DashRattlesnake

But that assumes a lot fluency with pinyin and the prediction system. A lot of people are missing one or both.

That's won't happen. The mistake you're making is assuming that Facebook wants to "please everyone." It doesn't. It only cares about pleasing itself, and it does that through manipulating the algorithm to attempt to get its users to do what it wants.

Giving up control of the algorithm means giving up control of its user-products, and it's not going to do that.

> I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in.

You're not going to see more ads about the things you're interested in, you're going to see ads that have a higher potential to manipulate you into commercially profitable behavior. There's a big but subtle difference between those things. You are definitely not going to see ads for your interests that bring you more joy but aren't easily monetizeable.

The coarseness of TV targeting meant people had more opportunity to assert their own priorities against the less effective manipulation.

>> which are then captured and reported to HR for violating Google’s mores around civility or for offending white men.

> Rules requiring civility don't only apply towards white men

Welcome to the cutting edge of contemporary social justice culture, significant portions of which seem to want to invert and reorganize racial/gender power structures to put themselves at the top, rather than working to actually wash them away.

> It's very hard, probably impossible, to come up with a specific list. The list will either be incomplete (the trolls are cunning) or overly broad and spark anti-authoritarian feelings.

They should put up a big banner of the question the employees should be asking themselves about their work activities: "Is this good for the company?"

And I'm not being totally unserious.

> the goal is to ensure they always keep product in stock, and the "holes" are a forcing function

This empty shelves thing is enough of a thing that it seems like it's not really working.

And empty shelves sends such a terrible message to everybody who encounters them that I question the wisdom of who picked that as a "forcing function." Whenever I see that in a store, it just reeks of failure and decay.

I have recently, in Sears.

Retail protip: don't be like Sears.

I'd prefer they just put up a sign saying "sorry, we're out of bananas" and putting something else there in the interim. The employees are right: empty shelves look sloppy. Too many and the place even looks like it's going out of business.

> it's up to individuals to decide what their own identity is. When an individual identifies as one thing...

That's actually not true and not workable. A very obvious example is a criminal who identifies as a good, upstanding person.

IMHO there are actually two kinds of identity (at least). They are separate things, but related and often confused.

1. Self-identity: the identity that someone applies to themselves based on their own thoughts and aspirations. This is very closely related to one's inner life. This is the identity that you're referring to above.

2. Applied-identity (for lack of a better term): the identity that each person applies to someone else based on their own thoughts, beliefs, and experiences with that person. Someone's reputation is an example.

If you try to force everyone's applied-identity of you to conform with your self-identity, that's also a form of oppression. What and how they think of you is their own business.

> The money that never exists in any form other than on some computers managed by systems built and maintained as cost centers that need to have every single possible corner cut?

Those systems also probably have more humans carefully monitoring their daily operation than any other kind of system anywhere. People really care about their money.

That just looks like a website made by a hateful obsessive.

It definitely seems to be loosing popularity in the US with the most profitable demographics.

Facebook became dominant because it had an aura of exclusivity and successfully captured some trend-setting demographics. If it loses those, no amount of users accessing it through Free Basics is going to make up for it.

> Everybody uses FB differently. Some people use it to share and read news. Others as an "aggregator" for different services (Insta, Twitter...). Others for groups. Or chats. Or to connect with businesses. I use it exclusively to share posts and pics with friends.

> Wrapping up, I'm sure that Facebook has identified 5-6 clear use cases of its platform. Why isn't the news feed tailored for them? I simply do not understand it. Give more of what I want, or my engagement will drop. Give me my friends posts, and a few ads in between, and I'll be a happy Facebook user, surely it can't be that hard?

You're approaching this wrong. You're not Facebook's customer, you're it's product. They don't care how you want to use it, they only care about what will keep you on it and seeing what they want you to see. They're not going to optimize their website to fit your preferences. They want to maximize their value metrics, not yours.