How to Fix Facebook
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Isn't that how ads work? Why is this any more controversial than Google's paid, targeted ads?
This is what facebook is, and it's what any machine learned user interface is, if the loss function on the machine learning algorithm is ultimately corporate profit. Your time, friendships, and emotional stability are all just raw materials to be mined, at near zero cost.
The worst part is, in the U.S., the average user spends 50 minutes per day, 300 hours per year on facebook, but facebook earns less than 25 cents per day for each U.S. user. They're screwing up your relationships, getting you pissed off, sapping your precious free time, all so they can get a lousy quarter. We have got to come up with a better revenue model for sites like this than ads.
Before you fix something, you have to identify what "fix" means. What's fixing, and what's breaking? How do you make a distinction of evil awful manipulation that must be stopped at all costs, that doesn't also include socially positive activism, journalism, or other legitimate kinds of speech? That's the issue the pundits should be grappling with, before they offer laughable suggestions like "make it a public benefit corporation".
I happen to believe that a return to corporate charters that actually meant something, that required some public benefit to balance the public harm of limited liability, would be fantastic. However, saying we should only do that for one company is like a bill of attainder. We haven't done it for financial companies, where it more clearly makes sense. We haven't done it for oil companies. We haven't done it for the media companies like the one that owns NYT. What's a coherent argument for making this one exception to a long-held principle of leaving the market alone?
* Requiring verification of real names for people. (Kevin Kelly)
* Firing at least half of the leadership team and replacing them with people of color. (Ellen Pao)
* Becoming a public benefit corporation. (Tim Wu)
The only scalable solution to this involves uploading a scanned ID, which can be easily doctored and forged.
Moreover, as the author mentions, this is bad news for political dissidents, survivors of domestic/spousal/etc abuse, victims of stalking or bullying, celebrities (and semi-celebrities), LGBT activists http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-apologizes-for-real-... and some edge cases where people change countries and adapt their original name to something recognizable in other language https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=8692372...
There are ways to do it, you just need the backing infrastructure to make it happen. The American SSN system is a joke nowadays and needs to be overhauled, it could go hand-in-hand with online verifications.
Mind you Facebook is a global company, and tailoring these solutions to every country would be nigh impossible.
Why can't we work on diversity without picking someone with so much baggage? Characterizing her tenure at Reddit as successful is beyond strange.
This seems to suggest that only people of color are able to focus on interaction quality. She is suggesting that people should be fired based on the color of their skin. That is racism.
If the mayor drives an F-150 truck, potholes will be less important than big parking spaces. If she drives a supercar, the reverse will be true.
That's not to say a truck-driving mayor is incapable of understanding the supercar driver's perspective. Just that limited resources mean trade-offs always have to be made, and some combination of the power of dogfooding to inspire improvements, the power of self-interest, and the simple fact you see your own problems more often than other problems mean truck drivers will end up coming first. It's just human nature.
Some people would say changing the composition of leadership is easier and bound to be more effective than trying to change human nature.
I remind folks that Dr. King's vision was that people be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Nice.
Why not just require a cryptographic signature/blockchain on "shares" and "likes"? Who cares about real identity as long as your account activity is traceable?
Many of these problems seem to originate from a small number of sources and then rely on the echo chamber to amplify them. If you have a unique ID that you can trace back to being the source, you can do things from that point. Or you can find the particularly activated echo chamberers and do something about that.
Or, even better, if I, as a user, can look at the chain, I can see that "news" either entered or shared via idiots and can block it. For you youngsters, we called that a "killfile" in the bad old days.
In reality, the true problem is that Facebook doesn't want to do a single thing that might affect "engagement".
Same for Google.
Moreover, considering that Facebook is profitable and developes exactly into the direction their founders and investors envisioned, I don't see what to "fix" here. Facebook is working exactly as intended.
In that regard, "fixing" Facebook is like "fixing" the rm tool to not delete files.
The other half of the analysis is that Facebook can only make money on ads if they have users on the site, and can keep them there. They need to provide persistent value to users to keep them on the site long term, and that aligns their incentives with users (not exclusively, but significantly).
Any suggestions?
You can hate on them for a lot, but lack of effectiveness as an advertising tool..... that's not really fair.
Until they blocked me, I used to run advertising campaigns targeted at SINGLE INDIVIDUALS. Ie... "Hey Bill Gates, is it time to invest in Startup X?"
There are still some tricks you can do to get around it... which they also don't like, and that is what got my account pulled.
This story is embarrassing and stupid... I know. I wouldn't do this again.
The ad that got me in trouble was for a real estate agent. He showed a high net worth individual a home that cost ~ 10 million. We made an ad that said "Hey Jeff, could you see your family living here? - and it had a picture of the house." They wanted me to Photoshop pictures of his kids playing in the yard, but I drew the line there. Still Jeff submitted a complaint which got me banned because it wasn't the first violation.
Everyone talks about how "creepy" ad tracking technology is, but both Facebook and Google are stopping marketers like me from doing the "really creepy" stuff we would like to be doing.
Facebook actually has a real-names policy, but they enforce it very spottily, and there's a reason why.
The only truly workable real-name policy is the jwz one:
"1. Stop deleting peoples' accounts when you suspect that the name they are using is not their legal name. 2. There is no step 2."
But, that should be at least broadly clear to anyone who bothers to look at what Facebook does.
Maybe we should instead be asking, what is wrong with a society that places this much reliance on an entity whose interests are clearly at odds with the interests of the public, and how do we fix that.
>what if Facebook optimized for how much value an article or video or game gave us weeks or months afterward?
Facebook needs a second page that isnt the newsfeed or trending. That isnt "give the people what they want" as much as "this is good for you." It needs strong editorial discretion. It could still be algorithmic, just one that prefers a certain type of voter.
If I look at the sites below, its obvious that a focused team of more like minded people can output something MUCH more coherent than the "everybody gets what everybody wants" style newsfeed.
https://redef.com/charts/shared/total
https://www.techmeme.com/river
Facebook needs a "Front Page" that you can toggle to that isnt the Custom Newsfeed. It should be the same for everyone, it should be important stuff, it should be beneficial to society. Maybe teams of people should be allowed to compete with it.
I have said it before, they should combine Groups and Interest Lists. Groups should be able to subscribe to sources, have their own ingestion queue, and teams of voters should be able to determine what shows up in the group page feed.
(people might wonder why I single out drudge as a good example. It is a water cooler. It is the same for every viewer on the planet. It gets people TALKING about the same things, it creates dialog within the community. Sure its also a filter bubble, I understand the dissonance.)
Curious if they will come back to FB when they are older, or if something else fills the void then. That is, once they've "grown up", FB might be more attractive to find their old friends from school that have since scattered, or older relatives they know are there.
Otherwise, until facebook cannot make money doing what it is doing it will continue to do what it is doing. No politico/journalista whining would change that.
That's impossible thanks to the dual-class share structure that gives Zuckerberg complete control of the company.
The point is that all of the whining coming from journalistas/political class/guides/policy wonks etc is nothing other than whining of the former jocks who got de-throned.
Or that it might be a serious problem to have a global scale company that has perfected shoveling content to people so well that it can be hijacked to shovel lies into whole countries. It's probably worth talking about. The fact that it's controlled entirely by one person is just another wrinkle.
Does that mean there can't be a legitimate criticism?
That's why we have government regulation.
"That's why we have government regulation."
We do not have government regulation for the content.
"Facebook successfully blocks all sorts of content because of its policies (porn) and government policies (child porn)."
No, facebook is blocking all kinds of content because in its view it can make less money allowing this content than not allowing this content.
If facebook/twitter/tumblr/google/etc blocked child porn then there would have been no child porn on these platforms. Child porn does exist on these platforms because it is not being blocked.
Their moral high ground on Soviet and Russian influence on the news isn't that impressive either given that they still haven't renounced the Pulitzer given to Walter Duranty for his explicit lying about the Holodomor so as to not impede the Communist movement.
https://www.nytco.com/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pu...
"refocus the experience of using Facebook on the people using it, and their intentions for communication and interaction."
(That was a quote from the "vintage facebook" idea.)