IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. When something is propaganda or false just quickly tag it as such with why it is false like Xitter does.
Full disclosure: I work for Meta, but not on ranking, and my opinions are my own. Edit: this isn't specific to Meta; it's common to all content platforms.
This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude. There are leaked state secrets the public should know. There's hate speech (laws vary by country). Sexual material (laws vary). Nudity (laws and customs vary). Then there's libel (which is hard and slow to prove). That's just on the legal side. That's what you're calling for, but that's hard enough. I have no idea how Kiwi Farms and 4chan do it.
Then there's ranking. Maybe the posts are there if you know where to look, but realistically, you'll never see them. People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.
That's just rationalizing a business decision. Nobody is saying there should be no algorithmic timeline. If it "doesn't scale" for my own timeline, that's 100% on me. Why take away the decision or "nudge" into the other direction?
If the algorithmic timeline really were THAT better, there would be zero need to remove the chronological option or "forget" when the user sets it as an option. People would just use it.
Just having the option to not see anything I am not explicitly following and always seeing posts in reverse chronological order would be nice.
Right now I barely ever go to Facebook because my timeline is a mess. I've manually unfollowed all my friends and yet the spam comes through.
If you've unfollowed everyone what do you expect to see?
Having a clear "you are caught up" point probably isn't positive for engagement metrics so I understand why they don't do it but I'd rather the app be oriented towards UX than to be oriented towards engagement metrics.
I fail to see how this is a problem. Much less one that necessitates spending billions of dollars developing sorting and recommendation algorithms to solve.
Unless your priority is not "show the user what they have explicitly requested to see".
Users were perfectly happy when twitter, Facebook, tumblr, MySpace, and literally every other site was a reverse chronological feed. Now that they aren't, we have federated social media with no algorithm, just reverse chronological. People are perfectly happy with it now, same as always.
If you follow too many people to keep up with, the problem is that you follow too many people. Users will self regulate. If you give them filtering and sorting tools, they'll use them.
It's crazy that we keep reinventing the same solutions and wonder why heaping additional complexity on top of the original idea does nothing but make it worse. You'd figure that someone somewhere would be at least aware of what came before, but apparently not.
We're just gonna keep inventing wheels, and keep touting how many more edges this new wheel has compared to the last one until we get back to round and wonder where it all went wrong.
When those were reverse chronological feeds everyone and their mother wasn’t on these sites. They were smaller groups of people who were mostly younger and the overall traffic was lower. For people who didn’t follow a bajillion people, including people they didn’t know you would feasibly reach the end of the feed. But that’s not how people use the sites anymore.
But even then, if you wanted people to actually see and respond to your posts you’d have to time out when you posted it to hit around lunchtime. No 2AM musings if you expected to have anyone see it. And good luck with having your engagement or childbirth announcements getting to people in a different time zone if your family is international.
If I see a post on mastodon, it's from someone I follow or a post that someone I follow thought was worth sharing. That's a genuine interaction between humans. I get to decide what's in my feed based on who I follow and the filters I set up. The system is designed only to connect me with people I choose to follow.
Meanwhile, an algorithmic feed with no options is designed for one thing: manipulating users to optimize "engagement". That by definition requires ignoring what users prefer. I really shouldn't have to explain that this is a bad thing.
You're wrong about the design of algorithmic feeds. I worked on them, that's not how we designed them.
Also, 20% of people is hundreds of millions of people.
My experience is meta prioritizes instant gratification, which yeah people and their immediate actions says they want. But also I’ve completely stopped using Facebook and instagram because it became clear it’s of limited value to me. Yeah, i might mouse over a piece of salacious content because it’s salacious. But i know it’s low value to me. And most of my peers are in the same boat.
I'm not saying anything about Meta, but content forums as a whole. I'm also not saying people will even make decisions. Sometimes those running the platform might, sometimes users might, sometimes users might implicitly decide as recommender systems learn their preferences.
I'm not sure I agree with you. I'm in 40+ IRC channels and multiple networks. I have an IRC Bouncer with playback enabled and my window stops when I log off at the place where I left off. I can easily scroll back to the bottom an see what's current. Same thing goes for Discord and Slack.
I have never in my life thought, "wow I wish I could get a summary of all the dumb shit said in ##chat and ##politics in the same place when I come back." Maybe, just maybe, I don't need to know the highlights of everything that's happened since I last logged on?
You're right. Instagram feeds can get quite 4chan esque: https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-instagram-video-algorithm-chil... Even so, TFA claims that Meta has figured out a way to suppress pro-Pal content... so clearly, something's up?
People say they want kind, honest car salesmen, but that doesn't scale for the kind of overleveraged floor plans and impulsive, short-term thinking that characterize most dealerships.
The two things that immediately come to my mind are the organisation of the genocide of Rohingya [1] and the live streaming of the Christchurch mosque massacre [2]. Both of these were promoted by Facebook too I believe.
Free speech absolutists see no issue with allowing that content to exist. I believe in free speech, but believe it has limits. It’s good to see the FB employee, dehrmann, with sane (personal) comments.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/29/facebook-new...
It seems to me this just moves the problem, because then we'd be having discussions about how this stuff is wrongly tagged, no? Also who does the tagging? Random users? See how well that will work.
And I'm fairly certain Twitter still removes stuff? If I post "gas the Jews" or "gas the Arabs" I wouldn't expect that to stay up?
What is the platform for? Checking out pictures of your grandchildren and keeping up on with the knitting group or is it for an international propaganda war? If you censor nothing then it's no longer a platform, it's a war zone. You can argue that the censorship is unfair, politically skewed, etc but you can't argue that it shouldn't be done at all or there won't be one inch of the Internet not dedicated to this and every other conflict everywhere.
If HN itself went completely uncensored it would become useless to us almost immediately. Who ever posts most, wins.
Yeah. I don't think I've seen any pro-Israeli content on Instagram, just overwhelming comment spam on random posts asking said content creator to acknowledge Palestine.
As for Threads, both are common.
Even advertisers aren’t immune, I’ve seen community tags on paid ads calling them out for being drop shippers.
Perhaps the confusion is that CN was originally called 'Birdwatch' and people don't realize they're the same thing.
Of course anything illegal or against ToS should be removed and only be the purview of Twitter's moderation team (or what's left of it).
Advertisers are fleeing Twitter and nobody knows how much longer Twitter will exist, because, well, they don't want their ads to be displayed next to Nazi content, in any circumstances.
If you find Twitter better, good for you for swimming in that kind of content.
Gave me some hope that Elon is serious.
How does that work? can anyone post a "community note", or by what process is that decided?
Edit: this, from https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/about/introducti... (via your third link) is interesting:
Community Notes doesn't work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.
Then they link to https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/contributing/div..., which expands on that. It seems they're basically trying to control for ideological perspective, i.e. to identify signal that doesn't just boil down to "I like / agree with this". I've often wondered if something like that could work.
I didn't look into the details myself, but there is a 24-page paper linked from this page:
>Details of our methodology and past findings can be found in our paper.
https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/under-the-hood/g...
https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes/blob/main/birdwatc...
(Perhaps I should add: yes, I'm being lazy; no, I'm not being critical - I just want someone to explain this to me so I don't have to work to find out.)
But twitter is not only counting the yes / no votes. They need people who have voted differently on some previous notes, to agree in their votes on this note, before their algorithm makes the decision to publish or reject the note.
A lot of proposed notes will never get enough votes to be decidedly published or rejected, so they will linger in the "proposed" stage forever.