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Comment by lowdose | Hacker News Reader

How can facebook turn a dumpster fire like reddit in a bot that response with more empathy than a human?

Didn't Facebook just merge all fb messenger and whatsapp data and trained a NN on the new chat db?

Reddit a dumpster fire? Some of Reddits technical communities have a way higher signal than HN, like Reddit’s math or rust community. Reddit math is more curious about math than HN is about tech.

signal and empathy seem orthogonal traits to me.

Reddit's best big technical communities are better on this regard too. Their moderation is more transparent and dependent on volunteerism, and somehow even the more serious communities squeeze in more humor.

Also, HN gives you the vibe such that you'd wish to argue about the orthogonality of empathy and signal? As opposed to HN feels like SO?

Do they actually though? If you have empathy for the people in your community, are you not more likely to contribute more meaningfully to that community (I.e. more signal)?

To even have a snowball's chance at success, they would have had to make use of reddit's voting system. Tons of toxicity and disinformation still makes it up into highly upvoted comments, but I'd expect throwing away heavily downvoted comments to exclude a good fraction of the utter crap.

They probably run a sentiment analysis on the content before feeding it in so they can filter out the ugly highly upvoted content.

downvotes are not necessarily indicative of bad ideas or comment but more about alignment to each specific sub-reddit groupthink.

I was thinking of a possible way to improve the downvote issue. Make users either comment or upvote an existing child comment to downvote.

I'm sure you'll get tons of "u suk" comments but there's just as many who won't even bother since they need to do two things now.

Hi, paper author here. The model was fine-tuned on (non-Reddit) data that was specifically designed to give it positive conversational skills, like empathy, knowledge, and personality (see: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.13637).

No FB data was used to train these models, which is what allowed us to open source it.

I don't understand that last bit. Can you expand a bit please? Earlier comments in this thread say the copyright on a model is a grey area and can be classified as fair use

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094601

To be fair, there is plenty of content on reddit that is far more empathetic and human than that created by many other people who call it a dumpster fire from afar.

You: hello Facebook!

Facebook chatbot: [deleted]

Probably on /r/askhistorians lol

[ Removed by reddit in response to a copyright notice. ]

It's not just the 'messages' they're using, it's the 'voting' and 'moderation' human inputs as well.

If a comment is deleted by moderators, the absence of that comment influences the outcomes of using the dataset.

Facebook has no such human moderation of all conversations. Neither does Twitter. That's why it didn't turn quite as evil as the Microsoft bot.

But in the end, this all critically depends on human beings making human judgments and having those taken into account when training the bot. The text itself is secondary. If it was just text, Facebook could have trained using their own dataset. This way, they get all the benefits of volunteer moderators (upvotes, downvotes, moderator-deletes all qualify) without having to pay anyone a single penny for their effort.

I'd love to see Facebook train a chatbot using messenger data only from conversations between people and their grandmothers.

Obviously this is creepy because of privacy concerns, but I would love if I could pick the 'personality' of my chatbot, so that it responded to me in language and tone more like a responsible adult and not an average redditor.

Of course you could always run it the opposite way and get a chatbot that responds like a teenage daughter does to her parents. That would be both equally hilarious and painful.

In my experience reddit is heavily moderated. At least all the popular communities.

> How can facebook turn a dumpster fire like reddit in a bot that response with more empathy than a human?

Because people who say “Reddit is a dumpster fire” are usually just thinking of r/Politics, RedPill, TheDonald, LateStageCapitalism, basically any remotely political subreddit... when, in reality, there are plenty of subreddits where quality conversation can be had and some where people just share art or animal pictures, and these are pleasant places to kill some time (although there’s almost always per-subreddit groupthink, but it’s not like HN doesn’t also suffer from that in some cases).

Now if they also include everything from /r/subredditSimulator then this could all be really interesting

ooh, outside would be cool, too!

Yeah I think a huge advantage Reddit has over other social networks is that it's broken up into myriad communities which are able to develop their own norms and self-govern to some degree. In smaller communities, this totally sidesteps some of the issues you have on a platform like Twitter, where people with very different beliefs and assumptions are essentially having conversations about how much they don't like each-other in the same room.

Reddit has no shortage of problems, but it's the most civilized large online discussion platform by far.

Moderation, partitioning of interests into subreddits, and the existence of downvotes go a long way to reeling in the worst things about online discussions.

Kind of funny that I got downvoted for saying downvotes help conversations go well online.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com