Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

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Every reply so far has missed the point of this sentence, so here it is:

Facebook reporting accurately is sane, but Facebook is in charge of what is being reported, which is not sane.

Like, imagine if your friend was slowly poisoning himself by flavoring his food with lead for a month. Even if he is honest with you about what he’s been doing, it’s still not a sane situation. If anything it’s less sane to be seemingly lucid and forthright about a month of self-destructive behavior, but not actually do anything to change it.

The question here is: why did Facebook allow the situation to get so bad that this page was the top for a whole month? Why didn’t someone at Facebook notice this stupid pointless scam page was surging and do even a little of research and tweaking to change that?

They have seemingly abandoning any responsibility for the behavior of the machine they built and operate. Personally I don’t give them many points for just reporting that.

Ex-FB here. My guess is that it's primarily a combination of two factors:

1) Someone / some org was slow to notice that this was happening. 2) Bureaucratic muck slowed resolution down. Even once escalated, there would be a lot of red tape to go through to make the necessary changes to how things are ranked. The people noticing the problem most likely aren't the people able to make changes, the changes would need to be tested at scale and their effects evaluated, and the people making the changes would have a lot of deliberating, politicking, explaining, and appeasing to do. Add onto that that everyone is stressed out of their minds, worried about performance reviews, and having to balance changes they want to make against how they and everyone else are evaluated at perf time...

Ok, but all that must also be true for the change that originally created this situation. There's all this red tape and large-scale testing and then... nobody actually looks at what hits the #1 spot?

Presumably there are people who are in charge of designing the ranking algorithm, so they would look at the #1 spot, but they would also look have to look at numbers 2 through 1 billion, and evaluate over long timescales and have a lot of reports, and compare how one algorithm performs vs another one.

Maybe they've already evaluated and decided that they're ok with #1 being off, if the majority of everything else performs better. Doesn't really make any difference per se what is #1. And then even if you want to stop X becoming #1, you'll never truly understand the myriad of butterfly chain events that caused us to get here, and how do you know even if you've solved this one issues, you haven't just ruined everything else.

Remember spam is an adversarial relationship. Almost certainly when whatever ranking change was exploited here was deployed the top ranked items were great, then some actor started realizing what was being selected for and exploited it

This, and the comment above about 2 through a billion, seem pretty spot on from what I know from talking to people still working there.

Good lord. I'll never invest a single dollar in Facebook after reading this. Talk about dysfunction

> Even once escalated, there would be a lot of red tape to go through to make the necessary changes to how things are ranked.

When I write a program that accidentally gradually fills a disk with garbage, I don't wait until I can redesign the program before I delete the garbage.

Yea, but does the garbage earn you money on ad views?

It's more complicated than that. Facebook is a company. People in different parts of the company do different things, have different motivations, etc. One cannot look at a large organization as an individual. I tried to come up with a more apt analogy... but analogies are awful here.

So, probably lots of people actually did notice it, and either (a) shrugged and thought "not my job", or (b) notified someone else about it, who then did (a)?

There's also likely a (c), which is people who don't think that Facebook should do anything about it. I guess that could be considered part of a set with (a), but I thought it should be mentioned separately as it's a different motivation.

Might I suggest (d): analysts, disgusted by the fact this crap is on top, tweaked The Feed in an attempt to disfavor that type of content then ran a simulation but saw their simulated ad revenue become lower than allowed minimum, then did (a) and went out to have lunch.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

- Upton Sinclair

In particular, stare too hard at that viral page, realize how scummy that page is, and then spend the rest of a career at facebook trying to tear down the systems that made that the most viral page, are likely going to earn you enemies, and cause the company to lose money (in the short term, at least).

Did you stare at that page on Facebook? The top post has millions of comments.

Which is totally fair in my opinion. It is no single individual's job to fix an issue this big and I don't think it's even feasible for a single person to do at a company like this. And if management hasn't set up incentives for people to proactively fix issues like this then they probably won't get fixed. Upper management can and should fix these issues but they probably don't care because they don't think it's an issue.

If it were a tiny thing that slipped under the radar, I'd buy it, but if my company were being dinged in the media every day for spreading misinformation, I would make sure the whole company is hyperaware of how misinformation spreads... which is often through viral posts and pages. I don't think this sort of oversight is something to blame on corporate bureaucracy.

maybe these junk posts are all that’s left to boost after tamping down the obvious misinformation and political propaganda

It doesn't seem like facebook pumped the whole page, all other posts have extremely low engagement, literally < 10 likes. What's wrong with pumping individual "good" posts? If anything it can be seen as honorable/egalitarian giving folks a chance to make it even if they aren't some media behemoth.

This is the central tragedy of Facebook.

They set out to build a platform where anyone, no matter how small, could compete with big media on a level playing field based on a straightforward metric: whether a user cares enough about a post that they're willing to engage with it. Publishers get rewarded for producing compelling content, users get to see more content they care about, and Facebook makes money since people spend more time on the site. Everybody wins.

And they succeeded wildly at this. But as it turns out, the things people respond to most are spam and hate and conspiracy theories.

I'm really not sure if that was ever what Facebook set out to do.

My mental construct of Facebook is analogous to Morty following the path defined by the death crystal but towards the end goal of 'the most money'.

Mine is Universal Paperclips, except it makes engagement statistics instead of paperclips.

The scenario describes an advanced artificial intelligence tasked with manufacturing paperclips. If such a machine were not programmed to value human life, then given enough power over its environment, it would try to turn all matter in the universe, including human beings, into either paperclips or machines which manufacture paperclips.[0]

Replace "paperclips" with "clickbait" and "human life" with "the right to privacy". "Artificial intelligence" then becomes Mark Zuckerborg.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...

Collect data

And collecting data leads to what in this day and age?

Collecting money.

I enjoy this author's podcasts and newsletters, and an interesting angle they've covered recently is that Facebook, ostensibly trying to "clean up their act" with regard to being seen as a platform for disinformation and radicalization, has been tweaking their algorithm to not promote so much alt-right and similar content.

But the problem is, once they exclude all that stuff, there's just not a lot left. So you end up with inane garbage like this account being the most popular content on the platform. Like the whole platform is just Ben Shapiro and drop-shipping scammers. Really paints an "emperor has no clothes" picture of what's going on on Facebook these days.

You just don't understand the Metav3rse.

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