Facebook's News Feed

Before I deleted my Facebook account the first time I had ~&gt; 2,000 friends. These were all people who knew me or of me, mainly from my community. My wife has topped out well above that. She still uses it.<p>You might think going from 2000 friends to zero Facebook would be a big social change. It wasn&#x27;t really. Beyond about 10 friends (well below whatshisnames number) Facebook didn&#x27;t increase its social value to me. At 2,000 it was just a time waste.<p>I don&#x27;t really need to know what is happening in the lives of so many people. My real tribe isn&#x27;t that big. Facebook didn&#x27;t deepen my relationships either. It didn&#x27;t enrich my life.<p>I got back on about two years ago and added plenty of people. By then Facebook had become this kind of Twitter for idiots&#x2F;drudge report&#x2F;unmoderated Reddit&#x2F;MySpace so I deleted it.<p>I recently created an account (my third) and I think I have about 5 friends on there. I added them mainly because a real friend died. It&#x27;s not a great experience. My feed is full of stuff friends liked and stuff I don&#x27;t understand why Facebook thinks is relevant to me.<p>Facebook&#x27;s land grab worked. They&#x27;re huge but their product makes me feel like I walked into a dirty gas station bathroom.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m naive but couldn&#x27;t a product that deepens relationships (quality not quantity) be a more stable long term business?

I see the optimization problem they face. Promote non-personal content to generate short term revenue versus promote personal content to minimize long-term churn. It looks like their data scientists and business analysts have identified significant risk to pursuing the former and advocate the latter, for now.<p>In other words this has nothing to do with a return to claimed core values, but a shift in strategy to remain afloat for as long as possible.

This might be just me but,<p>On facebook &#x27;friend&#x27; mostly means someone you met once, your colleagues or those people you went to high school with and lost connection etc. Also, even at the age of 35, I feel I have some &quot;uncool&quot; family connections there. I can&#x27;t image what it&#x27;s like for teenagers. Facebook friendships don&#x27;t mean anything for most of the people.<p>Therefore, I don&#x27;t want to see their babies taking their first steps. I just don&#x27;t care. Those who I care, I follow on other platforms actually.<p>Not sure how this will play out.

The way I see it, Facebook&#x27;s newsfeed has already penalized organic reach so severely it doesn&#x27;t really doesn&#x27;t provide a strong growth channel for small businesses any more. Nowadays, Pages are better used to communicate with existing customers by distributing content to a highly engaged, much smaller audience (which would still see your posts in their newsfeed).<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.yalabot.com&#x2F;facebooks-changing-the-newsfeed-algorithm-and-it-really-doesn-t-matter-2c2461df8a30#.7ybp6dgnq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.yalabot.com&#x2F;facebooks-changing-the-newsfeed-alg...</a>

One thing I&#x27;ve noticed (and I don&#x27;t have any hard data for this, just anecdotal evidence) is that the rate of my friends sharing memories on Facebook has dropped a lot. It seems like more and more people are going to other networks&#x2F;sites to share, and Facebook not so much. Messaging and communication is still going strong, but posting photos and stuff not so much.<p>These changes, plus the features I&#x27;ve noticed lately that push up &quot;your past memories&quot; or &quot;friendship anniversaries&quot; certainly seem to be an attempt to get people posting more again, and remind them that what Facebook wants them to do is make this their &#x27;social database&#x27;.

I&#x27;m always annoyed at Facebook&#x27;s definition of &quot;news&quot; being about babies, marriages, etc. Just like listening to someone talk about their kids in real life, I just don&#x27;t really care.<p>On the other hand, I do like the articles and commentary people post for the most part. It&#x27;s more interesting to know my friends opinions than some Reddit stranger&#x27;s. Those article discussions are more like what I talk about when I&#x27;m out with friends than the babies and vacations the Facebook news feed wants to focus on.<p>In psychology, memory is divided into autobiographical and semantic. I think Facebook &quot;news&quot; needs to be split into the same categories as well.<p>As in having a &#x27;news feed&#x27; that updates you on everyone&#x27;s life, and an &#x27;issues feed&#x27; where you can talk with your friends about what&#x27;s going on in the world.

I wonder if the author (Om Malik) has revised his thinking on a related matter:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;om.co&#x2F;2016&#x2F;04&#x2F;25&#x2F;should-you-publish-on-facebook-first&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;om.co&#x2F;2016&#x2F;04&#x2F;25&#x2F;should-you-publish-on-facebook-first...</a><p>&gt; <i>My parting comment (which he included in the final piece) was that if I were to start a publication, it would be on Facebook (perhaps as a Facebook page). Today I learned that Vox Media is going to launch Circuit Breaker, a gadget blog, as a Facebook-only publication. (It will also have it as a section of The Verge on the web. I call this a web-based backup&#x2F;archive.)</i><p>&gt; <i>Despite hand-wringing by traditonalists, I believe Vox’s decision is bold and the right one: In the post-browser-only world, it makes perfect sense to go where the audience lives. I am not clear how well it will monetize this effort. After all, Facebook is a selfish partner when it comes to monetization.</i><p>At least The Verge&#x2F;Vox is savvy enough to manage a workflow that pushes to both Facebook and the Web...but I imagine prioritizing FB means doing much less A&#x2F;B testing and other optimizations that are needed to create a refined Web product.

A lot of us are thinking Facebook made this decision without any research and AB testing. I belive a change this big had to prove it&#x27;s usefulness I pilot runs before going public. Maybe we will share more I&#x27;m Facebook after this change is in effect. By we I mean Facebook uses. Hacker news crowd of course is a very small and unusual niche of Facebook users.

Facebook weighs&#x27;share&#x27; more than anything else which I don&#x27;t think is cool. I personally might not want to share a post or anything but it shouldn&#x27;t mean I don&#x27;t like it. Yes, interaction is crucial but narrowing it down to just sharing isn&#x27;t a good measure. The official explanation by facebook seems to hint at providing monetary benefit to the company by playing on business&#x27; money. It seems facebook is running out of funds and is coining out ways to weed out more money from businesses. Thoughts?

I imagine the best solution is to stop using the Facebook news feed. There are better way to get information . I had no idea people still regularly check their Facebook

I started seeing an unreasonable amount of friend&#x27;s page likes as little page ads. A lot of those, in close succession. Not sure that is what they had in mind.

<i>&gt; ... in deciding to prioritize one kind of post over another for reasons that seem to have little to do with what individuals are asking for, Facebook is once again confusing its users.</i><p>Has Facebook (or media or academia) publicly asked users how they want posts to be prioritized? This data would inform investors, management and algorithms.

There&#x27;s only so much you can innovate with a reverse chronological list of content. After a while one starts revisiting old territory. Perhaps Facebook needs to start thinking about alternative presentation formats?

I go on Facebook for the sole purpose of posting anti-Facebook news articles and related items. I do sometimes engage with other crap when I&#x27;m there, but the majority of the occasions it&#x27;s a waste of time.