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Comment by WWKong | Hacker News Reader

"stop feeding people an endless stream of ad-stuffed trash media selected by an algorithm maximizing for clickbait factor and nothing else".

I'm not sure if this is the core of the problem, if at all. Most of what you see on facebook are links shared by your network. If your "friends" are sharing and re-sharing clickbait fake news, you see clickbait fake news. This is evident in groups on whatsapp where there is no algorithmic intervention and it is still an endless stream of misinformation (in most diverse groups). This also mirrors real world echo chambers.

If you do have have some suggestions for solving this problem, it would be great to discuss here.

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> I'm not sure if this is the core of the problem, if at all. Most of what you see on facebook are links shared by your network.

Except FB's said [0] that the four main factors for what you see are who posted, age of article, article type, and interactions. The last factor is key as FB wants articles to draw eyeballs in order to sell ads. Thus, it sounds like the algorithm doesn't produce newsfeeds that are representative of what a majority of friends are reading v. that of a select, active few. I think the parent is arguing that FB could turn this off and improve newsfeed information quality at the cost of lower revenues.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/06/ultimate-guide-to-the-news...

Disallow sharing of links. Only allow sharing of personal photos and statements of the old school type "MyName is feeling so and so...". That is how Facebook started and grew big. And it's what I signed up for, not the clickbait infested link sharing site it is now.. Curious: my photo to link ratio is probably 1-to-10. Is that the same for others?

Yeah, unfortunately looking at your friends' pictures gets old pretty fast, and you're not gonna do that every hour of the day.

I'd be happy if a Facebook2 came around to only do what Facebook did, but I'm pretty sure no one would sign up since everyone is already on Facebook anyway.

These days I try only to connect to messenger, there I can keep in touch with friends without the "news feed" functionality.

Use instagram then - there are other choices. FB is meant to be a full stack platform.

1. Remove the like button or limit the number of times it appears per week person post count.

2. Maintain a public bug list not on software issues but social issues being created by social networks. These cannot be solved by software developers and need expertise from many other domains.

3. Look at Wikipedia, Stackoverflow/Stackexchange, Apache , Linux etc where contributing members of the community all have agendas. Yet they are kept in check. There is huge institutional experience here baked into these platforms on how to deal with competing (unconstructive/damaging) agendas. Bring people on board from these kind of orgs and experts in sociology, ecology, behavioral psycology that oversee fixes to "society effecting" bugs.

4. There needs to be a long term plan for media so they arent just pandering to the lowest common denominator. Journalists must be certified and ranked on quality every year.

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