Remember in 2014 when it came out that Facebook tweaked their algorithm for a number of users to boost positive posts, and it turned out that it made them much happier people?
Remember that people completely lost their shit and made Facebook promise not to do that again? Well, instead they just optimized for "engagement" and here we are.
It would be SOOO easy to make a social network that actually increases a global sense of joy, comfort, satisfaction, security, etc. Facebook already has all the users, so they'd be perfect to flip this switch if the general public would let them. Why is it that they get hounded for making people happy, but not when optimizing for addictive compulsive behavior? Are companies just expected to optimize for addiction due to profit margins, something something, yay capitalism? Why is every other optimization off limits?
Facebook already has a massive amount of global social manipulation capabilities. There's no way around that, and no way they can just turn that off. They have the users, and the users expect some form of curation. Maybe at least give users the option to flip on the happy switch? It's still all real news from their network, just slightly boosted towards positive posts. I feel like for them to even be neutral, they should be at least boosting positive posts by 4x due to Negativity Bias inherent in how our brains filter data.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...
Remember that people completely lost their shit and made Facebook promise not to do that again? Well, instead they just optimized for "engagement" and here we are.
It would be SOOO easy to make a social network that actually increases a global sense of joy, comfort, satisfaction, security, etc. Facebook already has all the users, so they'd be perfect to flip this switch if the general public would let them. Why is it that they get hounded for making people happy, but not when optimizing for addictive compulsive behavior? Are companies just expected to optimize for addiction due to profit margins, something something, yay capitalism? Why is every other optimization off limits?
Facebook already has a massive amount of global social manipulation capabilities. There's no way around that, and no way they can just turn that off. They have the users, and the users expect some form of curation. Maybe at least give users the option to flip on the happy switch? It's still all real news from their network, just slightly boosted towards positive posts. I feel like for them to even be neutral, they should be at least boosting positive posts by 4x due to Negativity Bias inherent in how our brains filter data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias