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by cylon13 1730 days ago
Worse in a really insidious way too. Optimizing based on engagement for instance could be maxxing the amount of time people spend using a service, while minning unseen variables people care about like their emotional state while engaged. It’s sort of an inevitable thing that optimizers do to things they don’t measure, and it’s an extremely difficult problem to put everything people care about into the equation. Like for instance, think of how horrible a polynomial fit gets for a function just outside the window you are fitting as you add more terms.
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im3w1l 1730 days ago
> But last week, Facebook revealed that it had manipulated the news feeds of over half a million randomly selected users to change the number of positive and negative posts they saw. It was part of a psychological study to examine how emotions can be spread on social media.

Doing such a study would be the first step in optimizing for a good emotional state. But it (quite understandably) led to an outcry which stopped it dead in its tracks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...

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pseudalopex 1730 days ago
Sentiment analysis will tell you people have positive feelings about cute animals and negative feelings about friends getting cancer. An extremely difficult problem to put everything people care about into the equation.
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im3w1l 1730 days ago
I think it's way more complicated than that. Like you could measure how much better someone feels after seeing cute animals. Short term happiness isn't the only goal and needs to be traded of with other things, both as informing the user about what their friends are doing (you probably do want to know if they get cancer even if learning about it is sad), trending topics so you are clued into what everyone else is talking about, and of course ads. Learning more about the numbers allows better tradeoffs.
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pseudalopex 1716 days ago
The impact of missing important personal news isn't quantifiable in practice. Different people want different things from the platform too. And Facebook can't put everything people care about into the equation as long as the real goal remains getting them to look at more ads.
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