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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Is any of this news? None of it seems like “whistleblowing”.

Facebook is old and not very good at the content moderation / censorship balance. Yep.

Seems like a lot of people want to be edgy and hate facebook without ideas on how to do things better (unless those ideas are pretty extreme censorship favoring a specific ideology).

Facebook is doing somewhat of a bad job but still people are trying to use it as a scapegoat for perfectly normal shitty human behavior which finds a way to exist regardless.

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> not very good at the content moderation / censorship balance

I'd say that considering how hard this problem is (technologically and ethically), they're doing quite well.

It's funny how they are blamed by both free speech advocates and by those who ask for more censorship. No wonder everybody hates them. It's a battle that they can't win.

You can be doing a bad job in both directions at the same time.

Facebook is like advertising free heroin and punishing people who get addicted.

They promote content that takes advantage of human weaknesses and then sometimes arbitrarily ban certain things unevenly. It is also why they lose people, they have been optimizing for the “most popular” for so long that they continually drive away people and are left with mostly addicts for whom the most popular gets worse and worse.

They could win, it wouldn’t be that difficult, but they would have to significantly change their motivations and behaviors.

> ... and are left with mostly addicts for whom the most popular gets worse and worse.

I think you're painting a darker picture than what it really is.

Maybe it's a US thing where people fight each other over Trump and vaccines. But my FB experience is pretty mundane. Watching some friends or acquaintance pictures when I'm procrastinating, and chatting with friends who still use Messenger. I also follow a few groups. Never got any fake news or harmful content whatsoever.

I'm not a FB fan because I'm favor of decentralization and openness, and I don't think a company (or gvt) should have access to that much information.

But I don't buy into the opinion that FB is such a threat to humanity because a small minority of people share fake news on the platform.

> They could win, it wouldn’t be that difficult

If they are doing such a horrible job and they could easily change and become better, why there haven't been actual competitors for so long then? You seem to have solutions, you should work on them or at least share them.

>If they are doing such a horrible job and they could easily change and become better, why there haven't been actual competitors for so long then?

They're doing a horrible job at content moderation, that's not what attracts people to a platform.

Why haven't there been competitors? There are plenty, one of their problems being leaked is kids don't use Facebook any more.

I don't want to run a social network? That's why. And the solutions aren't a piece of technology, they're changing how they make decisions and what optimizing strategy they use.

The short version is they need to optimize for a long fat tail and not the lowest common denominator.

If Facebook is not very good I'm wondering who, of any size, is good? As I understand it, Facebook is actually the best at this. It's just also the biggest.

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