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Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

>> FB need to ask themselves "is the content (eg news) on FB of good quality?"

I think this is a general problem. If Facebook is optimizing for whatever users "Like", as you suggest with the data scientists, it is analagous to a business given customers whatever they ask for.

As Henry Ford is said to have said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse" (or something). You have to find a balance between "the customer is always right" and the fact that you are in a better position to be a domain expert.

They have to balance "what gets people engaged" with "what's good for everybody" and hopefully find an optimal solution for both.

Not sure how accurate it is, but the way Facebook's founding ideas are portrayed in The Social Network definitely screams "exploiting human psychology".

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Is Facebook any different than Coke, Pepsi or any other consumed product? (Probably not.) Their KPIs are usage and retention. That's it. The is no "the world is a better, happier, safer place" KPI.

The means - intentional or not - are going to take whatever form necessary to meet the ends.

If there's a surprise here is that its taken Parker et al this wrong to figure this out.

For Facebook, the customers are the ad buyers and the users are the product. Their only focus is to keep the product on the platform diligently submitting personal information and viewing ads.

This seems like a simplistic take, and I don't think it accurately reflects the view of many people who actually work at Facebook. In online games like League of Legends, we do not say that whales are the customers and the players are the product, even though it's true in much the same way — the whales wouldn't give you money to play with the other users if the other users didn't exist. In both cases, the product is the product, non-paying users bring value to the product, and paying users turn that value into money.

> This seems like a simplistic take, and I don't think it accurately reflects the view of many people who actually work at Facebook.

Well sure. I'm sure thousands of employees have very sophisticated and subtle views. But when you average out all of those views, it winds up that the only thing that really matters is getting eyes on ads.

No one needs to be a villain. The subtle views just cancel each other out, and the huge amount of effort fb puts forth regresses to the mean. Get more eyeballs on ads.

>>In online games like League of Legends, we do not say that whales are the customers and the players are the product

We don't? Seems accurate to me.

No, people don't usually say that, because it is obvious to most people what the product is in that situation, and trying to redefine terms so that it's something else seems like newspeak.

The game is a product — the company produces it. The players are players — they play the game. The whales are a sub-category of players, so if the players are indeed the product, you'd have to say they're buying themselves. In fact, the game is a product that both paying and non-paying customers consume, in some cases with barely differing experiences.

> Not sure how accurate it is, but the way Facebook's founding ideas are portrayed in The Social Network definitely screams "exploiting human psychology".

It's fiction. Yes, inspired by a true story but fiction nonetheless.

You wouldn't base your knowledge about Nikola Tesla on "The Prestige", would you?

I'm gonna say no, they wouldn't, nor would they base their knowledge about Facebook on The Social Network, and to support this claim I cite the first 5 words: "Not sure how accurate it is."

I guess you're saying "don't trust movies" and/or "Facebook would never exploit human psychology, that's a made-up fiction." Har har, good one.

Regardless, "fiction inspired by a true story" would presumably have some true elements and some not-true elements. If they were all not-true elements, it would be completely made-up, literally 100% fiction (not based on or inspired by a true story), and anyway I don't think there's any such thing as 100% fiction, no matter how hard people try. Every fiction owes something to the reality it was concocted in.

Therefore the problem becomes knowing which elements are true (facts) and which are not-true (fiction).

I wonder how much of this is tied to the commiditization of content and how no one wants to pay for "good quality" content anymore--seems most actual good quality content exists because of philanthropy in our times.

I even try to pay for "good quality" content but it's increasingly mimicking viral sources that are sensational, rushed to publishing, and irrelevant.

Speaking as a content director myself and former writer/journalist, it does kill me a little inside that much of my day is spent around figuring out how to do this mimicking and how much I have to push my writers to think about this too in their writing. The state of the media industry/content makes me sad.

Also just read this, coincidentally, about Buzzfeed today: https://www.startups.co/articles/interview-jonah-peretti-co-...

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