Yeah my highest karma comment was about my boyfriend dying (7 years ago). I don’t need reminders like that. Nice to see a shout-out to exjw.
Shoutout to Facebook for reminding my wife every year of the day her dad died so she comes home from work crying. 10 years. Every December. 😥
Fuck
I agree the other comment is a bit crass and small minded. It sounds like a very painful situation.
But… for ten (10) years your wife is terrorized by a website on a specific day…? Sounds like it could have been mitigated no?
- don’t go on facebook
- don’t go to work (if your job intrinsically involves using facebook or you just can’t resist it)
- have someone triage/screen your facebook on this specific day — delete/hide the post
my condolences to your wife for the loss of her father.
Yes, you get it. Speaking as a software engineer, users need to adapt their behavior to accommodate the product, not the other way around.
It’s impossible to account for every fanciful scenario or ethical edge case - remember, software exists in a vacuum of pure logic. So if a braindead algorithm dredges up a painful memory of yours every year and tactlessly features it alongside a lighthearted quip from the marketing team, it’s nobody’s fault.
Well, it’s your fault for not avoiding Facebook on that day. What I mean is, it’s not my fault and it’s not Facebook’s fault, whatever that means. It’s just the computer doing its thing.
Just kidding!!! I am using sarcasm to express my contempt for this mentality! It is correct to criticize tech companies for catastrophic UX failures! I believe it is in very poor taste to offer workarounds in reply to an anecdote like this!
remember, software exists in a vacuum of pure logic
You got me fooled until that line. Then I read the “just kidding”.
I think that you’re being spot on; that’s a lot like plenty software developers handle ethical and moral matters, by not doing it at all, pretending that “its just maths lol” without acknowledging that, ultimately, software is made for people, not the opposite.
You can block dates from your memories on Facebook, and I think that should stop it from doing that.
Why are you or your wife still using facebook? The party has been over for 10+ years, it’s time move on from college.
So…this is very difficult for us and I don’t understand why you felt it was necessary to say that. It would be great if you could mind your own business or just say nice things when someone talks about a family member passing away. 😊
Sounds like you need some parasocial engagement. Let your friends at Facebook and Reddit remind you of all the good times you’ve had on their site. You have given yourself no other option.
[Speaking as a mod]
Please, back off. You’re being obnoxious (rule #4) and rude (rule #1), by insisting on uncalled advice even after another user told you to “mind your own business”.
Personally I love when Google Photos pulls together a cute album of my dog who had to be put down a few months back and hits me with that shit on a Monday morning.
For Google Photos you can hide people and pets from memories to help prevent painful ones.
https://support.google.com/photos/answer/9454489
Photos settings > Preferences > Memories > Hide people and pets.
Well shit, I had no idea. Thank you!
Every month Snapchat shows me my parrot that died 2 years ago. Still hurts
Starting it a decade after Facebook is actually worse - it means that they had a whole decade to see what goes wrong with it, but still implemented it. This shows that they either 1) don’t really care about the users, or 2) are completely clueless on what they’re doing. (Spoilers: it’s both.)
How nobody ever thought that this feature should work only on a few whitelisted communities where the possibility of a sad post is small, like pics or funny?
In exjw the chance of a sad post are too high
How nobody ever thought that this feature should work only on a few whitelisted communities where the possibility of a sad post is small, like pics or funny?
Because the administration of Reddit never thinks on the consequences of the half-baked features that they implement. They do it, then wait to see if the users rage. If the users rage, they change something and gaslight the users to cover their own arses.
It was the same with the chat feature, 3y ago. Excerpt from that thread: the admins added a “start chatting” button to /r/rape, then accused the moderators of /r/rape of doctoring a screenshot that showed it. And then edited their comments to remove said accusation.
Wow that’s awful. My highest rated comments on Reddit all seemed to be about a personal tragedy, so I quit going to look at my comment scores. Glad I’m not there to experience this.
And on /r/exjw. There’s a good likelihood that person was kicked out of their family, and their last conversation with their grandmother was not a happy one.
The frustrating thing is that pretty much anyone who has interacted with these systems has encountered that. Whether it’s photos or social media posts, there are some “memories” that make it worse for people, and in extreme cases could trigger depression or worse.
And ot could be fixed (or at least mitigated) fairly easily. First, obviously, remove from the candidate set any references to something that’s obviously triggering - death, SA, violence, abuse, and so on. Those items wil still be there for the person to look back through at whatever time of their own choosing. They don’t want to wake up to this kind of thing. It’s not a boost to user experience. Photos would need a bit more work, but things like image and facial recognition are good enough that you could come up with a heuristic along the lines of “If there’s a lot of photos of a specific person or animal and then photos of them just stop, remove it from the data set.” You could do something similar for car accidents, burning buildings, scenes containing injury or violence, and so on. On the other hand, you can boost scores for things like pictures of parties and concerts. And I’m just talking about simple heuristics, not invoking an ML model or anything at this point. There would be a lot of false positives, perhaps, but hopefully few false negatives. It’s better to skip a potentially “good” photo when you have a thousand other good photos than it is to show a “bad” one, so we’d bias our error function like that.
Photos would need a bit more work, but things like image and facial recognition
And I’m just talking about simple heuristics, not invoking an ML model or anything at this point.
I don’t disagree with your main point, but what to you think facial recognition is if not a ML model?
Fair point. I meant you could avoid having to do any specific development and training. The facial/object recognition is an off the shelf function these days.
Busting out an old hood classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OzZxjqKG10
Remember that time you totaled your car? Facebook does!
