This piece is part of Gizmodo's ongoing effort to make the Facebook Papers available to the public. See the full directory of documents here.
In a presentation dated May 6, 2018, a Facebook employee asked, "Is Ranking Good?"
"Probably. Even asking the question feels slightly blasphemous at Facebook," the same employee answered in smaller text below. "So many experiments and product launches demonstrate the value of ranking that it's [sic] value is often taken as an article of faith."
[...] . The presentation is part of the Facebook Papers, a trove of documents that offer an unprecedented look inside the most powerful social media company in the world. [...]
Today, as part of a rolling effort to make the Facebook Papers available publicly, Gizmodo is releasing a second batch of documents—37 files in all. In our first drop, we shared 28 files related to the 2020 election and the Jan 6. attack on the U.S. Capitol. [...]
Today's batch offers insight into how Meta chooses to rank the content submitted by its users. It's a system that very few people seem to understand, a problem that the company appears short on clues how to solve. [...]
Several key documents concern what Facebook calls "meaningful social interactions," a term introduced by the company in Jan. 2018. This metric, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained at the time, was meant to help prioritize "personal connections'' over an endless online dribble of viral news and videos. [...]
[...] On the subject of ranking, the documents below contain an admission from one employee that is indicative of Facebook's quandary of growth vs. user health. [...] The employee goes on to argue that, though the modified feeds undeniably boost "consumption"—internal Facebook code for time spent using Facebook—they also change the dynamics of "friending" to discourage "personal sharing."
[...] In other words, ranking encourages the sharing of fewer meaningful posts, while allowing "bad content to spread farther due to the costless accumulation of friends," according to the presentation. The sentiment is not universal within Facebook, however: employees in the comments disagreed.
Can you get "meaningful social interactions" outside of a bubble, or will it always devolve into noise?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @12:59PM (2 children)
G started out ranking to make a useful service. Then adjusted to make I'm not sure what. Perhaps folks gaming the system complicated things, but there was a way to do ranking in a method constructive to he common good.
For F, I wonder if there is a similar story. The problem is not how to do ranking, but the primary goal of ranking.
Perhaps all this Twitter stuff will show that it is possible to make money and serve the common good?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @01:10PM (1 child)
Ranking is completely useless.
Some person you met once on an overseas trip 6 years ago gets top billing over people you've known for decades? C'mon.
Select "Most Recent".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @09:47PM
No! Instead you must
SELECT TOP 10 * FROM Feed ORDER BY PostDate DESC;
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @01:11PM (3 children)
No, it doesn't control my news feed, because I control my news feed.
You asshats lost me with the misogynerd narrative. Go get fucked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @02:42PM (2 children)
Nerds can never be allowed to gain power. The misogynerd beatdown helps society.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @03:26PM (1 child)
Yet despite the misogynerd beatdown abortion is going away.
Are there any lessons we can learn from this? Not that I expect a right-winger to do anything other than double down.... By "helps society" what you really mean is "sabotages working class struggles."
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Friday May 06 2022, @04:49PM
fify
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @07:00PM
responsible disclosure... We believe in the value of open access to these materials.
Uh huh. No cherry picking, right?
No, not a setup at all
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Friday May 06 2022, @10:45PM
Making 'friends' with strangers on the internet runs contrary to everything I learned as the web came online.
O hell no.