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The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

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Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#31

Post by chickenfries »

paulcnichols wrote: post #22

Honestly, if FB was just me and my mom I'd probably get more value out of the site. Smaller radius is better IMO.

Pruning my friends improved my experience, but they grow back over time as people rediscover you or you make new acquaintances. I wonder if you could make a game or website that forced you to prune your facebook friends down, perhaps by looking at your social graph and telling you that you haven't messaged with a person in x years or something, or that you've never even "liked" something they posted. Some heuristics to determine who you really wouldn't miss. The problem with unfriending is that Facebook's UI makes it almost impossible to do in batches, and it feels kind of rude to "unfriend" someone, even though I personally wouldn't care if someone I don't talk to unfriended me.

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#32

Post by jakelazaroff »

aeturnum wrote: post #12

I'm pretty sure this description is wrong. My impression is facebook shows your content to a subset of friends and then classifies it based on likes received. If your mom 'like's 9/10 posts and your other friends like 3/10 posts, then 60% of your posts /are/ family content. Even if they're about mathematical theories.

This is the case if Facebook is only classifying it, but if it's using those likes to determine which subset of friends see your content then it becomes self-reinforcing. E.g. do your friends see all 10 posts, or do they only see 5 because the first few people to interact with the other 5 were family members?

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#33

Post by delecti »

chickenfries wrote: post #31
paulcnichols wrote: post #22

Honestly, if FB was just me and my mom I'd probably get more value out of the site. Smaller radius is better IMO.

Pruning my friends improved my experience, but they grow back over time as people rediscover you or you make new acquaintances. I wonder if you could make a game or website that forced you to prune your facebook friends down, perhaps by looking at your social graph and telling you that you haven't messaged with a person in x years or something, or that you've never even "liked" something they posted. Some heuristics…

Here's a trick to constantly pruning down your friends list. Don't worry about pruning down your whole list, just check the people who have birthdays every day you log in. I just checked; there was a single friend who had a birthday today, and I haven't had any contact with her in years. That makes for a nice easy prune.

Of course the downsides are that you risk disappointing someone who obsessively checks their friend count on their birthday, and that it only really works if you log in every day.

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#34

Post by delecti »

artur_makly wrote: post #25
ianhawes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that option already exists[0]. [0] http://imgur.com/a/gg2DH

not on ios mobile

If it's anything like the Android version, it's hidden in the settings.

Hamburger menu > Scroll way down to the "Feeds" section > "Most Recent"

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#35

Post by ramzyo »

AznHisoka wrote: post #30
rigden33 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem he is referring to is not that facebook narrows down the audience based off of likes. His problem is that his mom, and consequently other family members, always immediately likes his posts regardless of the content which narrows the audience down to his family members instead of the intended audience. He wants Facebook to take into account that the person liking his post is his mom before narrowing down t…

But the content is not intended for his mom, so he shouldn't have targeted it to everybody.

The post is intended for an audience including his mom (she interacts with his posts by liking them). The author's argument is that Facebook's algorithm is (incorrectly) assuming that her interaction is based on interest in the actual content, rather than her association with the author.

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#36

Post by thex10 »

Anderkent wrote: post #28
paulcnichols wrote: post #22

Honestly, if FB was just me and my mom I'd probably get more value out of the site. Smaller radius is better IMO.

Remove other friends then?

I did this. One day I just decided to make my Facebook account family only - removed hundreds of "friends". It worked great for me. I don't idly check it so often (because there are fewer updates), but I still get to see what people I care about are up to.

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#37

Post by _greim_ »

> Facebook, despite the fact that they know she’s my mom, doesn’t take this fact into account in their algorithm.

Wouldn't it also be possible to analyze the content of the post to determine if it's family-related? It seems like with a math or technical post, that should be easy for FB to do.

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#38

Post by bad_user »

danso wrote: post #13

tl;dr, as I understand it: when family members Like your Facebook content in relative quick succession, FB apparently interprets it as a signal that it is family-specific content. I didn't see any metrics but this seems plausible. I think I'm more of a fan of FB than the average web geek, probably because I used it at its phase of peak innocence (college years) and have since weaned myself off to the point of checkin…

> But wasn't the feature of making yourself a "brand page" and/or having "subscribers" (which don't count toward the 5,000 friend limit) supposed to mitigate this a bit?

If you have a page, Facebook wants to milk you, so they've got this weird algorithm that pushes your posts to only a small fraction of the page's followers, expecting you to start "promoting" them.

Basically they screwed "organic reach".

Oh, and about 3 days ago I created a second Facebook account with the purpose of connecting with software developers and my English-speaking friends (I'm Romanian). I did this thinking that I don't want to share semi-private pictures of family with strangers, or to spam my family and friends with programming stuff.

But only 24 hours later they've disabled my account because of "security concerns", without notice and now I'm waiting on their support to reply after I've sent them my picture for validation.

And another thing - the online parents group from my son's school is on WhatsApp. They tried a Facebook group, but the problem is that when important announcements happen, not all parents receive notifications, so they resorted to something that works.

Facebook is freaking terrible.

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#39

Post by detaro »

AznHisoka wrote: post #18

This is not a problem, and I certainly hope Facebook does not fix it. Why? Because it forced the OP to narrow down his audience and show the post only to those who would enjoy it. That's a much better experience than everyone trying to push everything they publish to you.

How do you know his mom did not enjoy seeing what her son is up to, even if she doesn't understand much of it?

Re: The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem

#40

Post by creaghpatr »

athenot wrote: post #17
creaghpatr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting if Facebook allowed personal users to access the brand tools that pages get (impressions, distribution, etc). This won't happen because facebook wants you to think everyone is seeing your posts. People would be livid if they knew just how low of a % of friends were actually viewing their stuff due to algorithmic meddling.

I think that's why there's been more and more images posted as video, to track viewership (FB shows the number of views on videos but not pictures).

I agree, people want validation and it steers them to post a higher ratio of videos. A subtle way of altering user behavior.
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