7 ms·

So Facebook is no longer showing all posts to people who intentionally subscribe to a page? If so, what, if anything, does “subscription” or “following” mean, t

So Facebook is no longer showing all posts to people who intentionally subscribe to a page? If so, what, if anything, does “subscription” or “following” mean, then? I realize I’m showing my age here, but I remember when missing an issue of a paper “subscription” was cause for anger and resulted in an apology from the publisher (and usually a redelivered copy). But I also remember when “follow” meant “show me all new posts from this user” on Facebook, too, back before they fucked up the News Feed in the 2010s and turned it into their manure delivery system.

dwighttk 5y ago
Same with YouTube. It is infuriating as a user.
- orangegreen 5y ago
  What I really dislike now about YouTube's algorithm is its insistence on showing short videos. I do not come to YouTube to watch 30 second videos. If I want to watch short videos I'd go to Instagram or Tiktok. Yet, no. I am bombarded with short videos. I removed the videos from showing up on the home page with some CSS, so now I solely rely on related videos for non-subscription content. Those seem to be delivered based on engagement so they're usually longer. Unfortunately, half the time they're hour long videos. Come on YouTube, just give me a 5-10 minute video.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > What I really dislike now about YouTube's algorithm is its insistence on showing short videos. I do not come to YouTube to watch 30 second videos. If I want to watch short videos I'd go to Instagram or Tiktok. Yet, no. I am bombarded with short videos. Was it always like that, or is it them trying to ape Tiktok? I use Youtube a lot, but never from their home page. One of the most annoying things is how, whenever there's some hot new thing, the old things I like seem to race to destroy themselves to imitate it.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      I use YouTube mostly from the Android app, and they are constantly pushing their "shorts" and COVID-19 propaganda. I'm even a Premium subscriber and have found no way to disable this.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    I was listening to the latest Reply All podcast about TikTok and they theorized that one big advantage the TikTok algorithm has for getting to know you is it gets to see like 50 - 60 reactions per hour of app usage, of whether the algo was hot or cold with each minute long video. YouTube is probably jealous because most of their data is just people putting on music playlists and not interacting at all.
  - Telemakhos 5y ago
    When you play advertisements between ads, shorter videos mean more ads per hour.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- afterburner 5y ago
  Just use your Youtube subscription page https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
  - null_object 5y ago
    > Just use your Youtube subscription page I know this isn't a YouTube algorithm discussion thread, but just to jump-in and say that I try to use the 'home' view in the iOS app as discovery for content that's related to my subscriptions to find new channels. The actual 'Discovery' tab is completely useless to me, as it's exclusively filled with complete trash that's trending locally (and in my case in Sweden, this means endless videos of local reality 'stars' doing 'crazy' stuff, interspersed with young women with well-filled tops talking to camera about 'something' from their beds, and what appear to be Arabic romantic dramas, and of course videos about sports cars). The home view mostly shows me content that includes my subscriptions and is related to it (programming channels, large-format analog photography channels), but about once a month - despite being a Premium subscriber with a very carefully curated watch history (I don't even click on friends' 'hilarious' YouTube links anymore) - the whole algorithm breaks down and even my Home view is totally overtaken by big-breasted girls, Arabic(?) dramas, some sort of Free Fight boxing competition, and other trash that has to be removed one video at a time with at least two clicks each. The whole process is really fiddly and I'm always in dread of accidentally clicking the wrong tiny and poorly-designed little interface element so the video plays instead of confirming (for the fiftieth time) that what I really want is "don't recommend channel". I've rage-quit my Premium subscription a few times about this. But always come back as otherwise YouTube interrupts the videos every few minutes with their random spray ads these days - making it impossible to watch a 40-minute video and retain my sanity.
- phy6 5y ago
  I agree. My revenge as a user has been to scrape entire channels I want to watch, as I can only imagine things getting worse than they are now (less free, less intrusive, more thought-police). I now have a lifetime worth of non-perishable knowledge/wisdom stored up in video form, which compliments ebooks. It's like prepping but for data. Shot out to r/datahoarder.
- everdrive 5y ago
  The best thing to do with facebook is to ignore the feed altogether. Or even block it. Use search, and use subscriptions.
  - nicbou 5y ago
    Recently I used uBlock filters to hide feeds from various sites. It instantly curbed my usage.
- axiolite 5y ago
  Switching to NewPipe solved this problem for me. Performs better than the Google Youtube app, preserves some privacy, etc.
jasonjayr 5y ago
And they continue to make it harder and harder to make your feed a simple reverse chronological list of all the things you follow. You have to submit to 'the algorithm'
- bmlzootown 5y ago
  Twitter does the same thing -- they show "top" tweets by default now, rather than latest. Don't even get me started on their adoption of the mobile UI for desktop...
  - erhk 5y ago
    Infinite scroll is possbly the most damaging invention of the 21st century
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    Facebook and Twitter went from having relatively resource light pages to having "simple" interfaces that somehow use 2GB RAM per tab in Chrome or Firefox. Same thing with Reddit and its redesign.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- cratermoon 5y ago
  At one point in the growth of social media there was a legit argument that a strictly correct (or even approximately time-ordered) reverse chronological list of all the things a user followed didn't scale sufficiently, past a certain level. While there really is a level of combinatorial complexity which makes it hard, I no longer believe it's any less scalable than the algorithm complexity involved in their little game of "pull the lever to see if you get something interesting this time".
  - jasonjayr 5y ago
    Before facebook was born, users had client-side tools to help filter, sort, & highlight things that were important to them. NNTP, Mail, & RSS clients would consume volumes of data, sort through thousands of posts or articles, and users could focus and prioritize on what they knew to themselves what was important. Facebook strips users of those tools, and the only choice users have is to trust their algorithm to do it for them, and do it in the user's interest. They actively work against users trying to pull data from facebook's feed into their own clients not only by making it a ToS violation, but by scrambling the html layout of the page that renders it, making it extremely difficult to parse. And also using newspeak-esque language like "We are trying to protect you by doing this", suggesting that you're doing something bad by consuming your data. I think it's becoming painfully clear these social networks have an increasingly twisted view of what they feel is the user's interest.
vmception 5y ago
Its been like this for half of a decade, at least. Surprise!
paulddraper 5y ago
But then you wouldn't be subjected to the algorithm.
dade_ 5y ago
Once I realized that FB was controlling what posts I see, I started the painful process of deleting my account. I was furious that a friend of mine was in town, posted on FB but they filtered the post. Then I realized that they were blocking my posts from being seen my actual friends (not FB 'friends'). It was 2014, FB DELETE (disable? Who really knoes with those bastards). Wish I never signed up to the toxic dump of a website. Check out Neal Stephenson Fall or Dodge In Hell. As usual, Neal called it.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  At this point the only reason I stay on Facebook boils down to "squatting" my own identity.
- JonathanMerklin 5y ago
  Two questions, since I enjoyed the few Stephensons I've read: 1) a quick search of FoDiH brings up that it's from the perspective of a character in Reamde, which is one of his I have not read yet. Is it a mandatory prerequisite, a good-to-have but optional prerequisite, or essentially unrelated? 2) that search also brings up that it came out in 2019, but your comment says "It was 2014" w.r.t. something to do with FB (I actually had a lot of troubling parsing the meaning of that specific sentence and am still unsure, but that isn't the point). Can you really say he "called it" if he's reasoning a posteriori?
  - gshubert17 5y ago
    >> a quick search of FoDiH brings up that it's from the perspective of a character in Reamde, which is one of his I have not read yet. Is it a mandatory prerequisite, a good-to-have but optional prerequisite, or essentially unrelated? I read Reamde about 8 years before FoDiH. I recognized some of the characters but I had forgotten the details. I never got the feeling I needed to go back and reread it. And I enjoyed FoDiH for its own sake.
  - ruined 5y ago
    reamde is essentially unrelated. you could enjoy fall without it, stand-alone.
cratermoon 5y ago
> If so, what, if anything, does “subscription” or “following” mean, then? It means Facebook is using its system to game page owners into buying "boosts" or straight up ads. We know social media companies use the same psychological tricks that casinos use to get users to keep coming back, would it shock anyone to know that the company is turning the technology towards organizations and companies that have hitched their fortunes to it? All FB has to do is massage the algorithms just right to generate appropriate variable rewards and random payoffs to nudge page owners into thinking paying for attention is a good deal.

dwighttk 5y ago

Same with YouTube. It is infuriating as a user.

orangegreen 5y ago
What I really dislike now about YouTube's algorithm is its insistence on showing short videos. I do not come to YouTube to watch 30 second videos. If I want to watch short videos I'd go to Instagram or Tiktok. Yet, no. I am bombarded with short videos. I removed the videos from showing up on the home page with some CSS, so now I solely rely on related videos for non-subscription content. Those seem to be delivered based on engagement so they're usually longer. Unfortunately, half the time they're hour long videos. Come on YouTube, just give me a 5-10 minute video.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > What I really dislike now about YouTube's algorithm is its insistence on showing short videos. I do not come to YouTube to watch 30 second videos. If I want to watch short videos I'd go to Instagram or Tiktok. Yet, no. I am bombarded with short videos. Was it always like that, or is it them trying to ape Tiktok? I use Youtube a lot, but never from their home page. One of the most annoying things is how, whenever there's some hot new thing, the old things I like seem to race to destroy themselves to imitate it.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    I use YouTube mostly from the Android app, and they are constantly pushing their "shorts" and COVID-19 propaganda. I'm even a Premium subscriber and have found no way to disable this.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I was listening to the latest Reply All podcast about TikTok and they theorized that one big advantage the TikTok algorithm has for getting to know you is it gets to see like 50 - 60 reactions per hour of app usage, of whether the algo was hot or cold with each minute long video. YouTube is probably jealous because most of their data is just people putting on music playlists and not interacting at all.
- Telemakhos 5y ago
  When you play advertisements between ads, shorter videos mean more ads per hour.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
afterburner 5y ago
Just use your Youtube subscription page https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
- null_object 5y ago
  > Just use your Youtube subscription page I know this isn't a YouTube algorithm discussion thread, but just to jump-in and say that I try to use the 'home' view in the iOS app as discovery for content that's related to my subscriptions to find new channels. The actual 'Discovery' tab is completely useless to me, as it's exclusively filled with complete trash that's trending locally (and in my case in Sweden, this means endless videos of local reality 'stars' doing 'crazy' stuff, interspersed with young women with well-filled tops talking to camera about 'something' from their beds, and what appear to be Arabic romantic dramas, and of course videos about sports cars). The home view mostly shows me content that includes my subscriptions and is related to it (programming channels, large-format analog photography channels), but about once a month - despite being a Premium subscriber with a very carefully curated watch history (I don't even click on friends' 'hilarious' YouTube links anymore) - the whole algorithm breaks down and even my Home view is totally overtaken by big-breasted girls, Arabic(?) dramas, some sort of Free Fight boxing competition, and other trash that has to be removed one video at a time with at least two clicks each. The whole process is really fiddly and I'm always in dread of accidentally clicking the wrong tiny and poorly-designed little interface element so the video plays instead of confirming (for the fiftieth time) that what I really want is "don't recommend channel". I've rage-quit my Premium subscription a few times about this. But always come back as otherwise YouTube interrupts the videos every few minutes with their random spray ads these days - making it impossible to watch a 40-minute video and retain my sanity.
phy6 5y ago
I agree. My revenge as a user has been to scrape entire channels I want to watch, as I can only imagine things getting worse than they are now (less free, less intrusive, more thought-police). I now have a lifetime worth of non-perishable knowledge/wisdom stored up in video form, which compliments ebooks. It's like prepping but for data. Shot out to r/datahoarder.
everdrive 5y ago
The best thing to do with facebook is to ignore the feed altogether. Or even block it. Use search, and use subscriptions.
- nicbou 5y ago
  Recently I used uBlock filters to hide feeds from various sites. It instantly curbed my usage.
axiolite 5y ago
Switching to NewPipe solved this problem for me. Performs better than the Google Youtube app, preserves some privacy, etc.

jasonjayr 5y ago

And they continue to make it harder and harder to make your feed a simple reverse chronological list of all the things you follow. You have to submit to 'the algorithm'

bmlzootown 5y ago
Twitter does the same thing -- they show "top" tweets by default now, rather than latest. Don't even get me started on their adoption of the mobile UI for desktop...
- erhk 5y ago
  Infinite scroll is possbly the most damaging invention of the 21st century
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Facebook and Twitter went from having relatively resource light pages to having "simple" interfaces that somehow use 2GB RAM per tab in Chrome or Firefox. Same thing with Reddit and its redesign.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cratermoon 5y ago
At one point in the growth of social media there was a legit argument that a strictly correct (or even approximately time-ordered) reverse chronological list of all the things a user followed didn't scale sufficiently, past a certain level. While there really is a level of combinatorial complexity which makes it hard, I no longer believe it's any less scalable than the algorithm complexity involved in their little game of "pull the lever to see if you get something interesting this time".
- jasonjayr 5y ago
  Before facebook was born, users had client-side tools to help filter, sort, & highlight things that were important to them. NNTP, Mail, & RSS clients would consume volumes of data, sort through thousands of posts or articles, and users could focus and prioritize on what they knew to themselves what was important. Facebook strips users of those tools, and the only choice users have is to trust their algorithm to do it for them, and do it in the user's interest. They actively work against users trying to pull data from facebook's feed into their own clients not only by making it a ToS violation, but by scrambling the html layout of the page that renders it, making it extremely difficult to parse. And also using newspeak-esque language like "We are trying to protect you by doing this", suggesting that you're doing something bad by consuming your data. I think it's becoming painfully clear these social networks have an increasingly twisted view of what they feel is the user's interest.

vmception 5y ago

Its been like this for half of a decade, at least. Surprise!

paulddraper 5y ago

But then you wouldn't be subjected to the algorithm.

dade_ 5y ago

Once I realized that FB was controlling what posts I see, I started the painful process of deleting my account. I was furious that a friend of mine was in town, posted on FB but they filtered the post. Then I realized that they were blocking my posts from being seen my actual friends (not FB 'friends'). It was 2014, FB DELETE (disable? Who really knoes with those bastards). Wish I never signed up to the toxic dump of a website. Check out Neal Stephenson Fall or Dodge In Hell. As usual, Neal called it.

cratermoon 5y ago
At this point the only reason I stay on Facebook boils down to "squatting" my own identity.
JonathanMerklin 5y ago
Two questions, since I enjoyed the few Stephensons I've read: 1) a quick search of FoDiH brings up that it's from the perspective of a character in Reamde, which is one of his I have not read yet. Is it a mandatory prerequisite, a good-to-have but optional prerequisite, or essentially unrelated? 2) that search also brings up that it came out in 2019, but your comment says "It was 2014" w.r.t. something to do with FB (I actually had a lot of troubling parsing the meaning of that specific sentence and am still unsure, but that isn't the point). Can you really say he "called it" if he's reasoning a posteriori?
- gshubert17 5y ago
  >> a quick search of FoDiH brings up that it's from the perspective of a character in Reamde, which is one of his I have not read yet. Is it a mandatory prerequisite, a good-to-have but optional prerequisite, or essentially unrelated? I read Reamde about 8 years before FoDiH. I recognized some of the characters but I had forgotten the details. I never got the feeling I needed to go back and reread it. And I enjoyed FoDiH for its own sake.
- ruined 5y ago
  reamde is essentially unrelated. you could enjoy fall without it, stand-alone.

cratermoon 5y ago

> If so, what, if anything, does “subscription” or “following” mean, then? It means Facebook is using its system to game page owners into buying "boosts" or straight up ads. We know social media companies use the same psychological tricks that casinos use to get users to keep coming back, would it shock anyone to know that the company is turning the technology towards organizations and companies that have hitched their fortunes to it? All FB has to do is massage the algorithms just right to generate appropriate variable rewards and random payoffs to nudge page owners into thinking paying for attention is a good deal.