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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

#61

Post by VLM »

inetknght wrote: post #56
twelvedogs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

FYI Slack could easily do the same thing. And indeed, being a closed system, what protection do you have against it?

That would utterly annihilate its corporate use if there was even a rumor they randomly censored content like operations and QA/QC discussion. My company also pays extra money to slack for the "we log everything for your e-discovery enjoyment" so there would be substantial legal issues if they randomly started hiding stuff we're paying to be e-discovered. Slack has problems, but weird censorship stuff isn't one of them.

Weird as it probably sounds, FB sucks for humans because its users are people not corporations.

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

#62

Post by jasonjayr »

jandrese wrote: post #48
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.

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.

And worse -- they seem to have recently capped the chronological view to 24 hrs. with just a tag at the end "to see more, add more friends" :-/

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

#63

Post by autokad »

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.

my favorite part is when facebok switched to prioritizing popularity of posts, and not time.

Now I see from my friends "I'm going out to devil's den in 20 minutes if anyone wants to join me - 23 hours ago"

yeah, thanks for that facebook. i really needed cat videos and political rants triaged ahead of that for a whoel day.

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

#64

Post by rdiddly »

bhhaskin wrote: post #2

I find it fascinating that media companies like news papers have completely tied their success to a 3rd party platform like Facebook. They have essentially given all of the publishing power to Facebook. AMP is another one that comes to mind.

Came here to say the same thing, except with me it's more of a facepalm type of thing. To see a major newspaper allow its business model to depend on an arbitrary, self-interested black box... groveling for views... wasting time analyzing it... complaining about it like a typical user (like a bitch, if you'll forgive me) is frustrating to watch.

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

#65

Post by VLM »

marricks wrote: post #43

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…

Some people are extremely happy to ritualistically watch the 3pm saturday star trek rerun before going out. They're not in order, its OK if you miss one, in fact variety is cool because you know next week will be at least average even if today was one of the "bad seasons". My friends and I loved that experience.

Some people are extremely happy to binge watch an entire season of star trek in precise order. I loved that and in my opinion its really the only way to enjoy the much maligned DS9. DS9 is essentially the seven year epic adventures of Garak, its the only Trek where the main character isn't a human star ship captain. Sisko is weak and boring because he's a minor supporting character, not like main character Garak.

Everyone hates it and flips out when they want option A or B and "the man" refuses them and gives them the opposite of what they asked for. About half the population hates facebook, may even be a majority. Note that once you narrowcast enough you can drop user engagement until the survivors 100% love what you're doing, even if 97% of the population refuses to watch it, which ironically is the state today of legacy TV, such as "Survivor" the TV show.

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

#66

Post by intoverflow2 »

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.

Reddit (the corporation) highly curates many parts of their site actually. It's not much different these days.

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

#67

Post by inimino »

VLM wrote: post #65
marricks wrote: post #43

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…

Some people are extremely happy to ritualistically watch the 3pm saturday star trek rerun before going out. They're not in order, its OK if you miss one, in fact variety is cool because you know next week will be at least average even if today was one of the "bad seasons". My friends and I loved that experience. Some people are extremely happy to binge watch an entire season of star trek in precise order. I loved tha…

Right, but the tools you use to interact with society (engage, persuade, argue) are a bit more consequential than Saturday evening mindless entertainment.

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

#68

Post by mikeash »

marricks wrote: post #43

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…

Why is it so terrible that they control the order of the feed? If the feed was just sorted by date then it would be unusable for most people. I feel like a lot of objections to how Facebook does things come down to thinking Facebook is something different from what it is. It is not, nor is it intended to be, something that shows you every single post from every single friend.

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

#69

Post by derwiki »

mikeash wrote: post #68
marricks wrote: post #43

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…

Why is it so terrible that they control the order of the feed? If the feed was just sorted by date then it would be unusable for most people. I feel like a lot of objections to how Facebook does things come down to thinking Facebook is something different from what it is. It is not, nor is it intended to be, something that shows you every single post from every single friend.

This isn't referring to the general Newsfeed, where sure, they can reorder. It's referring to the fact that on _my profile_ FB will rearrange my stories, so most recent isn't always on top.

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

#70

Post by derwiki »

autokad wrote: post #63
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.

my favorite part is when facebok switched to prioritizing popularity of posts, and not time. Now I see from my friends "I'm going out to devil's den in 20 minutes if anyone wants to join me - 23 hours ago" yeah, thanks for that facebook. i really needed cat videos and political rants triaged ahead of that for a whoel day.

If it is a complete machine-learning backed algorithm (I have no idea if it is), it could learn that if you find a time sensitive post after the deadline, it gives you FOMO and you start checking FB more frequently. That is, the algorithm is optimizing for engagement.
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