[skystrife]

Interesting idea, but I'm bothered by the idea that social media platforms would be effectively monetizing grief in this solution.

This sort of thing, to me, points at the deficiencies of appealing to purely statistical patterns without any guard rails placed on top. After all, statistically, the most likely relevant categories after "pre-natal" are going to be surrounding children who _were_ born safely. So if you appeal just to data alone, you won't likely solve this problem because it is relatively rare.

The biggest failure, to me, is the response of the system when the user goes out of her way to say that the "pre-natal" ads are not relevant. Statistically it assumes successful birth, but that doesn't reflect her actual intent. A simple dialog tree would maybe suffice: "not relevant" -> "this specific thing is irrelevant" vs "suppress this and all related content". One signal says maybe don't show that particular brand again, and the other says to pivot the relevance model significantly away from that topical section of the ad space entirely.

[throwanem]

They already monetize joy. Is monetizing grief worse? Why? What about monetizing neither? What's the signal to pivot the relevance model significantly away from a world full of robots constantly self-optimizing to exploit emotions they cannot understand or share?

(Or if we can't manage that, maybe at least we could somewhat curtail the misbehavior of the ML systems they foist on the rest of us.)

[gbear605]

If they monetize grief, they’re incentivized to maximize it