Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fsloth 3575 days ago
Facebook - context oblivious censorship on the other hand - reality-bubble forming curator algorithms on the other. Somehow the term "negative feedback loop" comes to mind every time Facebooks mechanisms to filter and market content is brought forth.

I don't think internet search engines should try to be helpful. Guessing what the recipient would like to see removes chance for serendipity and creates and information bubble with a radius given by the algorithms parameters... and then, for what is brought out, they remove the too-saucy bits. This is worse than censorship.
2 comments
ajoy39 3575 days ago
Facebook hasn't been filtering their trending news for about a week now, and in that time some of the top stories have been

- A man having sex with a chicken sandwich

- A fake story about Fox News firing Ann Coulter

- A fake article about the iphone 8, claiming tim cook said Siri is going to do your chores for you.

So yeah maybe the people were kinda needed?

link
Miner49er 3575 days ago
Depends on what function you want the trending news feature to serve. If you want an unbiased view of what's currently popular on FB, this is better. If you want real, noteworthy news the this is probably worse.
link
robryan 3575 days ago
You can get away without people when you have a set list of sources like google news does.
link
tormeh 3575 days ago
They did this previously. The problem was that this disqualifies most news outlets operating on the fringes of reality. Since this includes most of the favorite news sources of tea-partiers it obviously can't stand. I don't particularly like the Democratic party, but any news site labeling itself as "right wing news" is for nutters. Facebook censored those sites and the nutters got angry and that's how we got here.
link
MichaelGG 3575 days ago
Google News covers plenty of "right wing" news. One can only think FB is intentionally letting quality fall in order to show they really had to do something.
link
Cozumel 3575 days ago
>'I don't think internet search engines should try to be helpful'

I agree but the results need to be helpful in so much as they need to be context relevant. Google serves up any old cr*p, hardly ever related to what I'm looking for.

Of course, the flip side of that is for the result to be context relevant the search engine needs to know you which could be privacy infringing etc.

link