CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012)

For one week in January 2012, Facebook deliberately made about 155,000 people sad, just to see if it could.

Stated that bluntly, it’s not hard to see why the company’s study, which was published in the prestigious PNAS journal on 17 June, has elicited such a strong negative reaction.

To be fair to the firm, it also made a similar number of people happy. The study involved examining Facebook profiles for evidence of “emotional contagion”, trying to find out whether being exposed to specific emotions invokes that mood in readers. For some, that meant 90% of all “positive” posts were removed from their newsfeed for a week, rendering the social network a pit of despair. Even more so than normal…

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

First Post!

Carter

Carter

What a vile thing to do–I wish somebody somewhere sued them

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

First poster: dimitarvp
On Wednesday last week, Google’s Fiona Cicconi wrote to company employees. She announced that Google was bringing forward its timetable ...
New
First poster: mafinar
F# Is The Best Coding Language Today. If you want to personally pick up a programming language in order to become a better coder in what...
New
First poster: bot
Last night I re-read this Steve Yegge article about learning to type as a programmer. I can touch type, but I don’t usually manage to bre...
New
First poster: malloryerik
GitHub - hlissner/doom-emacs: An Emacs framework for the stubborn martian hacker. An Emacs framework for the stubborn martian hacker - G...
New
First poster: peterchancc
Why I like Clojure as a solo developer | Biff. Most of the reasons fall into a few categories: data orientation, the JVM, and the REPL.
New
First poster: bot
Declarative GNOME configuration with NixOS. I adore tinkering with my machine, trying new tools, extensions, themes, and ideas. When I w...
New
First poster: dyowee
Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?. There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five yea...
New
First poster: joeb
The new frameworks will continue until morale improves.
/js
New
First poster: alvinkatojr
About accelerationism, NRx, and the intersection of technology, religion, and philosophy: an analysis of the essential ideas in the new A...
New
New

Other popular topics Top

siddhant3030
I’m thinking of buying a monitor that I can rotate to use as a vertical monitor? Also, I want to know if someone is using it for program...
New
dasdom
No chair. I have a standing desk. This post was split into a dedicated thread from our thread about chairs :slight_smile:
New
AstonJ
Just done a fresh install of macOS Big Sur and on installing Erlang I am getting: asdf install erlang 23.1.2 Configure failed. checking ...
New
AstonJ
In case anyone else is wondering why Ruby 3 doesn’t show when you do asdf list-all ruby :man_facepalming: do this first: asdf plugin-upd...
New
mafinar
Crystal recently reached version 1. I had been following it for awhile but never got to really learn it. Most languages I picked up out o...
New
gagan7995
API 4 Path: /user/following/ Method: GET Description: Returns the list of all names of people whom the user follows Response [ { ...
New
AstonJ
Biggest jackpot ever apparently! :upside_down_face: I don’t (usually) gamble/play the lottery, but working on a program to predict the...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build efficient applications that exploit the unique benefits of a pure functional language, learning from an engineer who uses Haskell t...
New
First poster: bot
The overengineered Solution to my Pigeon Problem. TL;DR: I built a wifi-equipped water gun to shoot the pigeons on my balcony, controlle...
New
First poster: bot
Large Language Models like ChatGPT say The Darnedest Things. The Errors They MakeWhy We Need to Document Them, and What We Have Decided ...
New