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nsfwtttt t1_j6erdfg wrote

Of all there bad things that can be said about Facebook / Meta, this is the most story about nothing I’ve ever heard.

So basically this one guy who worked for Facebook, saw a document called “thoughtful negative testing”, describes nothing of what it contains, but assumes from it that FB was purposely draining users’ batteries, while the nypost (which is basically, the Fox News version of “People”) exaggerates it to be “life threatening”.

Every company on earth tests whether their features impact battery life, it’s not “evil”.

There’s no story here.

Let’s talk about the really bad things Mets actually does.

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nomorerainpls t1_j6evhr7 wrote

Negative experiments can be really useful because they can highlight the inflection point beyond which users are negatively impacted and begin changing behaviors. 10-15 years ago tech companies did a few crappy surveys, made a bunch of guesses and hoped users liked it.

Of course Reddit assumes the worst and that Facebook doesn’t care but guess what users can’t do with a dead battery - use Facebook.

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little_traveler t1_j6ihp10 wrote

I’m tired of hearing about Meta when there are so many companies doing way worse shit. Meta is in a chokehold right now and is so closely observed because of the actual past fuckups that they can’t really get away with much. People love to just glom onto Meta and use it as a scapegoat but holy shit TikTok ACTUALLY steals your data and no one cares. If meta was doing that today people would lose their shit, but no one cares about TikTok? Or how poorly Apple treats their factory workers? I would love to actually rip apart some of these other companies. Meta is like a hornet with its wings cut off. Boring and old.

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nsfwtttt t1_j6k29xt wrote

I agree actually.

Anything you catch Meta doing, it’s safe to assume tik tok is doing in a worse way.

Ironically Apple present themselves as the heroes of privacy, but are actually allowing Tik Tok to do thing it won’t allow Facebook to do, just because they are Facebook as a competitor

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BroForceOne t1_j6fksxc wrote

He both described what it contained and that it contained information on experiments that were actually carried out.

From the article: >The practice, known as “negative testing,” allows tech companies to “surreptitiously” run down someone’s mobile juice in the name of testing features or issues such as how fast their app runs or how an image might load, according to data scientist George Hayward.

>“How to run thoughtful negative tests,” which included examples of such experiments being carried out.

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nsfwtttt t1_j6guv7v wrote

The first paragraph you quoted does not come from the document, it just describes what negative tests are.

The second refers to a document titled “how to..” and the only description of it is “it contains examples of tests”… he says “it’s the most horrible document I ever read”, so I’d expect him to describe what was so horrible in it… a test of loading an image that drained the battery faster? Jesus Christ! The children! The horror!!!

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JohannesOliver t1_j6i8hah wrote

It’s from the NY Post. That’s how every article is.

The real lesson is that tabloids sometimes have legitimate-sounding names.

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bryguy001 t1_j6j9aqs wrote

Exactly. And look at how many NPCs here jumped on the 15 minutes of hate bandwagon in these comments.

Keep this in mind whenever you notice someone being vilified on this site.

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t0slink t1_j6fs4z7 wrote

Negative tests don't include battery life tests. This guy is lying because he was part of the November layoffs.

They are always used to quantify things relating to the app, e.g. what happens if the app takes three seconds to load an image instead of half a second? How does that impact revenue?

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bilby2020 t1_j6fhg7v wrote

Right if you "test" in phones owned by your company in a test lab or at the best with employees who volunteer. No right with to test on the general population on their devices.

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nsfwtttt t1_j6guiwq wrote

That’s not how things work in real life.

Tests in “a lab” don’t represent reality, and every single company on earth expands testing to users to get real data.

That’s why new features are rolled out and not just appear for all users at once.

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bilby2020 t1_j6gwmfy wrote

Deliberately draining battery is a "feature"? I hope that in some countries, this will be treated as a malicious activity with possible investigation from authorities. How is this different from unauthorised use of computing resources.

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nsfwtttt t1_j6gyupw wrote

It’s not. This is exactly the problem with the article, it takes something that’s a normal procedure and makes it sound evil to people who don’t understand it.

In a “lab” I can test a change to my app on 30 devices maybe. 100 maybe if I have a bigger budget.

But still, with thousands of devices out there and an infinite amount of setups I can’t predict all the different ways a change to any piece of code can affect every single user.

As evil as Facebook are (and they are), they have ZERO interest in draining your battery. The opposite is true.

So when they create a new feature, or even make a change to something you don’t even notice about the app (I.e. the method in which images are loaded) - instead of releasing it to everyone - they release it to some… if the effect is negative, yes, these few users get fucked, but then the code is fixed, without fucking every single user.

So for example if Facebook finds a way to make images load faster, which is for the benefit of all users, one thing they need to do is make sure it doesn’t drain the battery too fast - because that would defeat the purpose.

They can’t just test it in the lab. They need to make sure it works well even if the device is on low battery mode, low/high brightness, with open apps in the background, and without, and so on and so on and so on for every single device.

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bilby2020 t1_j6h092k wrote

I am not sure. If they release a feature and that drains the battery by accident, then yes, they can be forgiven. In this case, it seems they knew it would drain the battery and still released the feature. Apple did similar wuth deliberately slowing down the OS and was fined. I hope the internal training document is revealed during the trial for us to know.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate#:~:text=The%20investigation%20concluded%20in%20November,about%20how%20it%20throttles%20performance.

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nsfwtttt t1_j6h154s wrote

It’s really unclear from the article since the contents of the document and the guide are not described (other than “horrible”), as well as the scale of the tests.

Most likely the document contains standard procedures.

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t0slink t1_j6hpttp wrote

You don't understand Batterygate either, probably because it's been so misreported on Reddit.

Batteries cannot consistently provide max voltage as they age. In order to prevent your phone from shutting down randomly - say, during a 911 call - they make the processor stay within the minimum voltage that the battery can provide.

Yes, it should have been an option, but most customers should leave this feature enabled anyways if they want a stable experience and a reliable phone.

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