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Don't sponsored posts tend to get stickied at the top of feeds?
I'm not familiar with instagram, but I would be surprised if they weren't just replicating Facebooks' model. https://www.facebook.com/business/help/547448218658012
I can totally see genuine reasons for that. Feed is a huge part of the product, and you want to control that (which means controlling UX). You don't want to let things go out of hand. Some of us feel like, well, we can control it ourselves by unfriending/unfollowing/unliking things we don't like. That's true. But we shouldn't forget that we can't apply this assumption to the whole active userbase of Facebook/Instagra…
Perhaps that is the UX challenge companies like these should be pursuing? One of the unfortunate side effects of the valley's growth fetish is that features like "make it easier to break connections" get sharply deprioritized.
I naively dream of a world where products teach the masses "it's easy to settle only for quality, and it's okay to stiffarm the other noise that clamors for your attention"
On the face of it, the article fails to address any of the concerns raised throughout this thread / elsewhere on the internet.
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Because the majority of social media users subscribe to more people/companies posting more things than the user could ever possibly read. Rather than users being overwhelmed with noise, getting frustrated, and possibly logging in less, social media companies come up with a way to show them enough content to keep them engaged and happy (and visiting the site/using the app) as long as possible.
If that was the real reason, then facebook wouldn't revert from 'chronological' to 'best' every time I visit the site. The sorting algorithm is for the benefit of facebook and advertisers - and not necessarily by making me spend more time on facebook.
The three social platforms with non-chronological timelines now: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, may all be seeing diminishing engagement from critical demographics (16-21.) Users log in less, so by "rewarding" them with the stickiest post when the do happen to log in, it appears to increase the retention of those cohorts.
Power users are following/friends with a lot of other users. If 1,000 - 2,000 people are followed there is a lot of noise. This also presents opportunities to completely bury the less sticky content, which also results in increasing ad revenue from publishers who got addicted to the free traffic (with "sticky" ads being rewarded with cheaper clickthroughs.)
The chronology complaint is interesting because reddit & hacker news have a similar sorting algorithm (voting, but with other complexities thrown in.) You log in, look, and log off. A compulsive user may check hourly.
There are definitely problems with dynamic sorting. Noisy producers may become more noisier because less of their stuff is being shown. Other users may not bother posting at all because they don't expect anyone to see what they posted. That audience is going to feel comfortable if another platform offers them a place they feel they are being heard.
Whatever the numbers show right now, the longer term retention cohorts have yet to be seen by anyone.
Despite monster ad revenue I am not convinced that Facebook has made a "slam dunk" on social media and will be the last man standing.
This makes sense. Gotta wean people off chronology to sell them the "best" ads.
I believe the algorithmic ordering is intended to optimize other variables such as "time on site," because if you stay longer they can show you more ads. It seems like the conspiracy stuff would be much harder to actually do, like manipulating the content to influence you to click on more ads.
(Free services, users, products, etc)
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Reddit is Fun has a nice solution (though it's just an interface to reddit's core functionality): at the top of the screen you can select which ordering you want (time order, most points per time period, hotness).
I think Reddit is not quite analogous to the other sites listed. Excepts for posts being deleted or stickied, all content is sorted democratically on a timer. You have the option (by default) to additionally sort by newest or newest post that are also popular with users. I'm sure other Reddit mobile clients have this functionality as well.
I'm not inherently opposed to a smarter order, but I feel like it (at least in the case of Facebook and Twitter so far) breaks a fundamental part of the use case for me. I check in every so often, and want to scroll back to the last post I saw, so I can know I saw everything. When it is sorted non-chronologically, this is impossible. I see the same thing multiple times because it's sorted near the top, and I miss som…
I am on the same boat. I'm not sure how they don't see the contradiction in pushing mobile more and more at the same time ignoring the problem that their default newsfeed is stale. They still have the option to switch between 'Most Recent' and 'Top Stories', but it defaults to 'Top Stories' which wasn't the case a while back -- it used to default to whatever I last chose.
Now I don't check Facebook that often mainly because there is nothing new, and its always the same handful of people I am forced to engage with.