Facebook's Adam Mosseri on Why You'll See Less Video, More from Friends

Everybody uses FB differently. Some people use it to share and read news. Others as an "aggregator" for different services (Insta, Twitter...). Others for groups. Or chats. Or to connect with businesses. I use it exclusively to share posts and pics with friends.

However, after years and years of using the "hide all content from (domain)" feature, the algorithm hasn't yet learned that I want to read zero news in Facebook. If I could block domains inside FB I'll be the happiest -- actually, let me whitelist a few pic sharing sites and block the rest of the web. For me, FB is not RSS. But, for some people, it is.

I love Facebook. I will not "quit". People who do that, I understand. But it lets me connect with people that I have no other way of communicating with.

Wrapping up, I'm sure that Facebook has identified 5-6 clear use cases of its platform. Why isn't the news feed tailored for them? I simply do not understand it. Give more of what I want, or my engagement will drop. Give me my friends posts, and a few ads in between, and I'll be a happy Facebook user, surely it can't be that hard?

Exactly.

- The majority of people will never seek out settings like this, so the engineering effort you spend on these sorts of classifiers is only going to benefit a minority. Facebook has a lot of engineers to throw at these problems, so that's not the end of the world, but all else equal they'll prefer improvements that have a better chance of helping the whole userbase.

- Trying to coax people to look at settings is tricky. Users have very limited patience for interruptions, and a lot of it is already taken up with important flows like "hey did you know your password is terrible?"

- Exposing settings like this kind of ties down some of the details of your system. Say you start with 6 different categories, and I choose 3 of them. Fast forward a couple of years, and now there are 30 categories. If I haven't changed anything, do I still have only 3, or do I now have 15? That's gonna depend on the details, of course, but one problem is that not everyone will interpret the old-categories-new-categories relationship in the same way, and some users are going to end up confused or disappointed.

- Users don't necessarily know what they want, especially looking farther into the future. Maybe it's an election year, and I get tired of politics, and I say "no political news for me please." A year later, maybe I'd be interested in some of the political news that's happening, but there's nothing prompting me to go back and change that setting. Trying to put a time-limit on these filters, or prompting users to change them, adds more and more to the clutter.

I think Facebook is a company that is based on insidious manipulations and deceptions.* It's about making the users think that they are freeing themselves and becoming more connected, when the company is actually restricting them and locking them in. It seems unlikely that they would give users control in a way that might make the site less sticky.

* I could provide specific examples, but it would be a long comment. I took screenshots of examples before I quit.