Comment by hackernewds
3 days ago
Maybe you are too young to have noticed, but this is how Facebook used to be for every one. Until some a/b testing likely led to short term engagement boosts for news content and that's all you could see - especially during the 2016 news cycle with (allegedly Russian) political ads. Then people stopped posting, and others stopped posting, feedback loop and here we are.
This is lie, I was there and this is not at all what happened
I appreciate the voice of experience but if you're going to post a comment like this, could you please share some of that experience so we know at least some of what did happen?
Otherwise it comes across as a drive-by swipe, which is a human reaction when you know that something on the internet is wrong, but which degrades the threads, partly because of the example it sets for others. The life of this community depends on knowledgeable people sharing some of what they know, so the rest of us can learn.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Fair and sorry about that
Specifically what happened, and I think this is all public now is that prior to 2016 journalists and news organizations argued that Facebook was demoting news for various reasons. In reality it wasn't very engaging so it was automatically demoted. They promised to boost news more in early 2016, but largely as a result of worse engagement and negative experiences (arguing in comments) Facebook started ranking news worse than other content. This all happened in 2016, months before the general election
And while Russia did run ads, it was mostly not political and the political content they ran had very little engagement. Russia mostly focuses on conspiracy theories and undermining American institutions. Facebook was aware of this in 2016 and certainly did not contribute to it intentionally, and I don't believe even by accident of some kind of misguided A/B testing
The reason Facebook got worse for younger people is because younger people stopped posting.
1 reply →