Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I recently came back to using RSS feeds and it feels great. The problem is that many websites don't maintain their feeds properly. Broken links, missing content and whatnot.. I guess nobody ever uses them aside from weirdos.
The actual solution is to invite your neighbor over for dinner.
The actual solution is to volunteer at a retirement home.
The actual solution is to join an amateur sports league.
The actual solution is to take an in-person group class in a subject that you find interesting.
Not bad. It's probably how things should have been, but that boat has sailed long, long back.
Point is, efforts to make decentralisation and independent content creating, hosting and sharing should go on simultaneously with other social steps that you have enumerated. Neither can replace the other.
Are you going US vs THEM on 2 billion people? Good luck with that.
^ regrettable quote
> Are you going US vs THEM on 2 billion people? Good luck with that.
^ another regrettable quote
Something's popularity says nothing about its value. See, for example, religion. The most popular ones still suck a lot. Some more than others.
Buddhism makes testable predictions about mental states and proposes systematic mental exercises to test those predictions.
In my view, religion is a cultural spine of a community that defines the rules for living together. It also comes with a set of assumptions (beliefs) that are used to justify the rules, make the whole hold together, and enforce their acceptance.
Calling back into question the assumptions lead to question the rules. This puts the community at risk. As a consequence religions establish protective measures. Some of them are swift and brutal. I hope you understand what I'm referring to.
Some religions are much less toxic, but there is still the problem of their assumptions that introduce a bias in the act and decision making. People who adhere to a religion tend to forget to put a weight of confidence in the assumptions with the rational to not put the community in danger. Anything that represent a threat to the religion is considered bad, and this includes calling back into question assumptions and rules.
Science did not work that way. And this is why it evolves so fast toward a better understanding of the world we are living in. I'm not saying science is a religion or an acceptable religion substitute. I'm just comparing the effectiveness and benefit of a faster evolution of knowledge.
I'm convinced by multiple personal experiences that any community (e.g. startups, forums) needs a cultural spine and community rules, but I don't think that religions is the appropriate answer to it. The rule and the knowledge must be able to evolve and this is only possible when they can be called back in question by anyone anytime, and an objective method is used to decide. Assumptions and beliefs should be considered as mere hypothesis. Religions tend to obstruct evolution for their survival and the survival of the community. And of course many humans use religions as leverage to manipulate people, not only for the good of the community.
The real problem of religions are their beliefs that we can't call back into question. People brain washed through all their childhood with these beliefs, that we are requested to respect, can't make the difference with was is true and not, can't call back into question the beliefs and are prone to integrate similar irrational beliefs. This put humanity at risk.
That is a summary of my current view of religions. Note that it may still evolve because it is only based on my current knowledge and past experience.
Anything else?
True. But thinking you can shame 2 Billion people to stop using certain service?
Why not right here and now?
Also given the recent velocity and volume of bad PR for Facebook, it's possible that public sentiment is irreparably turning against them.
Lastly, technology has no shortage of once popular products that have been relegated to the dustbin of history - see AOL, Nokia, Friendster, etc. Today's dominance is far from a guarantee.
I also don't have a Linkedin account. (Well, maybe i do now, because i have a hotmail account). Don't need it. Don't care for it.
According to others it is a bloody miracle i survive in IT :)
Exactly this. The benefit of small newspaper services is just too small for most of their readers to bother making sure to actually receive the news.
If they are gone, other content will fill the gap. That's pretty bad for those current content creators, sure. It also enables a local news revival as soon as people realise that there might be huge value in some forms of local publishing.
It's not West where we can assume benevolence or at least competence in our leadership (ok, we... used to be able to do that, which makes this even scarier).
These people take everything they can until their caught, and if you're a small organization you can bet that you'll never be on a newsstand or build an audience without going to where people already are (hint: it's Facebook)
Lawyer: What are you doing?
Mark Zuckerberg: Checking in to see how it's going in Bosnia.
Lawyer: Bosnia? The don't have roads. But they do have Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg: [stops typing and looks up from his notebook]
For those people where leaving FB is just individually positive, absolutely they should do it. For those doing, e.g. political organizing where most of their audience is on FB, they are stuck in a terrible conundrum.
Personally, I think FB should be used where effective to reach people on FB, and everyone should try to make at least 70% of their posts be specifically discussions of what's wrong with Facebook. As much as possible, every comment and discussion should include a side reference criticizing the platform. If enough people get the problem, maybe some day we'll have critical mass for a boycott that might work.
The question isn't for individuals, it's for distribution. If you're in these countries essentially the only way to reach the people these days is through Facebook. Any other option and you're handing out a poorly xeroxed zine on the side of the street. The president of the country used to explicitly run the censorship of media in Yugoslavia. Nothing gets published without a tacit sign off even now.
Facebook promised to democratize interactions, got every journalist in the world to go along with it, and then pulled the carpet.
That said, from an objective point of view, first off the media is not entitled to the user's home page in a random social network. They should have never believed that they were.
Second, to be honest, I think it's better for democracy if stories aren't fed by Facebook through its black-box algorithm. I suppose the a small government like the Serbian one couldn't do much to get Facebook to spread their propaganda through it, but if say the U.S. government were to do that, or even say the Indian government - oh boy. It would be such a propaganda machine, better than TV ever was.
The second part to this is that even if governments don't directly control the feeds to spread propaganda, they can exploit Facebook's algorithm, just like Russia supposedly did in the U.S. election, so the end result is the same.
This is why I'd rather people do their own research and they do the job of looking for posts, rather than "being served" those posts by a black magic algorithm that may have all sorts of biases embedded in it.
It's beneficial to the users and Facebook owes the pages absolutely nothing. It has to cater to the users if it wants to sell ads, and this is beneficial to the users (or at least how Facebook sees its users).
And while I agree it's not solely a media issue, they were extremely loud about it. Following many pages in the country that is already affected, the media cried out the most (for an individual user, me, they have the same voice as smaller pages).
There is no duty whatsoever for Facebook or reddit or twitter or any other company to provide viewers for small businesses and communities for free. As far as I know, facebook never even promised to not change this functionality. If you claim to be search engine or use your power to damage competitors, absolutely. If you selectively hide content to damage opposition, sure.
Maybe facebook should think about timing when there are election around or something similarly important. But still, just like it was ok to separate games from feed, it is ok to separate news from feed.
It feels like all our work (good or bad) is work being done by Zuckenberg, even if he did not have any input on some issues.
I don't see Larry Page receiving the same thanks or blame when deepmind or other google thing does good or bad.
Moderation of public discourse – in the sense of keeping public discourse in a roughly central place, and minimising the extent to which extremists can manipulate it – is absolutely a requirement for a working democracy.
Nobody is entitled to the visibility or exclusive treatment on the Facebook. There are much more posts than anybody can read, those using Facebook agreed to let Facebook apply its algorithms and designs.
Nonsense! EVERYONE clicks "I agree to the ToS" WITHOUT agreeing to the ToS. They don't read it, they don't understand it, they aren't agreeing to it. The suggestion that users actually agree is completely dishonest.
I understand that the author is running an investigative nonprofit which likely does his country a large service. With that being said, I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for an organization which consciously buit itself up using Facebook as a foundation. Facebook is not a nonprofit organization and should be expected to experiment in capitalizing on its users.
With that being said, in this particular case, how is facebook to decide what is moral? Would you suggest that they put together an investigative team to decide which moral news organizations are negatively affected by the changes, and exclude said organizations? Surely the new "experiments" do not target purely moral organizations; it's indiscriminate. Even within this thread we have active debate surrounding whether or not stories should be fed through the black-box algorithm.
I know the pain and struggle investigative journalism organizations face (especially in infosec). Going through all of this and reaching less people because some dickhead in the United States decided to add these countries randomly really pisses me off.
Even worse are the other countries chosen like Cambodia and Venezuela, which both have Free Basics. Bloggers, pizza shops, investigative journalism organizations... they're all screwed because of one group of dickheads in Silicon Valley.
And I do think that Facebook wouldn't lose a lot compared to the current system. 98.41%[0] of the total social media traffic would still go to Facebook.
[0] I chose that percentage because that's the percentage for my country, with YouTube at the second place with .53%: http://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/bosnia-and-...
It's really annoying from my experience, I just forget to check that other tab also. Basically your feed is now split to what your friends posted and what pages you follow posted. The effect author describes might as well be attributed to people: a) not realizing there is another tab to check, b) people forget to check other tab (I'm one of those). From UX standpoint it might be an improvement, but I'd rather see it implemented as filter you can switch on/off than hardcoded tab you have to remember to check.
For comments advising author not using Facebook, I don't see where that goes? It's just how media works in our country and Facebook is most common social network that all groups of people follow, and there is quite a lot (otherwise censored) political information floating around on it.
Specifically:
> You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the solution.
That's all nice and visionary, but in countries where you can cut yourself off of alternative news sources by not following Facebook I don't see how that's good advice.
From a user perspective, doesn't moving non-person-related (actually social media) things to a separate feed make the ux better?
I asked around and many non-tech people think liking a page equals subscribing. Both pages owners and regular users. They think they communicate to each other. Well, in fact they don't.
FB is dangerously close to monopoly if it isn't one already. But I wonder if any gov has the guts to deal with it. Even EU seems to be in bed with Zuck.
Nobody is entitled to the visibility or exclusive treatment on the Facebook. There are much more posts than anybody can read
It seems the media are "disappointed" the same way. And when they don't get the reach on the Facebook that they wrongly expect to "deserve" they wrongly call that "an attack to democracy."
The alternative is not rss. The alternative is news aggregator few months down the line when sites stop asking people to like them.
Users don't go to pages on FB to find new info, they expect to see it in the feed. This way only paid content gets seeing, and otherwise you are SOL.
Not to say that it isn't expected, FB needs to chase growth and likes, but it's still unpleasant in a world where people are making FB synonymous with the internet.
Does anyone know if the views of paid page posts are going to go up, or is it just that the views of unpaid page posts are going to go down? Maybe that level of detail isn't public, but it seems important for deciding how to tell this story.
Where's your integrity, journalists?
The solution is not to downplay articles from established news organisations, especially not organisations that Facebook users have chosen to follow.
Europe needs to do something about the Silicon Valley companies, we can't build Chinese firewall but in order to have a chance for competition we need to come up with a plan. One possible way to fuck off FB is because it's spy machine that is very much illegal on some aspects.
(There's nothing wrong with European countries protecting their citizens with data privacy and security laws. But that's separate from competition.)
It needs work, but what part of democracy doesn't?
What does it take for widespread support for the project?
Early Bitcoin-- download this app and click the "Generate Coins" button. Now you've got digital tokens in exchange for having verified the global state of the transaction database. A problem was addressed by some software. Woot! Somebody bought a pizza with these digital tokens, so mission accomplished.
Current IPFS-- lots of people add an important file/directory, and now other people can retrieve that data. Doesn't exactly have a robust system to discover things. But Catalonia used it to workaround some censorship, so it must be at least minimally usable. Hence a problem was addressed with software. Mission accomplished.
Freedombox-- please continue the pattern here. What technical problem does Freedombox solve with software, and what is a single example of how it has been leveraged to accomplish a mission by ordinary humans?
Much like the Serbia and other FB experiments a system will be set up, tested and then rolled out across the first world...
Long story short, its not concern for democracy (if NYT was concerned about democracy it would not be a rabid partisan) its just jealousy and hate that Zuckerberg is eating their cake.
Don't believe you can support your second paragraph. You can't erase the points an article makes by identifying a potential motive, and surely in an organization the size of the NYT, there's room for lots of motives.
Whether they are jealous or not, Facebook is still a threat to democracy.
Use context. It's so incredibly obvious that this person didn't mean treat, and yet here it is, a little jab to say "I'm just a little bit better than you" because I noticed a missing h and just couldn't help but point it out to everyone else, who also noticed it but didn't care.
No jab intended. I think assumptions are dangerous as well, and lead to more problems - including internal distress - instead of perhaps putting inquiry forward to ask for intentions instead. Obviously you're getting an answer from me now, however you still may not believe my intentions.
The first poster says Facebook "[is] not [a] concern for democracy".
The responder says "What an uneducated answer from what I assume is a techy. Facebook is a treat to democracies. There are more articles on this than the other way around."
The first two sentences seems to imply that they disagree with what has just been said, that is except for the word "treat", which implies that they actually agree. If they are saying "treat" then they're saying not only is Facebook not a concern for democracy, but it is actively beneficial.
However this argument is then immediately negated by saying "There are more articles on this than the other way around." Ignoring the ridiculously false logic of the statement, there are objectively more articles about Facebook being a threat to democracy than there are about Facebook being a benefit to it.
Thus I concluded the person meant "threat", which I found to be a very obvious conclusion given the context of the statement.
Funny that you should mention education in your comment, since commentary based on the lack of it is a real threat to democracy.
> There are more articles on this than the other way around.
Appeal to popularity. Facebook might indeed be a threat to democracy, in the same way that radio or TV were in their heyday. It's for us to deal with it and turn it into something positive, not try to turn back the technological clock.
I'm sorry, what?
How does that follow? How are democracy and partisanship exclusive, or "orthogonal"?
We make all of this stuff up, we can do whatever we want, let's just get rid of it.