
Joel on Software: Birdcage liners - wozer
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/01/12/birdcage-liners/
======
pillowkusis
> As software developers and designers, we have a responsibility to the world
> to think these things through carefully and design software that makes the
> world better

I’ve seen this opinion, especially in the post-2016 world. I’m not sure I
agree completely. I think it totally misses the core issue, which is that
somebody was incentivized to be paid to do this work. If you’re an engineer at
Facebook who thinks the News Feed algorithm is tearing people apart, quitting
is not going to solve the problem. Facebook has an incentive to make the
algorithm the way it is. Your refusal just leads to your replacement with
someone who will do the work (and get paid well for it).

That’s not to say that you don’t have a moral responsibility to stop doing
work that makes the world worse. But “all software engineers in the world
should refuse to work on bad things” is hopelessly naive. If you want Facebook
to stop showing people crappy news, find a way to stop Facebook from getting
rewarded from it. Write laws. Raise awareness. Write a competitor that does
better. But refrains like these, I worry, are just hoping that everyone will
commit to doing the right thing 100% of the time. There are better solutions.

~~~
vl
I think Joel misinterprets what happened in the first place:

It turns out that using ML to optimize for immediate engagement has two
unintended side-effects: 1) it produces junkier content, 2) it decreases long-
term retention. For obvious reasons, building a model to optimize for the
long-term engagement is way harder and takes way more time.

While in the long run new model is more profitable (due to increased retention
life-long engagement goes up), it decreases immediate engagement metrics. When
this happens, major accounts start to call in and ask why now they are getting
less for their dollar, thus this preemptive explanation by Mr Zuckerberg.

------
alexandercrohde
tl; dr:

1\. Joel Spolsky, co-founder of stack-overflow, and well-known software
commentator disavows twitter/facebook.

2\. Theorizes that twitter's low-character limit leads to misunderstanding,
which leads to conflict, which leads to drama, which is addictive to our
"rubber-necker" tendencies. Cites personal experience and hashtag wars in a
comedic example.

3\. Furthers that facebook's machine-learning is (advertantly?) accomplishing
the same effect, by selecting for things that elicit a strong response
(mistaken as "engagement").

4\. Proposes that facebook uses "intermittent reinforcement" to ration out its
good content slowly, forcing users to spend excess time on the site to get to
the small amounts of interesting material they enjoy.

5\. Proposes that these naive attention-optimizing algorithms can lead to much
"shriller" political battles. Raises a moral obligation to engineers to
acknowledge the large-scale social consequences of simple algorithms.

~~~
mundo
Perhaps an essay arguing that Twitter flamewars, "...emerged from the fact
that we’ve taken a medium, text, which is already bad at conveying emotion and
sentiment and high-bandwidth nuance, and [by limiting message length] made it
even worse, and the net result is a lot of outrage and indignation" is not the
best one to summarize with a tl;dr?

~~~
alexandercrohde
I don't see any merit to that other than as a cute irony.

Joel criticizes twitter's forced summarization because it leads to
oversimplification and resentment. I don't think he's arguing that all forms
of summary lead to oversimplification and resentment.

Think of it as bullet-point abstract to journal article.

~~~
mundo
It is fair to say that the irony was the reason I commented, rather than
downvoting and moving on, but the point stands that summarizing a brief, non-
technical article distorts the author's views (as Spolsky said, you lose
nuance when summarizing _your own_ thoughts - how could it be otherwise when
your thoughts are summarized by a stranger?) and leads to pointless, flame-
bait-y semantic argments of the kind he complained about (cf: this post , and
the 3 above it, and (god forbid) those below it).

And by the by, any time you find yourself using words like "all", "always" or
"never" in describing someone else's position is a good time to pause and
reflect on whether you're honoring the Principle of Charity, as paraphrased in
the HN comment guidelines thusly:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone
> says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

The good faith interpretation of my post was that I was complaining about your
summary, not about summaries generally and certainly not about summaries in
wildly different contexts like journal abstracts.

However, just to reiterate: please understand that I'm not attacking you, or
saying that you mis-characterized anyone's position on purpose, or out of
malice or incompetence. The whole point of the essay we're discussing is that
conveying a complex and nuanced position through a short block of text is
_hard_ , and that when someone tries, a distorted view of the author's
position is the _expected outcome_.

------
geebee
Like Joel, I was close to quitting Facebook, largely because of politics. And
for similar reasons, the political posts were making me unhappy. So, what I do
now is hide pretty much all personal feeds, and subscribe to groups. Most of
my groups are musical (bands, symphony, jazz center), a few are art studios,
theaters, or museums. This way, I still get to know about most (but not all)
of the events going on, without the politics. It's made Facebook a much better
place for me, though at this point, I'm really just using it as an events
aggregator.

For a while, I tried the "Show me less like this" response. I slowly came to
realize that this button doesn't do a damn thing (actually, it's worse).
Facebook didn't stop showing me this kind of news, at all. At the time, I
figured "show me less" was like those crosswalk buttons that don't have any
actual influence on the timing of lights, but deter jaywalking by providing an
illusion of control to a pedestrian. I realize now that it's probably worse
than that - "show me less like this" is probably the Facebook equivalent of
asking a spammer to take you off the email list. All it does is tell them they
have a live one.

------
pillowkusis
>happens to limit messages to 140 characters and that happens to create,
unintentionally, a subtlety-free indignation machine, which is addictive as
heck, so this is the one that survives and thrives and becomes a huge new
engine of polarization and anger.

I am glad to see someone definitely smarter than me find this opinion too. As
far as I can tell the only value in twitter is network effects and the total
removal of nuance.

------
krallja
> misattributing the kick from the caffeine to something they just read online
> and now MUST share IMMEDIATELY with EVERYONE

I think this is why I continue reading a few dozen webcomics every day. Some
of them are good, but oh boy is that caffeine kicking in.

------
sjg007
This may indirectly explain why instagram is more popular now.. less crap to
filter. Facebook is effectively your own Faux news channel, instagram is just
your friends/family photos.

~~~
HankB99
Indeed. He states "I gave up on the feeds because they were making me angry."

I found that the things that were making me angry were the reposts of garbage
by friends and family who don't apparently have an original thought. If
someone posts a cogent comment that I disagree with, I'll be happy to discuss.
I don't see that very often. I just blocked viewing for the people that posted
that kind of crap. I do miss the occasional interesting thought that they post
but I also don't see all of the garbage.

Yes, this puts me in the bubble of blocking the things I don't agree with, but
very little of the stuff I disagree with is anything beyond an inflammatory
repost.

~~~
sjg007
I think for some people it is hard to write a post or comment, which is why
they repost. It may be hard due to the difficulty in organizing your thoughts,
writing, or by taking ownership of what is said vs just sharing someone else's
opinion. I think also that when people start to write down greater than 140
characters that they discover the topic is more nuanced.

------
erikpukinskis
> By the time you get off the plane in Africa you’re on the international
> pariah list and your @replies are full of people accusing you of throwing
> puppies out of moving cars for profit.

Ok, Joel obviously isn’t talking about puppies. What is he actually referring
to? Anti-immigration comments? Casual suggestions the wage gap is a myth?

The overt message he’s giving is “I am scared I might say the wrong thing and
get hurt.” But the subtext is: “I think the people currently being removed
from their jobs deserve to stay in them.”

But he doesn’t have the guts to say which people deserve their jobs.

The result of that is he signals support for all of them, from Eich to
Weinstein.

I feel like we need to be more surgical than that in 2018. Not just throw our
voices in with movements that are too big to be bound by any kind of
principle.

~~~
dablya
>What is he actually referring to?

I'm guessing this:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-
stupid-t...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-
ruined-justine-saccos-life.html)

