC. It felt more like a community. I think there are still pockets of that out there, its just buried in all the noise.

There are definitely pockets of this out there, smaller communities/channels on IRC still have this feel.

Exactly! I am sick of seeing posts related to only Hillary/Trump even when they were not the presumptive leading candidates. Also missed some important updates of friends because FB thinks it's not relevant to me.

Have you tried hiding the Hillary/Trump posts and interacting with the friends whose updates you want to see?

Or you could just install Social Fixer, and control your feed that way. However, in my experience, it's quite hard to produce a better feed than Facebook's AI...

http://socialfixer.com/

All the major publications i follow do this. FB doesn't have to hide posts by keyword. The extension sounds good, but as you know, a lot of users including me used it mostly on mobile.

Seriously - just hide posts. Facebook's AI is pretty good at allowing you to properly prune your news feed.

You can also game this system by getting others to interact with your posts more often, which will push your posts into their feed at a higher rate.

You are probably a person who has been online for a long time, and seen a lot. You have expectations that are not similar to the majority of FB users. They are mostly young people, or poor, or from poor countries who only have a cheap Android phone, no laptop, don't know what Twitter is and they discover Facebook for the first time.

This argument seems remarkably similar to the sort of argument once used to justify the dictatorial rule of colonial strongmen. "You don't understand these people, they don't value the thing you value, for them a sense of security is much more important than choice." etc.

Which is to say that its pretty patronizing assumption.

I use FB for hours a day, Facebook is probably my main Internet outlet. I think it's problematic that FB substitutes their version of how they expect you to filter things for giving their users control over how their news feed is filtered. Lots of "unsophisticated" users complain about this and there are even cargo-cult methods used by the unsophisticated to get control over their feed (such the "disclaimer post" purporting to give the average Facebook user some extra legal rights over their posts).

Discussing Facebook's censorship of "conservative" trending stories: http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-supp...

"Offensive Content: I could not give 2 f@@@@ about this"

I like what you did there :P

Perhaps you add more data to your profile. These AI algorithms are only as good as you train them. Like things you like, unlike things you don't like, add demographic and interests. It will get better with use.

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