The other problem with this, content aside, is the classification of a post as "successful" or "unsuccessful", implying that how much interaction your post receives is a scoreboard and you should be using the platform solely with the goal of scoring higher in mind. Which is basically exactly what happens in most big Reddit subs, and is a large contributor to the platform growing increasingly shitty.

People used to post on internet forums because they were interested in the discussion, or had something novel to share, and now it's just to make an imaginary number go up.

If I have a problem I can't solve, and I make a post, and get 1 upvote and 1 reply that solves my problem, I'd call that post far more successful than a repost of a repost of a cat video that gets 100 replies and 10,000 upvotes.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Busting out an old hood classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OzZxjqKG10