Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 133 posts

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

#91

Post by gnicholas »

sigmar wrote: post #83
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…

>only 1 - 2 times a month I have suspected that facebook punishes your visibility if you don't post frequently (like a few times a day). Have you tried posting much more often than two times a month? Try two a day and see if your average engagement increases.

I've found the opposite — posting frequently results in decreased visibility in my experience. My wife and I trade off posting family photos of our kid, and whenever one of us has recently posted the photo gets much less of a reaction (i.e., 25 likes instead of 65).

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

#92

Post by backtoyoujim »

mtberatwork wrote: post #76
kevin_b_er wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they're not publishers anymore. Facebook decides what can be seen, and thus facebook is now the publisher.

Facebook isn't the publisher. They aren't producing the content. They are just another distributor...albeit a very large one.

Distributor is not quite right.

If I run a shop that sells magazines, and I order a four magazines to fill some rack space in the shop the distributor does not decide to send you two and black hole the rest of your order.

They send you what you ordered.

Facebook is not a distributor. They are acting as gatekeepers, too.

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

#93

Post by ravenstine »

revicon wrote: post #90
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…

For me, I'm only interested in postings about "stupid life updates" as you call them when I'm on Facebook. I got so sick of the "10 ways batman is better than superman" articles that I started blocking every external site I saw being posted on my feed. And I mean everything, wsj, nyt, USA Today, etc etc etc. Facebook is not a newsreader, it's a place where I go to see "stupid life events" from my friends and family t…

There's validity in both positions. I am generally the same in that I only use Facebook for stupid life events and keeping in touch with people. Then again, I'd prefer not to use Facebook at all, but these days you are pretty much a no one without a FB profile. Nobody answers their phone and they hardly even text at this point.

Anyway, the problem is that Facebook pretends that it wants to make people "more connected", yet they also want to be the place where people get their news, and the only comments on current events that ever bubble up are the first handful of inflammatory nonsense. Post anything even 30 minutes after the fact, and the likelihood it gets seen drops drastically. Note that this mostly applies to comments made on posts from the media. Make a non-vapid comment on a friend's post, or make a post that's more than a sentence long, and it may never get seen. There were plenty of times when I made posts or comments that should have offended my friends, but when asked if they sae that activity, they had no idea what I was talking about. Yet they somehow always know about my family photos when I add them.

I'd be okay with it if Facebook wasn't also full of shit about being a place for discussion and for aggregating news. Sure, you and I can get our news elsewhere, but most people will continue to use the trending posts as a lens to view the world with. For things that arent vapid, I am going to move to Minds.com. I'm getting sick of Zuckerberg.

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

#94

Post by zajd »

padseeker wrote: post #72
strict9 wrote: post #16

FB has always prioritized content which doesn't lead them to see ads elsewhere (like photos instead of links), but maybe it's something else. I live in Chicago and subscribe to the Sunday edition. I also read the digital edition, and have found it lacking, particularly since inauguration. In recent months Michael Ferro became the majority shareholder in the Tribune, a person obsessed with celebrities and not so much…

I work for the Trib, and read it every day. While your comment about Ferro is true, being interested in hanging with celebrities, I have not noticed a change in the content with Ferro in charge. The Trib has always focused on very local stuff - city and state politics, the midwest, local sports teams, the spike in murders, etc. I don't think that is going to change. I think the editorial board would like to believe i…

Maybe ad revenue isn't the correct way to fund a newspaper these days. Disruption!

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

#95

Post by ballenf »

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…

FB is a proficient patent filer and here is just one of several hundred they've been issues in 2017:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

It covers how FB uses "influencer" activity to determine what a "viewer" would see. There's nothing new here that I see, but for all the people talking about and trying to understand FB I don't see anyone reading their patents.

It's a lot of work and takes some practice parsing things out, but there is value there in understanding the general direction FB is going or where they are spending their r&d dollars.

Side note: all the people asking why a good FB alternative hasn't arisen should take a look at these patents to realize how much of what we take for granted that FB does is prohibited for a competitor. FB is defining and locking out competitors from what the worlds thinks a social network is.

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

#96

Post by zero_shift »

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.

> Why is it so terrible that they control the order of the feed?

Because for more and more people, social media is becoming 'the news', and this gives Facebook certain obligations to treat content fairly and act transparently.

Whether this state of affairs is intentional or not is moot - FB knows its power and reach. (Though I struggle to believe FB really is just some naive company that suddenly had greatness 'thrust upon them' - they've spent a good ten years proselytising their "platform", after all)

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

#97

Post by ashark »

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.

Not knowing how/where/to-whom my posts would show up (and how/where others' posts or status updates or whatever could be seen) was my biggest (non-privacy-related) problem with Facebook when I briefly tried it back in '09 or so. Their UI was so damn confusing that I quickly gave up on it. Seems like it's only gotten worse, but I guess most people don't mind not knowing what a given action will actually do. It felt to me like a giant step back as a communication tool, adding levels of uncertainty and chance for no good reason.

Add the fact that their weighting of posts also shapes conversations in possibly-unpredictable (or predictable, deliberately-manipulative) ways and yeah, I object to it.

Then again I also find Twitter's UI to be fairly confusing (and really stressful, god it's messy). Less so, but still. So maybe I'm just bad at understanding GUIs. Back to SMS, IRC, and Basic HTML GMail for me.

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

#98

Post by vkou »

zajd wrote: post #94
padseeker wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for the Trib, and read it every day. While your comment about Ferro is true, being interested in hanging with celebrities, I have not noticed a change in the content with Ferro in charge. The Trib has always focused on very local stuff - city and state politics, the midwest, local sports teams, the spike in murders, etc. I don't think that is going to change. I think the editorial board would like to believe i…

Maybe ad revenue isn't the correct way to fund a newspaper these days. Disruption!

Disruption - the rallying cry of an industry that is notorious for displacing working, paid products, by creating non-working free products.

The latter either start non-working, or become non-working once the money/interest runs out, and they shut down.

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

#99

Post by icebraining »

Declanomous wrote: post #78
basch wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"hurt user engagement" if Facebook is personalizing everyones feed based on what they click, isnt the clicker to blame for the result of personalization, not the technology provider. it sounds like your friends didnt engage with your posts, they did engage with other posts, and the facebook feedback loop built them a filter bubble of things they liked more than your posts.

I blame Facebook. I've ranted on HN about what I consider to be an abuse of 'curation' in the past, but I think 'curation' is killing the internet. I agree with the grandparent about Facebook killing engagement, but the place I noticed it first was Last.fm. I used to spend tons of time on Last.fm looking up music. I made sure every track I played was scrobbled, and I listened to their recommendations all of the time.…

Seems like you dislike bad curation specifically, rather than curation itself. After all, Last.fm was already curating the songs they recommended (it wasn't like they literally threw a random sample of all their catalog).

That said, I agree with you that this kind of "finding the closest match" model is quite silly for recommendation systems. And you can see the same problems with ad matching too.

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

#100

Post by [deleted] »

Declanomous wrote: post #78
basch wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"hurt user engagement" if Facebook is personalizing everyones feed based on what they click, isnt the clicker to blame for the result of personalization, not the technology provider. it sounds like your friends didnt engage with your posts, they did engage with other posts, and the facebook feedback loop built them a filter bubble of things they liked more than your posts.

I blame Facebook. I've ranted on HN about what I consider to be an abuse of 'curation' in the past, but I think 'curation' is killing the internet. I agree with the grandparent about Facebook killing engagement, but the place I noticed it first was Last.fm. I used to spend tons of time on Last.fm looking up music. I made sure every track I played was scrobbled, and I listened to their recommendations all of the time.…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN