18 ms·

We might be swinging away from the newsfeed

• quadrangle 9y ago
  Spot on. Note that the issues are different (and not as bad) for Reddit and HN type things. > It ought to be able to work out who your close friends are, and what kinds of things you normally click on, surely? I wish this didn't even seem right to anyone, even from the beginning. It's different whether I happen to click or be interested in something once than it being what I want to see again. If I go to a movie, that's not evidence that it's my sort of movie — I don't know if I'll like it until I see it! Priority really has to be on the evaluation of things and the explicit desire to get more, not on reading things into the fact that I was open to something in the first place. With the what-I-click approach, one day I am prompted for some reason to click one sort of thing… then I'm shown that more the next day… then one pretty-arbitrary starting point is turned into a defining filter for me forever. This reality means that simply clicking something out of curiosity threatens to define you and your experience for years. The ethical way to handle this is to do some mix of (A) giving back control to the readers for what they explicitly choose to follow (not whatever they happen to click, and not even what they "like" because liking should not equal following) and (B) doing the opposite of bubbling and actively insert some mix of stuff-they-don't-usually-click, i.e. novelty so that people are actually exposed to new ideas and perspectives they might otherwise not even know exist.
  • ClintEhrlich 9y ago
    Your general concern is well taken, but clicking on something once will not "define you and your experience for years." The system will respond to your initial click by introducing similar content to your feed, but if you don't click on those stories, the effect will be transient. Failure to engage is itself a form of feedback, for better or worse.
    • duxup 9y ago
      I don't doubt that works that way sometimes... but man somewhere along the line I googled a Nebraska Cornhusker football score and Google randomly brings it up again and again and again.... even when I give it feedback that I don't want that information, it comes back later on. I feel like I've seen this behavior on other sites and systems as well. I've no doubt the prioritization initially works, but it seems there are other factors at play that seem to bring up old data. In my case my team is not nearly as popular as Nebraska so I suspect the logic very roughly ends up something like "Ok he watches college football and oh hey this Nebraska story is really popular and stories about that team are big now so here ya go..."
      • washadjeffmad 9y ago
        After a university in another state sent me an unsolicited email offer (never opened), my google feed started showing me everything about that school, even going as far as setting up notifications for its class registration calendar. The feed started to loop in college football and greek life news, which are incredibly off base for my actual and actively searched interest history. I spent a year slowly cultivating a pretty decent feed of relevant content on my Pixel, and it went full Netflix 2010 seemingly overnight. Early Netflix suggestions, no matter how selective and consistent your selections over many years, could be instantly subverted by your lonely sister-in-law getting on your account one Saturday night and watching a few foreign language romance flicks. After that, you'd never really stop getting recommendations for "movies starring sexually aggressive male leads" or "films with actors who look like Antonio Banderas". I think I'm done being used to train everyone's algorithms.
        • JoeAltmaier 9y ago
          Heaven forbid you entertain your 6yo niece for a day, and find she's polluted your Netflix with the most insanely numb drivel that passes for animation today. It takes months to expunge. What's wrong with Netflix anyway, that one off-topic movie can sway your 'preferences' so drastically?
          • lakechfoma 9y ago
    • fyfy18 9y ago
      Amazon is probably more well placed to make an informed decision, as it’s most likely the products you look at, but don’t buy, that you are probably interested in. Unfortunately in reality that doesn’t seem to be the case. Last week I bought some wireless headphones, and now my feed shows a bunch of those. It also keeps showing me books by an author who I bought a series from, but never finished (on Kindle). And a selection of Spanish books, that my wife needed once for her studies. And for some reason a load of large kitchen applicances.
  • happybuy 9y ago
    Apple News actually follows the model that you describe as the ethical way to do this. In my experience, it produces better and more pleasing recommended content in it's feed due to this control. Inference models such as YouTubes always feels like you are being pushed into certain content and actually makes me personally hesitate from sampling / clicking on certain videos. In the YouTube model, simply sampling a single video starts up the recommendation engine to keep pushing similar videos and as a user you feel railroaded into being profiled.
    • quadrangle 9y ago
      EXACTLY! And thanks for the note about Apple News. I must admit that having left Apple over their walled-garden iOS direction (turning to embrace of GNU etc.), they have stuck to a higher-road in a lot of regards compared to the other big companies. They're still nowhere near as awful as Google, Facebook, Microsoft… if only Apple weren't sabotaging copyleft and hadn't pioneered the in-app advertising, sales, and tracking that are actually so much of what's wrong…
• combatentropy 9y ago
  AI is still oh so much like Clippy. In Google, I keep having to change it from All Results to Verbatim. With Facebook, I keep having to change it from Top Stories to Most Recent. Try UI before AI. Purely chronological will suffer the spam of frequent-posting friends. Group their posts, which can be flicked through as a cluster. All in all, am I the only one that thinks that the current fashion in page layout squanders real estate? Make the news feed a huge grid, with each post smaller, like one of those photo walls in a hip restaurant.
  • TACIXAT 9y ago
    I think you just solved a huge grievance I've been having with Google search. I get absolute trash results that are hardly even tangential to what I searched. I'm going to try out this verbatim thing.
    • ReverseCold 9y ago
      Woah. I just tried a search (that originally didn't find what I wanted) with "Verbatim" selected and I found what I was looking for. I don't know if it will hold up for other searches, but so far so good.
    • ehnto 9y ago
      The issue I have is that if the topic could even remotely sell me something, those selling or reviewing the thing sold in order to sell it will be the only results. The communities actually interested and talking about the things have disappeared from the results.
      • Bjartr 9y ago
        One trick that works for some topics is to limit your search to a custom time range like pre 2005 or so. Specifically this only works for information that would have been available then, but when that is the case you can avoid a ton of modern spam.
    • tehwalrus 9y ago
      I've actually stopped trying to search google for things anymore, because it almost always tried to be clever and totally missed the point. Sounds like I should try "verbatim" too!
• skybrian 9y ago
  I vaguely remember a joke about a radio that didn't have a volume knob because "it's already set to the correct volume". It's certainly possible to overload people with settings, but I don't see why we don't see a choice of a few very different feed filters to choose from. It's not like any single algorithm can be what everyone wants. This seems more important than more photo filters, don't you think?
  • TangoTrotFox 9y ago
    The pink elephant you can't forget is that the feeds on most services are not designed to benefit you, but to benefit the company. So for instance Facebook engaged in substantial research manipulating peoples' emotions by making their feed either more positive or more negative, and seeing how this affected their posting and sharing trends. This one was widely reported (search for 'facebook psychological experiment') and demonized. I think there are a couple of important takeaways from it. First Facebook wasn't just doing that out of academic curiosity. They're manipulating their users to maximize their benefit. And the more important point is that that behavior is, all but certainly, something most of every company that also relies on advertising is engaging in. Letting you see what you want to see is not their goal, except if that coincidentally coincides with you being more likely to stay on their service and provide more personal information to them. And we might intuitively expect these two goals to be aligned, but this is improbable. Consider casinos. It's not wins that keep people gambling - almost nobody wins in the longrun in most games. Instead it's a complex system of addiction including near wins, and visual-audio manipulation that keeps people dumping their money in the machines. And so too with Facebook, it's that small rush of interaction, likes, and so on that also keeps people 'playing'.
    • fallous 9y ago
      Actually casinos DO depend on wins to keep people gambling, there just needs to be more losing over time. If nothing else the psychology of inflating personal successes and devaluing losses will achieve the needed goals, although adding all the other goodies you mention optimizes the process. A casino in which you ALWAYS lost, despite a constant "near win!" incentive and all the other manipulations would quickly be empty.
• egfx 9y ago
  The death of the newsfeed, the start of the broadcast. Why deal with a feed at all when you can present everything you need live. https://qkast.com https://qkast.com
  • egfx 9y ago
    and why is this being downvoted, besides for the shameless link sharing? PS.. I hope the downvotes continue. I'm going to look back at this and have a good laugh.
    • cmstoken 9y ago
      You're not going to be the next dhouston bud ;) Take it easy!
      • dang 9y ago
        Please don't reply to a comment that breaks the site guidelines by breaking them yourself. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• crabasa 9y ago
  I was fascinated by the "circles" approach Google took with G+. It felt like a great solution to newsfeed overload and directional sharing. But then Google+ failed, and we never got to find out whether Circles worked or not
  • msoad 9y ago
    I don't have time to clean up my inbox. Who thought it's a good idea to require manual work to "setup" a social network? Of course it failed! It was designed by engineers who spend time indenting their code to the exact right format!
    • blowski 9y ago
      Joel Spolsky talked about this, with regards to StackOverflow. Engineers love organising content - tagging it, grouping it, structuring it. But most people can’t be bothered, including engineers in a hurry.
  • abalone 9y ago
    I recall Zuckerberg commented on this. Same reason Facebook groups didn’t take off in a major way. Nobody wants to manage assigning people to groups. I also remember this slide deck from some hip product guy who pitched circles.. 150 slide hot mess.[1] [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-presentation-that-inspired-google-2011-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-presentation-that-i...
    • est 9y ago
      > Nobody wants to manage assigning people to groups Instead we really should use NLP to automatically categorize contents. e.g. I wanna make my 50% for seriously thought-provoking articles, 20% for shitposts, 20% for news and 10% for memes.
      • blowski 9y ago
        It’s a good idea that Facebook could let you control the algorithms, but set sensible defaults. But would that help Facebook’s bottom line?
• msoad 9y ago
  The tree described in the second tweet is visible in Telegram right now. There are channels that are overloaded with content. I can see Telegram inventing news feed soon.
• kiostech 9y ago
  I want to build a solution to solve this problem. Back to classic RSS feed , but along with evolution algorithm / strategy (https://blog.openai.com/evolution-strategies/ https://blog.openai.com/evolution-strategies/) which means 80% of the information you usually click + 20% of information you never click before. It's a good way to acquire news and knowledge out of your comfort zone.
  • kthejoker2 9y ago
    Even this is too much, I don't want a feed, I just want a daily digest about the cognitive equivalent of the daily newspaper.
    • Falkon1313 9y ago
      Your newspaper idea meshes with what I've been thinking. But there's a problem. Newspapers did have images, ads, and headlines, but they were more than just that and a few one-line editorials. In the early days, people posted rather lengthy articles/editorials about what they were doing, thinking, feeling, who they were, etc. On Livejournal, then on blogs, even in the early days of Facebook. But those are mostly gone now, reduced to tweet-sized chunks and making up only a fraction of the feed. Instead, people mostly just reshare, reblog, retweet, copy memes, add links, sometimes photos, checkin somewhere, etc. A newsletter with all of that filtered out, and only the actual content posts would usually be empty. But if someone could start something like that and start a trend of people actually communicating on a large scale, and making it as digest/newspaper style, that could be pretty interesting.
      • kiostech 9y ago
        Can you be more specific about "communicating on a large scale" ? You mean public discussion on social issues / news ?
        • Falkon1313 9y ago
          I was picturing larger scale as in more like journal entries or blog posts than tweets and shares and one-line statuses. Not necessarily lengthy, but enough to give some context and some idea of the writer's feelings/thoughts around whatever they're writing about, yet still within the realm of social. That could include their thoughts on social issues or news (rather than just a link, meme, or one-line opinion), or just their thoughts about life and philosophy and what's going on their lives.
• keyle 9y ago
  I'm not sure the concept of the News Feed is the problem. I think it's in the execution. Currently, it's a big algorithm that's thick and opaque to the user. A full page grid of posts doesn't solve the problem, if anything it makes it worse. You'd lose visual hierarchy and no grouping, making posts that are mostly red or bright get more eyeball time than the rest. I think a more natural control over your own News Feed without going through a screen of dials and buttons could be the way to do it. Simple filters at the top, similar to what the Gmail inbox introduced. Funny/Sad/Deep/etc. based on the content and the response from other people (like/angry/sad/etc.) And like Gmail inbox filter, use it or ignore the filtering. You still need some smarts to nuke down the every-day spammers. And sometimes chronology isn't the best order, but it's not too hard to work out when a big-deal occurs; e.g. someone posted 12 pictures of their wedding ceremony, 5 hours ago, and their feed blew up, making it more important than someone's best ramen noodles they've ever had 15 mins ago.
  • CodeCube 9y ago
    > I'm not sure the concept of the News Feed is the problem. I'm honestly starting to believe that it is. These are just random on-the-spot ideas, but I want to start seeing more innovative and different ideas. For example, if you want to optimize for getting news, let's see some innovation in journalism. If you want to optimize for being entertained, let's see some innovation in curated experiences. If you want to optimize for keeping in touch and connecting folks, let's do something akin to a CRM-for-friends ... where you still share all the stuff, but instead of showing you a feed, the site/app would just give you targeted reminders to reach out to folks you hadn't connected with in X amount of time. Again, these are just random ideas off the cuff ... but this whole "wisdom of the crowds" thing we need to rethink, because it's too easy to manipulate by any number of actors in the system.
• qwerty2020 9y ago
  Have been seeing similar overload of information on Reddit as well (HN not quite there yet, but would imagine it's not too far behind). The front page is littered with images/gifs of bite size information/memes. A few years ago, I'd learn something new almost every time I visited the front page. I created a tool [1] that lets users aggregate top posts from selected subreddits and receive a daily email summary, but I think there can be more done in this space. Would also like a better discovery mechanism for things that I may be interested in that aren't obviously connected to current content (e.g. someone interested in programming may be interested in art as well, if fed nice introduction to that information/scene, but current algos just stick to known interests). [1] www.storyrake.com
• dilap 9y ago
  i remember instagram pre-algorithmic timeline, and it worked well: because everyone knew every post would be seen, there was a cultural norm of not posting more than ~ 1 time a day. it's not like crazy-amounts-of-posting is some inexorable law; it's a response to the social networks as they now exist. even for too much content to read, a time-based sample is arguably still superior an algorithmic one, because it's _unbiased_. this gives you (1) an accurate impression of mood and content of your timeline and (2) completely short-circuits problems with soft-censorship and manipulative influence. (fb has done various vaguely-evil experiments w/ controlling the emotional content of your timeline one way or the other.) lastly, there's an easy fix that gives you best-of-both worlds: simply allow tagging some sets of people as "close friends" (or any other label!) and allow filtering posts by that label. (and, sure, if you want to, go ahead and include an algorithmic timeline view. or even algorithmic w/ various different criteria for inclusion. the fact that fb/instagram/twitter won't even give you the option of chronological ordering suggests that it's more about maintaining control than about creating a good user experience. /tinfoilhat)
  • jamesrcole 9y ago
    > allow tagging some sets of people as "close friends" (or any other label!) and allow filtering posts by that label. Facebook has this feature. You can tag someone as a close friend, and it will show you posts by close friends first.
    • dilap 9y ago
      in my experience, even with tagging and the "chronological" timeline, i still don't get a strictly time-based timeline that shows everything. i just get a "less algorythmic" timeline. (i havent tried recently, tho.)
  • jclardy 9y ago
    My biggest issue with Instagram's algorithm is that it resets on every view. Which is understandable from a product marketers perspective - if a user sees the same post up top they are probably just going to close the app again. The problem is that I open the app, see something interesting (like a friend announcing a baby,) I leave a comment and swipe back to my home screen. I tell someone around me then they want to see and so I reopen the app and that post has been obliterated from my timeline, because it already extracted value from me with the like and comment. And this is literally within 5 seconds of leaving the app (Not even killing it, just going to the home screen.) The true reason for the algorithmic timeline is just to increase engagement, that is all. With a timeline based feed you know where you left off, and you know how far you have to scroll to get back there. With an arbitrarily organized feed you just keep scrolling, thinking you will find something interesting or new. It is the same reason why casino's have no windows and are always the same lighting - so you stay longer and forget about time.
• amirathi 9y ago
  There's a business angle to the newsfeed that's not being talked at all. Your news feed being "algorithmically controlled" is a huge advantage to the platform from advertising perspective. Facebook at this point has liberty to show me a promoted page because one of my 700 friends liked it at some point of time. If none of my friends has liked it then it's promoted as "Popular across Facebook". I believe promoted tweets work in a similar way. If a platform provides any sort of control over newsfeed it looses the leverage to show you what it wants you to see.
  • riantogo 9y ago
    How so? They can give you control and still insert ad cards with any targeting they want.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • blowski 9y ago
      Banner blindness and ad blockers mean you’re more likely to see something shared by a friend than an ad.
  • gboudrias 9y ago
    Which is exactly why Facebook and Twitter have "blurrified" your content by making it have no verifiable order by default ("top posts" meaning "totally arbitrary order"). This, as you highlight, probably brings in the big bucks. This makes me think Google had something similar in mind when they "personalized" the search results (a wildly unpopular move), going to show that when you are the product, there may be no UX too unpleasant to sink to. The upside of this is that these incremental UX sacrifices leave the market open for an alternative, either of the same ad-driven kind or, hopefully, of the more sustainable kind. Hey, a man can dream.
    • nasredin 9y ago
      I think the - actually usable UI as opposed to the dumbified abortion most of the big sites have - train is long gone. A usable UI (for non-niche sites) is one of those things you can get nostalgic about with "back in my day...". It's not coming back as long as advertisers pay for things.
• salqadri 9y ago
  Having too many newsfeeds sounds like a good problem to have: perfect application for Machine Learning to solve!
• LeicaLatte 9y ago
  This is why curation is king and a good human editor is a rockstar. On this algorithmic side Apple and Spotify are leading the way. For example, Apple Music solves this problems by grouping feeds. Favourites Mix, Chill Mix, New Music Mix, Friends are Listening To, Radio.
  • pmlnr 9y ago
    Spotify is very far from ideal, or even fromwhat last.fm had when it comes to radio based on song though.
    • adrianmsmith 9y ago
      A bit off-topic: because you used the word “had”: last.fm is still going, the algorithms are just as good as they ever were, it plays music through Spotify.
    • chrisvalleybay 9y ago
      This might be anecdotal, but I only listen to my 'Discover Weekly' list on Spotify. Every week I get a new set of songs, and I mostly listen to those songs every day, until I get a new one. Some of the songs on the list, I hop onto the album of, and listen to that as well. That algorithm knows me very well, and it's able to delight me with new music every week.
      • rajeck 9y ago
        I've found this as well. Discover Weekly both gives me old favs as well as introduces me to new stuff. It's pretty cool.
    • coatmatter 9y ago
      I've lost the link to the article, but there's still a certain something that Spotify lacks compared to a human radio playlist programmer.
      • ddingus 9y ago
• pgodzin 9y ago
  I really like what François Chollet wrote here: https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-about-ai-ed9df072b704 https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-about-a... Instead of having an algorithmic feed that tunes an opaque optimization problem, we should harness the power of AI/ML and optimize for what the user explicitly wants - whether it be learning, family, or sports commentary.
  • kiostech 9y ago
    let users to set the algorithms they want to use maybe ? e.g sentimental analysis , fake new filter ...
• narrator 9y ago
  I like what reddit does. Choose your sorting method (best,top,new,rising,controversial,gilded) Reading my front page sorted by controversial has led me to a lot of unusual and interesting content.
• hliyan 9y ago
  Personally speaking, what I would prefer is a stream instead of a feed. Like old fashioned television, I see whatever's on the stream at the time I look at it, and nothing more: there is no temptation to keep swiping down to infinity. Important items can reappear later if they're missed. The content of the stream is based on subject subscriptions.
  • petercooper 9y ago
    Would something like https://www.techmeme.com/ https://www.techmeme.com/ count as that? It's basically a "snapshot" of tech news right now, but the page basically ends at that.
  • coatmatter 9y ago
    How well would this work across different timezones for friends who want to stay in touch but aren't on daily messaging terms?
• kiostech 9y ago
  Maybe all we need is just a simple news aggregator
  • pmlnr 9y ago
    You'd need people to post to fetchable places first, say, their own website, or at least tumblr.
    • kiostech 9y ago
      Looking forward to a new rss feed standard
      • pmlnr 9y ago
        Right, cause that will solve it, like it did the first time /s The last thing we need is yet another standard; we need people to utilize the existing ones, like activitypub, webmentions, websub, micropub. And grouping is a client task. This is not a tech problem in 2018.
        • kiostech 9y ago
          How about json rss instead of xml rss . Or even ipfs pubsub
          • pmlnr 9y ago
            What problem exactly json solves over xml? How does it address the problem of people being lazy and still using FB?
      • majewsky 9y ago
        What's wrong with RSS as it exists today? (I've heard people criticize the lack of comments, but that's clearly a feature.)
  • coatmatter 9y ago
    I think ahead of that, what we as a society all need is to read more books and do more physical activity. After that along with work/study, there's not much time left for news (in any form).
• Marazan 9y ago
  The newsfeed is a creation of mobilefirst. Remember old Facebook? The MySpace ripoff with a nice design? Your homepage populated with widgets? That can easily cope with 200 friends. You'd just have separate widgets for different types of events. One widget for a feed of genuine status updates, one for friends' shares, one for likes etc. Mobile first destroys that. You've only got space for one list.
  • blowski 9y ago
    That’s part of it, but not the whole story. Mobiles have also produced a lot more content. The article makes the point that checking once a day means you might have 3000 updates.
    • Marazan 9y ago
      Yes but not all updates are created equal. A 50 line status update is not equivalent to clicking a like. The everything-nature of the feed itself is the problem. It is the source of its own weakness. A source of information too dense to be browsed by a normal human was created, forced as the only way to interact with the product and then automatically curated to 'fix' the issue that was created by having a firehouse of updates.
  • zeveb 9y ago
    That's a really good point. As awesome as it is to have a supercomputer in my pocket, I wonder if it's really a net benefit: mobile computing has led to a lot of compromises (e.g. the newsfeed) which really aren't good. FWIW, I don't even have Facebook installed on my phone. My most frequently used apps are Firefox, Signal & Inbox (in roughly that order), followed probably by Maps, Google Play Music, KeePass & Authenticator. For everything else, there's my desktop or my laptop.
    • fallous 9y ago
      "Mobile computing" is almost always "mobile consuming," and trying to fit the requirements of computing into the design of a consumption platform is necessarily compromising, if not failing outright.
• feelin_googley 9y ago
  "There has been an overwhelmingly negative public response to Facebook's launch of two new products yesterday. The products, called News Feed and Mini Feed, allow users to get a quick view of what their friends are up to, including relationship changes, groups joined, pictures uploaded, etc., in a streaming news format. ... Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded personally, saying "Calm down. Breathe. We hear you." and "We didn't take away any privacy options." Source: https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-facebook-replies/ https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-face...
  • briandear 9y ago
    The funny thing is that privacy options are worthless -- while they protect your content from being seen by other Facebook users or the public -- they don't protect the content from being seen and used by Facebook itself -- which is the problem. A "hide from Facebook ad targeting or newsfeed emotional manipulation" option isn't a privacy setting is it?
• feelin_googley 9y ago
  "And when you have 10 [P2P] groups with [small number of family, friends, etc.] in each, then people will share to them pretty freely [in each case, only the content that is warranted for those individual groups]." ... It's not possible in iMessage - with end-to-end encryption, Apple has no idea what you're sharing." [ There is no technicological reason that one company, or any company, needs to have control over the management of these "groups" and the "messaging" that may occur within them. Two "groups" communicating over internet need not be connected in any way, bridging them is an option that should be left for the user. For example, each group is reachable only via a separate network interface. Not "networks" or "interfaces" as defined by marketing copy and buzzwords, but traditional network interfaces defined by software. The type of interfaces displayed when a user types "ifconfig" and "ipconfig /all". The interface used to "surf the web", the one that connects to the sewer of advertising that is todays web, is the not same one used to reach any group. Think of this like VLANs if you wish but its even simpler. I have been "beta-testing" such a system, which is not new, for many years. Theres no ads, no spam, no BS. It works. The "intelligence" of the network, so to speak, is at the edge, with the user. Theres no money in this, necessarily. This isnt an elevator pitch. Its called "a private life". Everyone needs one. The whole point is to escape the commercial world for a little while. "Clean separation", like those network interfaces. ]
• hoosaf 9y ago
  Nice. A thorough read. I once realised a similar problem with feed. But had a slightly different perspective. Hope you can shed some light on these points as well. https://medium.com/@husain_safdari/we-deserve-a-better-facebook-feed-period-33b69a085e4a https://medium.com/@husain_safdari/we-deserve-a-better-faceb...
• menotyou 9y ago
  I am no FB User. Never was. Never seemed to me interesting enough to join. When I read these kind of articles I am always amused with which kind of problems your live is enriched when you are. Not to mention the occasional article about how much your live improved after stop using FB. Fascinating.
• kristianc 9y ago
  Is there not something of an expectation mismatch here? I don't expect a newsfeed to be an exact representation of everything that I'm going to find interesting, nor can it guarantee that it is never going to miss anything - the best that Facebook is ever going to do is a 'best guess'. A good analogy might be my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist - it is pretty good, but it isn't a complete encapsulation of my musical tastes, and a lot more manageable than a chronological representation of everything that has been released that week. What Facebook has always been missing is a low friction, invisible way to say "show less of this kind of thing", without it seeming like I am unfollowing that person, or the social baggage of it being a 'Dislike' button. If I need any more granularity than that, it's probably more worth me contacting the person directly.
• gaius 9y ago
  you will have something over a thousand new items in your feed every single da This is clearly nonsense. Why do people’s “likes” end up in the feed in the first place? When people say they want a reverse chronological feed they mean of actual posts, not every possible activity. And everyone knows it, too.
  • twanvl 9y ago
    I would love it if you could filter Facebook to only show posts of friends, and not their likes of clickbait news articles, shares of stupid math puzzles, or them wishing their third cousin a happy birthday. Actually, the fact that your friends' likes show up in the Facebook newsfeed is actively discouraging me from liking anything. I do not want my friends to see what posts I like.
    • brlewis 9y ago
      That was a friendfeed feature I really liked. I don't know if the feature ever made it into facebook after the acquisition.
    • coatmatter 9y ago
      I think there is a setting that disables the default option of (edit: some of) your likes showing up on friends' feeds (ad preferences?) but I know that's all beside the point now in the broader context. Before my deactivation, I thought about those in my list whom I wanted to see or communicate with and to be honest, I couldn't think of that many in proportion to all those I mostly added a decade ago. Frankly, I found the "news" to be more interesting than most "personal" posts. I also didn't want new Friends to be able to easily trawl through my no-longer-relevant past Facebook life. Upon realising there was no easy way to control the privacy settings for that and in frustration, I started the process of deleting Facebook. (Not many realise this, but Messenger will still work while an account is deactivated.) It's simply too hard to create a graduated list of different "Friends" on Facebook (or Google+). While their presented mission might be to "connect people", real life doesn't work that way. Coupled with an encouragement of oversharing by design, it's a recipe for not a very good website to spend time on. I don't know of anyone within my own friends group who has gotten successful from using more social media. I also don't plan to be the first, not when other more lucrative niches exist.
• deleted 9y ago
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• rahoulb 9y ago
  I use Tweetbot as my Twitter client precisely because it uses a chronological feed. I will start scrolling and if there's too much to go through I just scroll to the top, missing hundreds of items. If it's important it will reappear. If not, I've not missed anything.
• stuaxo 9y ago
  The newsfeed is the ultimate version of the 90s wet dream of "portals": an corporate orifice to enter and never leave.
• Hendrikto 9y ago
  > We’d just invite close family and friends. Then, we actually made a list of ‘close family and friends’… and realized why people have 100 or 200 people at a wedding. Then you either have a VERY big family or a VERY broad definition of “close friends”.
  • Finnucane 9y ago
    Yeah, my wife and I actually pulled off the small wedding in our living room with about 20 people there. The officiant was an old friend of the family. Still glad we did it that way.
  • CapitalistCartr 9y ago
    Having had to make such plans, lists grow fast. Well, we have to invite all three of my sisters. So their husbands/boyfriends, kids, kids boy/girlfriends, grandkids. Then most of our friends have families. We have to invite Joe: he was there on our first date. Justin, for sure: he helped us move in together . . Crap, now there's ove a hundred people.
    • josefresco 9y ago
      Just say "no kids" and "no dates" and watch 50% of your friends and family opt-out - problem solved. /s
    • hvidgaard 9y ago
      Then split it. Family and close friends, i.e. people you see regularly for a traditional party in the evening. For everyone else there is an informal dessert reception after the ceremony. There is this idea that for it to be a "proper" wedding, you have to host a formal party and provide for each and everyone that has had an impact on your life. It doesn't have to be this way, but if one chose to do so, then the implications is the planning and cost skyrocket.
  • mrweasel 9y ago
    Well, there's two of them, and each family member or friend may bring a partner, so I can see someone reaching 100 quickly. But I see your point. In terms of social media, I might be the one that a little outside the norm. I have at most 150 friends, family members and acquaintances on Facebook. Maybe 10 of them most the majority of content. If people but nothing but links, games or only share stuff, I just unfollow them. I only care about the stuff that's actually going on in people lives, that is an increasingly small subset of all the Facebook posts. My Facebook feed is curated, by me, so that I can browse everything that happened in the last week in 10 minutes at the most. So to me the articles claim that wanting chronological order is pointless doesn't make much sense to me. Facebook just doesn't seem to encourage this kind of usage, there simply isn't enough ad money in it.
• 3chelon 9y ago
  It was Douglas Adams (I think) who described a VCR as a machine to watch TV for you, so you didn't have to. It's good joke, but joking aside I've been thinking for some years now that it could apply to social media. You could have your own AI bot that reads your newsfeeds for you and tells you only what you might be interested in. The AI is tuned to your own preferences, not the social media provider's. Has anyone done anything like this already?
  • hzay 9y ago
    These would be browser extensions that work on the feeds, I think? More complex "viewers" could be devised of course.
• jamesrcole 9y ago
  My idea: limit how frequently people can post. E.g. max of two posts per day. That could certainly help with info overload, though I don't know how most people would react to the restriction.
  • billysielu 9y ago
    I was thinking more like 1 per week :)
• zatkin 9y ago
  > ‘what do my friends want (or need) me to see?’ feed Isn’t this what the notifications on FB are for?
  • coatmatter 9y ago
    This does work well for Close Friends. However, most of Facebook isn't close friends.
• sparkzilla 9y ago
  This article is based on the false premise that a person with 300 friends will have 1500 posts a day. This was a lie manufactured by Facebook to sell the algorithmic feed to journalists, who passed it on as truth to their readers. As we all know, people with 300 or even 500 friends have nowhere newer 1500 posts a day. Sure, some friends post 10 memes a day, but most people do not post anything at all. In any case, people were able to manage the chronological feed without any problems. I did not hear anyone complaining that they had to deal with too many posts, and managing the feed wasn't an issue. What was an issue, however, was that Facebook needed to make more money. So they created an algorithmic feed that pushed posts that engaged people more (videos and images) and downgraded external links (to keep people on the platform). They lied about the 1500 posts a day, and journalists passed it on, and Facebook made more money. All at the users' expense.
• alphaalpha101 9y ago
  >This overload means it now makes little sense to ask for the ‘chronological feed’ back. If you have 1,500 or 3,000 items a day, then the chronological feed is actually just the items you can be bothered to scroll through before giving up, which can only be 10% or 20% of what’s actually there. This will be sorted by no logical order at all except whether your friends happened to post them within the last hour. It’s not so much chronological in any useful sense as a random sample, where the randomizer is simply whatever time you yourself happen to open the app. ’What did any of the 300 people that I friended in the last 5 years post between 16:32 and 17:03?’ Meanwhile, giving us detailed manual controls and filters makes little more sense - the entire history of the tech industry tells us that actual normal people would never use them, even if they worked. People don't file. I think the problem here is the implicit assumption that I want all 1000-1500 things. I don't, and neither does anyone else. What people want on Facebook is a feed of all the things people have actually posted. I want to see peoples' photos, and their status updates, and news articles they've shared. I never ever want to see things people have liked, commented on or otherwise interacted with. How other people interact with Facebook is irrelevant to me. In fact, the whole system of people just commenting with someone's name to share something with them is very annoying.
• fallous 9y ago
  The reason this problem keeps popping up is due to the mistaken belief that you can deduce intent via inferred behaviors, and worse that deduced intent is preferable (or at least comparable) to explicit intent. You can't and it isn't. As an example of deduced intent let's envision a system where every action I commit over the course of a year can be observed and recorded for inference analysis to determine if I am evil or good. Assume that in all ways I meet the standard definition of good... I help people across the street, save puppies, etc. At the end of the year the BEST that you can conclude is that I behaved ethically (good actions), but that says nothing about MY intentions. I may in fact be evil and am only ingratiating myself within a community in order to later kill them all. There is a reason that within philosophy that morality and ethics are separate words. There is a reason that when viewing demographic data people say "I can tell you what 9 out of 10 people in the group prefer, but I can say nothing about any one individual within it." As to the preference between inferred vs explicit intent, you're placing your own judgement of the value of inference vs explicit above that of the user which will inevitably lead to frustrations on the part of the user. In the simple case of a catalog there are two distinct intent patterns that users engage in... one is the specific intent to find a known product and the other is what I refer to as "discovery." Discovery is, as the word suggests, finding things that the user did not know existed or knew very little about.
  • 2sk21 9y ago
    Very well articulated. I wonder if there is a difference between a machine trying to deduce intent vs a human doing the same task. As humans, we may be able to pick up subtle cues that machines simply lack the ability for.
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      > I wonder if there is a difference between a machine trying to deduce intent vs a human doing the same task. Fundamentally, no. There may be practical difference between specific machines and people. > As humans, we may be able to pick up subtle cues that machines simply lack the ability for. Depending on the machine, the reverse could be true.
    • 9y ago
• Zak 9y ago
  There's a different problem I want solved. I want the option to see only original content, nothing shared. I don't want to see some random cat video Sarah thought was cute. I can go to /r/kittens myself if I want to see random cute cat videos. I do want to see the video Jen took of her cat because I know him and sometimes feed him when she's out of town. I think I'm not alone in this, and some of the popularity of Instagram is due to its UX making it easy to upload content directly from a mobile device and not so convenient to share content not created by the user. I've used the FBPurity browser extension to create a nearly share-free Facebook feed. It reduced the amount of content by 80+% and greatly improved the signal to noise ratio.
  • fredley 9y ago
    I've often wondered that it wouldn't be that hard to make an image-based 'social network'/sharing platform à la Imgur (or /r/pics, etc.), but using simple visual hashing to make every image is unique. By partitioning your network so that low-effort memes have a place to go, and with some light moderation you could probably make something quite enjoyable.
  • CodeCube 9y ago
    100% ... although I sometimes value some links and images shared by friends that aren't original content, I _rarely_ appreciate the stupid memes, and page shares that are little more than just people screaming into the echo chamber at people that already agree with them. I've been manually blocking page after page after page ... every time something gets through, and I think to myself, "ugh, this is stupid", I "hide everything" from that page in the hopes that I'll never see it again (and yet, "LAD Bible" keeps coming back into my feed!). As you say, I much prefer to see original content and pics posted by people ... in fact, even if it's a link that's posted (and not re-shared from another page), it's usually interesting because they took the time to actually copy/paste that link from a website, so chances are they've actually read the content.
    • Zak 9y ago
      > if it's a link that's posted (and not re-shared from another page), it's usually interesting I agree, and would be fine with including that sort of thing, especially with a UX that encouraged writing something about the link. A text post including a URL is still something my friend wrote.
• artur_makly 9y ago
  my only issue with Evan’s article is his generalisation and potentially racial use of “Russians” .. > There are lots of incentives for people (Russians, game developers) to try to manipulate the feed.
• greggman 9y ago
  does anyone else refrain from posting because you know that each post you may take up your friends' time?
• arkh 9y ago
  > you probably do know several hundred people well enough to friend them on Facebook Different people have different standards for what they call friends.
• fallous 9y ago
  Think of the problem in this way... you have a butler that is very very knowledgeable about all manner of things, which surely is a valuable and useful resource. When you ask him to pack you a tuxedo for attending the baseball game he responds with "might I suggest a more leisurely attire? I've noted that most people attending baseball games seem to dress casually." You may respond "Capital idea, man! By Jove, Jeeves you are a life saver!" He then packs your jeans and a bowling shirt in your travel bag and you are heartily satisfied. Over the course of years you repeat this many times, until one day when Jeeves decides not to suggest but instead to simply pack your jeans and a bowling shirt. When you arrive at your destination and open your bag you are aghast and call your butler. "Good God Jeeves! I specifically asked you for a tuxedo to attend the baseball game and you packed me this slovenly casual wear!" Jeeves, in his defense, responds "but sir, for YEARS you've asked for a tuxedo to attend baseball games and I have suggested casual wear, and you have ALWAYS chosen the casual wear!" "True enough Jeeves, you presumptuous butler, but tonight I am singing the national anthem at the game! Without formal attire I shall be reduced to ruin! You're fired!" Too many products have opted to be the presumptuous Jeeves, without even bothering to spend the years our poor butler did learning the eccentricities of his employer. And yet even with that dedication, poor Jeeves was fired because he was confident he could infer the intentions of his employer. Whether it was the arrogance of Jeeves presuming to know better than his employer, the ignorance of Jeeves in understanding that he lacked crucial information, or that Jeeves suffered under the delusion that past performance predicted future results matters not a whit... because Jeeves has been sacked. Jeeves may find employment elsewhere but if he does not mend his ways he will eventually find himself unwanted and unemployable due entirely to his own faults.
  • fiatjaf 9y ago
    I believe Jeeves is right in your story. You should have specified to him that this time it was different.
    • fallous 9y ago
      No I should not have, because Jeeves' job is to serve me and at no point did I confer to him the right to insert his decision-making over mine with regards to garment selection. Had I done so, then indeed I should have been explicit and specific that this was a change in behavior. I did not opt-in to the agreement.
• fiatjaf 9y ago
  Orkut was the biggest social network in Brazil before Facebook. Orkut didn't have the concept of a news feed. It had just communities, which were thousands of micro forums people joined and were displayed on their profiles; and scrapbooks, which were walls of text messages -- people could post on others' scrapbooks and on their own, so you used it to both message people and "broadcast" content about yourself, but that wasn't shown to anyone who hadn't voluntarily visited that scrapbook page. https://tiddly.alhur.es/fiatjaf@5apps.com/main/#The%20Orkut%20model https://tiddly.alhur.es/fiatjaf@5apps.com/main/#The%20Orkut%...
• panglott 9y ago
  Why not just give users more power over their newsfeed, instead of assuming that the site engineers can get the balance right. A user could be able to specify "I want 50% of my newsfeed to be from immediate family, 35% from close friends, 15% from acqaintances." Use a pie chart slider bar to make it clear. Then let the algorithm figure out how to interpret that chart.
  • bdhess 9y ago
    Because your preferred allocation might not produce updates at Facebook's desired frequency. FB's revenue is directly related to manufactured urgency and FOMO.
• ballenf 9y ago
  The real problem is that we need to be incentivized to pare down our friends to those we truly care about. But that's exactly the opposite of the platform's incentive. The reason for the shift to an algorithm is that FB doesn't want to give you any incentive to unfriend or unfollow anyone, because that reduces FB's ability to maximize your engagement. They want to be in control, not you. If FB just let chronological newsfeeds get out of control, we'd have no choice but to manage it ourselves avoiding this entire problem. It would cost us a little time upfront but save hours in the long run and result in a healthier, less algorithmic experience. The easiest way to judge what FB believes is in their interest is to compare various actions by their ease of execution. For example, "liking" a post is one click and instant. Unfollowing is 2-3 clicks into a hidden menu at the least. Not to mention that it has an artificial 1-2 second delay built in that kind of makes you "pay" for the action.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• chiefalchemist 9y ago
  > "One basic problem here is that if the feed is focused on ‘what do I want to see?’..." False flag. The Feed is focused on engagement. Period. There is no right or wrong. Just engagement. No one can know what the possible feed is, let alone what their ideal feed should be. Let's face it, that's going change from day to day. We're humans. It's what we do. As long as the long arc keeps you coming back THAT is all FB is concerned about.
• jesusthatsgreat 9y ago
  We need a new social network that helps make the world more isolated and disconnected.
• interlocutor2 9y ago
  The wikipedia android app actually does this well. They separate items in the feed into different categories. You may opt out of any category: https://i.imgur.com/GKqtl3T.jpg https://i.imgur.com/GKqtl3T.jpg
• piccolbo 9y ago
  This is free AI. If you paid for it, it would serve you. This way, it serves whoever pays for it. Email from top fintech asking me to work on their "personalized recommendation system that balances engagement, revenue, and our partner constraints". Do you see the welfare of their users in there? It's financial clickbait for naive people. Stop saying it's a tech problem, it's the uncanny valley and what not. This problem is created by billions of naive cheapskates and a system that rewards moral flexibility.