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by Epenthesis 1691 days ago
It's weird to me that that article's headline emphasizes "angry emojis" have 5x higher score than "likes (and repeats it in the first paragraph) and then only lower down explains it's in fact that any emotion emoji (including "love", "care" and "haha") produce a 5x higher score than a simple like.

And it doesn't even explicitly state it, instead saying first "A person was able to react with emojis that correlated to “angry,” “sad,” “haha,” “love” and “wow.”" and then "If a person reacted with an emoji instead of the “like” button, the Facebook algorithm would see the post as five times more valuable and push similar content.", requiring the user to draw an inference that all emojis were treated equally, despite the priming that it only refers to "angry" earlier in the article.

This feels, ironically, like an intentionally inflammatory framing.

1 comments

Somewhat.

In the Twitter world, there's a concept called getting "Ratioed", which is when your comments exceed the number of retweets / likes.

The idea is (at least on Twitter), "better" posts are roughly the ones that have more eyeballs but fewer reactions. "Getting Ratioed" is a bad thing. You want your tweets to get many eyeballs but not a lot of back-and-forth discussion (as back-and-forth discussion is often a proxy for toxicity)

In contrast: Facebook is clearly of the opinion that "better" posts are the ones where people feel like making a comment on. Surprise surprise, Facebook is beginning to look like the more toxic social network.

While it's true that the article indicates FB views comments as positive signals, that's definitely not the primary focus of it, which is about likes vs "higher intentionality likes + other emotions".
Why award anger at all?