(no subject)

[randomness]

There's a Wired article going around Facebook describing what happened when the author "liked" everything on his feed for 48 hours. It's silly, so I'm not going to link to it.

As one of my friends put it, "It's not actually an argument against using likes on facebook, it's an argument against using likes indiscriminately."

Garbage-in, garbage-out. I imagine one can create something pretty awful using Pandora, as well. But an article about that wouldn't get passed around as much.

Comments

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is GIGO. At the same time, it throws into relief an already present problem. Mike's feed turned into an unrelenting onslaught of outrage porn and he was not quite sure why. I think it is that he tried to engage with outrage-y posts to have intellectual discussion on the issue - which had the negative effect of showing him even more outrage porn.

I have tried to correct some misconceptions that my Fox-watching aunt has about politics (for example, that the Medicare "donut hole" is Obama's fault). It worked, but now I am shown lots of rage-inducing Fox stuff.

Both of these are examples in which Facebook mistakes engagement for interest, and turns up the volume on things you may not actually be all that interested in reading.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Both of these are examples in which Facebook mistakes engagement for interest, and turns up the volume on things you may not actually be all that interested in reading.

On the other hand, it isn't that hard to create a Facebook feed that shows you what you actually want to see, if you do so consciously looking at the bigger picture as you use it. I think of it mostly as an advertising medium and tailor my likes accordingly. I had the opportunity to experiment with this after losing access to my original account a few years ago. I started fresh with the online name people know me by.

Generally I think the experiment has worked well. I'm not sure I'd recommend restarting Facebook at all if I hadn't decided to experiment with the service, but as an experiment it has provided endless hours of entertainment. I probably spend more hours with it than I ought!

But if the problem with your Facebook feed is that it's showing you lots of rage-inducing stuff, it might well be time to reboot. There's certainly a larger Internet problem that exists but at least with Facebook you have the opportunity to start fresh explicitly.

Perhaps I should do a post about the experiment and the thinking behind what I did.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Facebook mistakes engagement for interest

Of course, what Facebook wants is engagement, since that's what generates ad views.

[merlinofchaos]

Facebook *does* have an "I don't want to see this" that might help hide some of the rage inducing stuff.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that too.

I haven't actually used it myself, because on the whole I find my Facebook feed entertaining and watching the results of its algorithms intriguing, but if anything did really irritate me I'd certainly consider it.