Facebook is testing hiding like counts to see if that makes people feel better | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is testing hiding like counts to see if that makes people feel better

theverge.com

47 pointsAlphaWeaver58 comments

Also discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21085323

Those of us who've been here long enough will remember HN used to show the points for each comment next to the author's name. It would be interesting to know if anyone had collected any metrics relating to this and how it affected the experience.

Personally I remember just after the change was first made I kept automatically looking for the score, as I had been using it for some hueristic for how much I should value the contents of the comment. Removing it made me a lot more critical and also open to potentially less popular ideas.

I do know that greyed out comments still make me automatically think less of them, and I try and make a point of upvoting comments that are downvoted because people disagree with them (rather than troll/spam/bad faith comments).

Well, to see how it use to look....

http://tenyearsago.io/news.ycombinator.com

Wow and as luck would have it. The top story on HN 10 years ago (well actually it’s not updated daily).

“Experiment: No comment score”

http://tenyearsago.io/news.ycombinator.com

That's an amazing coincidence.

Close enough! 2009-09-26: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844979

In my own experience, about half of my greyed out comments are due to saying something against the culture, and the other half are when I say something factually wrong. That's really good compared to most places (lots of subreddits for example) where saying something that doesn't fit the culture is necessary and sufficient for a points penalty.

Well, there are occasional third and fourth categories -- when I got overly political, I was upvoted but still (correctly) got flagged or once or twice that looking back, I was being an asshole.

I seem to recall that pg first posted a poll asking users whether they wanted to keep comment scores. Most said yes, and then he got rid of them anyway. That sticks in my mind because (a) I voted yes and (b) it was a striking example of following something other than immediate user feedback.

So they admit their product makes people feel bad. Think about that.

Huge jump here...

They had a feature that they (as most would) thought would help people engage with each other and express support. Turns out it has unintended consequences. Now rightfully so they are exploring how to get away from that.

Not everything is a nefarious scheme. Sometimes it’s just good old product iteration.

Facebook has exhausted all of the goodwill it could have been given at this point.

Only in geek culture -- Facebook still has billions of users,

"We are running a limited test where like, reaction, and video view counts are made private across Facebook. We will gather feedback to understand whether this change will improve people’s experiences"

Stating that you are improving the experience doesn't mean you are admitting the current experience is bad.

No, but the multiple peer reviewed studies do.

Not necessarily. If I add chocolate sprinkles to my son's ice cream cone I am improving his experience but ice cream without sprinkles is still pretty good.

They should improve their UI, provide a real chronological timeline, stop harvesting user data, create a better way to organize and access historical photos, stop spamming people with phony notices, end deceptive ads and all sun-glass sales, and let ALL friends of users see ALL of their friend's posts again if they really wanted to make people "feel better". ಠ_ಠ

I would feel better if Facebook ceased to exist. Can they "test" that?

The big problem with a chronological timeline is that it doesn’t scale very well. It can quickly overwhelm you with mostly stuff you aren’t interested in.

I dunno what the solution to this is. How it works now also annoys me because it often hides things/people I would be very interested in. But at the same time I don’t have time to look at everything.

It is a tough problem and no matter what you do there are positives and negatives. No silver bullet.

With a chronological time line you'd still have the ability to unfollow and follow users, which would eventually get you to a manageable chronological list...

Facebook removed chronological order to posts so they can manipulate what is presented to users any time they want.

you can manually tell it to view recent posts first and get what you're looking for

Of course, when you do that, you get overwhelmed with thousands of obnoxious reposted political memes, and if you unfollow the people posting them you miss out on important life events

Facebook lets you make lists of friends and view posts from that list chronologically too, but it only gives a couple days' worth of posts from the lists, so that ends up being pretty useless too

EDIT: I should note that it'll automatically go back to its own evil sorting algorithm pretty often, so you have to keep clicking on "Recent First" again and again

Ton of people on here dogging on Facebook, "SEE FACEBOOK ADMITS IT'S PRODUCT IS BAD".

What do you call it when a company recognizes an area for improvement and strives to improve it?

Where I come from that's just good business.

That's akin to the Mafia saying they're going to install a "consumer feedback box" on Jimmy Hoffa's grave...

We all need to raise our standards for corporate behavior...

Yeah people don't want to see Facebook improve and become beneficial. They want to see it burn and die.

It's worse now that tech is more about dogmatism as it becomes more popular.

The reality is they have a lot to improve, and they want to improve to keep the business running.

It's good that people are critical of FB and other companies, but many cross the line into a purely emotional state.

Even the rhetoric of Facebook breaking democracy is just a rhetoric. It's a problem with the whole industry.

There are many more Cambridge Analytica companies that don't require data from Facebook to know everything about you. It's good though that CA was a huge news story. I'm hopeful that in the next decade we can figure out these things because it is a huge problem.

Welcome to old-school era, where "forums" was social network platforms without `Like` buttons!

Forums now have like buttons... and it has utterly corrupted the values of at least one of them I’ve been on for decades sadly!

Great point. I upvoted it

I couldn't tell...

A forum I was on in 2006 had "reputation" which was a proto-like button. It had rules (can only rep a person once in a set period, can't rep more than 10 people a day). The higher the rep you had, the more your repping affected others. Below a threshold you got autobanned (good for keeping out trolls and spammers). At different rep levels you got different messages. These were like medals or badges of honour.

I also realised back then how much I was strangely addicted to it. I would try to be funny just to get rep. I envied those with higher rep than me or who jumped the levels more quickly. Basically, it was toxic for me. It kind of innoculated me against likes a few years later.

I think I must be part of the "test" bunch... noticed last night I couldn't access the full menu for like option emojis, only click the like button itself on a group post. The counts also seem to be missing as well.

They should add a "meh" button.

Seems ironic but would be curious to know the actual outcomes of the test. I guess we all agree to participate in their testing when you agree to the terms and sign up for an account.

All social media is bad imho. For example, people on Instagram only show the good, never the bad. So its a fake reality that people look up to, when in fact its far from the truth. The like button is part of the problem.

Hacker News is social media too.

Tough for people to look in the mirror.

imho, its not.., myspace, facebook, instagram are.. This is a news aggregator. I dont use any other part of YT, just the news section.

It's social media. It's not a news aggregator.

People post things they want to talk about. It just happens to be largely links (but not always; for example AskHN).

Let's do a quick test. Do you consider Reddit to be social media? How about Twitter? If you do, then so is Hacker News.

Just because you it happens to be a social media site that you personally like doesn't mean it gets to be in a different category that you consider more holy. Or just because there's no photos or because there's fewer features, doesn't mean it's not social media.

"According to her findings, people will still be able to tap to see the full list of people who liked and reacted to a post (and presumably you manually could count from there), but the like count will no longer be shown on the News Feed."

Oh great, so now people have to do just one more step to get the same dopamine rush. I can't see this solving the problem.

It's kind of nice in a way because sources like FB groups are becoming qualitatively easier to trust. Some of my Facebook groups easily rival the best communities / forums I've used for the last decade. So really, in that case no, I don't want to see the 5-10 laughter reactions on a post about a new theory or niche product that is untested. I'm simply there because news about the theory is available from a community I trust (I do trust the membership overall, if not individually).

It'll absolutely make the experience nicer (no one wants to see that Aunt Doreen just "liked" Grandpa Bob's cancer announcement), but I don't know if it will make those who feel bad about likes feel better.

> Oh great, so now people have to do just one more step to get the same dopamine rush.

Friction is useful. Sure, this doesn't solve for some hypothetical influencer types or advertisers getting count data. For the hypothetical teenager who is apparently being made mentally unwell by social media, this probably precludes their putting forth the effort.

Then again I think back to all of those "See Who Viewed Your Page" malware ads from back in my day, and wonder if this isn't one viral app away from being useless.

Who the fuck knows? At least it's an attempt. They can go back to the drawing board if this fails.

It adds friction, but for those who jones for that rush, I don't think it'll be anything but a speed-bump. But it may keep future users from getting hooked. Maybe.

They should just hide the entire domain.

Facebook acknowledges their product is toxic, and is taking steps to make it less so.

If you work for Facebook, how does it feel building a product that is actively hurting people and the societies they live in?

Have you experienced a crisis of faith, or has your insulated world prevented you from actual introspection into what you are a part of?

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