
What Happened When Facebook Hired Some Journalists - hollaur
http://gizmodo.com/want-to-know-what-facebook-really-thinks-of-journalists-1773916117
======
morgante
Having worked with journalists, these sound like typical entitlement
complaints. Frankly, a lot of writers have an attitude that they're "artists"
who shouldn't be rushed and don't have performance requirements.

Frankly, it does not sound very hard at all. They have to write 20 posts a
day, but each post is only a headline and a brief summary. A focused writer
can finish that in 15 minutes.

> We had to write in the most passive tense possible. That’s why you’d see
> headlines that appear in an alien-esque, passive language.

Oh no! How dare Facebook strive to be neutral and passive.

> After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to
> believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules
> for Facebook’s algorithm

Of course they were. Facebook is quite explicitly trying to apply ML
throughout their site. Why should they permanently be in the business of
employing writers to do something which computers could do reliably and
effectively?

~~~
vcarl
> We had to write in the most passive tense possible. That’s why you’d see
> headlines that appear in an alien-esque, passive language.

I was just thinking that the Facebook summary headlines are surprisingly
journalistic compared to Buzzfeed, Upworthy, etc. Seeing somebody complain
about that explains why their title is "news curator" and not "journalist."

~~~
krick
Oh, I would say it's a very "journalistic" complaint, unfortunately.
Apparently, there is a fair market for that (given the popularity of sites
like newyorker.com on HN), but in general what some journalist wants to write
is almost opposite to what I want to read. I want to know news, meaning as
short and pointed messages as possible, and "no news today" would be actually
a good thing. A journalist who thinks he is "good" (note the "graduated from
Ivy League" part) wants presence, wants to be someone, a (or, preferably,
"the") trendmaker, the Lord of opinions, like that Spider Jerusalem guy. His
ego gets in his way. Which is pretty natural, actually — not only for
journalists, but for everyone who wants to be a Person, an Individual, not
just a smaller part of the system. Which is actually good, I think, for a
human.

It might be somewhat working with printed media and specialized news agencies
— after all, agency wants something close to what the journalist wants: to
have presence, for public to pay attention to them, not to some other agency.
"No news today" would be a disaster for them.

I mean, it's all pretty natural, if we admit that typical news agency's goal
is not to "give information". And Facebook's "trending news" section's goal,
on the contrary, is quite close to that.

~~~
kriro
I think that's an unfair dig at Spider Jerusalem. He's a decent (fictional)
journalist in my opinion. Trying to uncover truth and stuff, old school.

More on topic though, the comments section of the article is also full of
"booohoo they have it sooo tough" comments but I think work conditions are
relative. It's the typical job agency treatment only a couple of levels
higher. If everyone around you is living the Facebook life and you're curating
news in a basement/conference room...sure that's not horrible but it's still
fairly indecent treatment.

Disclaimer: Huge Transmetropolitan fan, programmer not journalist :)

------
andrewfromx
"After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to
believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for
Facebook’s algorithm." ha! aren't we all.

~~~
mc32
So.... They finally know what it feels like to be a blue collar worker whose
job gets outsourced and sometimes are offered benefits contingent on training
their offshore trainees.

Everyone was happy to have $30 jeans which could last one year over their $70
jeans made stateside which could last five years or more... But now that it
affects them, oh my, this is bad now...

~~~
Retra
>Everyone was happy to have $30 jeans which could last one year over their $70
jeans made stateside which could last five years or more...

I'm not sure this analogy works. Surely the people selling jeans would prefer
to sell new $30 pairs every year rather than $70 pairs every five.

~~~
EGreg
I see this as a fundamental problem of the unsustainability of our economy.
The incentive of every corporation is to earn an increasing amount of money,
and thus to move more things from resources to garbage as quickly as possible.
"But all those jobs!!" is a stupid argument. Jobs aren't the goal. The goal
should be getting resources to the right people, and sustainability for the
long term.

~~~
harmegido
I don't buy this planned obsolescence bs. I get that most markets aren't very
free, but they're free enough to ensure that superior products generally win
out. Companies are trying to make money _today_. They aren't thinking: "hey,
let's put out a crappy product that will be worse than our competitors' so
that people will have to buy more of our stuff in the future!"

Any company that did that wouldn't make it to tomorrow.

~~~
aninhumer
The problem is that the consumer usually has no way to compare quality easily,
and so all they have to go on is sticker price. As a result the incentive is
for companies to reduce sticker price at the expense of quality.

If you ask a consumer whether they want a $500 product that lasts 10 years or
a $200 product that lasts 2 years, they'll happily pay extra for the higher
quality product. But that's not usually the choice they're presented with.

I think a solution to planned obsolescence would be to mandate prominent
labelling of lifetime guarantees.

~~~
stevetrewick
>The problem is that the consumer usually has no way to compare quality easily

That used to be true and is an example of information asymmetry in markets -
classic example being the used car market [0]. It is much less so now, when
was the last time you bought anything substantial without reading a review of
it or checking the customer ratings?

>If you ask a consumer whether they want a $500 product that lasts 10 years or
a $200 product that lasts 2 years, they'll happily pay extra for the higher
quality product.

That's not necessarily true - value decisions are more complex than that.
Depending on the market, those two price points may be in different segments
based on (e.g.) disposable income. Sure, for Alice, who has $500 disposable
income available for a particular purchase, this might be a no brainer, but
for Bob with only $200, not so much. See also Vimes' boots theory of
socioeconomic unfairness [1], hyperbolic discounting [2]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons)

[1] [http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-
ri...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-
rich-vimes-reasoned)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting)

~~~
acdha
aninhumer pointed out the main flaw in this line of reasoning but it's not
just the lack of long term data. Many companies change models frequently or
make quiet design changes – e.g. the blender given a good reliability review
changes a couple of years in to replace metal gears with plastic, which
requires a teardown to see. If you go to Costco, Sam's Club, etc. count how
many things have slightly different specs and model numbers than the ones you
can find reviews for, etc. The last time we bought a washing machine, only one
of the models which Consumer Reports had recommended a little over a year
before was still offered for sale in our region – everything else had changed
and most online reviews were just “we got it last week and it's great”
comments which don't tell you anything about long-term experience.

In some cases, you can simply conclude that an entire brand is either
unreliable or trustworthy (e.g. Apple doesn't sell Walmart edition devices
which break within 18 months) but in most cases you have to do a lot more
research to know what level you're getting.

------
n72
'Mark Zuckerberg has been transparent about his goal to monopolize digital
news distribution. “When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook,
people will naturally read a lot more news,”'

Oh lord. That's not news. Those are sensationalist, click baity headlines
making us all collectively dumber. It's anecdotal, but I'm quite sure the
'news' my girlfriend has gotten from FB has made her less informed.

I actually wrote an FF plugin to hide that right bar, since I would now and
then get sucked in by that crap and waste 15 minutes reading about Lindsey
Lohan or whatever.

~~~
morgante
Actually, I find that the Facebook headlines are much less clickbaity than the
predominant headlines from news organizations.

------
notliketherest
When the employees of Facebook collectively ask "What responsibility do we
have to stop the election of Donald Trump" at an internal meeting, it gives me
Orwellian chills. Today, it's not governments we need to fear the most, it's
data hungry, fascist internet corporations.

~~~
mc32
Sometimes people have a hard time decoupling politics from their jobs. They
should try how ridiculous it would sound to say "What can we do to stop Bernie
Sanders". That should give them pause. As far as I know all the major
candidates are operating within the law and thus we ought not try to Stop
Them" just because our politics differ.

Or what if instead of national figures FB or anyone else tried to railroad an
SF Supe they didn't particularly like because they shot down their proposed
development. Or Menlo Park.

~~~
notliketherest
Exactly. The problem is, as a private company, should Facebook choose to
manipulate it's news feed algorithm to promote one candidate or the other, or
for whatever reason, this would be its prerogative under the First Amendment.

I personally choose to not use Facebook specifically for these reasons. Even
though I know many Facebook employees personally, I don't trust it's employees
to divorce their own interests and their powerful position as Facebook's
curators.

~~~
harmegido
This isn't a new problem. Old media has been doing this for centuries.

~~~
ivanca
Old media usually has had opposition, like there is Fox but there is also
MSNBC. Facebook is THE social network, even Twitter is a joke in terms of size
against it.

~~~
aorth

      They were also discouraged from mentioning Twitter by name in headlines and summaries, and instead asked to refer to social media in a broader context.
    

Hah!

------
kristianc
> “It was degrading as a human being,” said another. “We weren’t treated as
> individuals. We were treated in this robot way.”

Strange that people at Facebook would feel apathetic toward individuals that
can't code.

~~~
dredmorbius
Google has this disease _quite_ badly, from multiple sources.

It's pretty common elsewhere in SV as well. And is a cardinal error.

------
AndrewKemendo
_almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to
serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm_

If Facebook is doing it's job and utilizing their biggest talent acquisition
of Yann LeCun, then this is exactly what they should be doing.

A critical part of the path towards AGI is using humans to teach it.

~~~
germinalphrase
Thoughts about the utility of schools to serve this function? We are already
teaching humans very simple to very advanced tasks and we do so millions of
times a day. Is the fact that tasks/knowledge are being structured for paced
human learning irrelevant for this purpose?

~~~
aab0
It's not irrelevant, since there is a minor area of ML called 'curriculum
learning' which asks how to order examples to teach a ML algorithm most
efficiently, and it comes up in some other contexts (for example, a boosting
algorithm which focuses on optimizing performance on hard/misclassified cases
can be seen as somewhat like curriculum learning, and there are variants of
gradient descent which focus on hard examples rather than wasting time on
cases where the NN can already get the right answer; and for 'active
learning', you want to pick the example which will teach the algorithm the
most), but there's not much you can take from known pedagogy at the moment and
apply straight to NNs. Even the non-bullshit parts of education like spaced
repetition have no clear analogues for tasks like 'train an RNN to write news
headlines based an article text using this corpus of human-written headlines'.

------
golergka
So, I got interested in this article's description of horrid working
conditions and decided to read about it carefully. But I noticed that it gives
emotional descriptions of it long before the actual facts. I wouldn't go as
far as calling this a manipulation, but it's certainly a disturbing writing
style.

3rd paragraph:

> grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious
> culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders.

6th paragraph:

> “It was degrading as a human being,” said another. “We weren’t treated as
> individuals. We were treated in this robot way.”

And then, finally, on 10th paragraphs, we get a glimpse on the facts:

> they received benefits including limited medical insurance, paid time off
> after 6 months and transit reimbursement

(BTW, is it usual for contractors to receive such perks?)

> A company happy hour would happen at 8 p.m., and we’d be working

Horrible, inhumane treatment indeed.

> Over time, the work became increasingly demanding, and Facebook’s trending
> news team started to look more and more like the worst stereotypes of a
> digital media content farm. Managers gave curators aggressive quotas for how
> many summaries and headlines to write, and timed how long it took curators
> to write a post. The general standard was 20 posts a day.

20 posts during 8 hour work day is almost half an hour on one post. It is
considered too little? Seriously?

So — apart from all the pretty words, I didn't really see any especially bad
treatment. Hell, I'm pretty sure that your average newspaper employees have
more nightmare stories.

------
andrewfromx
“It was degrading as a human being,” said another. “We weren’t treated as
individuals." hmmm. Trying hard to feel sympathy/emapthy for these victums but
my algorithm is throwing an exception.

------
zxv
Reducing the number of journalists implies that supervised learning[0] was
effective enough to begin to replace some human effort.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_learning)

------
smelendez
Maybe Facebook should have advertised this as a temporary "Robot Journalist
Training Fellowship"

------
kriro
I don't think the assessment that they were part of a future algorithm is too
far off. Given enough expert input picking a fitting image/video or headline
should be doable. Worst case you reduce the number of humans needed to one
quality assurance person. Algorithm says "this headline, this
image"...yes/no;fix.

------
jccalhoun
why would they hire journalists to do this? It doesn't seem like it takes much
skill at all to pick a story and write a short summary of it.

~~~
jonathankoren
I wonder that myself. I think it has more to do with standard corporate over
thinking about what's skills are actually required for a job. It certainly
make it easier to say, "We want someone to write titles and snippets of news
stories. Who does that? Journalists. Cool, let's get some of those."

disclaimer: i worked on that fb product.

------
morning_star
why am i reading this

this is the most worthless piece of thing i've ever read in my life

~~~
dang
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines.

~~~
fallenshell
bless m8

