Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

i.e. - facebook wants to be paid by advertisers instead of being a free promotion platform.

Really it makes sense all around though, and you have to wonder what took them so long.

Agree - If I want to learn more about Brexit I go to NYT, WSJ, etc. FB is for learning about old friends' whereabouts, new babies, etc.

Wonder how this will affect the political discourse for the elections this year...

This is how Facebook operates. Open up the platform until everyone piles on and basically ruins it, then tighten it back up and start charging those same people to do what they were previously doing for free.

They did it with games (they became basically spam until they locked it down). Then when they opened things up to advertising, you could basically run any ad you want to any offer you want. Then they tightened that down once it got adoption. And now they're going to lock the news feed back down a bit.

It's interesting how well they've pulled this off without poisoning the well and alienating their user base.

After overloading the world with information it can't ever process, I don't think either news companies or tech companies know what the fuck they are doing or what they need to do next.

Is that because your friends keep resharing posts from those publishers or because you're following the publishers themselves?

Facebook already has tools to hide posts from certain friends or shares of links to certain publishers (click the disclosure arrow in the top right).

I think the basis for all these "post selection algorithms" that people are continually outraged about is the fact that people are completely unwilling to prune their feeds. Then they get overwhelmed with crap posts and complain about how there's nothing interesting. Then Facebook/Twitter try to figure out what people want to see, and people complain they don't get to see everything.