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comment by goobster
goobster  ·  1242 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The view from outside.

Well, the problems with infinite scroll are well documented.

And ever notice when there are more than a dozen comments on a post, it only shows you a few of them - which are invariably the ugliest/most controversial comments?

And the fact that Facebook is designed to emphasize and spread "controversial" content - aka conspiracies and bullshit - and only fact checks actual science? It is specifically designed this way, to increase agitation and annoyance because this routes around your "thinking" part of your brain, and rewards the instant-gratification parts of your brain that clicking provides. This has been known for a long time. In fact, even followup articles on these issues are over 2 years old now.

And that their fact checkers include Breitbart, and the Daily Caller (Tucker Carlson's personal conspiracy generation site), and their senior staff are conservative lobbyists with pet political disinformation projects they promote via FB's code and tools?

They regularly pay lip service to important things like climate change while working in the background in direct opposition to these same things?

And all of this may seem inconsequential when looking at your cousin Tilda's kids birthday party photos... but that content is provided within a frame that is more than 70% that "other stuff", 15% controls, and 10% that is the actual content you want to see. The rest is being fed into your brain whether you want it to or not.

And that's just Facebook.





CrazyEyeJoe  ·  1241 days ago  ·  link  ·  

All good points, some of which are obviously true now that I think about it. Thanks for all the sources too, I'll definitely have a look at them.

EDIT: One thing that really pisses me off is that the only real choice you have is either seeing which comments Facebook decides is "most relevant", or seeing thousands of twats tagging each other. That practice basically destroyed the FB comment sections (not that they were that great before). They should simply be filtered out for anyone who doesn't know the people.