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by OrwellianChild 4366 days ago
Am I alone in being completely un-surprised and accepting of Facebook doing research in this way on its users? The News Feed as an interface for using FB is and has always been an evolving product and in the control of FB. They've been constantly messing with it, A/B testing different combinations of user/advertiser content and post/comment structure. They do this to test outcomes, and achieve goals that most likely include (and are certainly not limited to):

  - Optimizing ad targeting
  - Maximizing click-thru
  - Maximizing engagement
  - Minimizing abandonment/bounce rates
The News Feed already doesn't show you all your friends' posts and hasn't for quite some time. How they choose to "curate" what they do show is going to be dictated by their incentives/needs.

Getting outraged about any of this seems akin to getting pissed that the new season of your favorite TV show sucked...

Edited for formatting...
1 comments
kevingadd 4366 days ago
You're not alone, but I think you do yourself a disservice by underestimating the potential negative impact of an experiment designed for the purpose of manipulating a customer's emotions. There's no defensible business objective here, and furthermore, any business objective that relies on this kind of emotional manipulation is suspect.

Intentionally making a customer depressed is not something you fuck around with. It's incredibly dangerous, and doing it to a huge subset of your audience with no mechanisms to ensure you don't inflict real harm is utterly reckless and irresponsible.

The individual mechanisms and approach used here for the experiment are not, in and of themselves, objectionable. Many A/B tests are wholly defensible. The end goal and process are the problem here.

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amirmc 4366 days ago
> "... any business objective that relies on this kind of emotional manipulation is suspect."

So all modern day advertising then, that attempts to create a connection with the viewer/reader (as opposed to presenting bare facts).

I agree that there was a process problem from the point of view of a research study but had this just been an A/B test for engagement levels, we might never have known what Facebook did.

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