How Facebook Is Changing the Way Its Users Consume Journalism
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
A voting system based on free and fair participation by the users is in no way similar or equivalent to that.
You can show shadowbanned people's contributions by setting showdead to true in your profile. I haven't seen too much admin/mod abuse lately.
Users with karma over 750(?) can downvote and so it's entirely users who are greying out comments or flag-killing comments.
- If you've spent more than 6 months on HN, you probably know the rules (and they are not a secret), - I'm myself a French entrepreneur and I'm glad I have been influenced towards start-up creation by HN, - HN is both capitalizing on SV's leadership and reinforcing it.
Of course I wish I were influenced by my country's start-up material, but I'm not. Now that we've confirmed HN has influence, what would you do differently?
It was one of many many election advertising campaigns that influenced voters, and wasn't biased beyond the general leanings of its user base, which is already a majority of voters.
"However, the ability to reach large populations online means that even small effects could yield behaviour changes for millions of people. Furthermore, as many elections are competitive, these changes could affect electoral outcomes. For example, in the 2000 US presidential election, George Bush beat Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes (less than 0.01% of votes cast in Florida). Had Gore won Florida, he would have won the election"
"To put these results in context, it is important to note that turnout has been steadily increasing in recent US midterm elections, from 36.3% of the voting age population in 2002 to 37.2% in 2006, and to 37.8% in 2010. Our results suggest that the Facebook social message increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for a total of 340,000 additional votes. That represents about 0.14% of the voting age population of about 236 million in 2010. However, this estimate does not include the effect of the treatment on Facebook users who were registered to vote but who we could not match because of nicknames, typographical errors, and so on. It would be complex to estimate the number of users on Facebook who are in the voter record but unmatchable, and it is not clear whether treatment effects would be of the same magnitude for these individuals, so we restrict our estimate to the matched group that we were able to sample and observe. This means it is possible that more of the 0.60% growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010 might have been caused by a single message on Facebook."
It's important to note that 0.14% of the population is the small number. It was 0.6% of the mobilized voting population and they got these results messaging 1/6 of the population. Furthermore they only report on effects that they could track and so all numbers are lower bounds.
AFTER EDIT: Encouraging, as I do both here on Hacker News and on Facebook, informative disagreement, I'd be very delighted to hear an explanation for the early downvote this comment received. What did you not like about it? How does your experience with Facebook differ from mine, and what is your view of the article kindly submitted here?
In summation, buzzfeed has a commitment to only report current events, and the most interesting and thought provoking content. They have a strict "no filler" mandate and a commitment to only report important news stories.
>Not sure this guy has ever even read buzzfeed
Filler is pointless. But, an even more important point is depth. If someone has an interesting point of view on anything from ISIS in Iraq, post conflict Russia-Ukraine relations to the medium term implications of lower oil costs on energy exporting economies of South American there is an unlimited level of depth that a reader may want to get into. IE, there's a place for recent facts in headlines, there is a place for two minute commentary. But, there is also room for people to jump into far more depth.
Whether in print of on video, those talking heads frame a battling for 12 second soundbites in a battle of of cliche and shallow wit are now pointless. If people want to engage deeper, there is no page limit.
The terms “content” and “consumption” in this context make me cringe. I know it’s arguing over connotations, but I think they frame the matter in an unfortunate way. On the other hand, they’re telling.
The content you speak of might be good journalism. It could even be art. However, it could also be shitty journalism, it could in fact be advertising copy, perhaps it's just some words designed to generate ad revenue. The word is wonderfully ambiguous.
Honestly I wish that all this "consume" thing would disappear soon...
There has been a massive influx of hopeless and useless junk in my Facebook feed. Why do I need to click it off? Why isn't it opt-in?
That said, I have a Facebook group with just my friends in it, where we organise social events, share interesting stuff and just generally shoot the shit. It's exactly what I want Facebook to be - no junk, no ads, no brands marketing to me, and no one cultivating their social presence. Just a couple of posts a day and a bunch of follow up comments from my (real) friends.
Sorry but the usage you described is exactly what the group of friends I was part of did in the 90's using an IRC channel. usenet would be public and a board would not update itself in real time.
Many times, friends have told me that they either hid or simply unfriended connections that posted political or ideological viewpoints which differed from their own. Although I try to keep my feed diverse, I admit to doing the same for the particularly extreme posters.
It suspect this is one of several factors in the increased partisan polarization and really should be studied further.
I tend to think that people divide because they can't relate on a conceptual/experiential level; they begin with different perceptive assumptions. That's just a theory, though.
Why support someone else's "grassroots" advertising model?
On the other hand, I have some FB friends who at least appear rational and interesting as long as you don't see any post containing Obama, Marxist, Kenyan, Job Creator, and a couple other key phrases. Keyword blocking would be an interesting feature to add to the "I don't want to see this" menu that is already present in FB. Add an option "contains keywords" and then select predetermined keywords.
One interesting side effect is likely to be an explosion of vocabulary. Once I block the obvious keyphrases above, I'll just have a newsfeed spammed with 'bama, Stalinist, African, and anticapitalist. I'm not sure that would be an improvement. Or it'll look like modern spam with weirdly spelled words.
Facebook allows our peers/friends to influence what it thinks our preferences are. Therefore we are now becoming more influenced by those around us and possibly dulling the ability to form our own opinions.
In today's world, when one controls the internet, that's all that matters.
From WikiPedia: ''Upon the creation of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Milošević's government engaged in reforms to the Serbian Penal Code regarding restrictions on free speech, which were seen by critics as highly authoritarian. In particular Article 98 of the Serbian Penal Code during the 1990s punished imprisonment of up to three years for the following: "...public ridicule [of] the Republic of Serbia or another Republic within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, their flag, coat of arms or anthem, their presidencies, assemblies or executive councils, the president of the executive council in connection with the performance of their office..."[65]''