Last week, Facebook announced that they'd be keeping their users in happy little bubbles that wouldn't let anything controversial to appear in their newsfeed. They also made sure that an entire social media platform is devoted to pictures of what others are eating for dinner.
Illustrating how unwelcome that change was after the company announced it’s altering the algorithm to focus on friends and family and exclude news and information, Facebook saw a near-instant drop of 4.4%, which cost Mark Zuckerberg approximately $3.3 billion.
In a Facebook post at the beginning of the year, Zuckerberg claimed that public content that was coming from brands, had inundated news feeds and overtook posts from personal connections. 24 hours after his post, Facebook shares were trading at $179.37, down over 4.4% from the previous day's price of $187.77, according to a Newsweek's report.
“Video and other public content have exploded on Facebook in the past couple of years,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Since there’s more public content than posts from your friends and family, the balance of what’s in News Feed has shifted away from the most important thing Facebook can do—help us connect with each other.”
“As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard—it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”
In a nutshell, that new move by Facebook places every user in a “safety” bubble where they're assured never to receive anything that challenges their view of the world, as a means to keep them happy.
Although this move might seem like a good idea to people who are easily triggered by new information, it will inevitably divide people by creating groups who always reinforce the same comfortable opinions fostering a phenomenon mostly known as confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias or ‘myside bias’ refers to the tendency to search for, interpret, favor as well as recall information in a way which confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. Placing everybody in their bubble will, therefore, create multiple bubbles of individuals confirming over and over what would an entirely skewed reality be. When these people finally interact with others who don't share the same skewed reality, the result might be disastrous.
The algorithm shift goes directly against the thought of open-mindedness as paraphrased in Aristotle's famous quote: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Facebook is trying to make people believe that all news is good and positive, so they don't need to challenge their worldview, as nothing could go wrong.
While social media's future might seem bleak on the side of Facebook, there's also fantastic news on the side of innovation and free speech and thought. Those who have been paying attention saw the problem: many people use a similar system which is ultimately controlled by those who try to mine our data for profit, control the political narrative, and essentially create a personal database on billions of people.
Rather than trying to change Facebook`s system from within, some individuals decided to build a new system, which demonstrated the obsolescence of the old: Steemit was born.
Check out and follow Thinking Humanity on Steemit.
Steemit's general concept is similar to other blogging websites and social news websites such as Reddit; only the text content is saved in a blockchain. That enables rewarding comments as well as posts with secure tokens of value.
As said in the Steemit White Paper:
Steem combines concepts from social media with lessons learned from building cryptocurrencies and their communities. An important key to inspiring participation in any community, currency or free market economy is a fair accounting system that consistently reflects each person’s contribution. Steem is the first cryptocurrency that attempts to accurately and transparently reward an unbounded number of individuals who make subjective contributions to its community.
Instead of leeching off the wealth made by user-generated content as Facebook does, Steemit returns most of its value to its users by rewarding them with cryptocurrencies. Therefore, many people have started living on the value gained from this particular platform.
According to the White Paper, Steemit provides the five following services to its members:
- A source of curated news and commentary.
- A means to get high-quality answers to personalized questions.
- A stable cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar.
- Free payments.
- Jobs providing above services to other members.
As a result, Steemit creates a whole economy out of social media in which everybody—not merely the platform owners—benefits from the creation of content. It's a beautiful model which is constantly being improved.
If you aren't on Steemit, consider checking it out and participating in this social media revolution. While the social media dinosaurs keep on cracking down on users, censoring information, and creating more division among the world, Steemit does the exact opposite. Check out Thinking Humanity on Steemit.
Check out and follow Thinking Humanity on Steemit.
Reference: Thefreethoughtproject.com
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