11 ms·

Facebook and its news feed algorithm

123 points by piyushmakhija 11y ago

franze 11y ago
a TL;DR would be strongly appreciated, the first page is basically: .... bla bla .... went to the toilet ...
- tombrossman 11y ago
  You can stop reading at the second paragraph which has your TL;DR "No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside the company will tell you." but it is an interesting article so maybe give it another shot. Bottom line is that it constantly changes just like Google's algorithms for search change, and if you find one person to explain it to you correctly one day they will likely have it wrong next week.
bpicolo 11y ago
In my experience, Facebook pretty much just shoves all photo (visual) content to the top. Kind of frustrating. Not actually possible to find people talking on facebook anymore, it's just single-column pinterest. The whole internet is sort of evolving into photo content these days it feels like. Twitter, tumblr, pinterest, reddit...all very photo focused.
- peterhadlaw 11y ago
  As a hobbyist photographer, I appreciate being able to share my photos, however I don't feel like throwing the "art gallery" at the user. That's why I take a much humbler approach by just posting my pictures to my own personal website's gallery. If someone were to stumble across it, great, otherwise no harm. It also helps that I have canceled my Facebook account.
- fsckin 11y ago
  This. I missed repeated posts from a good friend asking for help. If I had seen them, I would have been there in 10 minutes. They committed suicide exactly 1 month ago. Just goes to show how incredibly important some algorithms can be.
  - randycupertino 11y ago
    Fuck man. I'm sorry about your friend. That really fucking sucks.
- randycupertino 11y ago
  It's just like how in reddit when the "front page" subs get too popular, the lowest-value, easiest hanging fruit, fastest digestible content (images) always floats to the top, same with the news feed. The lengthy quality discussion posts get bogged down and the popcorn candy content fluff of memes overrun everything.
TheBiv 11y ago
Title: How Facebook's news feed algorithm works Second Paragraph: "No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside the company will tell you."
- dang 11y ago
  Yeah, that's bad. We changed it to something generic. If anyone suggests a better title we can change it again.
  - soneca 11y ago
    The current article title is fair enough i guess: "Who Controls Your Facebook Feed" (i guess they changed it themselves, as the URL shows this old title)
    - dang 11y ago
      Presumably nobody outside Facebook knows that either though?
      - soneca 11y ago
        But the subtitle answers it fairly (IMO): "A small team of engineers in Menlo Park. A panel of anonymous power users around the world. And, increasingly, you." And they not claim they know themselves.
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    I think that sentence was somewhat hyperbolic. It doesn't mean that there is literally no information about how Facebook works, just that it's a bit secretive. The rest of the article does go into many details about the behind the scenes of Facebook's algorithm. And shares a number of interesting details about how it works, and how decisions about it are made. So I would say the title isn't that bad.
- askafriend 11y ago
  Xfb here, no one inside the company knows exactly how newsfeed works either. The infrastructure and all of the components involved in generating and rendering newsfeed at this point (and for a while) have been far too large for any single person to understand. It's generally accepted as a mystery, even to those working on components of newafeed. I worked on a component of newsfeed for a while, and yet had no clue how the rest of the system worked despite trying. That's the level of complexity involved here.
faide 11y ago
My problem with the news feed is how non-deterministic the results are. There have been so many cases where I will see a post/photo/video that I find interesting, but fuck me if I ever want to find it again on a different device or at some point in the future if I didn't bookmark it or remember who posted it and when. It always seems like a random shuffling of the deck when I load the page, and it's incredibly frustrating.
- yeukhon 11y ago
  My biggest problem seems to be a bug, not sure if it is FB or browser. But from time to time as you scroll down the news feed, FB displays the stuff you have already seen from the beginning. Sounds like a problem with request firing off and not able to retrieve and populate stuff from the beginning again. There is also no way to "remember this" unless you like the post.
  - soneca 11y ago
    I started having the exact same problem on my Windows Phone FB app. Took some time to realize it was a bug and not a weird deja vu of mine.
  - jlgaddis 11y ago
    Click the little drop down arrow at the top right of each post. On many of them (maybe not all -- I can't check right now), there's now a "Save" option.
    - yeukhon 11y ago
      Ah great! Thanks.
  - what_ever 11y ago
    Yup that bug is really annoying. I have observed it only kicks if you open a photo in the photo viewer and then go back to the home feed by closing the photo viewer.
- amelius 11y ago
noobie 11y ago
I wonder how they test it. I've unfollowed all but a couple of my close friends, the stories that show up are inconsistent (some date all the way back to December 25th but will show up every now and then). Most of their "liking and commenting" activities show up in the news feed but not in the close friends list. It's a mess.
- randycupertino 11y ago
  Unfollowing is freaking awesome. I unfollowed a bunch of my old college friends who "work from home" now and are caught up in MLM pyramid schemes selling beachbody, energy drinks, arbonne makeup and other MLM junk. It is awesome. I actually wonder how popular "unfollowing" is and if facebook is worried about it, because everyone I know is psyched about the ability to do it!
pmlnr 11y ago
I wonder is PageRank was applied instead how well would that work. As for recommendation algorithms, I still believe Last.fm is one of the best around, so there might be something to learn from those guys.
hudell 11y ago
My facebook timeline is the worst of all social networks. I unfollowed 90% of my friends that I don't care about, so it has very little data to show me, but instead of showing all of the content of those users, it still filters out most stuff by whatever criteria they use, so I often go days with the same content being shown on the top of my timeline (and missing a lot of posts that I actually wanted to see). Setting the feed to "Most Recent" usually gives better content, but the option unsets itself every other day.
- gs7 11y ago
  Here's a tip: bookmark https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr and you will always see the most recent feed. I've been using this for months now and it hasn't unset the most recent setting yet.
  - 1024core 11y ago
    But what about the app?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - gs7 11y ago
      Sadly I haven't figured out how to do this in the app yet :(
      - aneidon 11y ago
        I've switched to using the mobile web version. I personally find it much more responsive, and Facebook can't bug me with notifications anymore ;)
    - pconner 11y ago
      It's accessible from the Android app as a list (called "Most Recent"), from the same menu where you can access your timeline or the app settings.
artpepper 11y ago
> “Sometimes” isn’t the success rate you might expect for such a vaunted and feared bit of code. ... only if you don't understand machine learning.
gukov 11y ago
They completely refresh the feed hiding previously visible posts on pretty much every page load to feed you as much content as possible. Noticed something else with the corner of your eye right before clicking? Too bad, it's now gone.
mschuster91 11y ago
That algorithm crap was the reason I use facebook only as a messenger since they turned off the ability to use a Twitter-like feed. I don't need fucking "intelligent algorithms" to tell me what is important, I can read an arbitrary newspaper if I want filtered content.
dcole2929 11y ago
This was a pretty interesting article but as a sports fan I got distracted by the dig at Deflategate. Especially since the author not only mixed his sports metaphors (basketball to football) but also because it was an accusation scientifically proven to be untrue. It wasn't even relevant to the article really but stuff like that takes you out of it and you lose interest.
- subie 11y ago
  Yeah I'm a fan of the pats too.
overcast 11y ago
I think I managed to unfollow everyone except for a handful of "friends" on Facebook. End of 2015 I finally unfollowed Facebook by deactivating my account. It really did not provide anything useful for me in retrospect, so it had to go.
ilyanep 11y ago
Somewhat related: Today, I noticed that the vast majority of the articles on my news feed are "X liked/commented on Y's post" where Y is someone I don't know and the post isn't very good. I hope this is only a temporary change, but I installed a Chrome extension to filter these out <_<
- jgh 11y ago
  Or, worse, it's a thought-provoking article and you want to reply to a comment but can't.
balladeer 11y ago
I have again started to use Facebook since last few months. So I never see anything that I want to see. What surprises me is I always see exactly everything I don't want to see. I get people in friend suggestions that I must have removed (clicking on that "remove" button) like half dozens of times and they keep coming. I get stories that are not at all relevant to my taste, search history (even on other sites - assuming Fb tracks me anyway even with uBlock Origin) or anything I can attribute it to. I get page and group suggestions are ridiculously tangential to me as a person. I hide a story and I hide many similar stories and at times I also mark them spam, report but I still get more similar stories. Then they have some kind of limit on the number of posts/stories shown to you. At times, that limit seems to be like as low as 4-5 stories, sometimes more. This is very random. Then there is this completely irrelevant being shown to me throughout the week. Also, posts that I hide pop up again. I've not checked whether it happens all the time. Then one day I decided to check my friend's walls (the ones whom I have not unfollowed) and evaluate what I am actually seeing. Well, there were many text status updates that I would have loved to see, many nice photo shares, very few article shares (for some reason articles shared on Fb are not really the brightest imho), decent rants, some excellent political remark, most of these posts were recent and usually latest post on those walls, but guess what - they were not shown to me. I was shown posts that would force me to unfollow more friends and force me to close the Facebook tab a lot quicker than I might have otherwise. I guess maybe that's a good thing. As for this Slate article, felt like a paid PR piece. > No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside the company will tell you. Yeah, I guess, from an end user point of view, no one on the inside knows it either.
thetree1 11y ago
Funny how they casually throw in the fact that facebook knows how much time you spend on an article.
frik 11y ago
Facebook timeline change late 2011/early 2012 was catastrophic. It rendered Facebook useless to me. Before you could browse the timeline page in linear order (ordered by date descending) - no filtering, no bullshit - it was perfect. Now you see only certain posts of your friends that Facebook thinks might be interesting for you. Very bad change.
kmonad 11y ago
A lengthy, convoluted article that concludes "It would be premature to declare the age of the algorithm over before it really began". No shit. For those wondering whether or not to read it, I'd say it's not really worth your time as it lays out pretty obvious difficulties in finding what to add to an individual's news feed, but comes up with really weird "conclusions" throughout.
will_pseudonym 11y ago
I have unfollowed all but about 3-5 people on Facebook. It's pretty great. It's turned down the junk, but I miss out on stuff so much more often now. Oh well. The alternative is worse for me, and it makes me seek out real interactions with my network instead. That's a huge win for me. Facebook could win back some of my time by allowing me unfollow topics or other entities, across my timeline. I LOVE some of my friends, but I hate 99% of any post on the NFL. I'll certainly never seek it out. I unfollow people because it's just so frustrating to start to dislike the person ranting about something I don't care about, just because Facebook isn't smart enough to understand how human relationships work. In real life, I can tell that person, "Look, I love you, but you've got to stop talking about the NFL around me! You're showing me you're not listening to me or valuing me as a person by doing so..." And that's what Facebook is not doing: valuing me as a person. So, I unfollow everyone; the NFL is just one example.

123 points by piyushmakhija 11y ago

franze 11y ago

a TL;DR would be strongly appreciated, the first page is basically: .... bla bla .... went to the toilet ...

tombrossman 11y ago
You can stop reading at the second paragraph which has your TL;DR "No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside the company will tell you." but it is an interesting article so maybe give it another shot. Bottom line is that it constantly changes just like Google's algorithms for search change, and if you find one person to explain it to you correctly one day they will likely have it wrong next week.

bpicolo 11y ago

In my experience, Facebook pretty much just shoves all photo (visual) content to the top. Kind of frustrating. Not actually possible to find people talking on facebook anymore, it's just single-column pinterest. The whole internet is sort of evolving into photo content these days it feels like. Twitter, tumblr, pinterest, reddit...all very photo focused.

peterhadlaw 11y ago
As a hobbyist photographer, I appreciate being able to share my photos, however I don't feel like throwing the "art gallery" at the user. That's why I take a much humbler approach by just posting my pictures to my own personal website's gallery. If someone were to stumble across it, great, otherwise no harm. It also helps that I have canceled my Facebook account.
fsckin 11y ago
This. I missed repeated posts from a good friend asking for help. If I had seen them, I would have been there in 10 minutes. They committed suicide exactly 1 month ago. Just goes to show how incredibly important some algorithms can be.
- randycupertino 11y ago
  Fuck man. I'm sorry about your friend. That really fucking sucks.
randycupertino 11y ago
It's just like how in reddit when the "front page" subs get too popular, the lowest-value, easiest hanging fruit, fastest digestible content (images) always floats to the top, same with the news feed. The lengthy quality discussion posts get bogged down and the popcorn candy content fluff of memes overrun everything.

TheBiv 11y ago

Title: How Facebook's news feed algorithm works Second Paragraph: "No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside the company will tell you."

dang 11y ago
Yeah, that's bad. We changed it to something generic. If anyone suggests a better title we can change it again.
- soneca 11y ago
  The current article title is fair enough i guess: "Who Controls Your Facebook Feed" (i guess they changed it themselves, as the URL shows this old title)
  - dang 11y ago
    Presumably nobody outside Facebook knows that either though?
    - soneca 11y ago
      But the subtitle answers it fairly (IMO): "A small team of engineers in Menlo Park. A panel of anonymous power users around the world. And, increasingly, you." And they not claim they know themselves.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  I think that sentence was somewhat hyperbolic. It doesn't mean that there is literally no information about how Facebook works, just that it's a bit secretive. The rest of the article does go into many details about the behind the scenes of Facebook's algorithm. And shares a number of interesting details about how it works, and how decisions about it are made. So I would say the title isn't that bad.
askafriend 11y ago
Xfb here, no one inside the company knows exactly how newsfeed works either. The infrastructure and all of the components involved in generating and rendering newsfeed at this point (and for a while) have been far too large for any single person to understand. It's generally accepted as a mystery, even to those working on components of newafeed. I worked on a component of newsfeed for a while, and yet had no clue how the rest of the system worked despite trying. That's the level of complexity involved here.

faide 11y ago

My problem with the news feed is how non-deterministic the results are. There have been so many cases where I will see a post/photo/video that I find interesting, but fuck me if I ever want to find it again on a different device or at some point in the future if I didn't bookmark it or remember who posted it and when. It always seems like a random shuffling of the deck when I load the page, and it's incredibly frustrating.

yeukhon 11y ago
My biggest problem seems to be a bug, not sure if it is FB or browser. But from time to time as you scroll down the news feed, FB displays the stuff you have already seen from the beginning. Sounds like a problem with request firing off and not able to retrieve and populate stuff from the beginning again. There is also no way to "remember this" unless you like the post.
- soneca 11y ago
  I started having the exact same problem on my Windows Phone FB app. Took some time to realize it was a bug and not a weird deja vu of mine.
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  Click the little drop down arrow at the top right of each post. On many of them (maybe not all -- I can't check right now), there's now a "Save" option.
  - yeukhon 11y ago
    Ah great! Thanks.
- what_ever 11y ago
  Yup that bug is really annoying. I have observed it only kicks if you open a photo in the photo viewer and then go back to the home feed by closing the photo viewer.
amelius 11y ago

noobie 11y ago

I wonder how they test it. I've unfollowed all but a couple of my close friends, the stories that show up are inconsistent (some date all the way back to December 25th but will show up every now and then). Most of their "liking and commenting" activities show up in the news feed but not in the close friends list. It's a mess.

randycupertino 11y ago
Unfollowing is freaking awesome. I unfollowed a bunch of my old college friends who "work from home" now and are caught up in MLM pyramid schemes selling beachbody, energy drinks, arbonne makeup and other MLM junk. It is awesome. I actually wonder how popular "unfollowing" is and if facebook is worried about it, because everyone I know is psyched about the ability to do it!

pmlnr 11y ago

I wonder is PageRank was applied instead how well would that work. As for recommendation algorithms, I still believe Last.fm is one of the best around, so there might be something to learn from those guys.

hudell 11y ago

My facebook timeline is the worst of all social networks. I unfollowed 90% of my friends that I don't care about, so it has very little data to show me, but instead of showing all of the content of those users, it still filters out most stuff by whatever criteria they use, so I often go days with the same content being shown on the top of my timeline (and missing a lot of posts that I actually wanted to see). Setting the feed to "Most Recent" usually gives better content, but the option unsets itself every other day.

gs7 11y ago
Here's a tip: bookmark https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr and you will always see the most recent feed. I've been using this for months now and it hasn't unset the most recent setting yet.
- 1024core 11y ago
  But what about the app?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - gs7 11y ago
    Sadly I haven't figured out how to do this in the app yet :(
    - aneidon 11y ago
      I've switched to using the mobile web version. I personally find it much more responsive, and Facebook can't bug me with notifications anymore ;)
  - pconner 11y ago
    It's accessible from the Android app as a list (called "Most Recent"), from the same menu where you can access your timeline or the app settings.

artpepper 11y ago

> “Sometimes” isn’t the success rate you might expect for such a vaunted and feared bit of code. ... only if you don't understand machine learning.

gukov 11y ago

They completely refresh the feed hiding previously visible posts on pretty much every page load to feed you as much content as possible. Noticed something else with the corner of your eye right before clicking? Too bad, it's now gone.

mschuster91 11y ago

That algorithm crap was the reason I use facebook only as a messenger since they turned off the ability to use a Twitter-like feed. I don't need fucking "intelligent algorithms" to tell me what is important, I can read an arbitrary newspaper if I want filtered content.

dcole2929 11y ago

This was a pretty interesting article but as a sports fan I got distracted by the dig at Deflategate. Especially since the author not only mixed his sports metaphors (basketball to football) but also because it was an accusation scientifically proven to be untrue. It wasn't even relevant to the article really but stuff like that takes you out of it and you lose interest.

subie 11y ago
Yeah I'm a fan of the pats too.

overcast 11y ago

I think I managed to unfollow everyone except for a handful of "friends" on Facebook. End of 2015 I finally unfollowed Facebook by deactivating my account. It really did not provide anything useful for me in retrospect, so it had to go.

ilyanep 11y ago

Somewhat related: Today, I noticed that the vast majority of the articles on my news feed are "X liked/commented on Y's post" where Y is someone I don't know and the post isn't very good. I hope this is only a temporary change, but I installed a Chrome extension to filter these out <_<

jgh 11y ago
Or, worse, it's a thought-provoking article and you want to reply to a comment but can't.

balladeer 11y ago

I have again started to use Facebook since last few months. So I never see anything that I want to see. What surprises me is I always see exactly everything I don't want to see. I get people in friend suggestions that I must have removed (clicking on that "remove" button) like half dozens of times and they keep coming. I get stories that are not at all relevant to my taste, search history (even on other sites - assuming Fb tracks me anyway even with uBlock Origin) or anything I can attribute it to. I get page and group suggestions are ridiculously tangential to me as a person. I hide a story and I hide many similar stories and at times I also mark them spam, report but I still get more similar stories. Then they have some kind of limit on the number of posts/stories shown to you. At times, that limit seems to be like as low as 4-5 stories, sometimes more. This is very random. Then there is this completely irrelevant being shown to me throughout the week. Also, posts that I hide pop up again. I've not checked whether it happens all the time. Then one day I decided to check my friend's walls (the ones whom I have not unfollowed) and evaluate what I am actually seeing. Well, there were many text status updates that I would have loved to see, many nice photo shares, very few article shares (for some reason articles shared on Fb are not really the brightest imho), decent rants, some excellent political remark, most of these posts were recent and usually latest post on those walls, but guess what - they were not shown to me. I was shown posts that would force me to unfollow more friends and force me to close the Facebook tab a lot quicker than I might have otherwise. I guess maybe that's a good thing. As for this Slate article, felt like a paid PR piece. > No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside the company will tell you. Yeah, I guess, from an end user point of view, no one on the inside knows it either.

thetree1 11y ago

Funny how they casually throw in the fact that facebook knows how much time you spend on an article.

frik 11y ago

Facebook timeline change late 2011/early 2012 was catastrophic. It rendered Facebook useless to me. Before you could browse the timeline page in linear order (ordered by date descending) - no filtering, no bullshit - it was perfect. Now you see only certain posts of your friends that Facebook thinks might be interesting for you. Very bad change.

kmonad 11y ago

A lengthy, convoluted article that concludes "It would be premature to declare the age of the algorithm over before it really began". No shit. For those wondering whether or not to read it, I'd say it's not really worth your time as it lays out pretty obvious difficulties in finding what to add to an individual's news feed, but comes up with really weird "conclusions" throughout.

will_pseudonym 11y ago

I have unfollowed all but about 3-5 people on Facebook. It's pretty great. It's turned down the junk, but I miss out on stuff so much more often now. Oh well. The alternative is worse for me, and it makes me seek out real interactions with my network instead. That's a huge win for me. Facebook could win back some of my time by allowing me unfollow topics or other entities, across my timeline. I LOVE some of my friends, but I hate 99% of any post on the NFL. I'll certainly never seek it out. I unfollow people because it's just so frustrating to start to dislike the person ranting about something I don't care about, just because Facebook isn't smart enough to understand how human relationships work. In real life, I can tell that person, "Look, I love you, but you've got to stop talking about the NFL around me! You're showing me you're not listening to me or valuing me as a person by doing so..." And that's what Facebook is not doing: valuing me as a person. So, I unfollow everyone; the NFL is just one example.