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Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

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Re: Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

#11

Post by prepend »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #5
quantumwannabe wrote: post #4

I want to go to Facebook to keep connected with friends and family, not to see cringy memes and clickbait 'news' articles. Zuckerberg made the right decision to focus on users instead of publishers, and I think these changes will change Facebook for the better.

Unfortunately, a lot of the times it's friends and family that post these cringy memes.

This is certainly true. But at least with my friends and family, I learn them over time.

With “news” sources it requires a constant pain to vet them.

Also, with FB I can just block shares by source so over time I’ve blocked out my relatives’ stupid posts by Brietbart and Being Liberal.

Re: Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

#12

Post by prepend »

drdrey wrote: post #8
prepend wrote: post #2

We really just need RSS. Everyone on Facebook should get an RSS feed and you just subscribe to who you want to follow. News publishers already have feeds. So you can mix in as you like to get NYTimes right next to Uncle Jim’s fakenews. There’s no algorithm, just based on publishing order. Maybe mix in some flags that let you see if others have disliked things with that same URI. We need more protocols and less platfo…

We used to have RSS. Why did it not stick around? When Google Reader was killed, my account was just a stressful pile of thousands of unread items. The occasional gem was drowned in the noise.

RSS is still here, but the major platforms don’t publish RSS feeds and make it hard to scrape into feeds. Facebook and Twitter don’t allow it. Google usually doesn’t.

I use RSS extensively to follow blogs and news sources. There are even many that put ads into my feed, which is cool by me.

Re: Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

#13

Post by SomewhatLikely »

prepend wrote: post #2

We really just need RSS. Everyone on Facebook should get an RSS feed and you just subscribe to who you want to follow. News publishers already have feeds. So you can mix in as you like to get NYTimes right next to Uncle Jim’s fakenews. There’s no algorithm, just based on publishing order. Maybe mix in some flags that let you see if others have disliked things with that same URI. We need more protocols and less platfo…

An algorithm is desperately needed though. Sources have varying publishing rates and quality. Aggregating across them and culling is crucial. For the most part I've thrown up my hands and delegated this job to hacker news and Reddit subscriptions, but it's still not well personalized.

Re: Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

#14

Post by paulddraper »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #5
quantumwannabe wrote: post #4

I want to go to Facebook to keep connected with friends and family, not to see cringy memes and clickbait 'news' articles. Zuckerberg made the right decision to focus on users instead of publishers, and I think these changes will change Facebook for the better.

Unfortunately, a lot of the times it's friends and family that post these cringy memes.

And each required explicit acceptance of a friend request.

As opposed to a gaggle of news sources that crop up whenever.

Re: Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

#15

Post by drdrey »

prepend wrote: post #12
drdrey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to have RSS. Why did it not stick around? When Google Reader was killed, my account was just a stressful pile of thousands of unread items. The occasional gem was drowned in the noise.

RSS is still here, but the major platforms don’t publish RSS feeds and make it hard to scrape into feeds. Facebook and Twitter don’t allow it. Google usually doesn’t. I use RSS extensively to follow blogs and news sources. There are even many that put ads into my feed, which is cool by me.

RSS is technically still here, but it seems to me you're the exception here, not the norm. RSS is not quite as mainstream as it used to be

Re: Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

#16

Post by gaius »

SomewhatLikely wrote: post #13
prepend wrote: post #2

We really just need RSS. Everyone on Facebook should get an RSS feed and you just subscribe to who you want to follow. News publishers already have feeds. So you can mix in as you like to get NYTimes right next to Uncle Jim’s fakenews. There’s no algorithm, just based on publishing order. Maybe mix in some flags that let you see if others have disliked things with that same URI. We need more protocols and less platfo…

An algorithm is desperately needed though. Sources have varying publishing rates and quality. Aggregating across them and culling is crucial. For the most part I've thrown up my hands and delegated this job to hacker news and Reddit subscriptions, but it's still not well personalized.

An algorithm is desperately needed though

An algorithm that weaponises jealousy, FOMO and outrage will always out-monetise a benign or no algorithm at all, over any financially viable timescale. The algo doesn’t “know” of course. It just knows that showing you X has historically made you spend longer on the site than Y.

The only way to win is not to play.

Re: Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

#17

Post by thescribe »

SomewhatLikely wrote: post #13
prepend wrote: post #2

We really just need RSS. Everyone on Facebook should get an RSS feed and you just subscribe to who you want to follow. News publishers already have feeds. So you can mix in as you like to get NYTimes right next to Uncle Jim’s fakenews. There’s no algorithm, just based on publishing order. Maybe mix in some flags that let you see if others have disliked things with that same URI. We need more protocols and less platfo…

An algorithm is desperately needed though. Sources have varying publishing rates and quality. Aggregating across them and culling is crucial. For the most part I've thrown up my hands and delegated this job to hacker news and Reddit subscriptions, but it's still not well personalized.

I do fine without an algorithm, everything appears at the rate it is published in chronological order, if I dislike a feed or discover I rarely read it I remove it.

Re: Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

#18

Post by thescribe »

drdrey wrote: post #8
prepend wrote: post #2

We really just need RSS. Everyone on Facebook should get an RSS feed and you just subscribe to who you want to follow. News publishers already have feeds. So you can mix in as you like to get NYTimes right next to Uncle Jim’s fakenews. There’s no algorithm, just based on publishing order. Maybe mix in some flags that let you see if others have disliked things with that same URI. We need more protocols and less platfo…

We used to have RSS. Why did it not stick around? When Google Reader was killed, my account was just a stressful pile of thousands of unread items. The occasional gem was drowned in the noise.

That's how I feel about social sites, unlike RSS I have no control about items, they just disappear in a sea of tweets. To me it sounds like you subscribe to a lot of spammy feeds.

Re: Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

#19

Post by thescribe »

prepend wrote: post #2

We really just need RSS. Everyone on Facebook should get an RSS feed and you just subscribe to who you want to follow. News publishers already have feeds. So you can mix in as you like to get NYTimes right next to Uncle Jim’s fakenews. There’s no algorithm, just based on publishing order. Maybe mix in some flags that let you see if others have disliked things with that same URI. We need more protocols and less platfo…

I would love to see an RSS reader that was smart enough to follow links and make a 'source graph' so it the NYT and Slashdot write articles about the same source they both appear in the same 'thread' about that source. To me that would be the killer app for RSS.

Re: Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

#20

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

paulddraper wrote: post #14
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, a lot of the times it's friends and family that post these cringy memes.

And each required explicit acceptance of a friend request. As opposed to a gaggle of news sources that crop up whenever.

The gaggle of sources needed you to either like their pages or have friends who like or comment on them.
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