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It's not everyone though. FB algorithm is giving preference to the most controversial person. People that are reasonable are boring and don't cause engagement, so their posts also are not displayed.

When you get away from the site, FB will start bombarding you with the messages from people that you would mostly react, because they want you back.

...and not just "the most controversial", in a lot of cases on both the content creators' as well as the sockpuppets' sides, we're not even talking about "village idiot" type real humans anymore, but — in contrast to Meta CTO's words — about extremely skillful mass manipulators sitting somewhere in Russia and hiding behind international proxies.

Not only was that tolerated in the name of profit, these individuals were able to create official looking, completely unverified "pages" with bogus attribution to create their "engagement" campaigns meant to poison and destruct western society (and arguably being successful in that).

How this is legally anything different than complicity in treason is hard to comprehend for me.

Yeah I think this the crux of it. Facebook is prioritizing the most "engagement" which means prioritizing the most "reactions" which means prioritizing the most divisive and enraging content on both sides. If Facebook instead prioritized the "ah that's nice" kind of content we wouldn't see the divisiveness we see today

I feel this ignores human nature to engage an in conflict. Or in other words, humans like to debate so we will.

It's also common for people to accept defaults without substantial customization. That's why the algorithms matter. Some people will deliberately seek out rage-bait even if the default algorithm delivers just-the-facts news and heartwarming pictures from friends' families. Most won't. Also, most people won't customize their settings to eliminate rage-bait if that's what gets prioritized by algorithmic defaults.

It also doesn't matter how much you customize your settings if they're inherently useless, minimally functional, or never there in the first place. A lot of the content control settings that Facebook loves to tout are practically useless.

Sure, I can hide every post from the "Controversial News" page, but I can't stop viewing content from third parties entirely. I'm only interested in first-party content - what my contacts create. Unfortunately that goes against the monetization model of Facebook.

I want a more closed loop social network and think that's the model we should return to, but unfortunately that's not where the profit/engagement is.

Yeah but it is also human nature to fuck as much as possible but we have rules and laws against things like rape to control those tendencies. Just because we are naturally inclined to do something does not necessarily mean that it is best for us

What? This is certainly [citation needed]

I highly disagree that it's human nature to 'fuck as much as possible'.

Certainly it is the goal of some humans. I can speak with personal experience that my nature isn't just to 'fuck as much as possible'. And neither is it most ppl I know. And the thing that's stopping us is not just anti-rape laws?

Fucking is great, but if you have a family and young kids, you care a lot about taking care of you family and not just going to the club and fucking more people.

Yeah you're right, not my best take. But I guess the point I wanted to get across is that we shouldn't let our natural desires dictate what is legal or not, time and time throughout history.

It's more interesting to debate subject and preferences where there is not already an overwhelming amount of evidence that one side is wrong.

It's about surprise... content that is surprising has more information content (from the perspective of the surprised person), which drives engagement. The problem is that when you don't make a distinction between true surprising content, and false surprising content, it's a heck of a lot easier to generate false surprising content.

Was going to say exactly this. Reasonable people with reasonable views have no reason to promote themselves or their views on Facebook. However non-reasonable people with non-reasonable views promote heavily for clicks/engagement to sell you something, or just to “idiot farm” to sell the idiots something later.

Facebook’s unregulated revenue model will keep ensuring this dynamic.

> Half of the population is below average intelligence, and giving the wrong people the loudest megaphones has a devastating effect on society.

I don't think humans need a lot of intelligence to not be gullible. Scientific method for example is simple enough way of extracting truth from lies and does not require massive amounts of intelligence to apply to your measurements of the world.

Generally I don't think people believe in a "paedophile ring run out of a pizza shop" because they are stupid. They just see how unreal politicians behave from their tall platform and extrapolate that behaviour to domestic questions.

Working as a software engineer from a poor family I had seen so many times my CEO (or my upper middle class coworkers) being awkward or plain out low-key abusive with cleaners/waiters/etc that I can totally see where people who don't have ability to directly speak to people in power assume things about them which are not totally true. But let's be honest, they have a reason to think this way.

> You'll have noticed on the internet that there's a tendency to prioritise engaging with things you disagree with (hell, half of my HN comments are because I felt motivated to write something to disagree with some OP at some point - even this one).

It tends to be that platforms with more disagreement have healthier discourse. I think that actually the opposite is more harmful. Echo-chambers allow for extremist ideas to grow and encourage hostility towards those that don't go along with the echo chamber.

Intelligence is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong were quite intelligent by any objective measure, but giving them megaphones resulted in horrific disasters far worse than anything caused by Facebook users so far.

> Half of the population is below average intelligence

Maybe the real problem is that everyone assumes they're in the other half. Or possibly that intelligence and wisdom are the same thing.

I guess what I'm saying is that I would generally agree with your post if it weren't for this statement. I don't think intelligence really has anything to do with the problem as even a lot of otherwise 'intelligent' people have engaged with today's bullshit conspiracy theories and nonsense.

> You'll have noticed on the internet that there's a tendency to prioritise engaging with things you disagree with

I wonder if you're aware of any known effect/research on this topic? I'm openminded to learning more

> Half of the population is below average intelligence

By definition :)

Only if the distribution is symmetric. [0]

Extra pedantic mode: if the population is an odd number, the number of below average intelligence will not equal the number of above average intelligence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_probability_distribu...

>if the population is an odd number, the number of below average intelligence will not equal the number of above average intelligence

I'll leave counting as an exercise for the reader :D

Not if there's exactly one person of exactly average intelligence. :-)

Or any odd number :)

You're right that if the set is of {99,100,101} then of course 100 falls into neither category and each category has cardinality 1, but we're talking about real-valued variables, so I don't think that's a worry. I imagine it happens 'almost never' (except where n=1).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_never

Good point :-P

This is what I'm seeing also. Youtube, Facebook, etc. all prioritize engagement. It's not only the megaphone problem, it's a quicksand problem. As soon as you watch some misinformation to even try to understand what the hell anti-vaxxers are claiming, then you get a ton of related misinformation promoted to your homepage. How the hell are technically ignorant people supposed to keep up with this? Youtube and Facebook will lump you in a category and show you what similar viewers watched.

that's all good points. I agree. I think it's not Facebook gives the wrong people the loudest megaphones, but our human nature and nature of the population are drawn to those megaphones held by the wrong people.

What could we do about this? How could we identify the wrong people so that we could take away the megaphone from them? Who to decide which people are wrong? Some of them are obvious, But some of them are not that obviously.

Maybe we could say madmen claiming the world is flat and there's a paedophile ring run out of a pizza shop are obviously wrong. We might know Nazi is obviously wrong, but what about What about Antifa, what about "woke"? What about all those theories behind "group identity"? The most dangerous wrong people are the ones hold "good intentions" (they could be self-deceiving or could be truly genuine) but bad ideas, and its hard to discern.

History repeats itself. I suggest reading history of China in 1930-1950, the rise of Communist China, and then read "Culture Revolution" in 1970s. You could find that how the people with "good intention" ended up being the most evil in the history.

How could we avoid that to happen here? I don't have an answer.

> Half of the population is below average intelligence

This is the real problem

Half of the population will always have below average intelligence.

This is incorrect. At least half the population will always have median or below intelligence.

If we are referring to IQ the median and average is supposed to be the same by definition.

I disagree. Half the population will always have above average intelligence.

But the majority is somewhere near center.