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Part of the Facebook problem is that they mostly took control of the feed away from users. They now surface the more "engaging" posts at the top and more freque
by guelo 9y ago
Part of the Facebook problem is that they mostly took control of the feed away from users. They now surface the more "engaging" posts at the top and more frequently. This leads to the overemphasis of viral images and videos. If you post a simple personal status message without an image and Facebook's sentiment analysis considers it to be non-engaging many of your friends won't even see it as Facebook will favor marketing spam over your actual personal post. Users also become trained over time by the number of likes they receive to tailor their posts to conform to Facebook's whims.
- odbol_ 9y agoI tried to write an extension that would hide all video/photo/link posts and only show pure text posts from my friends. It was really nice, although there wasn't much to the feed once all the garbage was hidden...
- krrrh 9y agoEven worse, purposely optimizing for engagement isn't too different from accidentally optimizing for outrage.
- ballenf 9y agoI'm kind of in the opposite camp. The way-too-excited responses from people reacting to the silly video of my kid just remind me how I often don't like the FB-version of my friends and family. So I really avoid interacting with them there.