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Facebook removed the news feed algorithm in an experiment

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Re: Facebook removed the news feed algorithm in an experiment

#111

Post by pipeline_peak »

fsflover wrote: post #65
pipeline_peak wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true, I’ve looked at Twitter and went “how is something so basic in functionality not an open standard?”. Although it’s not always as intuitive as email. IRC could’ve extended into something like Discord had it not been so programmer centric. Either way, these people have us by the balls over already established syndication capabilities like RSS, just weighted in their direction(s).

> I’ve looked at Twitter and went “how is something so basic in functionality not an open standard?”. Mastodon (Activity Pub) is basically the open standard you are looking for here.

I know, and I've seen it. A lot of the major publishers like CNN are loosely mirrored and far less consistent.

With enough man power, you can recreate anything, but without a strong userbase, well...

And don't even get me started on a name like "Mastodon", lol.

Re: Facebook removed the news feed algorithm in an experiment

#112

Post by xg15 »

Zak wrote: post #37
asimpletune wrote: post #12

I don’t remember what Facebook had instead of a news feed in 2008, but I do remember thinking Facebook was so cool then. When messenger came out, it was amazing. It was totally normal then to message random people who you thought were cool and just have a conversation. I would even get random chats from Facebook employees. It just seemed so different then than now. I’m just trying to piece together the evolution of F…

According to Wikipedia, Facebook had a news feed in 2008; it was added in 2006, before which it was necessary to view a user's profile to see their posts. The switch to an algorithmically generated, rather than chronological feed started in 2011. Facebook's decline, for me was not due to the feed being algorithmic. I think it got better around that time; showing original content from people I like to interact with fi…

I have the strong suspicion that Facebook often decides first that it wants to show me some post, then does some graph-walking and invents a "reason" after the fact why that post was somehow related to my friends list.

At least that would explain why a video that some friend of a friend watched 3 days ago is suddenly at the top of my newsfeed.

Re: Facebook removed the news feed algorithm in an experiment

#113

Post by fullshark »

tomjen3 wrote: post #36
asimpletune wrote: post #12

I don’t remember what Facebook had instead of a news feed in 2008, but I do remember thinking Facebook was so cool then. When messenger came out, it was amazing. It was totally normal then to message random people who you thought were cool and just have a conversation. I would even get random chats from Facebook employees. It just seemed so different then than now. I’m just trying to piece together the evolution of F…

Maybe we were just younger and had friends who did cooler things?

Definitely part of it, also we were more naive and willing to share more of our lives online. It’s why youth social networks seem alive and others seem to be decaying.

Re: Facebook removed the news feed algorithm in an experiment

#114

Post by starchild_3001 »

This is hilarious (what Facebook calls meaningful!). I know people where back and forth comments with them are a lot less than meaningful or desired.

"Meaningful Social Interactions — the back and forth comments between friends that Facebook optimizes for."

Re: Facebook removed the news feed algorithm in an experiment

#115

Post by jacurtis »

lanerobertlane wrote: post #32

When people argue against the 'news feed algorithm' they mean anything other than a reverse chronological feed of posts from the people they follow. status updates, and interactions between people/pages you both follow. This article mentions that they turned the news feed off but people were still hiding posts from pages they don't follow, which friends had commented on. These shouldn't appear in a news feed that is…

> "Without a News Feed algorithm, engagement on Facebook drops significantly, people hide 50% more posts, content from Facebook Groups rises to the top, and — surprisingly — Facebook makes even more money from users scrolling through the News Feed."

Yes, it is confusing when they say they "turned off the algorithm" because what it sounds like is they are still using an algorithm here, just a far worse version of one, maybe an earlier version of the algorithm.

But if posts are "rising to the top" and "they saw double the amount of posts from public pages they don’t follow, often because friends commented on those pages". This still sounds like an algorithm is ranking posts, just in a "worse" way.

Removing the algorithm to me would mean seeing posts in a reverse-chronological order as they happened. Everything would appear equally. Maybe some controls are given to users to hide certain types of items, such as 2nd degree pages (pages your friends follow and comment on, but you do not follow), group posts, and so on.

But as soon as you re-order posts, you are using an algorithm. It is very disingenuous to claim you removed an algorithm when all you really did was replace it with a worse algorithm. Then justify your actions because the worse algorithm performed worse (wow shocking i know).

Re: Facebook removed the news feed algorithm in an experiment

#116

Post by CompuHacker »

pishpash wrote: post #87
timbit42 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FBPurity is a browser plugin that lets you decide what to see on FB. You can decide to only see what friends post and not what they like, share, or comment on, etc.

Doesn't seem to work, won't filter out Sponsored posts despite the option being selected...

Facebook changes the way Spοnsored content is formatted on a moment to moment basis, sometimes in a way that breaks accessibility software, to foil exactly this kind of software, and ad-blockers.

Re: Facebook removed the news feed algorithm in an experiment

#117

Post by strken »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #74
lanerobertlane wrote: post #32

When people argue against the 'news feed algorithm' they mean anything other than a reverse chronological feed of posts from the people they follow. status updates, and interactions between people/pages you both follow. This article mentions that they turned the news feed off but people were still hiding posts from pages they don't follow, which friends had commented on. These shouldn't appear in a news feed that is…

100% agree. In addition, look at their metrics. When it comes to "meaningful social interaction", calling Uncle Joey a stupid ass because he posted another semi-racist Obama meme is the same as telling Cousin Jane you like her baby pics. I should HOPE "meaningful social interactions" go down with a reverse-chron, friends-only feed.

They might do sentiment analysis, in which case you'd have to put thinly veiled sarcasm in your reply to Uncle Joey to be counted.

Re: Facebook removed the news feed algorithm in an experiment

#118

Post by novok »

jacurtis wrote: post #115
lanerobertlane wrote: post #32

When people argue against the 'news feed algorithm' they mean anything other than a reverse chronological feed of posts from the people they follow. status updates, and interactions between people/pages you both follow. This article mentions that they turned the news feed off but people were still hiding posts from pages they don't follow, which friends had commented on. These shouldn't appear in a news feed that is…

> "Without a News Feed algorithm, engagement on Facebook drops significantly, people hide 50% more posts, content from Facebook Groups rises to the top, and — surprisingly — Facebook makes even more money from users scrolling through the News Feed." Yes, it is confusing when they say they "turned off the algorithm" because what it sounds like is they are still using an algorithm here, just a far worse version of one,…

I think it's still legit to think of what they did was turning off the algorithmic filtering, but did not turn off the algorithmic event generation. To be fair although, group and friend posts are things people explicitly subscribed to, it's only the friend comments that they didn't explicitly subscribe to. Which makes me think, did they do a version of the experiment without "people commented on X" items and see what happened?

I think the results would be somewhat similar although, because group activity will still dominate. Knowing a place like FB although, they probably tried all the combinations to see what happened. I'm curious what those results are too.

Re: Facebook removed the news feed algorithm in an experiment

#119

Post by chadlavi »

jacurtis wrote: post #115
lanerobertlane wrote: post #32

When people argue against the 'news feed algorithm' they mean anything other than a reverse chronological feed of posts from the people they follow. status updates, and interactions between people/pages you both follow. This article mentions that they turned the news feed off but people were still hiding posts from pages they don't follow, which friends had commented on. These shouldn't appear in a news feed that is…

> "Without a News Feed algorithm, engagement on Facebook drops significantly, people hide 50% more posts, content from Facebook Groups rises to the top, and — surprisingly — Facebook makes even more money from users scrolling through the News Feed." Yes, it is confusing when they say they "turned off the algorithm" because what it sounds like is they are still using an algorithm here, just a far worse version of one,…

it seems like they're using algorithm to mean "a more complicated means of calculating what to show you," and they're saying there is no algorithm involved when they use a simple means of determining what to show you. Which is of course also an algorithm -- when a person the user is friends with interacts with something, show that in the user's feed. But algorithm somehow means magic nowadays.

Re: Facebook removed the news feed algorithm in an experiment

#120

Post by torben-friis »

yodsanklai wrote: post #93

I'm under the impression that people are getting irrationally afraid of "algorithms". Like if some evil AI is controlling people mind. People wants to read the stuff they are interested in. No algorithm is forcing people to watch fox news for instance. That being said, FB should give the option to disable the news feed algorithm (or to have several version to choose from maybe), if that makes people happy.

>People wants to read the stuff they are interested in. No algorithm is forcing people to watch fox news for instance.

I think a mistake is thinking of people as static sets of tastes and interests. No one is going to be fed news that are a big deviation from their current worldview, but small deltas pile up over time.

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