Comment by marricks
9 years ago
When I had Facebook I was passionate about several topics, but I limited my posting to only 1 - 2 times a month. Initially when I started I got some engagement, questions, etc. As the years wore on I gained some friends who cared about those topics too, who liked my posts, shared, etc. Dozens of likes at times.
Well, turns out people paid less attention over time, or seemed too. Those posts got fewer likes and shares. Well, perhaps people just got turned off to my "activist" posting, bored, etc? If I posted a stupid life update about getting a new strainer though, fucktons of likes of course... Decided to ask my girlfriend and a couple family members if they even saw my posts on privacy or what have you, nope. It was buried or not shown on the feed when it came out.
It's not just the feed either, the ordering is bleeding elsewhere. When I asked my girlfriend if she could see specific posts she went directly to my profile and couldn't even find them often times because Facebook now controls the order of items on someone's feed. They show "trending items" and them semi ordered older ones.
I think this article, and some personal experience, shows some of the consequences of being tied to a social platform that controls just the order of news on your feed. It is trivially easy for them to bury topics either because they just don't like them or think they "hurt user engagement." It's a sort of super stealthy shadow ban, where sure, you content is "visible" but only in the loosest meaning of the word.
I had misgivings about Facebook initially from a privacy standpoint, but how much power they have to moderate content, virtually imperceptibly, was one of the final straws that got me off of it. We're not just giving away personal information, we're giving away our ability to persuade and connect in meaningful ways.
For me, I'm only interested in postings about "stupid life updates" as you call them when I'm on Facebook. I got so sick of the "10 ways batman is better than superman" articles that I started blocking every external site I saw being posted on my feed. And I mean everything, wsj, nyt, USA Today, etc etc etc.
Facebook is not a newsreader, it's a place where I go to see "stupid life events" from my friends and family that I don't get to see very much. There are a million other places I can go to read the news, I'm glad Facebook is nuking priority on external article posts, I wish they would do it more.
As I grow older, one thing I value more and more from friends is their opinions, knowing what they care about and perspectives they have to share.
I don't think I was alone in spending too much time on Facebook thinking I was connecting to my "friends" talking about important things. Facebook seems to have intentionally or unintentionally stifled that, so I left.
If you view it as a "vapid" place to share, and do important talking elsewhere I think that makes sense, I find it hard to separate those though, and think many do.
Agreed re: the separation. I don't know that I find that all that "hard", though.
Facebook is the place where I can see posts from all my high-school/college/work acquaintances and my extended family. Do I like these people? Sure! Do I want to know what they think about anything? Please, no; every time that happens I end up liking them less! And do I want them to know a single thing about me? Even less! Giving them even the slightest awareness of my actual interests would be a moralizing disaster for everyone involved!
Now, my friends, I have a Discord server for. There, we share all the stupid things we would say to one-another in person, but never ever if it was going to be on a big searchable record somewhere where my Grandma might see. I have some of those same friends added on Facebook, but none of us ever post there. There's no need.
I wouldn't "delete Facebook", as I actually do value keeping up with acquaintances and relatives... from a distance. It's very easy to keep it separated from my "important talking"—because nobody I'd ever want to do any "important talking" with would ever see anything I wrote there.
There's validity in both positions. I am generally the same in that I only use Facebook for stupid life events and keeping in touch with people. Then again, I'd prefer not to use Facebook at all, but these days you are pretty much a no one without a FB profile. Nobody answers their phone and they hardly even text at this point.
Anyway, the problem is that Facebook pretends that it wants to make people "more connected", yet they also want to be the place where people get their news, and the only comments on current events that ever bubble up are the first handful of inflammatory nonsense. Post anything even 30 minutes after the fact, and the likelihood it gets seen drops drastically. Note that this mostly applies to comments made on posts from the media. Make a non-vapid comment on a friend's post, or make a post that's more than a sentence long, and it may never get seen. There were plenty of times when I made posts or comments that should have offended my friends, but when asked if they sae that activity, they had no idea what I was talking about. Yet they somehow always know about my family photos when I add them.
I'd be okay with it if Facebook wasn't also full of shit about being a place for discussion and for aggregating news. Sure, you and I can get our news elsewhere, but most people will continue to use the trending posts as a lens to view the world with. For things that arent vapid, I am going to move to Minds.com. I'm getting sick of Zuckerberg.
Texting sucks and is extraordinary frustrating to try and keep up with massive group texts (almost borderline anxiety-creating), and phone conversations are always difficult and frustrating. However, FaceTime and similar video-calling is great. I wish we could make phone just default to this.
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FB is a proficient patent filer and here is just one of several hundred they've been issues in 2017:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...
It covers how FB uses "influencer" activity to determine what a "viewer" would see. There's nothing new here that I see, but for all the people talking about and trying to understand FB I don't see anyone reading their patents.
It's a lot of work and takes some practice parsing things out, but there is value there in understanding the general direction FB is going or where they are spending their r&d dollars.
Side note: all the people asking why a good FB alternative hasn't arisen should take a look at these patents to realize how much of what we take for granted that FB does is prohibited for a competitor. FB is defining and locking out competitors from what the worlds thinks a social network is.
Facebook isn't helpful in following the stupid life updates either.
Every now and then I try to use Facebook to check out what people are doing because I'm interested in their life updates but I don't really have a clue. I see some random posts from some friends, but not all nor necessarily the important posts. There are friends whose postings I haven't seen for ages, and when I go look back on his/her wall Facebook gives me a curated view with most posts hidden by default so I can't skim through the most recent twenty-or-so posts and make up my mind myself.
And don't get me started on posting to Facebook myself. If I want to say something it's an equally mystic selection of friends who might see it, or "see" it if they downloaded the post but never browsed that far. I think that the post saturation is close to 10%, at most: that many of my friends might actually see my posts.
I grant that Facebook is trying to solve a hard problem. I have a Facebook list that contains all my friends and looking at that list of chronological posts exhausts me before I exhaust the list. So there needs to be a filter, however, the algorithm to filter posts should be known to users. I would probably settle for "Most liked posts from recent days from each your friend", or something similar. Something that is finite and defined. The current views are none of that.
Why is it so terrible that they control the order of the feed? If the feed was just sorted by date then it would be unusable for most people. I feel like a lot of objections to how Facebook does things come down to thinking Facebook is something different from what it is. It is not, nor is it intended to be, something that shows you every single post from every single friend.
I tried to spell out why, but here you go, my personal experience is this out of order sorting meant that if I tried to post anything besides vapid updates few people saw them. If Facebook wanted to go from chronological to some other transparent metric, like hotness, I'd be more okay then whatever this is. The fact this is on the feed, my profile, and heck, even searching for events last I saw, is disturbing.
Also, sorted by date was great for many years when they initially got popularity. I (and others IIRC) were pretty unhappy when it changed to this.
Hypothetical solution: Wrap your serious posts in vapid trimmings.
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Because there's no way to ensure you have the option of seeing everything unless it's in chronological order. Even if there was just the option of sorting chronologically then a different sorting being the default could be fine, but when you click "sort by most recent" it doesn't, not really anyway. Currently when I click that option there are zero posts displayed. That's not a typo or exaggeration, literally zero posts display under "most recent".
"sort by most recent posts that we approve of"*
Why isn't this being talked about by various media outlets? It's blatant social engineering via dark patterns and deception.
Another way to put it -- it's not so much that ordering by something other than date is an issue, it's that ordering by date is (one of) the only neutral ways to sort. Anything else introduces a bias to some degree. Popularity of posts may be another way, although this gives older posts undue weight.
Sorting by an opaque algorithm gives FB the power to control the conversation.
> Why is it so terrible that they control the order of the feed?
Because for more and more people, social media is becoming 'the news', and this gives Facebook certain obligations to treat content fairly and act transparently.
Whether this state of affairs is intentional or not is moot - FB knows its power and reach. (Though I struggle to believe FB really is just some naive company that suddenly had greatness 'thrust upon them' - they've spent a good ten years proselytising their "platform", after all)
Not knowing how/where/to-whom my posts would show up (and how/where others' posts or status updates or whatever could be seen) was my biggest (non-privacy-related) problem with Facebook when I briefly tried it back in '09 or so. Their UI was so damn confusing that I quickly gave up on it. Seems like it's only gotten worse, but I guess most people don't mind not knowing what a given action will actually do. It felt to me like a giant step back as a communication tool, adding levels of uncertainty and chance for no good reason.
Add the fact that their weighting of posts also shapes conversations in possibly-unpredictable (or predictable, deliberately-manipulative) ways and yeah, I object to it.
Then again I also find Twitter's UI to be fairly confusing (and really stressful, god it's messy). Less so, but still. So maybe I'm just bad at understanding GUIs. Back to SMS, IRC, and Basic HTML GMail for me.
This isn't referring to the general Newsfeed, where sure, they can reorder. It's referring to the fact that on _my profile_ FB will rearrange my stories, so most recent isn't always on top.
>"hurt user engagement"
if Facebook is personalizing everyones feed based on what they click, isnt the clicker to blame for the result of personalization, not the technology provider. it sounds like your friends didnt engage with your posts, they did engage with other posts, and the facebook feedback loop built them a filter bubble of things they liked more than your posts.
I blame Facebook. I've ranted on HN about what I consider to be an abuse of 'curation' in the past, but I think 'curation' is killing the internet.
I agree with the grandparent about Facebook killing engagement, but the place I noticed it first was Last.fm. I used to spend tons of time on Last.fm looking up music. I made sure every track I played was scrobbled, and I listened to their recommendations all of the time.
As time passed, the recommendations got worse. Mind you, the recommended songs were closer to what I was listening to, but I appreciated when Last.fm used to recommend music that was somewhat off the wall. If it was a draft, I guess you could call that kind of recommendation a flier.
I personally blame machine learning. The recommendations I get in Last.fm now sound a lot like music I'm already listening to. Not only is it boring, but it's stupid, in the sense that finding music that sounds almost exactly like music you already like is easy.
I want content to be curated the way a friend would curate it for me. For instance, I had a friend recommend the band Sleigh Bells to me, because he knew I listened to punk all of the time, but that I really loved pop (and noise). Last.fm has never recommended me anything remotely as great as that.
I'm almost loathe to like anything on social media anymore, since it basically means I'm going to get similar posts shoved down my throat until I completely give up on the site.
Seems like you dislike bad curation specifically, rather than curation itself. After all, Last.fm was already curating the songs they recommended (it wasn't like they literally threw a random sample of all their catalog).
That said, I agree with you that this kind of "finding the closest match" model is quite silly for recommendation systems. And you can see the same problems with ad matching too.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-...
personally i somewhat agree with you. watercoolers like drudge report, techmeme, aldaily, redef show everyone the same page, not some regurgitation of their past. you experience new things by being shown something other than timehop.
If their algorithm causes such a positive feedback loop that only the most vapid of our content is seen I argue that is still Facebook's problem.
People already complain young people are superficial and self interested, algorithms feeding into/fueling that narrative sure doesn't help.
No. Which people and pages's posts I get to see because I follow them is up to me no matter how many times I click on their content. I am old enough to unsubscribe or ignore them by myself.
Facebook filter should be an opt-in.
In the simple case where they look at what your likes are to determine the bubble they create around you, sure. But I don't think that's all they look at. Content could be being buried simply because a friend of a friend doesn't like that content, but likes a bunch of other content you like. It's not as simple as a reaction to your action. There's a lot of "secret sauce" that goes into it that makes it not quite so transparent.
It could also be that they fail to understand the metrics. A topic rarely showing up gets fewer chances for the user to express interest.
Well Zuckerberg in his infinite wisdom is trying to tell you to be a little more like Kim Kardashian or Trump.
Facebook's "news feed" (or whatever they're calling it, now) is one giant funnel towards the lowest common denominator.
The only parameter you control over this, is your social network. But that's a pretty imprecise control frequently at least somewhat orthogonal to your interests. And in the last few months, I'm seeing more "promoted" content that none of my friends are specifically posting.
Giant funnel. Lowest common denominator.
I keep my network pretty small and limited to "real friends." I see enough of their posts to keep coming back; it leaves me at least a little in touch with their daily lives.
But I find myself increasingly motivated, if not compelled, to stay away from FB.
Giant funnel. Lowest common denominator.
>only 1 - 2 times a month
I have suspected that facebook punishes your visibility if you don't post frequently (like a few times a day). Have you tried posting much more often than two times a month? Try two a day and see if your average engagement increases.
I've found the opposite — posting frequently results in decreased visibility in my experience. My wife and I trade off posting family photos of our kid, and whenever one of us has recently posted the photo gets much less of a reaction (i.e., 25 likes instead of 65).
I've also found the opposite: Facebook sends me notifications to check out a friend's post if they make a post after not posting for a while.
>"I had misgivings about Facebook initially from a privacy standpoint, but how much power they have to moderate content, virtually imperceptibly, was one of the final straws that got me off of it."
Pair this with Zuckerberg's potential future political aims, the role of segmented social media advertising in this past election and privacy, that should be very concerning for one person to have so much power.
And Twitter shows the consequences of just ordering by time posted
Some people are extremely happy to ritualistically watch the 3pm saturday star trek rerun before going out. They're not in order, its OK if you miss one, in fact variety is cool because you know next week will be at least average even if today was one of the "bad seasons". My friends and I loved that experience.
Some people are extremely happy to binge watch an entire season of star trek in precise order. I loved that and in my opinion its really the only way to enjoy the much maligned DS9. DS9 is essentially the seven year epic adventures of Garak, its the only Trek where the main character isn't a human star ship captain. Sisko is weak and boring because he's a minor supporting character, not like main character Garak.
Everyone hates it and flips out when they want option A or B and "the man" refuses them and gives them the opposite of what they asked for. About half the population hates facebook, may even be a majority. Note that once you narrowcast enough you can drop user engagement until the survivors 100% love what you're doing, even if 97% of the population refuses to watch it, which ironically is the state today of legacy TV, such as "Survivor" the TV show.
Right, but the tools you use to interact with society (engage, persuade, argue) are a bit more consequential than Saturday evening mindless entertainment.