Facebook Internal Research: People tended to comment on and share controversial content, and in the process they apparently made Facebook in general angrier

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 14:50:20 -0300

Danie van der Merwe

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Today, The Wall Street Journal posted leaked reports from Facebook after it boosted “meaningful social interactions” on the platform. While Facebook framed the move as helping friends connect, internal reports said it had “unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content, such as politics and news,” calling these effects an “increasing liability.”

Today’s report delves into the fallout of a 2018 decision to prioritize posts with lots of comments and reactions. Facebook allegedly made the change after noticing that comments, likes, and reshares had declined throughout 2017.

The issue that many people have with Facebook, apart from selling access to personal and usage information, is the tweaking of algorithms to favour Facebook's business interests. It's probably why so many people who left Facebook have rather opted for networks with straight chronological algorithms which show only the profiles they are following.

See Political parties told Facebook its News Feed pushed them into ‘more extreme positions’

#technology #deletefacebook #socialnetworks #polarisation #misinformation

Parties worried about "long-term effects on democracy."

technology socialnetworks deletefacebook misinformation

show all 7 comentários

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 17:24:55 -0300

BlackTortoise

BlackTortoise@mastodon.explore-visions.com

@gadgeteer Social media have been design in the particular way that is promote bad feeling as it allows to sell more advertising. They are no reason they will stop as their revenue increase with it.

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 17:31:42 -0300

Danie van der Merwe

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@BlackTortoise very true. It's all about maximising engagement, which is what brings the money in. Of course, lots of self-hosted federated sites don't have the advertising or the algorithms, so they are largely an exception. I choose to pay in full for my websites hosting without any donations or advertisers, and many do do that for their social networks. It's when advertising gets involve that it has to show numbers and drive up engagement. Federated networks can scale with a lot fewer users, just spread across many connected sites.

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 17:50:23 -0300

BlackTortoise

BlackTortoise@mastodon.explore-visions.com

@gadgeteer A great advantage is federated systems can build by our own without ridiculous investment and are more reliable against failure. It also allows people with some technical knowledge and patience to have one. A computer engineer have said that informatics oscillate between centralization and decentralization, maybe the federate groups will lead the majority to the new norm away from the big cloud.

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 17:55:39 -0300

Danie van der Merwe

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@BlackTortoise yes I certainly hope so - that decentralisations gives options too like one server being say for engineering interests whilst still being connected to everyone else. Also, users can move to other servers if they wish, and still remain connected to everyone. Problem is the masses are locked in by their own friends and family. And we'd have to force Twitter, Facebook, etc to open up and federate, as Facebook made the decision years ago to shut down their federation with XMPP.

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 19:38:46 -0300

BlackTortoise

BlackTortoise@mastodon.explore-visions.com

@gadgeteer I suppose it would be not easy to force the path but is not impossible. Otherwise I found that on federate network, we have the ability to find interesting things. So maybe an another solution is by contributions and interactions, the more stuff happens on the fediverse the more interesting for others. And as censorship increase on the main network we could hope it will increase the number of people until we reach the critical number. But I found difficult to convince people to use it

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 19:40:03 -0300

BlackTortoise

BlackTortoise@mastodon.explore-visions.com

@gadgeteer And people don't want to have both account fediverse and not fediverse. I don't know why they want one social system and not several.

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 02:21:42 -0300

Danie van der Merwe

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@BlackTortoise well you may have put your finger on it with the discoverability. A network with a central (or virtual central) directory of groups to find interesting things, does seem to have more users. So even the Movim instance on XMPP is a lot more popular with it's easier signup and directory of news services, even though its part of a federated network service.