
I ‘Liked’ Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days - sethbannon
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook-for-two-days-heres-what-it-did-to-me/
======
eumenides1
I was thinking of a way to destroy my facebook account because you can't
actually delete it, this is pretty much it, like everything. Also I guess you
could check-in every where at once all the time.

I didn't think about the collateral damage it could cause to others, which is
to bombard your "friend's feeds". This is also interesting because, well you
can destory facebook in this manner. If enough people are peeing in the pool,
people are going to get out.

Maybe I should write a greasemonkey script to accomplish just that. Not that I
want to destroy facebook, but that if i wanted to destroy my data this would
be the way because facebook doesn't give me that option.

Also does everyone else think it's creepy when your friends stop using
facebook and old "likes" pop up on your feed to make it look like that user
hasn't left?

~~~
DanBC
> I was thinking of a way to destroy my facebook account because you can't
> actually delete it, this is pretty much it, like everything.

This kind of bloody-minded civil obedience is something that I very much like.

Many years ago the supermarket (20? 25?) Safeway (UK) started a customer
loyalty card. My flatmates and I applied for one in the name of "Ivor Trotts".
That card was only ever used to buy loo paper.

So a browser-plugin to allow me to auto-click all the social buttons might be
fun; especially if I can do that on a throwaway social media account. Or maybe
it's better if I do it on my main accounts?

~~~
smt88
I like Facebook. It helps me keep up with friends in distant places. If you
find it to be pernicious and intrusive, don't use it (or use it differently).
Don't impose your dislike on others. "Peeing in the pool" is a great metaphor
in that regard.

~~~
eumenides1
I agree that it can help people keep in touch with other, and i never
considered the network effects of doing what I was thinking, which is actually
why I'm glad I didn't get around to doing it.

Also another commenter mentioned that facebook does actual get around to
deleting things, albeit slowly.

As for imposing my dislike on others, that is a fair arguement, but there is
also the other side of the coin to consider. To impose your like of facebook
on others. People who want to remain off facebook get pulled into it via tags.
While i'm not saying you are doing the tagging, but opting out isn't really an
option in a network as vast and pervasive as facebook is.

------
phillmv
From the TFA,

>Also, as I went to bed, I remember thinking “Ah, crap. I have to like
something about Gaza,” as I hit the Like button on a post with a pro-Israel
message.

>By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to
the right.

[...]

>Rachel Maddow, Raw Story, Mother Jones, Daily Kos and all sort of other
leftie stuff was interspersed with items that are so far to the right I’m
nearly afraid to like them for fear of ending up on some sort of watch list.

[...]

>While I expected that what I saw might change, what I never expected was the
impact my behavior would have on my friends’ feeds.

This article has so much modern anxiety in a nutshell. We have the pervasive
surveillance society, and having our behaviour affected by algorithms.

What this really highlights, to me, is the extent to which Facebook exerts
editorial control over the news that you're subjected to. This has all sorts
of other effects on how media dollars are spent and as a result the shape of
discourse - I'm immediately reminded of
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/05/22/facebook_s_mi...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/05/22/facebook_s_mike_hudack_rants_about_the_media_why_won_t_anybody_do_something.html)

This is not to say that there haven't _always_ been pernicious incentives at
work; but before you could at least question those incentives and motivations
instead of shrugging, and pointing to there's an unexplainable, mysteriously
biased, support vector machine et al pulling strings.

~~~
fit2rule
Think about it. This is an article, with its own 'share on Facebook' icon,
entirely about a single persons interaction with a mechanized society, highly
intricate and well and truly operating under the constraints of its
totalitarian designers. Its not like we vote for Facebook features; that
privilege is reserved for those with money to spend, making money, and it is
an exclusive club indeed. Particularly given that those who attend to
"Facebook habits", i.e. members of that church, are not in control. At all.

So yeah, count "survive a dystopian dilemna" on the list of things that are
now well and truly DONE.

~~~
Houshalter
Good god, this reads like a parody. There is no totalitarian conspiracy to
manipulate your facebook feed. You are not in a dystopia. Having users vote
for features of a popular website is unreasonable.

If you like everything a recommendation algorithm feeds you, _of course_ you
are going to get shit recommendations. Your like data is no longer correlated
with your actual preferences at all. It's an interesting experiment, but
people are projecting their own fears and opinions onto the result.

------
protonfish
So if you like everything on Facebook, the result is political extremism and
the most insipid pop culture trash. What frightens me is what if this has
nothing to do with Facebook, but is instead about human nature? Does this also
describe what happens to a person's life when they stop caring, when they are
no longer motivated to put forth the effort to be discerning, when they give
up trying to make anything but the easiest and most immediate choices?

~~~
jerf
"So if you like everything on Facebook, the result is political extremism and
the most insipid pop culture trash."

Bear in mind that "extremism" is the _expected result_ of any reasonable
algorithm that you abuse like this. If you like X, the algorithm will focus
around X. If you like everything the algorithm suggests, you'll end up liking
a "bigger target", and it will start suggesting stuff yet further away from
your original starting point, until eventually you've "liked" everything. This
is deliberately engineering a scenario in which Facebook will feed one a set
of things that _all_ seem "extreme" on some metric or other, be it
"political", "pop culture insipid", or anything else, because they are all
"extremely" far away from your starting point.

You are also engineering a scenario in which you are receiving "everything",
so you will end up experiencing this proportional to raw volume within the
segments of the interest graph that you've transitively explored. We can't
eliminate the possibility that he's missing large chunks of the graph in his
transitive exploration. A massive anime fan or somebody else big into niches
and staying away from politics who starts doing this may end up with a very
different experience. (In fact I'd suspect that it's decent odds that _why_
the author ended up with "extreme politics" in the first place is that he
probably had a pre-existing politics seed set of likes, which then "fuzzed"
into the full set of political views while not getting into niches like anime
or figurine collection.)

As a story it's interesting, but I'm not sure it reveals stuff about society
so much as it reveals a very fuzzy picture of the author.

~~~
protonfish
Your idea that it was due to his pre-existing politics could be tested if
others wanted to repeat the experiment, but the fact that he ended up with
both extreme left and extreme right political news seems to be disproof
enough.

The expected outcome of liking everything the algorithm suggests
indiscriminately should be more moderation, not more extremism. If (as a
oversimplified example) you like colors so the algorithm asked if you like,
blue, green, yellow or red and you select them all, one would not expect it to
eventually lead to a community that believes green is the best color and all
others should be destroyed.

~~~
jerf
"Your idea that it was due to his pre-existing politics could be tested if
others wanted to repeat the experiment,"

Your phrasing suggests that you misunderstood my point, but does not prove it.
My point is not that he started with _extreme_ politics (or politics that
might be viewed as extreme by most people since of course $MY_VIEWS are always
perfectly sensible and obviously correct, it's everybody _else_ who is
extreme), my point is that he started with politics _at all_.

"The expected outcome of liking everything the algorithm suggests
indiscriminately should be more moderation, not more extremism."

Uh, no, that makes no sense. You're engaging in an operation that is
deliberately blurring Facebook's impression of you. Open your favorite image
editor. Cover an image with pure white. Put a blob of black in the middle.
Start using the "blur" tool. It doesn't _shrink_. And that's not perfect,
either... the center of the blob will remain the darkest, but in this system,
Facebook keeps presenting you with more "extreme" views, and you keep telling
it you like it. Of course it pulls you away from the "center"... you keep
telling it to. And this is where the raw volume point comes in... the extremes
are louder, so if you blur like that you'll see a lot more of it.

------
uberdog
I did sort of the opposite. I would click on "don't want to see this" for any
link to an external site. It took a few days, but now pretty much all I see is
updates from friends.

~~~
lucb1e
I do the same. Changed all settings I possibly could and unfollowed (while
still remaining friends) a few people, and my news feed is now basically
exactly what I want to see. It still hides some news events, like I found out
that someone got their driving exam months after everyone else did, but that's
the algorithm's fault and it's a lesson that you can't expect all friends to
see everything you post.

These modifications might also cause me to spend less time on my news feed
because all the garbage is filtered out, so Facebook might at some point
decide that it hurts them and disable these modification options, but then
I'll probably just stop using Facebook's news feed altogether. I mostly use FB
for groups and chats anyway. Just like with Youtube when they started showing
what friends liked, I unfriended everyone and kept subscriptions.

------
ChikkaChiChi
Confirmation bias bubbles like a social media feed like this are atrophying
the debate muscles of our society. When we don't actively participate in two-
sided discussions we lose the empathy and scope of how so few things are
really black and white.

I wish there were more discussion venues where the quality of your
participation was based on the value to the discussion, not as to whether or
not you supported what that person said.

~~~
crazypyro
Nonsense. If anything, the nature of our civilizations have caused the
atrophying of "debate muscles" and technology has allowed us, more than any
other time in history, to actively research more viewpoints and narratives
than ever before. The information/medium is there, the problem is the people.

~~~
dsuth
Agreed. Anything framed as a 'debate' has only ever been two sides arguing
their point, whilst studiously ignoring any potential validity in the other
side's opinion. Confirmation bias is an issue, but not because of social
medial. It's because people want validation of their existing opinions, not
complex worldviews.

------
scoot
Could someone please put 'Liked' in the HN title in quotes so it makes
grammatical sense.

As it stands, the title makes it sounds as if someone tried Facebook for two
days and was happy with what they saw. (I know this is the original title, but
that doesn't make it correct.)

~~~
dang
Ok.

------
snowwrestler
There's going to be a lot of Facebook bashing in this thread, but I'm going to
posit that this response from the Facebook software is not unexpected or even
wrong, because the author is purposefully playing against the assumptions
built into Facebook algorithms.

Most people rarely "like" branded or advertising content on Facebook. So
Facebook has tuned their algorithms to be very sensitive to the few data
inputs it receives per person.

Now, here is a person flooding it with input. I am not surprised that the
result is crazy deluge of branded content. It's like taking a carefully
balanced lever and pushing real hard on one end. The other end is going to
move a lot.

> I kept thinking Facebook would rate-limit me, but instead it grew
> increasingly ravenous.

Why would they build in a rate limit? The vast, vast majority of the time, the
level of input is very low. To build in a rate-limiting system would be
pointless gold-plating.

The rarity of this sort of flood is obvious from the fact that a human being
at Facebook noticed the level of activity and contacted the author. That is an
_incredibly_ high bar at Facebook, which prides itself on automating
everything.

~~~
zem
i have yet to meet anyone who wants the things they've 'liked' to show up in
their friends feeds. it's a purely user-hostile feature that facebook insists
upon because it drives their engagement numbers up.

~~~
snowwrestler
It would be purely user-hostile if all Facebook users feel the same way your
sample of users does, but that's not necessarily true.

~~~
zem
fair point, "purely" is an exaggeration, but it is at least telling that not a
single one of my friends actually wants this behaviour.

------
webwanderings
Nice. This is the post I needed to read, as I am on one-week fasting from
Facebook (in fact, I am fasting from all kinds of email/group, facebook
interactions). It is hard work, but much needed. I tend to believe, as humans
in this age and time, we are losing our fundamental ability to delay
gratification.

~~~
tlarkworthy
HN sucks more time than FB for me :/

~~~
enraged_camel
If it makes you feel any better, the time you spend on HN is infinitely more
productive. :)

~~~
zem
0/0 is "undefined" rather than "infinity" (:

------
NhanH
Just a very tangential point to the post, but the author mentioned a FB
employee trying to connect him with the PR department. Exactly what does FB
have in mind in doing that?

~~~
tokenadult
One of the jobs of the PR department is to fill in reporters with details
about the company's activities.

------
sosuke
I'd love to be able to hit the reset button on my FB profile, undo all the
profiling they've done on me and start again. Same thing for Google. What does
it look like to be a vanilla user?

~~~
ghaff
Well, with respect to Google search, you can just use an incognito window.

~~~
T-hawk
Only up to the limits of Google being able to track you anyway. There's IP
address, user agent, and any other HTTP header information your browser leaks.

~~~
icebraining
A VPN + Incognito should be enough. Not to truly anonymize you, but probably
enough to disable the personalization layers. It doesn't make economic sense
to waste engineering hours and computing time trying to show ads to the
0.0001% of paranoid users, which are likely blocking them anyway, even if the
data is there.

Of course, there's no such thing as _the_ vanilla user. You'll still be
targeted on generic features (location, browser, OS, etc). A vanilla Linux
user in SF is different than a vanilla Windows XP user in London.

~~~
longb4
The EFF has a service called Panopticlick[1] that gives you a sense of how
unique your browser looks to the sites you visit. My result: "Within our
dataset of several million visitors, only one in 886,262 browsers have the
same fingerprint as yours."

[1] [https://panopticlick.eff.org](https://panopticlick.eff.org)

~~~
ggreer
While it can be an issue, browser fingerprinting isn't as powerful as the EFF
claims. Any change to your user agent (browser updates), plugin list, time
zone, or screen size makes Panopticlick think you are a different user.

~~~
willvarfar
Correlated with a second or third tracking method such as cookies sent to
analytics, ad and fb sites, would it be super sticky?

------
artumi-richard
Could there be a browser plugin to like and share everything as you wander
through the web? That would be an interesting way to demonstrate tracking
technologies.

~~~
syva
[http://archive.j-mediaarts.jp/en/festival/2012/entertainment...](http://archive.j-mediaarts.jp/en/festival/2012/entertainment/works/16e_Whatever_Button/)

------
sebkomianos
This made me think about creating a second profile on facebook, adding myself
as a friend and liking whatever I post on my original - just to find out what
"advertising value and quality" I create. Anyone got any ideas on how to
automatise this?

~~~
gcr
I'd be surprised if they didn't flag your second account as just spam and
ignored it completely.

~~~
sebkomianos
I don't care about them, it'd be interesting to find out only out of personal
curiosity.

------
milge
The only winning move is not to play.

Or in this case like/post.

~~~
coldcode
I never like anything except my friends, anywhere. Of course Facebook gleans
stuff from that as well. I would pay to have a site where all you could do is
interact with friends posts/photos/movies with zero commercial features but we
all know FB would kill such a thing in its infancy.

~~~
milge
That's been tried before. App.net was that way. The downside is it would have
to be a paid service, because how else would you fund something like that?

------
skimmas
it's possible to unlike everything you've ever like isn't it? I'll try that
one day.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I'm sure their database doesn't just store a series of checkmarks, but rather
a series of "User liked", "User unliked", etc.

------
viniciosbarros
this could be some kind of metaphor? =D it starts with a simple but very
humanist text, about everybody should like everybody, but this all ends with
the statement that after he had liked everything, he got with nothing that he
really likes. This could be the same with our relationship with people, where
if you dont stand for your principles you could get around with people you
don't appreciate.

------
donbronson
So, that's what the bots see in Facebook. Doesn't that mean that bots are
consuming most of the ads?

------
po
This article has reminded me of how astoundingly ahead of his time Andy Warhol
was.

------
flippyhead
Every since I read The Circle stuff like this seems to ring true.

------
stevebot
Interesting read. wonder what would happen if they added a dislike button.

~~~
duderific
I think it would not be used much other than to dislike a brand status update.
It could create bad feelings in your Facebook community if you disliked
someone's status update. Probably why they never have added the dislike
button; it could sow flame wars -- "Hey, why did you dislike my update?" \--
kind of like on HN when someone gets a bunch of downvotes.

------
PaulHoule
Somebody still uses Facebook, film at 11.

------
limaoscarjuliet
I'm so put off by Facebook that I'm even put off by articles describing how
one is put off by Facebook.

Full disclosure - I closed my account 2 years ago. Did not miss it even for 10
seconds.

~~~
untog
How do you know if someone deleted their Facebook account?

Don't worry, they'll tell you.

