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Comment by kromem | Hacker News Reader

Facebook also has a serious problem in that its news feed is a content recommendation engine with only positive reinforcement but no negative reinforcement. So you end up with a ton of false positives even when actively interacting with the content, and their system doesn't even know how wrong it is.

And should you really not like some content, the solution is unfriending the poster, rather than simply matching against that type of content (political, religious, etc).

The fact there isn't a private dislike button (that no one sees you clicked other than Facebook), is remarkable at this point. It's either woefully obtuse, or intentional so that a feed of false positives better hides moderately targeted ads.

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That's like YouTube lord help you if you click on a video you don't like by mistake you'll never see the end of it in the recommended section.

It's to the point now where I just log out so I can see what's available rather than a continuous feedback of what I already watched.

You can go to the "History" page on youtube and delete the video from your watch history. It seems to stop youtube from using it for recommendations.

You can hide individual posts, posts similar to it, and posts from individual groups or people.

That solution doesn't require defriending or unliking a page. Facebook uses this feedback when recommending content

"The fact there isn't a private dislike button (that no one sees you clicked other than Facebook), is remarkable at this point. It's either woefully obtuse, or intentional so that a feed of false positives better hides moderately targeted ads."

I vote the last option. I think there was an explanation, basically saying it would make people upset or sad and they wanted to avoid that. The solution wound up being a variety of emotions to pick from (which counts more than a simple like). They included negatives like "angry" or "sad".... I'd still just rather have a simple dislike button.

I'm not sure I'd call it woefully obtuse, at least on the web (which is what I primarily use it for). See an example here: http://imgur.com/a/3Tjb7

...note that I can choose to dislike the post itself, or hide the entire source or app if I prefer.

Is that also true to HN, since most users can't downvote?

Not really? It's a very different system, there's no plausible way to have a "private" downvote when the "recommendation system" here is entirely crowdsourced rather than personalized. I suppose the hide button is sort of an equivalent, but I don't think the systems are really comparable.

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