Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 133 posts

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

#31

Post by logicallee »

dickbasedregex wrote: post #24
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.

Given that you were frustrated by not seeing all of your friends' posts and their not seeing all of yours, how are you better for it now that you see 0.0% of your friends' posts of any kind and now that you can now share your own content with only 0.5% of them (personally or through email etc)?

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

#32

Post by losteverything »

Can someone please give me perspective?

Does the newspaper increase/decrease revenue with better surfacing?

If so, how much? Or conversely, if they don't bother tracking this (& spend $ on a human resource ) will there be any appreciable decrease in revenue.

Or is this one person asking the world, "hey, have you also seen this?"

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

#33

Post by germinalphrase »

logicallee wrote: post #31
dickbasedregex wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given that you were frustrated by not seeing all of your friends' posts and their not seeing all of yours, how are you better for it now that you see 0.0% of your friends' posts of any kind and now that you can now share your own content with only 0.5% of them (personally or through email etc)?

Depends on how he reacted to the change. I started talking to my friends on the phone more often. I probably also reduced the overall number of friends I have - but then are they really friends if you won't make the effort to contact them? Maybe I'm just old enough to feel comfortable letting past friends, colleagues, etc. fade into the past in favor of focusing on the people right in front of me.

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

#34

Post by ams6110 »

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."

It's a game to all newspapers.

Reporters may be motivated to report news, but newspapers are only motivated to get readers and advertisers.

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

#35

Post by adrian1973 »

logicallee wrote: post #31
dickbasedregex wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given that you were frustrated by not seeing all of your friends' posts and their not seeing all of yours, how are you better for it now that you see 0.0% of your friends' posts of any kind and now that you can now share your own content with only 0.5% of them (personally or through email etc)?

Perhaps those 0.5% are the ones who matter. There are friends and then there facebook friends.

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

#36

Post by twelvedogs »

logicallee wrote: post #31
dickbasedregex wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given that you were frustrated by not seeing all of your friends' posts and their not seeing all of yours, how are you better for it now that you see 0.0% of your friends' posts of any kind and now that you can now share your own content with only 0.5% of them (personally or through email etc)?

i'm in this situation as well, i've moved to a slack group with my work friends and direct messaging with others, facebook was just a shitty way to talk to people i don't really care about where my posts were spirited away almost immediately

0.5% is being generous, i had almost no interaction with people i cared about while i was on there and i'm glad i've switched to other platforms where they aren't as interested in feeding me their stuff and just letting people talk

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

#37

Post by pier25 »

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…

Which is why I much prefer Reddit than Facebook. Content is curated by each community and not some corporation. There is a "hot" algorithm but you are free to switch to "top", "new", etc, if it doesn't work for you.

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

#38

Post by Ensorceled »

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."

You do realize that's just a turn of phrase, right?

Even if you want to be uncharitable about that, it's pretty clear the author is talking about Facebook and not Journalism.

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

#39

Post by 60654 »

strict9 wrote: post #16

FB has always prioritized content which doesn't lead them to see ads elsewhere (like photos instead of links), but maybe it's something else. I live in Chicago and subscribe to the Sunday edition. I also read the digital edition, and have found it lacking, particularly since inauguration. In recent months Michael Ferro became the majority shareholder in the Tribune, a person obsessed with celebrities and not so much…

Yeah, the Trib has been 'meh' at national news reporting for a while now... But while they used to have good local reporting, now DNAInfo and The Chicagoist are totally eating their lunch.

There are content issues for sure, but I suspect their presentation strategy isn't helping either - the Trib reacted to the growth of digital readership by putting up paywalls and obtrusive ads, essentially driving away digital readers... straight to their competitors.

PS. But it still has to be weird for a big newspaper that owned its own distribution and sales channels, to now be so dependent on an opaque third party distributor, which is so in control that it doesn't even bother to tell them when it's altering its distribution, and they have to reverse engineer it from traffic patterns...

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

#40

Post by kalleboo »

jpalomaki wrote: post #15
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…

Facebook is likely trying to maximize the time people spend on browsing their feed. Surface too many "boring" news articles in a row and user might go away. Put a nice mixture of news, goofy stuff, updates from friends, some fake news to provoke action and user remains. Hundreds of millions of people stare the news feed on weekly basis and interact with it. This creates a spectacular opportunity for employing machine…

Exactly, I remember when the main complaint was "there's too much irrelevant spam on my timeline". Now I only hear the opposite "I missed this and this important announcement"
Post reply on HN