Comment by florabuzzword | Hacker News Reader

Comment by florabuzzword | Hacker News Reader

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I bailed at the advent of forced non-chronological timelines. I would have been less insulted if Facebook hired someone to spit in my face.

Easily the scummiest design decision I have ever whitnessed.

Actively manipulating the structural representation of time in a communication platform is begging for chaos. Yes, of course I know the time stamps are still presented. That is not my point. Communication is sensitive; very sensitive. Adding barriers in reverse like that signals to me these companies do not have a clue. The issues with this sort of thing will not be measurable or even observable.

Our lives and society are impacted in mass proportions by events we as individuals will never perceive, or have the capacity to. And this is precisely what thinking is for; we theorize, organize, and make sense of things. This is the basis for all of our potential, and that potential is all we have.

But this is not rocket science. It’s a sorted list. that everyone uses. And now it’s unsorted. for And what?

Chronological is just one ordering. Why are you so attached to it? Why must deviating from this one specific ranking approach lead to "chaos"?

Algorithmic ranking is not evil. A tiny minority of people rail against algorithmic ranking, but the vast majority, as demonstrated by their engagement, prefer the algorithmic model. Should we let this tiny vocal minority dictate policy, data be damned?

> Algorithmic ranking is not evil. A tiny minority of people rail against algorithmic ranking, but the vast majority, as demonstrated by their engagement, prefer the algorithmic model. Should we let this tiny vocal minority dictate policy, data be damned?

I was listening to the Next Billion Seconds podcast the other day. They made the point that in social media 'engagement' is a polite euphemism for 'addictiveness'.

I've rephrased your post to show why I find it unsettling:

> Algorithmic ranking is not evil. A tiny minority of people rail against algorithmic ranking, but the vast majority find the algorithmic model to be more addictive. Should we let a tiny vocal minority dictate policy, data be damned?

How can you distinguish "addictiveness" from people just liking the product? The default assumption should be that people are in control of their own actions.

One hint to help differentiate addiction and enjoyment is to ask about enjoyment. Research shows that addicts tend to enjoy the focus of their addiction a bit less than regular folk.

For example, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t enjoy checking my email. But I still compulsively check it dozens of times a day. I think it’s fair to say that I’m an addict.

Do you enjoy checking Facebook? Ask your friends. I know what mine said.

Why would you assume that, all the research shows we spend most of our time on auto pilot.

I assume my fellow humans are sentient creatures with volition and judgement. Do you?

Especially those profiting from their fellow humans.

No, if you want evidence then just look at the numbers of obese people in the population. People don't make rational decisions, this isn't some moral failing, it's just the way we are.

And in this analogy, those arguing against algorithmic ranking would forbid optimizing food for taste. I don't want to live in that world.

No such thing as free will though

Addictiveness isn't inherently a bad thing though. I'm addicted to working out.

It by definition is a bad thing. I suspect you’re using the term as slang. Like, you enjoy working out, you do it regularly, and you don’t feel right when you’ve gone too long without a bit of exercise.

That’s not addiction, that’s a healthy habit. If you were truly addicted to working out, you’d be late for work because you wanted that last mile. Or miss your kids birthday party to hang out at the CrossFit gym. It would consume your time and attention to the detriment of other needs and the needs of others.

That’s the spirit the parent comment is using the term in. As something that demands more of your attention than it deserves.

Ok, I stand corrected!

> Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences.

"As demonstrated by engagement" - isn't really true. It's more "As demonstrated by count of time spent in the app". I believe that is true. But it's also a worse experience. Those two really seem to contradict each other, however, it's really quite nuanced.

I'd like to see mostly what my friends are up to. Instead of that, on Facebook at least, I mostly see viral videos from whatever groups I happen to be in. It is true that a lot of the time, those suck me into watching them. Technically that counts as "time spend in the app", but I also see that I'm wasting a lot of my time on crappy pointless videos and because of that I've actually not opened the app at all from time to time. In general, my attitude towards it has also changed - it used to be "ooh, exciting, let's see what's happened", now it's more like "meh, maybe this time there is something interesting, let's check, although probably not". Jaded is probably the correct description.

I realized a while ago that "engagement" is very much the wrong metric to optimize. The reason people optimize for "time spent" or "number of interactions" is because it is easy to measure.

I think ultimately what you need to optimize for is much harder to measure. I think for most senarios it is "value a user can recieve for a given amount of time". When measuring this, time spent in the application is acutally detrimental unless you are increasing the value a user is getting from the application by a substantial amount.

If your theory were true --- that apparent engagement increases really just represent navigational inefficiency --- you'd see drops in other metrics, like user retention and visits. But you don't. What you see is that people use the thing more. It's hard not to interpret that as better.

I'm not saying it's navigational inefficiency - it's giving me useless stuff that's really hard to stay away from. I don't want a platform that gives me a free shot of opium every now and then just to get me to stay there.

Being addictive is not a net positive!

Who are you to say that content which someone else enjoys is useless?

I'm quite the person to say that it is useless to me.

I also am quite free to have the opinion that a lot of content is simply a waste of time. I also propose the question of how much actual enjoyment it produces and the quality of said enjoyment. You are free to think otherwise :)

Yeah, having to refresh my instagram feed 2-3 times just to make sure I didn’t miss anything from my friends certainly has me engaged. But it’s the exact kind of “math-friendly refrigerator magnet junkfood” engagement GP was talking about.

> Chronological is just one ordering. Why are you so attached to it?

This is a very deep question you’re asking, and I don’t know the answer. But, this boat only goes in one direction so let’s make the best of it.

But seriously, sure other sorting methods are useful. I would like to have many options, but I can’t think of a better default for this use case. Can you?

> ...as demonstrated by their engagement, prefer the algorithmic model.

You just don’t understand my point. Maybe read it again. I dunno. But ...

As demonstrated by their engagement, people prefer doing whatever their boss tells them to do.

As demonstrated by their engagement, people don’t actually like sex very much at all.

I'd offer you one blindingly obvious explanation for why it's putrid: because it is a machine deciding which of my human relationships I should pay the most attention to.

Machines can't do that, silly. They can only promote hate speech with 100 comments and lolcat pictures with 100 likes. The only option is for them to take a back seat and present an ordering that is semantically meaningful to the human computer operating the tool -- the only one qualified to perform any kind of filtering and sorting.

"Relevance ranking" in social networks is a result of engineers having zero clue what applications they're working on, but that's just typical IT people divorced from reality for you. As you said, they find it acceptable because it's written in Angular v7 and uses ML and A/B testing revealed a 3.2% increase in clicks. The idea of the software industry helping real relationships is in general hilariously contradictory (but of course there are exceptions!)

> > ...as demonstrated by their engagement, prefer the algorithmic model. > > […] > > As demonstrated by their engagement, people prefer doing whatever their boss tells them to do.

Engagement means people are engaging more with non-chronological feeds than with chronological ones. This isn't just about blindly accepting what you are given, it's also about caring more for pertinence than order.

> Algorithmic ranking is not evil.

If you give no other option than algorithmic ranking that is not designed to maximize my utility but your revenue, that is as close to evil as you can get in my books.

(Edit: as close to evil in the context of social media content sorting. There obviously are more evil things than that...)

The biggest issue for me, when FB moved away from chronological ordering, was that if I clicked on a post in my feed, I could no longer go back to the feed and continue browsing where I left off, because the ordering appeared to change when the page was refreshed. I pretty much stopped using the service around that time, and though I didn't actually think about it, I think this change was a big factor in that.

The same for me - it got to the point of infuriation that if I navigated away by clicking on a link to a Chrome tab, if I came back to engage with the post organically, it was hidden from the feed.

I can't speak for GP, but most people who don't like the switch from non-chronological timelines because their replacements are usually opaque algorithms that are optimized for maximum shareholder profit. That's a downgrade.

On the other hand, non-chronological timelines are celebrated in communities like Scuttlebutt, but it's because we have control and you can choose the UX that works best for you without sacrificing connectivity.

Diagnosis: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm... First round of treatment: https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-interne...

Increased engagement because it takes more clicks and scrolling to get to what you want != increased engagement because I want to be on the platform.

It's not demonstrated by engagement. The engagement exists simply because there's no alternative: FB made new attempts to enter the social media impossible. You will not get funding and you will not be able to monetize with advertising: monetization of user generated content with ads is impossible in 2018 unless you are at least the size of Reddit.

Algorithmic ranking might not be evil per se, but it is if the algorithm is hidden and there is no way to adjust it, or to check what it filtered out.

Add to that a perverse incentive (money from ads and 'engagement') for the company designing the algorithm. How can that not lead to evil?

> Chronological is just one ordering. Why are you so attached to it?

Because one is essentially a feed of data, and the other is obviously/openly being manipulated based on things that I did not choose. The fact remains that removing that option is problematic. They switched the default - fine, makes sense. To remove the basic time ordered feed just shows they aren't interested in allowing users real choice.

I largely mothballed my facebook use years ago - so I'm not a user they should optimise for. But probably have bailed at that anyway.

the vast majority, as demonstrated by their engagement, prefer the algorithmic model

All engagement measures is time spent on the site. Or how much people are prepared to tolerate.

Exactly this. I like Instagram but I wish they would optimize for how I want to use it, now how they want me to use it. I want to get on, see stuff from my friends and get off. I want to spend the least amount of time possible on the site and that's something that social media sites seem to think would be bad for them.

Why is engagement the metric to optimize for? I can find utility in a post that I don't engage with.

One of the reasons that I like Twitter... It has a short section with "important" (by some metric) tweets since the last time that you viewed your feed, followed by tweets in chronological order. Facebook surely has the ability to do something similar but it would negatively impact how much time people spend on the site.

Personally I'm not a fan of this feature, but thankfully it doesn't do it to lists, so most of the more interesting people I follow I put into various lists by topic instead. That and I'm not a fan of the main timeline injecting likes from the people I follow, but that's twitter for you...

Twitter forces me to do a monthly dance of "I don't like this" clicking on stuff like that or the "XXX liked this tweet" crap to remove them, instead of providing a simple on/off setting and sticking to it.

Your Facebook newsfeed is not a communication platform. It's arguable if it ever was, but it certainly isn't now.

And the reason that it's not is that the chronologically ordered feed generate less revenue. I doubt that Facebook is just trying to mess with people.

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