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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

#41

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

chatmasta wrote: post #25
ganfortran wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Business likes anything that helps profits, and hates anything that hurts profits.

The threat of communist takeover permeated most of the 20th century as the ultimate threat for private enterprise, but the military-industrial-complex had a wonderful time.

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

#42

Post by zappo2938 »

I promoted posts on a Facebook page successfully a few times several months ago. Facebook has been surfacing those posts constantly bombarding me with reminders that they were successful and people are liking the posts and page. Everyday, such and such person liked your page.

Maybe Facebook is targeting the smaller people by having the algorithm push their posts over larger companies. This might be a good thing. Do you do better with 1000 duck sized advertisers or 1 horse sized advertiser?

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

#43

Post by marricks »

When I had Facebook I was passionate about several topics, but I limited my posting to only 1 - 2 times a month. Initially when I started I got some engagement, questions, etc. As the years wore on I gained some friends who cared about those topics too, who liked my posts, shared, etc. Dozens of likes at times.

Well, turns out people paid less attention over time, or seemed too. Those posts got fewer likes and shares. Well, perhaps people just got turned off to my "activist" posting, bored, etc? If I posted a stupid life update about getting a new strainer though, fucktons of likes of course... Decided to ask my girlfriend and a couple family members if they even saw my posts on privacy or what have you, nope. It was buried or not shown on the feed when it came out.

It's not just the feed either, the ordering is bleeding elsewhere. When I asked my girlfriend if she could see specific posts she went directly to my profile and couldn't even find them often times because Facebook now controls the order of items on someone's feed. They show "trending items" and them semi ordered older ones.

I think this article, and some personal experience, shows some of the consequences of being tied to a social platform that controls just the order of news on your feed. It is trivially easy for them to bury topics either because they just don't like them or think they "hurt user engagement." It's a sort of super stealthy shadow ban, where sure, you content is "visible" but only in the loosest meaning of the word.

I had misgivings about Facebook initially from a privacy standpoint, but how much power they have to moderate content, virtually imperceptibly, was one of the final straws that got me off of it. We're not just giving away personal information, we're giving away our ability to persuade and connect in meaningful ways.

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

#44

Post by cmdrfred »

pier25 wrote: post #37
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.

There have been allegations of Reddit playing around behind the scenes as well. It seems once you get so big you have to play this game.

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

#45

Post by frenchpress »

jschuur wrote: post #12
leejo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. From the article: > We went from roughly 20 posts per day to 24 posts per day. If you post that many articles to Facebook then I'm simply going to unfollow you. Imagine I have ten sources posting that much, or one hundred sources. You think I'm going to engage with everyone? Heck no. Post one thing a day, two absolute tops. Ideally one thing a week but obviously that's not many sources ideal model. If I really…

There are Twitter accounts (I'm looking at your Politico) that constantly repost their stories. I swear they're actually automating deleting their tweets and simply tweeting them every hour (disclaimer: I haven't validated this hypothesis). I don't even follow political Twitter accounts anymore, over tactics like this. I keep them all in a (private) list and browser the list when I want to see what's going on in US p…

Slate's Twitter reposts many of their stories as well, but the duplicate tweets remain intact. Duplicate tweets redirect to the same web page but have different Slate-branded short URLs so perhaps that's how they get away with it.

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

#46

Post by baking »

kalleboo wrote: post #40
jpalomaki wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I don't see how these are not the same things. I see lots of posts from people I don't know that are liked by some of my friends, but often never see original posts by other friends. And I only have about two dozen friends that I follow.

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

#47

Post by Broken_Hippo »

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."

Unfortunately, the world we live in requires some money to have professional journalism. Even if these folks were non-profit, they'd still need some money to get by and do the stuff (pay reporters, curate a website, print physical newspapers, and so on).

They have to play to survive. Sure, this could be fixed in a myriad of ways, each having their own set of issues, but most of us aren't in a position to do that.

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

#48

Post by jandrese »

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.

The worst part is you can switch it back to the chronological view, but Facebook will undo your change at their earliest convenience. You have to make a bookmark to the correct feed to keep it showing up properly.

It is annoying, but I'm not a power user. I only check it once every few days to keep up with the relatives, maybe post once a week or so. It's pretty low maintenance.

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

#49

Post by makomk »

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 other reason why we're long past the point of questioning whether it's ethical is because pretty much the entire press insisted that it was a moral imperative for Facebook to take control of news on their service because of people sharing "fake news". There weren't really any dissenting voices on this point from what I recall.

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

#50

Post by kakarot »

cmdrfred wrote: post #44
pier25 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There have been allegations of Reddit playing around behind the scenes as well. It seems once you get so big you have to play this game.

This is only a feature of hyper-centralized news curation systems. Once we figure out the issues of moderation and allowing illegal content to be purged while preventing purging of legal content, and someone figures out a way to get a bandwagon going, it will hopefully no longer be necessary for a news curation platform to have to "play ball".
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