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How Facebook could be freed from the trap of engagement

So what is a better way to address these issues from a design perspective?

This question is one of the reasons why the Institute was created, as few things have been tested in space, with different levels of success, but a lot of this knowledge is in small groups of companies and it is not. it has not been open.

One of my favorite examples I’ve always pointed out is the Google search quality team and the work they were doing until at least 2015 or so. Google created search quality guidelines. Everything is very objective; the content is not valued qualitatively, but in search of objective criteria. Many, in fact, are just basic media competency checks, such as: With all things being equal, it’s best to be transparent about who the publishers or content creators are. Another is different ways of assessing how much effort has been put into content, all things being equal, it is better to make more effort. Here would be the lowest quality signals, is the content copied from elsewhere?

At this point, however, when it comes to determining quality measures, it seems, on the one hand, like this: Duh, of course platforms should try to show users the good and not the bad. But they seem to be moving away from that, at least in the case of Facebook, because they are afraid to see them play like favorites, especially among user-generated content.

Many of the social media companies that have sprung up on the Internet since the 2000s, many of their mission statements and values ​​are on their way to giving a voice to everyone. YouTube’s mission statement “Give everyone a voice and show the world.” The statement of the mission on Twitter is, I forget exactly …

“Empowering everyone to create and share ideas and information instantly without hindrance.”

“Immediately without hindrance,” yes. Facebook’s initial mission statement was: “connect everyone in the world”.

All of these mission statements are very similar: “Let’s all talk, show everything, put everyone together,” and these are not allowed to be an objective definition of quality, to say what content we want to be successful. platform.

And they are all very suitable for growth. We shouldn’t be at all surprised that the big platforms that survived the first generation of social media companies or two were the ones that prioritized growth, the more they saw it, the more useful you are, and so get it as fast as possible.

There is a pessimistic consequence of this, which is that Facebook and other major platforms make a lot of money doing things the way they do now. And yet, one thing that the Facebook Papers have revealed is as prevalent as Facebook …or Meta—It is on the market, potential enemies like TikTok are still very scared. So if you propose to make changes that could sacrifice a portion of that immediate short-term commitment, imagine that the leaders of these companies believe they can’t risk bored children opening TikTok because Facebook is trying to read them. a New Yorker Article. So are we naive to even talk about changing the way platforms in this way?


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