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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

• 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.
  • fweespeech 11y ago
    That honestly sounds like mismanagement. Even if its too hard to understand the minutiae, there should be a chart/graph/something somewhere that shows what all the components are intended to do.
    • pc86 11y ago
      Understanding what the disparate pieces are and even how they talk to each other will not tell you how it actually works, unless you understand how each individual component works. And: > 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.
      • kuschku 11y ago
        That’s just mismanagement still. Each component should have a clearly and strictly defined way to interact with other components, which you should have in nice diagrams. Tack the diagrams together, and you get a full definition of how the newsfeed interacts and which piece does what. If that is not possible, then you have a very badly managed company, not even Healthcare.gov was that mismanaged.
        • askafriend 11y ago
          Yes those diagrams exist, but you've got to remember that these components are constantly changing as well as new components being added and others being removed all the time. It's a beast and perhaps I was a little liberal with my assertion that "NO ONE" understands it. It's possible to understand at a high level: eg "...and then the posts get filtered through this ranking component" But then that ranking component can change week over week so if you thought you understood all of the ranking mechanics last week, then you probably have some catching up to do this week. There's also a lot of people working on this so stuff changes fast and often. Think about all of Facebook's different products vyying for attention in the feed. Think of all the PMs with agendas who want their product in the feed in certain ways.