From the article: [...] [...] The article describes a second experiment:
From the article:
In response, the employees proposed an emergency change to the site’s news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than two billion people see every day. It involved emphasizing the importance of what Facebook calls “news ecosystem quality” scores, or N.E.Q., a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.
Typically, N.E.Q. scores play a minor role in determining what appears on users’ feeds. But several days after the election, Mr. Zuckerberg agreed to increase the weight that Facebook’s algorithm gave to N.E.Q. scores to make sure authoritative news appeared more prominently, said three people with knowledge of the decision, who were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
[...]
Some employees argued the change should become permanent, even if it was unclear how that might affect the amount of time people spent on Facebook. In an employee meeting the week after the election, workers asked whether the “nicer news feed” could stay, said two people who attended.
Guy Rosen, a Facebook executive who oversees the integrity division that is in charge of cleaning up the platform, said on a call with reporters last week that the changes were always meant to be temporary. “There has never been a plan to make these permanent,” he said. John Hegeman, who oversees the news feed, said in an interview that while Facebook might roll back these experiments, it would study and learn from them.
[...]
The article describes a second experiment:
The trade-offs came into focus this month, when Facebook engineers and data scientists posted the results of a series of experiments called “P(Bad for the World).”
The company had surveyed users about whether certain posts they had seen were “good for the world” or “bad for the world.” They found that high-reach posts — posts seen by many users — were more likely to be considered “bad for the world,” a finding that some employees said alarmed them.
So the team trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict posts that users would consider “bad for the world” and demote them in news feeds. In early tests, the new algorithm successfully reduced the visibility of objectionable content. But it also lowered the number of times users opened Facebook, an internal metric known as “sessions” that executives monitor closely.
“The results were good except that it led to a decrease in sessions, which motivated us to try a different approach,” according to a summary of the results, which was posted to Facebook’s internal network and reviewed by The Times.
The team then ran a second experiment, tweaking the algorithm so that a larger set of “bad for the world” content would be demoted less strongly. While that left more objectionable posts in users’ feeds, it did not reduce their sessions or time spent.
That change was ultimately approved. But other features employees developed before the election never were.
Being a software engineer for Facebook right now has to feel like the equivalent of working in tobacco advertisement in its heyday. Before the "TV rots your brain" and "don't believe everything...
Being a software engineer for Facebook right now has to feel like the equivalent of working in tobacco advertisement in its heyday. Before the "TV rots your brain" and "don't believe everything you read on the internet" crowd joined social media it was pretty fun. But in the 10 years Facebook and the like have had critical mass just look at what it has done to the internet and society writ large.
I shared this story because it is almost a smoking gun for Facebook prioritizing growth over what's "good for the world." It sounds like they have useful technology but won't turn it on. (I say...
I shared this story because it is almost a smoking gun for Facebook prioritizing growth over what's "good for the world." It sounds like they have useful technology but won't turn it on.
(I say "almost" because there may be subtlety that didn't make it into the news story. I think it would be reasonable to want to dig deeper and understand why the "sessions" metric went down before acting. There could be good or bad reasons for that.)
But yeah, it's gotta be hard to be trying to make things better, knowing that management is against you.
Nate Silver had a good point on Twitter (another but very different problem) that Facebook doesn't seem to care about the long-term effects on the platform's reputation. Optimizing for sessions...
Nate Silver had a good point on Twitter (another but very different problem) that Facebook doesn't seem to care about the long-term effects on the platform's reputation. Optimizing for sessions instead of user growth/retention seems shortsighted to me but maybe I'm missing something. Now of course the problem being that the high information users have already left the platform and they've selected their news users for people who prefer click bait articles. Thus trying to 'right the ship' is probably both going to drive down sessions and retention, at least in the short term.
I think everyone also needs to recognize that, no matter how much complaining is happening—and whether those complaints are true or not—it's going to be practically impossible to convince a...
I think everyone also needs to recognize that, no matter how much complaining is happening—and whether those complaints are true or not—it's going to be practically impossible to convince a company like Facebook that they're doing things wrong as long as they continue having a massive userbase and their stock price keeps increasing. People have certainly been complaining about Facebook for much longer than the last 5 years, but their stock has still almost tripled (105 to 275) in that period alone, despite all the controversy.
Until something happens that actually has a significant, lasting effect on the company's value, from a purely business perspective it's pretty hard to make a compelling case that they're going in the wrong direction. It only keeps getting easier for them to ignore complaints when they only see more and more success despite not meaningfully addressing any of it. Every boycott or period of backlash against them has only ended up with them making even more money shortly afterwards anyway, so it's no wonder they barely pretend to care any more. So far none of the concerns about their actions damaging their long-term reputation have come true, the term just seems to keep getting longer and longer.
I think we should leave the question open of what really motivates Zuckerberg and his management team, because wanting more growth or more revenue doesn't seem all that compelling. Facebook is #5...
I think we should leave the question open of what really motivates Zuckerberg and his management team, because wanting more growth or more revenue doesn't seem all that compelling.
Facebook is #5 in the S&P 500 by market cap and has billions of users. Zuckerberg's position is secure against anything short of a government breakup. It shouldn't be that hard to pay a bit less attention to short-term profits and growth. Like, how much more growth is there, really? By pretty much any benchmark, they won.
Yes, there are incentives for growth, but there comes a point where they become an inadequate explanation for why this might motivate people.
I think it's probably not so much a question of what Zuckerberg's motivations are - it's likely a question of what do the shareholders want. And shareholders almost always want more growth.
I think it's probably not so much a question of what Zuckerberg's motivations are - it's likely a question of what do the shareholders want. And shareholders almost always want more growth.
Shareholders' power is limited because Facebook has a special shareholder class for insiders [1]; there is no way to vote Zuckerberg out. Shareholders might be able to sue, but they aren't going...
Shareholders' power is limited because Facebook has a special shareholder class for insiders [1]; there is no way to vote Zuckerberg out. Shareholders might be able to sue, but they aren't going to win unless they have better grounds for it than just being disappointed about Facebooks' financial results. (The courts defer to management about matters of business judgement, so all management has to do is say that in their judgement, the company will do well in the long run.)
Maybe it's not completely secure, but it's pretty close.
Now, many employees are shareholders, including management, and Facebook uses its stock for other things like acquisitions, so like in other places there is likely a culture that promotes growth. But Zuckerburg could probably pull the culture in a different direction if he actually wanted to.
It's nothing like a VC-backed firm where management has to worry about investors forcing them out.
Well, to be specific Zuck is a minority shareholder now, however his shares have more voting power than normal shares so he does have a majority of voting power, so he can unilaterally make decisions.
Well, to be specific Zuck is a minority shareholder now, however his shares have more voting power than normal shares so he does have a majority of voting power, so he can unilaterally make decisions.
From the article:
[...]
[...]
The article describes a second experiment:
Being a software engineer for Facebook right now has to feel like the equivalent of working in tobacco advertisement in its heyday. Before the "TV rots your brain" and "don't believe everything you read on the internet" crowd joined social media it was pretty fun. But in the 10 years Facebook and the like have had critical mass just look at what it has done to the internet and society writ large.
I shared this story because it is almost a smoking gun for Facebook prioritizing growth over what's "good for the world." It sounds like they have useful technology but won't turn it on.
(I say "almost" because there may be subtlety that didn't make it into the news story. I think it would be reasonable to want to dig deeper and understand why the "sessions" metric went down before acting. There could be good or bad reasons for that.)
But yeah, it's gotta be hard to be trying to make things better, knowing that management is against you.
Nate Silver had a good point on Twitter (another but very different problem) that Facebook doesn't seem to care about the long-term effects on the platform's reputation. Optimizing for sessions instead of user growth/retention seems shortsighted to me but maybe I'm missing something. Now of course the problem being that the high information users have already left the platform and they've selected their news users for people who prefer click bait articles. Thus trying to 'right the ship' is probably both going to drive down sessions and retention, at least in the short term.
I think everyone also needs to recognize that, no matter how much complaining is happening—and whether those complaints are true or not—it's going to be practically impossible to convince a company like Facebook that they're doing things wrong as long as they continue having a massive userbase and their stock price keeps increasing. People have certainly been complaining about Facebook for much longer than the last 5 years, but their stock has still almost tripled (105 to 275) in that period alone, despite all the controversy.
Until something happens that actually has a significant, lasting effect on the company's value, from a purely business perspective it's pretty hard to make a compelling case that they're going in the wrong direction. It only keeps getting easier for them to ignore complaints when they only see more and more success despite not meaningfully addressing any of it. Every boycott or period of backlash against them has only ended up with them making even more money shortly afterwards anyway, so it's no wonder they barely pretend to care any more. So far none of the concerns about their actions damaging their long-term reputation have come true, the term just seems to keep getting longer and longer.
I think we should leave the question open of what really motivates Zuckerberg and his management team, because wanting more growth or more revenue doesn't seem all that compelling.
Facebook is #5 in the S&P 500 by market cap and has billions of users. Zuckerberg's position is secure against anything short of a government breakup. It shouldn't be that hard to pay a bit less attention to short-term profits and growth. Like, how much more growth is there, really? By pretty much any benchmark, they won.
Yes, there are incentives for growth, but there comes a point where they become an inadequate explanation for why this might motivate people.
I think it's probably not so much a question of what Zuckerberg's motivations are - it's likely a question of what do the shareholders want. And shareholders almost always want more growth.
Shareholders' power is limited because Facebook has a special shareholder class for insiders [1]; there is no way to vote Zuckerberg out. Shareholders might be able to sue, but they aren't going to win unless they have better grounds for it than just being disappointed about Facebooks' financial results. (The courts defer to management about matters of business judgement, so all management has to do is say that in their judgement, the company will do well in the long run.)
Maybe it's not completely secure, but it's pretty close.
Now, many employees are shareholders, including management, and Facebook uses its stock for other things like acquisitions, so like in other places there is likely a culture that promotes growth. But Zuckerburg could probably pull the culture in a different direction if he actually wanted to.
It's nothing like a VC-backed firm where management has to worry about investors forcing them out.
[1] https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/11/19/18099011/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-stock-nyt-wsj
Interesting - I didn't realize they were setup like that. Good to know!
The Zuck still is the single majority shareholder... so it really is what he wants.
Well, to be specific Zuck is a minority shareholder now, however his shares have more voting power than normal shares so he does have a majority of voting power, so he can unilaterally make decisions.