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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution.

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.

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"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.

> but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

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.

> I've manually unfollowed all my friends and yet the spam comes through.

If you've unfollowed everyone what do you expect to see?

Not the one you're replying to but I unfollow all, but a couple people.

... nothing?

I expect if you unfollowed everyone for it to show absolutely nothing, leaving a "consider following these people" prompt. And otherwise when I reach the end of new content, show me a "you reached the end of your unread content, consider following these people to add more".

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.

>People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

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.

I did work on ranking at Meta. The vast majority of people really do not prefer the chronological feed. We validated this by extraordinarily high powered randomized trials, including with surveys. No more than 20% of people preferred a chronological feed in any experiment I saw.

20% is far from small...

Typically less, depends on the surface.

I mean, yeah, but you could also do a lot of high powered randomized trials about kinds of cookies and learn that 80% of people always prefer eating the cookies with cocaine in them.

That's a different argument, and not one I really care about. It's no more "addictive" than tv and way less harmful

To push back, it does seem like you care. You've created rationalizations and offer them up unprompted. I think most people would argue for allowing both settings and having the app default to the one the internal research found more preferable and more profitable. Not offering the setting is telling.

I meant I don't care to argue. I've had this conversation too many times, and it does have the setting. You can Google it to figure out how to change it.

I think the point is: were the experiments testing whether people said they liked X better and immediately engaged or were you testing whether or not the user felt good about the experience and wanted to come back long term.

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.

We ran experiments that lasted up to 5 years. People who have ranked feeds self report a better experience after using the product for years, although you have to be careful with these sorts of things because the chronological users are more likely to churn, which biases the results

Interesting. I just logged into facebook and my feed is spam, and my notifications are basically a chronological feed of my closest connections.

If you don't use Facebook regularly, the feed will be bad. They use almost no data older than 90 days

Were you measuring what users like, or what they "engage" with?

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.

We ran lots of experiments, including asking people survey questions, monitoring usage, asking people offline to try both, etc

You're wrong about the design of algorithmic feeds. I worked on them, that's not how we designed them.

How about giving the people the option and letting them decide for themselves.

Also, 20% of people is hundreds of millions of people.

People have the option, you can choose to use a chronological feed on Facebook and Meta

Facebook engr is famous for popularizing the phrase “one in a million happens every millisecond” so this 20% hand wringing is funny to me

> Users were perfectly happy when twitter, Facebook, tumblr, MySpace, and literally every other site was a reverse chronological feed.

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.

I don't use FB anymore, but Instagram has reverse chronological feed as an option if you want to use it. Majority of users prefer algorithmic, so that's the default, but I do tap the chronological feed every once.

What you are effectively saying is "people in Meta will decide to be on one political side or the other. They will pick one political side to lose. They will sort/rank to be effectively censored (not scene in common usage). Pretend that can't be escaped". It can be escaped. Having the power to censor one political side is just too addicting for meta to use the self-control to not abuse that power. That is what is happening.

> What you are effectively saying is "people in Meta will decide to be on one political side or the other

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.

> "People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people."

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?

> This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude.

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?

"this doesn't scale" Yet it did fine for years before removing sane options.

Does not scale, sure, if 2 posts are from random people I am not interested in, 2 posts are ads. Repeat. That is the current feed on instagram.

> People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

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.

This isn't a universal problem though: only Instagram and Facebook have these accusations

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