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Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts

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Re: Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts

#21

Post by jsnell »

jasode wrote: post #14
jschuur wrote: post #5

People simply like too many pages that produce too much content. There has to be prioritization and people have a natural limit to how much time and attention they have to scroll down all the way. So this is a fundamentally hard problem to solve. You can already prioritize posts from a page to appear at the top of your feed if you really don't want to miss posts. The real issue is that people underestimate the amount…

>There has to be prioritization and people have a natural limit to how much time and attention I agree that this is probably the root cause. The top of the FB newsfeed is a zero sum game because each person has a finite amount of time. Since the pixels of a newsfeed is always filled with instead of being empty, it means there should be a corresponding "something" that increased in frequency which in turn, diluted the…

> Kurt Gessler is only able to see the audience stats from the vantage point of Chicago Tribune instead of total stats from the audience perspective.

Getting a wider perspective seems to be exactly why this post was written. The main call to action at the end of the blog post is to other content creators, to see if they're experiencing the same thing. Get enough data points, and you can start to form testable hypotheses about what's being prioritized now.

Re: Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts

#22

Post by criley2 »

ivanbakel wrote: post #4

It's interesting to see how Facebook is taking increasing control of news and publicity on its service. In a sense, we're long past the point of questioning whether it's ethical, since they've obviously been influencing content for a long while, but this is one of the strongest arguments for FOSS alternatives like Mastodon. Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more…

I think your model is completely reversed. Content follows users, not the other way around.

You can't beat Facebook by getting good content into some user-less alternative.

Users don't follow content. Content follows users.

Re: Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts

#23

Post by jasode »

jsnell wrote: post #21
jasode wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There has to be prioritization and people have a natural limit to how much time and attention I agree that this is probably the root cause. The top of the FB newsfeed is a zero sum game because each person has a finite amount of time. Since the pixels of a newsfeed is always filled with instead of being empty, it means there should be a corresponding "something" that increased in frequency which in turn, diluted the…

> Kurt Gessler is only able to see the audience stats from the vantage point of Chicago Tribune instead of total stats from the audience perspective. Getting a wider perspective seems to be exactly why this post was written. The main call to action at the end of the blog post is to other content creators, to see if they're experiencing the same thing. Get enough data points, and you can start to form testable hypothe…

>The main call to action at the end of the blog post is to other content creators,

I'm not a FB analytics expert but to me, it seems like it would be better to get statistics from a bunch of "bots" that saw posts from the audience side. Correlating with other creators still seems to be a very limited form of analysis.

Of course, one wouldn't have to do any of that if Facebook cooperates and transparently explains to the publishers how the zero-sum game has been reprioritized against them.

Re: Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts

#24

Post by dickbasedregex »

ivanbakel wrote: post #4

It's interesting to see how Facebook is taking increasing control of news and publicity on its service. In a sense, we're long past the point of questioning whether it's ethical, since they've obviously been influencing content for a long while, but this is one of the strongest arguments for FOSS alternatives like Mastodon. Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more…

I left FB ~4 years ago. One of the straws that broke the camel for me was that it was obvious FB was "curating" my feed for me. Without notifying or consulting me. Posts from friends wouldn't show in my feed and vice versa. The privacy issues were bad enough but when I couldn't trust the platform to fulfill the only need I had for it, I walked.

I'm far better for it.

Re: Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts

#25

Post by chatmasta »

ganfortran wrote: post #13
ivanbakel wrote: post #4

It's interesting to see how Facebook is taking increasing control of news and publicity on its service. In a sense, we're long past the point of questioning whether it's ethical, since they've obviously been influencing content for a long while, but this is one of the strongest arguments for FOSS alternatives like Mastodon. Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more…

Big business loves censorship, they go straight demands it if not offered, look at the Youtube boycott that is happening right now. They are surely not fan of FOSS or freedom of speech.

They love it until it causes them to lose control over distribution or user retention/acquisition. See: "native articles" and how poorly received they were by news publishers.

Re: Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts

#26

Post by ivanbakel »

criley2 wrote: post #22
ivanbakel wrote: post #4

It's interesting to see how Facebook is taking increasing control of news and publicity on its service. In a sense, we're long past the point of questioning whether it's ethical, since they've obviously been influencing content for a long while, but this is one of the strongest arguments for FOSS alternatives like Mastodon. Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more…

I think your model is completely reversed. Content follows users, not the other way around. You can't beat Facebook by getting good content into some user-less alternative. Users don't follow content. Content follows users.

I don't think it's exclusively one that follows the other. Users push for content migration, and content encourages user migration. However, there's not much draw for users right now to move away from Facebook, so we're more reliant on content to make the shift.

Re: Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts

#27

Post by skj »

james_pm wrote: post #3

Wonderful. Journalism is just a game to the Chicago Tribune. "Because if 1 of 3 Facebook posts isn’t going to be surfaced by the algorithm to a significant degree, that would change how we play the game."

I think we can allow writers some leeway with metaphor.

Re: Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts

#28

Post by ams6110 »

ivanbakel wrote: post #4

It's interesting to see how Facebook is taking increasing control of news and publicity on its service. In a sense, we're long past the point of questioning whether it's ethical, since they've obviously been influencing content for a long while, but this is one of the strongest arguments for FOSS alternatives like Mastodon. Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more…

The perils of depending on someone else's service, especially when you have no contract with them that defines what they are supposed to be doing for you.

Re: Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts

#29

Post by kristianc »

So, Facebook has a vast cache of data on what people do and don't like and respond to in their feed. Facebook also has any number of 'features' in ML language they can slice and dice this data by, from likes and shares through to time spent on article before returning to the main feed.

Browsers of the Facebook feed themselves have any number of ways of accessing information, which they did not have before. If I want sports news on teams from Chicago, I'm no longer beholden to Chicago Tribune or even Facebook for that, I can download something like Bleacher Report TeamStream and have a customized feed of what I find interesting and nothing else.

It's probably not massively difficult to work out the kind of content that makes people like, share and click at scale on Facebook - humans are humans after all - but it's probably not consistent with the output of the Chicago Tribune (national stories that are covered in greater detail elsewhere and content which is probably only of any real interest to Chicagoans).

This is probably even more the case at the moment with so much of the action politically happening at a national level - Trump is a once in a generation kind of news story.

It seems they have two options:

- Accept that Facebook is a pay-to-play platform and that they will have to pay to narrowcast news to Chicagoans

- Accept that Facebook is going to account for an ever-declining share of their traffic.

Either way, I'm not sure there is a way forward for online media that doesn't involve a huge rethink about what the product they serve up is. Blaming the algorithm seems incredibly fruitless.

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