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 not curated as they are not following that page, and is one of the things people are complaining about in the algorithm.
They didn't test the algorithm vs no algorithm, they tested the current algorithm vs another algorithm.
When Facebook started changing their timeline and messing up the chronological order of posts it had a really strange effect on reality. Old news stories and posts were showing up for many months late, and they were reminding people about their pets that died years before as well, many people have forgotten that.
The best option would be to abandon the ideal that one single news feed is best for everyone and give control back to users along with an option for a truly chronological time line. Thy should also make multiple pages that rank posts based on taxonomy that users can browse content that is most liked by everyone on the platform.
The only reason why Facebook wants to be able to have singular time lines is so that they can push targeted ads without it becoming obvious to their user base, but if the taxonomy pages were titled and organized properly, the ads would be somewhat more relevant by nature, and not require them to invade everyone's privacy like they have been doing thus far.
I should HOPE "meaningful social interactions" go down with a reverse-chron, friends-only 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).
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.
Simple reverse chronological order feed with no ranking.
Holy cow do FB just shove a bunch of shit into the feed.
Twitter also implemented a timer so that, if you choose simple reverse chron, it forces you back into the ranking algorithm after a certain period of time.
Hmm, I wonder why they'd go to the trouble to do that? Maybe these social networks have motivations that override user experience?
The misdirection term here is 'news feed ranking algorithm'... and what that means in the experiment versus what you might think that means, huge difference. e.g. I think most would assume the algorithm is responsible for showing you an unknown post that a friend merely liked, but it's right there in the article as still happening.
The results and how people used it don't at all say to me that they enjoyed it less, it shows explicit care & intention to curate their own feed by hiding what they don't like.. which is how it should be. If they find the group posts too overwhelming, they can mute/unfollow/leave, or other methods of grouping posts can be explored.
But look, they did this one bad science experiment, and now it's taken as fact and becomes folklore.
When it comes to Facebook it always feels like I'm being steered towards topics that yield monetizable verbiage. If a friend likes an upcoming concert I'll definitely hear about it loud and clear - while as an upcoming picnic or personal project being planned is less likely to float to the top.
[0] Never mind the more obvious problem that "people prefer it" is not a great excuse for intentionally makinga product as addictive as possible.
What evidence would that be?
I don't think having to actively force a feature on your audience is a good sign that they prefer it.
I’m just trying to piece together the evolution of Facebook, feeds, and then when I stopped caring. Like, I don’t think the feed was always like this. At one point there was nothing, sure, but there was also at one point a reverse chronically sorted log of what your friends were doing I think? That was the best. By the time my parents were on I think there was a few years of overlap before I just forgot about it.
The major difference is what people are posting, and how tangentially related to your network, the posts on your newsfeed are.
Back then celebrities and news media weren't part of the platform, so you didn't really have these major intersections in the graph. I also believe that you had to re-share in order to push a post into a node that isn't directly connected to the posts author. Today a like is enough.
The reason why facebook is uncool now, is a mix between who the active users are, and how much room and focus facebook puts on links to newssite and posts by people who aren't your friends.
This is why Facebook/IG is unrecoverable to me as a destination for connecting with the people I care about. Instead, it's become iMessage and I'm quite happy about that. No ads and the conversations/photos are a lot more authentic compared with social media.
I still love social media as a form (I think), it's just become more media and less social.
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 first is a positive experience. What's not positive is showing me most things other than original content from my friends.
I'm not sure why the change happened, but at some point it did. Most of what I see posted on Facebook now is not original content from my friends. I mostly don't want to see third-party content. The share button was there long before I noticed this trend, but people are using it a lot more. I just went and cataloged 50 algorithmically-chosen posts. Here's the distribution:
Shared third-party post or link: 24
Original text: 9
Original image: 9
Directly-posted image of third-party content: 3
Promotion of a physical product by a page I follow: 2
Promotion of media by a page I follow: 2
Promoting own event: 1
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.
Shared third-party content: 16
Original text: 5
Promoting own event: 4
Original image/video: 11
Directly-posted image of third-party content: 0
Page promoting product: 1
Page promoting media: 5
Group activity: 8
What would really make Facebook better for me is an algorithm that prefers original content. It might not be enough if that was something I could enable myself because what gets interaction from others affects what people post.
I wonder why it didn't happen in 2012. I remember ACA arguments on Facebook but while they were contentious, they were generally value-driven and not based off of batshit lies.
On Quora, I just turned off that feature. Almost every single message I got was "hi", from somebody who was trying to either sell me crypto or catfish me.
Maybe there's a period when a new open messaging system opens you up to just fun new people, but when it grows, spammers and scammers will follow. Glad you enjoyed Facebook before everybody got to enjoy Facebook, but most people never saw it like that.
Do you not have a phone number that anyone can call? Or an e-mail address that anyone can send to? Or have you used a platform like IRC that allows users anyone to send you direct messages?
> Glad you enjoyed Facebook before everybody got to enjoy Facebook, but most people never saw it like that
Facebook messenger isn't overrun by spammers. I've only used the messenger a handful of times but IIRC it wasn't hard to tell the difference between messages from friends and requests from people I wasn't friends with.
Spam detection also isn't terribly difficult at scale. Spammers need to message thousands or more accounts to even have a chance at converting someone, which is so far away from the normal use patterns of a real user that it's easy to flag.
+
Facebook should allow you to go filter and show posts using a calendar. Like all post from X date to Y date, from this location / friends. It will actually improve usage.
Miss the old photo sharing days.
The problem is that if Facebook implemented this site wide engagement would drop dramatically. No one really posts to Facebook anymore, people love it when you do, because it's actually kinda novel.
Facebook doesn't actually hide things when you make them show none from X. I see many of those things after I hide all them.
so whilst in theory it sounds good, in practice, not so much
While transparency and control of the "ranking algorithm" is important, I reject the implication that infiniscroll content feed is the best that social media can ever be.
Facebook (and others) have decided that discovery, chores, social upkeep, political activism, learning etc all belong in One Big Recommendation System. This is entirely new territory from a psychological perspective: Throughout history, humans have focused largely on one mental task at a time. You don't read Dostoevsky while having a drink with your friends, or answer emails while watching TV. Mental multitasking quickly converges on the low effort/instant gratification task. Add your favorite attention disorder to amplify this problem to the point of surrender.
Any meaningful alternative needs to account for these psychological biases. Although this is new territory, we've been through this before - with porn. Basically, if you mix porn with other content, then porn becomes predominant. Hence, any non-porn platform needs to ban porn. Reddit is an interesting counter-example, because their subreddit barriers work pretty damn well, so even though there is porn on the platform, it hasn't infected everything else.
Similar to the porn issue, we'll never extinguish celebrity clickbait, conspiracy theories and racist uncle posting memes. However, we might be able to partition it. How about designing tech which makes it POSSIBLE to avoid "crap", at least temporarily, without an outright boycott, careful curation or browser extensions?
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.
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.
FB should explore these options more. It sounds like there has to be more done here than just turning off the smart feed entirely.
It's common when interacting with an engagement loop to experience a loss of agency (perceived, at least). People don't like that feeling, even when they like the content they are being shown.
Machines can be built to exploit odd elements of human psychology. I strongly recommend the book Addiction by Design.
Like all of the other decentralized social media platforms that most people just don't care about? I'd argue that social media has become so polarized that, no matter their views, most people will want some sort of centralized body setting rules that act in their (the user's) interests.
>... and doesn't rely on advertising money.
People have widely adopted social media because they're not charged anything (aside from their privacy being invaded) to use it. How is such a platform staying online without charging users or using advertiser money?
Platforms that eschew psychological manipulation don't grow as large. That is the proverbial cat.
People are exchanging time for money. They will do this.
"Meaningful Social Interactions — the back and forth comments between friends that Facebook optimizes for."
Not very interesting without understanding these algorithms. "Integrity pass" seems a good marketing name, but, at least this article, does not explain how it works. It would be like reviewing the Boing 737 Max and only knowing MCAS as "that thingy that makes the plane easy to fly" instead of http://www.b737.org.uk/mcas.htm
The obvious conclusion one can draw is that the product is primarily engineered to control users' information intake, and only secondarily to make money.
How so?
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: I don't mind being downvoted, but I would really like to know why that's the case so I can improve how I contribute to the forum.
