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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 a

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.

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.