I'm highly skeptical they'll step away from this approach once it becomes a core part of their business metrics. With VCs pushing for higher growth, resources and new outside hires will inevitably be directed to fuel it. Eventually, growth through ads will become embedded in their culture.
theyve already partnered with aws. i mean every online company works through ads if not direct purchase/subscription. its just the only revenue model that works. unless every user purchases pro how else would they make money? sell perplex t-shirts? its obviously a costy product to maintain.
and if your not going to pay cash for a product then whats the only other revenue system that you will tolerate? its ads. everyone is fine with it in actuality but act like they arent. thats the funny part. vote with wallet, they will comply
100%... I lived and worked in many countries around the world and the amount of free speech we enjoy here is not common. This is why people like my parents escaped their motherland. It's surreal to me, as an immigrant, that we are trying self-limit free speech here. If you don't like what others say, then tune out, you have no right to silence other even if you abhor their ideas.
> FB biases are too extreme. The best thing for FB is to be broken up.
That's a non sequitur. Breaking up FB will not de-bias "the algorithm". We'd have one company doing VR, one doing phone calls, one doing image sharing, and finally a company running the old social network with the exact same recommendation and content-moderation system.
When Bell was broken up, it was into regional companies that were forced onto a common interchange that accepted traffic from competing telcos. I'd desperately like to see the same, where social media sites above a certain size are required to import/export data and play nicely with eachother's content.
Exactly. I don't understand how forcing a spin off of Instagram or however you want to organize the breakup resolves any of the problems HN has with FB.
Instagram would still be run by the same people, owned by the same people, and run with largely the same goals (profit, expansion, etc...)
Honestly at this point, I don't really care. I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but breaking up FB as a matter of principle may be a better idea than letting them slowly take over every tech sector.
The main problem is that it didn't seem to have much effect. Fast forward one generation, and AT&T is still pretty much a monopoly in most areas. It would be fascinating to know what long-term impact it actually had.
Breaking up a large company may benefit the company itself, too. Chaos is opportunity -- this is practically the thesis of startups -- and nothing would be more chaotic than to suddenly split Facebook's power into subunits, each with their own independent leaders and their own agendas.
The social network would be the most powerful subunit, sure. But it wouldn't be able to pool its profit with all of the others, which has a very real impact on the power it can wield. For example, imagine if Facebook wasn't able to acquire Instagram at all. What sort of empire would Instagram have built? We can't know. But if Facebook can't buy competitors, it unlocks more options for knocking down the castle.
Honestly, my main problem is that I'm having trouble coming to terms with why I want to see Facebook demolished. I don't want to turn into a hater. I guess my most powerful data point is that they ruined Oculus, a fact I'm still saddened by, and now they're trying to appropriate whatever the Metaverse will turn out to be.
One could argue that some company will do that, so it may as well be Facebook. But that logic doesn't work too well for a company that controls so much already.
I share a similar sentiment/observation. I am OK with the world where the occasional mistake occurs with algorithms. But when things like this continually happen with Facebook algorithm, it feels as though they are trying to outsource too much but should involve humans to computers.
In short, their tools tend to be overly restrictive, airing on the side of rejecting. I’m not sure thats right
It's a statistical inevitability that this will happen all the time at facebook's scale, even if you have an algorithm with a %0.00001 false positive rate, because they deal with billions of items per day. It's really actually fairly rare unless your purposefully bashing your content against their stated boundaries, but huge numbers make thousands of these events happen per day around the world.
Just like society has learned to accept certain rates of death, crime, medical imperfection and more to have a functioning society, we will have to come to terms that algorithmic moderation will also go wrong and we will have to pay for it, with $$$, one way or another. It will never be perfect, because what is perfect is different to different groups.
I don't think an appropriate reaction to an instance of murder, robbery or medical malpractice in our society is "well, as a society, we learned to accept certain rates of death, crime, medical imperfection, so move along, nothing to talk about here". That doesn't look like a society I am familiar with.
It is the society you are familiar with, it's just everyone treats it as normal and what are the limits of possibility so you are probably blind to it.
Some relatively extreme examples:
1. There isn't a cop / security person in every corner, to really prevent murder and robberies. After a certain point, society decided it wasn't worth the cost to prevent murder in this expensive way. You should dig into what the murder / robbery solving rate is in your own home, you might be surprised!
2. Cars kill a lot of people, all the time. We would save lives if the speed limit was reduced to 10kmh. But that makes cars not very useful. Our cars are not volvo tanks and miss a lot of safety testing that volvo does and goes above and beyond, partly because of cost.
3. We don't put highway style concrete barriers around every road boundary to prevent human death.
4. The success rate of medicine to save lives and prevent disability is accepted to be not perfect and socialized medical systems do not spend unlimited money to save X amount more of people.
5. Obesity is probably the largest killer and life reducer of humanity in the USA today, yet there isn't anywhere near a proportional response by US society to fix this like there was with COVID, smoking or 9/11.
6. I don't know if your american, but the entire insulin price jacking controversy kills people constantly today in america. That society has basically said the rich pharma companies rather make more money and kill people who cannot afford this insulin vs. save lives.
All of these things are way worse the 5 9s of reliability that are algorithmic moderation systems, but we accept the tradeoff because sometimes, the cost is worst than the cure. And sometimes, for way worse and gross reasons, like the american insulin example
Sometimes it is. But I do not see any reason why auto-moderation system that does not ban "Merry Christmas" should cost immensely more than one that does. I can see why 10mph speed limit would be very costly, but why not having a broken model is more costly than having a broken one? Where the costs are coming from? I don't think the costs are the problem here. They spent a lot of effort on attaching various warnings to every post mentioning covid, vaccines, etc. They could spend a little on making their models not to suck. They didn't. I don't think "it would cost too much" is a valid excuse - at least without demonstrating why it'd cost too much.
Somehow you find the idea that somebody could be against government coercion and still hold private individuals (and companies) responsible for their own actions contradictory?
Not only conversatives. Liberals are also upset about vaccines misinformation, election fraud, etc.
My point is that you have to 'train' the AI models somehow. FB introduces its own 'biases' on those models. They admitted this 'mistake' only because it affected a Canadian MP, otherwise I don't think they would have this for you or I. Their 'discrimation' policies are too broad for an automated system.
FB exhorts too much power over information.
I think the point they’re highlighting is that this is a “free market success story”. The private company did what it wanted (automated moderation), and ultimately the removed post got reinstated anyways.
Meaning it’s hypocritical of conservatives to be offended by this. Liberals are less for unregulated free markets, so it isn’t hypocritical of liberals to be for regulation or whatever to prevent private companies from doing this or that.
There's an important nuance in between though, such as defending freedom of speech while still objecting to what someone says.
It might be hypocrisy if the MP calls for a govt intervention (assuming he was some kind of free market advocate), but it was the poster here calling for breakup.
The “free market” we sipport really is competitio. Competition drives invention and progress.
With FB, they have no direct competition and thus can control the free market of ideas.
That is the problem.
I this case the idea od wishing a merry christmas? Where does that end you think?
1) If they seriously don't like it, they can change it (Gab, Paler, Truth Social).
2) When people do complain, they negotiate directly with the person they are complaining to instead of going via the government.
A non-free market would be much worse for the conservatives because the Silicon Valley standards would get enshrined in law and a competing platform would be taken out with lawsuits for allowing different opinions.
The interesting thing is that when attempts are made at alternatives, we have people doing everything in their power to stop the alternatives from existing.
Look at Parler for example: They did not create a secure website, that is bad on them. Then activists stated targeting them and coordinated to get as much material off their site. The activists used Twitter to do this: https://media.cybernews.com/2021/01/crash-override2.jpg
AWS then stopped providing service to Parler due to the content they were hosting exposed by this action. Well within their rights! But they excuse the same sort of content hosed by Twitter....
At some point people are looking at this and saying it is not a free market but a "Good Ole Boy's Club" and something needs to be done.
Personally, I think it was stupid for Twitter to ban people based on the message they send. But that is because I would like to be able to see what everyone is saying, not a small subset of people that uphold the "right" ideas.
The saying is that "Democracy dies in darkness"; We seem hellbent on throwing shade over every idea, opinion and inconvenient fact that comes along. We are bringing the night.
> AWS then stopped providing service to Parler due to the content they were hosting exposed by this action. Well within their rights! But they excuse the same sort of content hosed by Twitter....
> 1) If they seriously don't like it, they can change it (Gab, Paler, Truth Social).
No they can't. Remember how all the major companies coordinated to shut down conservative sites they scapegoated for the Trump riot (which was actually organized mostly on Facebook)?
That was a dirty trick back at the time, but the free market seems to be working here. It isn't the "Nice Market" or the "Friends Market". It is a Free Market.
Even if we take it as read that that's hypocritical (and plenty of Conservatives are not in favor of free markets) where are the Liberals railing against the new public square being owned by unaccountable private entities?
Neither of these cases are slam-dunks, but I'm a bit tired of people saying that the fact a website's private property necessarily means the owners have absolute control as if there were no possible objection to that stance.
"Richard Kucera, a former GE Aviation engineer, recounted "being placed in an untenable position where he was responsible for conducting engine conformity tests on behalf of [the] FAA, while also being charged with preparing GE engines to pass these same tests." --> This is crazy and scary.....
Boeing culture changed so much after it 'acquired’ McDonnell Douglass
This is what was described as McDonell acquiring Boeing from the inside. I have engineer friends in the company but the attitude of the upper rungs definitely changed.
I've read that quote on a couple of different occasions, and don't see a conflict. Of course you want to prepare engines to pass the tests, and in fact, make any ECOs to make that work.
Every airplane prototype goes through exactly that.
He shouldn't also be conducting the test. That's the conflict.
The wider conflict is that you cannot be employed by the testee and still a reliable tester. That's why we don't let people give themselves driving licenses for instance.
