Can't help but wonder if this has something to do with the recent allegations against them of having a bias against certain kinds of news.
Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
71–80 of 123 posts
Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
#72All I want from facebook is a time-ordered list of everything all my friends post. No filtering, no reordering by 'importance', no weighting by how often I 'like' or respond. No "you clicked off the page and back, we're gonna show you different stuff!". Just a simple time-ordered list. Apparently this desire is wrong.
It's not wrong. It just doesn't align with Facebook's business needs
Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
#73I am so tired of seeing "things my friends liked" as essentially my only stream of posts. The sponsored posts haven't been too bad, but around 80% of my news feed is "John liked this" (picture of someone I've never met), "Mary commented on an article" (some stupid comment like an emoji), "Sam reacted to a photo" (picture posted by Sam's friend of a friend who again, I've never met). I think in the last week I've seen maybe ten actual posts from friends and thousands of reactions, likes, etc. that i have no interest in.
Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
#74All I want from facebook is a time-ordered list of everything all my friends post. No filtering, no reordering by 'importance', no weighting by how often I 'like' or respond. No "you clicked off the page and back, we're gonna show you different stuff!". Just a simple time-ordered list. Apparently this desire is wrong.
That, and the ability to conceal my birthday from everyone, would go some way towards persuading me to use it.
For the birthday thing:
From your Profile page > About tab, then Contact and Basic Info. Click on the pen icon to edit your birthday and you'll see a dropdown to determine who can see the date and/or year of your birth. I've got mine set to "Only me".
Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
#75Facebook tweaks its algorithms constantly. Facebook's algorithms tweak the algorithms constantly. This is just PR fluffery.
Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
#76That is 10 years overdue and the main reason I closed my account years ago. It was like looking at a sponsored gawker newsfeed. Today people do not even mention it anymore. Wether i meet new people or when i connect with old friends. Facebook disappeared from my life as quickly as it came in. Do HN people still use Facebook?
Yes. It's still the only decent way to organize a party, group trip to a museum or anything like that - Meetup costs money, Slack costs money or requires a dodgy hack, other groupchat programs are too noisy, setting up a dedicated mailing list or website is too much effort, emails-to-everyone it's too hard to get everyone to add or remove someone from the list.
I put events on there, occasionally a few holiday photos or whatever, and check updates on my commute. I defriend people I'm no longer close to, and hide as much political news as I can, so mainly I see photos, personal-blog-like posts, and events. It's great for short-notice events - if I see someone's going to something cool tonight I can ask if they want to meet up. It's great.
Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
#77I am sure they are making these changes based on their engagement data but ultimately how many of us here believe that their engagement data is really down because some of the activity between friends is happening on Snapchat.
Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
#78All I want from facebook is a time-ordered list of everything all my friends post. No filtering, no reordering by 'importance', no weighting by how often I 'like' or respond. No "you clicked off the page and back, we're gonna show you different stuff!". Just a simple time-ordered list. Apparently this desire is wrong.
That, and the ability to conceal my birthday from everyone, would go some way towards persuading me to use it.
You can do that, AFAIK. I've hidden mine since I first signed up and it doesn't show it to anyone.
Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
#79This might get me to browse a little bit more. I have about 1000 friends on Facebook but 60℅ of my feed is news from a small group of publishers (ESPN, The Onion, NYT) and ads.
Completely OT and I apologise, but I've just noticed that your "60%" doesn't use the percent sign but instead ℅, a symbol I'd never seen before that appears to be the abbreviation for "care of". I'm fascinated by that -- how did that get there? What kind of keyboard did you use?
You don't want to know! https://xkcd.com/1530/
Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
#80As someone who runs a niche news site, it's hard to see the point focusing on running a Facebook page anymore. We kind of go through the motions to keep up with appearances, but Facebook is less than 5% of our total overall traffic, and 95% of that portion is all from individuals sharing our content, not from our page directly. It's just impossible to "bid" on traffic via Facebook and win out over companies that have…
I help run a site that is completely dependent on links from large facebook pages/groups. Basically because it's almost 100% clickbait with some classic buzzfeed-kind of crap. This change has potential to bring the income way down from that site.
It sounds like you already realize this is a good move for everyone else, it just sucks for you.