Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | nopriorarrests's commentslogin

I mean, 1.2M views for the whole channel is... almost nothing, in terms of $? Surely not enough to affore new comfy bed and pillows?


1.2M views is worth thousands of dollars to the right demographic.


I expect that there are whole networks of channels that put out this stuff. The channel in question hasn't been active in a year. The "content creators" probably don't depend on any one channel to deliver their "creations".


I'd guess between $1k to $5k, and probably on the lower end of that spectrum. Might be worth it in a low cost of living country.


Parler is dead, aka banned by apple and google 1-2 hours ago.


Something does not add up here. Making RV full of explosives and exploding it in a right place not a small feat. Oklahoma City Bombing, for example, took 8 month from start to final blast.

5G paranoids, IMHO, have attention span of a fly and, frankly speaking, just too dumb. I just don't see one of them executing such complex project, and avoiding FBI attention while doing it.


> Making RV full of explosives and exploding it in a right place not a small feat.

I don't see why not. The United States is absolutely stuffed to the gills with explosive materials. Tannerite is basically everywhere, for example.


But how much can you acquire without triggering some FBI/police alarm? I honestly don't know, but I think it's harder now than in 1995.


As another commenter mentioned, diesel fuel and fertilizer are ubiquitous. Tannerite, as you specifically mentioned, can be purchased in bulk by tens-of-lbs at single stores. In fact, you're likely to save a good chunk of change doing so.

I'm not being sarcastic when I say that the US is awash in explosive materials.


If you’re a farmer, plenty, as the components for one compound are diesel fuel and fertilizer, both of which are part of “running a farm”


I think people way overestimate the FBI and police department capabilities for detecting these activities.


It's one of about a dozen different theories that have come out over the past two days. Sounds like everyone is grasping at straws right now. In the early days of an investigation, that's understandable for investigators, but the press grabs each of these theories as they come out and runs with them. If it turns out that the 5G paranoid theory is incorrect, doubt there will be even a token retraction or clarification. Instead it will be move on to the next thing and pretend the previous one was never suggested.


I wonder if Ted Kaczynski is 5G paranoid.


Preparations might go a bit faster when you are trained and groomed by FBI to bomb something.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ev974m/isis-fake-bomb-terror...

https://www.france24.com/en/20121018-new-york-bomb-plot-arre...

etc


Maybe my mind playing tricks on me, but it seems to me this object is human-shaped with something attached on his back (jet-pack?)


I imagine you could dummy-up a person with a jetpack by starting with balloons stuffed into a tyvek suit.

This was on 21/21, and surface winds at LAX were from the East until noon - though a balloon/drone combination would not be at the mercy of light winds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nNBRShBVVM


Yeah, that's what it looks like to me. The posture looks pretty unnatural and the "pack" is ridiculously small given the altitude it's been spotted at.


How true. "Those evil Trump campaign staffers turned election in his favor using amazing evil micro-targeting FB techniques which are complete scam and do not work at all".

Pretty coherent point of view.



>Presumably if you had a blog aimed at high-earning college educated people you could get a pretty high ratio of (target demographic/all viewers).

Correct. The problem of course is scale. How much money such blog can accept from advertisers before it will get absurdly expensive to buy ads from such blog?

FB gives you targeting and scale, and you need both to run meaningful advertising campaign.


>recognize voices. All these things were not possible 5 years ago.

FTR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking

Dragon Systems released NaturallySpeaking 1.0 as their first continuous dictation product in 1997. <...> As of 2012 LG Smart TVs include voice recognition feature powered by the same speech engine as Dragon NaturallySpeaking.


Yeah I played with dragon in 97 and it was awful - it didn’t work at all, completely unusable.

Today voice transcription is a solved problem and while their engine might be the same in name - I’d be surprised if the approach isn’t totally different than what they were doing in 97, either that or the LG tv voice transcription probably doesn’t work as well as everyone else’s.

The deep learning revolution and the applications we’ve seen since 2015 are a major step forward and something truly different. People pretending otherwise are just acting cynical in some attempt to project intelligence or seem wise, it doesn’t work.


Of course it was awful. It was 1997.

But you can't claim that something "wasn't possible 5 years" ago, if 7 years ago said feature was included in inexpensive consumer product (LG TV).

I'm not acting cynical, but it's tiresome for me to see people who claim that 20-30 years ago we all were living in a caves and catching bugs with wooden sticks, and now boom, ML!

Regarding "something truly different", well, my personal computing / mobile experience not changed that much from 2015. Honestly speaking, progress from 1995 to 2000 felt much more impressive and 'truly different'. I mean, think of it, during this timeframe we went from DOOM via V.34 modems to amazon.com and ordering pizza online.


It matters if it actually works and if it works broadly or just for limited use cases. As I said in the original comment, I think that you will see many applications in the near future. The last 5 years have been focused on research (comparable to 1990-1995), only now are we getting ready for commercial applications.


Yeah - entire classes of problems went from unsolvable to solved. Some of that is in the consumer space and some of it is not.

I feel like an AGI could accidentally wipe out half of humanity and there would still be people commenting on HN about how the exact same technology already existed in a roomba seven years ago.


Honest question, no snark --- which consumer space problems were solved, if I don't play Go and don't have FB account to recognize me on a group photos (both of these two statements are true)?


A couple quick things I can think of:

- Voice transcription

- Tesla Autopilot

- Facial recognition (photo sorting on iphones, better photos)

- Better graphical performance on Nvidia cards (https://developer.nvidia.com/dlss), also better compression for streaming.

- Much better translation

- Colorizing and repairing old photos

- Visual recognition allowing better search of images

I’m sure there are some I left out. I think we’ll see a lot more interesting applications (particularly around tooling) in the next few years.

https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35

Outside of the consumer space, there are also things that hint at more generalizable intelligence.

Check out GPT-3’s performance on arithmetic tasks in the original paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165)

Pages: 21-23, 63

Which shows some generality, the best way to accurately predict an arithmetic answer is to deduce how the mathematical rules work. That paper shows some evidence of that and that’s just from a relatively dumb predict what comes next model.

It’s hard to predict timelines for this kind of thing, and people are notoriously bad at it. Nobody would have predicted the results we’re seeing today in 2010. What would you expect to see in the years leading up to AGI? Does what we’re seeing look like failure?

https://deepmind.com/blog/article/muzero-mastering-go-chess-...


Tesla autopilot is notoriously unsafe, and still extremely bad even at simple problems. Not sure how it could be called a "solved problem" - especially when you have the CEO of Waymo saying publically that he doesn't believe we'll "ever" reach level 5 autonomous driving.

There have been massive improvements in automated driving, but if you want to talk about solved problems, parking assisst is as far as you can get.

Translation is much better, and is often understandable, but it is far from a solved problem.

Colorizing/repairing old photos also often introduces strange artifacts in places where they are unnecessary. Again, workable technology, not a solved problem.

Voice transcription is also decent, but far from a solved problem. You need only look at YouTube auto-generated captions to see both how far it has come and how many trivial errors it still has.

And regarding "generalizable intelligence" and arithmetic in GPT-3, the paper can't even definitively confirm that the examples that they showed are not part of the corpus (they note that they made some attempts to find them that didn't turn out anything, but they can't go so far as to say they are certain that the particular calculations were not found within the corpus). They also make no attempts to check the model itself to find if any sub-structure may have simply encoded an addition table for 2-digit numbers.

Also, AGI will certainly require at least some attempts to get models to learn about the rules of the real world, the myriad bits of knowledge that we are born with that are not normally captured in any kinds of text you might train your AI on (the idea of objects and object permanence, the intelligent agent model of the world, the mechanical interaction model of the world etc.).


Autopilot is distinct from full self driving - I was talking about driver assist.

'Solved' is doing a lot of work here and is an unnecessary threshold I'm willing to concede. I think we would be more likely to agree that things went from unusably bad or impossible to usably good, but imperfect in a lot of consumer categories in the last five years due to ML and deep learning approaches.

The more clearly 'solved' cases of previously open problems (Go, protein folding, facial recognition, etc.) are mostly not in the consumer space.

As far as the gpt-3 bit I encourage others to read that excerpt, they explicitly state they excluded the problems they asked from the test data so it's not memorization. The types of failures it makes are failures like failing to carry the one, it certainly seems like it's deducing the rules. It'll be interesting to see what happens in gpt-4 as they continue to scale it up.


I keep hearing voice transcription is "solved", but both where I see it in consumer products (e.g. YT auto subtitles) and in dedicated transcription services I've tried it's far from solved.

Even the good translation services will randomly produce garbage, struggle with content that's not in nicely fully formed sentences, and are severely limited in language support.


First, nobody is claiming that people were living in caves before ML. I understand you're exaggerating for effect -- but that's the same thing the parent comment is doing when they say something "wasn't possible" 5 years ago. They don't mean that it was literally impossible, they mean that it was sufficiently bad that a typical consumer would be unlikely to use it back then -- whereas now the quality has improved to the point where these things are ubiquitous.

Similarly, both Amazon [1] and online pizza ordering [2] existed before 1995. They were just not commonly used.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)

[2] https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/index.html


>they mean that it was uncommon for a typical consumer to experience it back then.

Siri from Apple was launched in 2011, as some other commenter noted below. Also, "On June 14, 2011, Google announced at its Inside Google Search event that it would start to roll out Voice Search on Google.com during the coming days".

If it does not count as 'typical consumer to experience it', well, I do not know what counts then.

9 years ago, I mind you, not 5. And I think that 5 years ago voice recognition was more-or-less good already. In 4 years both Apple and Google acquired large enough datasets to learn from, afer initial launch of their products in 2011.

What we are still struggling with is proccesing of fuzzy queries, something among the lines of 'Siri tell me which restaurant in my area serves the most delicious sushi according to yelp reviews and also allows takeout', but this is not a voice recognition problem (though typical consumer can think it is).


> ‘Siri tell me which restaurant in my area serves the most delicious sushi according to yelp reviews and also allows takeout’

Siri stumbles at way less complex queries than that. Every year or so I retry using it, and give up due to the error rate. An accuracy of 99% and 10x slower is apparently preferable for me.


My experience has been very different. I use an Alexa purely to control lights and set alarms, and have enough misses at just those tasks that I don't consider it particularly good at them.

I'd take a literal clapper that hooked into smartbulbs over it at this point.


Live captions for English video or audio are nice, but it still doesn't work for music (not even rap), and it doesn't work for other languages. It might work in a lab setting, but doesn't in currently available phones.


Along the same vain, Siri was launched in 2011.


Honestly, americans who are thinking in all seriousness that "we can have democracy or we can have Facebook" are just deluding themselves.

I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands or, say, Germany, or other EU countries? From what I know, Facebook makes some real euros there, so adoption rate is quite high, but still, democracy is not "under attack" in these countries because of "automated newsfeed".

Consider these countries as a control group for "facebook being bad for democracy" test.

Maybe US should take a hard look into a mirror and accept the fact that it is very polarized country, not very cohesive society, with very little common ground (if any at all) between different factions, and facebook just shows this fact.

Don't blame the mirror for what you see in it.


> I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands or, say, Germany, or other EU countries? From what I know, Facebook makes some real euros there, so adoption rate is quite high, but still, democracy is not "under attack" in these countries because of "automated newsfeed".

Yes it is. Polarization is increasing in a lot of countries, and there is heavy criticism. But while US news are exposed to the rest of the world, news from EU countries aren't as much. That's why you don't see "Facebook is damaging democracy" takes from EU countries. At least from what I see in Spain (I can't speak for other countries because I don't read french or german or dutch news) the debate on Facebook (and other social media platforms) effect on democracy is growing bigger each day, specially now with the COVID pandemic.


Brexit?

I certainly can't prove it, but I'd be willing to bet that it wouldn't have happened without Facebook.

The thing is that it's the first time were you can really microtarget bigots, racists and xenophobes. And that's what makes it frightening. Especially when everybody nowadays has his own brand of reality.

Note: Despite the fact that I think Brexit is a devastatingly bad idea I don't mean to imply that leave voters are bigots or racists. Brexit is just a great example about undue influence on a referendum.

E: Removed redundancy


> Note: Despite the fact that I think Brexit is a devastatingly bad idea I don't mean to imply that leave voters are bigots or racists.

All the bigots and racists did vote leave though.


There was a strong racist undertone to the campaign. In my family we used to joke about my kids grandparents being mildly racist. The leave campaign helped turn that up a notch.


Sadly Brexit is a product of the "mainstream" rightwing media in the UK who've been lying about Europe for decades. Remember the UK media are explicitly political; Johnson was even employed as a journalist for a while on a higher salary than the one he gets as Prime Minister.


Exactly.

I live in California, and recently had a conversation with a family member in The Hague.

She was telling me about her frustrations with Anti-Maskers and Covid-deniers she has been arguing with locally.

Apparently these are not just US political issues.


Honest question -- do you think that without Facebook there will be no tensions between anti-maskers and people who insist on wearing masks everywhere? Is FB really to blame here?


Yes.

I think it’s a huge amplifier of what would otherwise be fringe ideas.

In the absence of FB, there would be tensions, but no battleground.



Yes. The progressives were fighting against the mask mandate imposed by the lynching-friendly Republican mayor of SF. They were saying that mask mandates are unscientific, and turned out to be right:

> A study then in 1919 concluded that mandatory mask mandates did not make any difference on epidemic


Without Facebook and the self-amplifying validation bubbles it produces, being "anti-mask" would be seen as just as ridiculous as being an anti-vaccine or a flat-earther. There wouldn't be tensions at all because the fringe group wouldn't have any other way to grow to the point where there could be "tensions".


There seems to be a relatively large covid-denial movement in the Netherlands compared to the rest of Europe, and focussed on The Hague in particular. The administrative capital is a good place to protest when the whole country is around an hour by train.

But, the politics is quite different from the US. Some restaurant and bar owners threatened to stage a protest and re-open against the law, giving six weeks notice that they might do this. This has since been defused.

https://nltimes.nl/2020/12/02/restaurants-bars-defy-dutch-ba...


Russia, and many populist/extremist political campaigns, literally manipulate European elections by employing content farms to push out controversial content. Internet Research Agency, Cambridge Analytica, etc.

How do you think populist leaders gain such a large voice so quickly in those EU countries? You're kidding yourself, if you don't think the same tactics are being deployed in Europe, and amplified via platforms like Facebook.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20191007IP...


>How do you think populist leaders gain such a large voice so quickly in those EU countries?

There are two options here.

1. People are not really happy with current status quo so they are looking to choose alternative leaders via elections, just as expected in democratic countries.

2. Some bad guys post bad stuff on Facebook and, like, 30% of german voters read it and march to election booth like zombies to vote the way bad guys said them to vote (for Alternative for Germany).

Well, you can pick which theory survives the Occam Razor test better.

EDIT: And oh, wrt to "a large voice so quickly" -- when a lot of stuff happens quickly (i mean, between 1 or 2 elections) -- yes, a lot of people can change their minds quickly. Turbulent times, you know. In stable times people change their minds slowly.


In case 2. you're being a little disingenuous by oversimplifying the issue.

The issue is that when "bad guys post bad stuff", it gets amplified because its engaging, and can really distort people's reality and nudge their belief systems. Have you taken a look at Cambridge Analytica? This was their playbook. There's a reason those people were paid a lot of money, and received a ton of scrutiny.

As for case 1. Yes, people are not happy with the status quo, but they can be convinced that the reason they are not happy is because of something that's difficult to prove, and creates an "us vs. them" mentality. Think antisemitism in WW2, or anti-immigration, more recently.


IRA was totally overblown in terms of its impact. See Thomas Rid's Active Measures.

Andrew Bosworth, former head of FB ads, has been pretty critical of Cambridge's claims as well: "In practical terms, Cambridge Analytica is a total non-event. They were snake oil salespeople. The tools they used didn’t work, and the scale they used them at wasn’t meaningful. Every claim they have made about themselves is garbage. Data of the kind they had isn’t that valuable to begin with and worse it degrades quickly, so much so as to be effectively useless in 12-18 months."


It’s easy to scapegoat than actually solve a real problem. This is a well tested way to win elections.


To me it seems like both of these are true? There is a lot wrong with the status quo, so people go looking outside that for solutions. They run into charlatans offering quick, easy, convenient, and disastrous solutions.

It's strong parallels to those people who've found a valid but isolated problem with the medical establishment then immediately jump off the deep end into completely untested nonsense from quacks which they've heard from Youtube. "Collodial silver" and all that.


Are you under the impression that 30% of the vote is insignificant? What if I told you that Hitler never won more than 37% of the vote in free and fair elections?


30% is HUGE, and this is why I do not buy the idea that you can get such percentage of votes because of some evil state actor who posts ads on facebook, with independent press, TV, all being available and popular as well.

If some party got 30% of votes in Germany, stop blaming facebook and 'state actors'. Germans are better then this, they are not zombies, and they have a lot of information sources to pick up news/opinions from.


> Germans are better then this

If they're voting for the Nazis again, maybe they're not better than this.


OK, agree. But then, don't shift the blame to 'malicious state actor'. This is their decision and they own it in full.


https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43301643

Especially Russia would have a lot to gain from Trump being re-elected. It would have been crazy if they didn't put all hands on it. And the same can be extended to friendly candidates in other countries.


Yeah, I know. Russia would have a lot to gain from:

-- Trump being re-elected

-- Yellow Vests riots in France

-- Brexit

-- Alternative for Germany party rise in Germany

and all of these happened because of Facebook+Russia.

Sorry, but this is just Q-Anon level global conspiracy theory adopted for progressives. :-(


How do you explain the Internet Research Agency then? What purpose do they serve?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency


Stealing goverment money under the premise of "we will rule the world comrade, so please allocate 100 million dollars to us ASAP" and pocketing it to buy London properties, obviously.

And of course, 50K out of 100M will be really allocated to buy some shitty FB ads to make screenshots and present it to higher-ups.


What a creative application of Occam's Razor!


Being originally from Russia, I know how things work there.

I mean, government contractors aren't saints in every country, it's a well known fact, but in Russia they are on a whole different level.


It's really interesting that people still bring up Cambridge Analytica as a driving force in elections both abroad and domestic. Earlier this year, the UK's ICO concluded after a 3 year long investigation that Cambridge Analytica had no impact on the Brexit vote, and really was no different than your run of the mill marketing agency (just with better PR spin)[1].

But no one has picked up/amplified that story. After the 2016 elections, NYT/WSJ/The Atlantic/etc. ran article after article pinning the outcomes of the US and UK elections on Facebook, despite having no evidence of this outside of testimonies from some former CA employees. Anyone with a background in adtech knew that these allegations were full of shit, but the narrative was too good to pass up.

Now, conclusive investigations have debunked these claims, but it's 4 years too late and the idea that FB/CA caused the problems of the past few years is ingrained in everyone's mind.

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/no-evidence-that-cambridge-a...


Platforms like FB are just a tool for abuse in your example. If not for FB it would just take place on different platforms or through different channels. This is the price we pay for an interconnected world, killing Facebook will not save "democracy" - whatever that is.


What makes you say that Facebook isn't doing those things in other countries? It really is. It's so easy to get caught in a web of scary news that agree with something you were already thinking, and never letting go.

I have friends and family members who will blame random problems on completely unrelated things like "new walk-way in large city" or "beheading in france". Meanwhile they will vehemently deny or state that real issues are overblown.


> Don't blame the mirror for what you see in it.

Agreed, Facebook is just exploiting weaknesses that already exist in American minds. Those problems exist elsewhere, but have not advanced as far.

There will be a silver lining in the Facebook case though. We're going to see a lot of emails and depositions that end the "Mark Zuckerberg is a uniquely competent person who earned an empire through ability" myth. That's good enough for me.


Thank you for saying that. The deposition will definitely be illuminating. Unlike his performance in front of congress, it will not be judged by public opinion ( and technically inept congressmen ) and will have real consequences should he chose to lie.


> I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands or, say, Germany, or other EU countries?

On what basis do you believe it isn't?


I haven't seen a single article even trying to suggest that politics in Germany or Netherlands is affected by Facebook is any way. (And for USA, you can see such articles on HN front page any other day, btw).

The only gripe EU is having with Facebook is about privacy violations, as I can see.


HN frontpage and US news sources aren't a good indicator for what's happening in countries that dare to not speak English.

It's maybe not to the same degree, but political polarization, filter bubbles and conspiracy theories made worse through FB and other social media totally are a topic here. EDIT: I guess hate speech legislation is in a similar corner and does appear on here too.


Europe isn't that different and its quickly getting worse in nearly every country, and of course also beyond country borders with things like Brexit.


It's sowing discord everywhere, because the design is the same everywhere, and humans have the same psychological vulnerabilities everywhere.

Maximum profit requires maximum engagement. This requires creating filter bubbles and prioritising emotional content. From there, the social fracturing is inevitable... only the topics differ from country to country.


>I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord"

Because it's not Facebook.

Notice that in US, one side (Democrats, media conglomerates and their 'journalist' employees) are pushing for Facebook to censor, de-platform, or 'rank down' independent, conservative and progressive outlets. It is this group, author of the post included, that keeps calling Facebook, YouTube, Twitter (and even first amendment) divisive or undemocratic as a cynical, self-serving strategy to move the needle in their direction (for Democrats, it means more political power, for media conglomerates, it means less competition for eyeballs, and more revenue).

Meanwhile conservative and progressive outlets are calling for less Facebook censorship because they see themselves under constant attack, even when they report factually correct news.


The far right and far left have surged globally, the old center has collapsed. The far right has had more successful surges, to be clear.

Are you American by any chance? You may be committing the same mistake you complain of.

The neonazis have made great gains in Germany, Brexit happened. The far right northern league came to power as part of a coalition, with a leader who called for mass cleansing.

A Hindu nationalist party is in power in India, buoyed by whatsapp chain messages. In France, Macron came out of nowehere: he is a centrist but this still shows a collapse of the old structures. His biggest threat is a fascist.

Bolsonaro, a Trump admirer is in power in Brazil. The president of the phillipines, Duterte, boasts of summarily executing drug dealers. Authoritarians rule in Hungary and Poland.


> facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands or, say, Germany, or other EU countries

I'll be honest, I have trouble believing you live in the EU if you're claiming something like this.


> I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands

But it is? Antivaxxers are at an all time high here, the Pietendiscussie is inflamed on both sides primarily through social media. My plumber-neighbour is an excellent source for learning what the latest conspiracy theory is on his Facebook feed.

If you don't see it, you probably meet people from a narrow slice of society. I certainly see that these kinds of experiences are vastly different between my friends-circle, all former fellow university students, or my villages neighbours, a tiny place far from the urban centres of the Netherlands. My family is a bit in between, again correlating with age.

I absolutely think Facebook is making this country worse. It's the main method of how corona-disbelievers are keeping rates up by encouraging each other to ignore 'rules'.


Another angle here is the amount of people communicating and making a living thru facebook, particularly in third world countries (i am born in, and still living in).

The accessible value in tapping the network effects of FB as a communication platform is quite an okay amount of democracy.

But on the other hand I think the polarity in US (and large countries like RU and CH) is quite relative to the size of their countries.. is there any science to that lol


Yes, there are problems in the United States but I do believe Facebook is accelerating the polarization significantly. We have widespread belief in voter fraud based on no hard evidence. This was simply not even conceivable 4 years ago. Just because there's a fire burning already doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to those who pour gasoline on it.


We had widespread belief in Trump-Russia collusion despite no hard evidence too. There's a word for a baseless conspiracy theory that implicates the right: "fact".


I’m not sure that you’re very well informed - your opinion is that theories of trump Russia collusion were baseless? Is that what you believe the Mueller report said?


It did say that they couldn't find hard evidence of collusion, yes.

But "baseless conspiracy theory" is practically a term of art. There was sufficient evidence of election irregularities in key battleground states to at least warrant a proper investigation. The same media companies which reported Trump-Russia collusion as hard, settled facts, however, rushed to call any suggestion of fraud a "baseless conspiracy theory" and reassured us that the 2020 elections were absolutely airtight, which -- I don't know what you have to be smoking to believe that last bit.


I am from Brazil, and here Facebook is a problem too...

We even have our supreme court doing blatantly inconstitutional things because they are upset with Facebook (and Whatsapp).

Also during the Gamergate debacle, there was some high profile news about a "gamergater" that sent actual death threats to people (many people falsely claim to have received death threats), when police caught the guy, it was a Brazillian leftist troll, that thought it would be hilarious to watch whatever was going on in Facebook and try to outviralize viral posts by doing whatever would stoke more controversy (in this case, pretending to be right wing, sending death threats to left wingers, and watch the two sides fight).


But Facebook is affecting Germany, the Netherlands and here in Sweden where I live. Most of the voters for SD (Sverigedemokraterna) follow the same pattern as Trumpists in the US: regurgitating bullshit spread through Facebook (and to a lesser extent YouTube) which became a firehose of lies, impossible to keep up with to be disproven. People fall into that hole more often than I imagined and I'm glad that the education system here is decent enough to allow the majority of the population to see through this farce.

It still affects society, it still sows discord and I'm not sure how you are unaware of this if you are making such claims...


It’s more than facebook.

It’s CAPITALISM.

People have to always preface any criticism of it by saying “there is nothing at all wrong with capitalism, but...”

But no, the actual ECONOMIC SYSTEM and the incentives and constraints it exerts on institutions and organizations is responsible for what is happening. It selects for the current types of organizations and outcomes by its very nature.

You see, both our news and our social networks are driven by a profit motive and face market competition. Thus they are forced to adapt to changing circumstancss in certain ways:

Act 1. Journalism was disrupted by the Internet, and survived by adopting the FOX News model of locking in an audience and being biased, showing one part of the story.

MSNBC explicitly did it, while CNN jumped the shark after the Malaysian Airlines flight, realizing it can lock in audience. One sided clickbait outrage articles are the norm. There is some attempt to have journalistic integrity and policy focus at Vox and NowThis, but then you also have MotherJones, OccupyDemocrats, DailyKos and more on the left. You have all kinds of independent podcasts like TYT network, Kyle Kulinski, David Pakman, Majority Report, etc. And similarly for the conservatives, libertarians, etc.

We are divided also because giant corporations like Sinclair Television bought up all the local stations and outlets, resulting in this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

No really, watch it. It’s black mirror level, and you can see the capitalism at work here. Top down control by a small group of people, disseminating to everyone under the banner of “free speech”.

Act 2. Social networks are in a race to the bottom for advertising dollars.

So they adapt by desiging algorithms to maximize your “engagement” and attention on their platform.

Capitalism leads to a tragedy of the unmanaged commons, where in this case the commons is human attention. There is a reason that you salivate at notifications like Pavlov’s dogs. You’ve been conditioned to look at that screen light up during dinner. It’s NOT just about a slot machine dynamic. It’s that - if Facebook doesn’t get your attention every so often, then LinkedIn or Twitter would.

The solution is changing the economic model for news and social media.

Yes I said it. But let me use less triggering words than capitalism and socialism.

We need more projects built on collaboration instead of competition.

Wikipedia instead of Britannica

Workd Wide Web instead of America Online

Open Source Software instead of closed source commercial software

Cryptocurrency instead of banks

Creative Commons instead of Copyright

Prizes for Open Source Drugs instead of Patent System and IP

And so on. Not only would it make the system cheaper, it would make it far more effective and less divisive. People would be able to build on each other’s work, without threats.

This is already how peer reviewed science has worked, and for all its flaws it has produced tremendous progress. Scientists are careful not to overstate things. Titles are “boring” and descriptive rather than sensational.

Compare that to the “free speech” where money - and yes, audience size - determines which ideas get pushed in one direction. Clay Shirky spoke about this 15 years ago:

https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_institutions_vs_collab...

So how would it work?

There would be a wiki-like site for news. People around the world would upload their own videos and raw media.

Then each news story would be edited and re-edited by mutually distrusting parties, checks and balances, similar to Wikipedia’s talk page.

The final result would be published only after a delay, when most parties have had a chance to challenge all the claims they needed, with well sourced claims of their own (each claim would have its own page).

That way, the world can make up its own mind by using the collaboration of the crowd, on issues like what’s happening in Saudi/Yemen, with China and Uyghurs or whether Assad gassed his own people after winning with conventional weapons. As well as on issues of religion, science, health policy, and so on.

We are building something like this as a reference implementation. The domain will be Rational.app

If you want to be involved you can email me at “greg” at the domain qbix.com. I am happy to welcome people on the project who know Javascript or PHP and who believe something like this is needed. This would be an open source project.


Very good point. There are a ton of legitimate criticisms of Facebook, but you can’t blame FB for American anti-intellectualism, rampant gullibility, and the failings of the two party system.

Americans have for decades been gullible fools who never read below headlines and fall for tabloid trash. This “post-reality” thing that is culminating with stuff like Qanon has also been cooking for decades, nurtured by trash TV, dumbed down religion, and new age word salad.

In the past only mass media had the privilege of being able to lead this mass of morons. Now that has been democratized, allowing DIY YouTube and Facebook personalities to take advantage of America’s rampant foolishness.

The solution has to start with an broad spectrum social movement to raise the quality of discourse in the culture, a kind of big tent anti-bullshit movement. We need to replace hard line partisan intolerance with intolerance for intellectual junk food. Liberals, conservatives, and anyone else should start promoting all content of any perspective so long as it is well written, well reasoned, and credible, and rejecting BS from their own side as well as others.


There is one simple option to preserve whatever you want. Pay for it, dammit.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: