3 ms·

I'm a homebrewer and lover of craft beer. I follow a lot of local breweries and beer brands that I like? Why? Because I want to hear more from them. They are a

by nhangen 12y ago

I'm a homebrewer and lover of craft beer. I follow a lot of local breweries and beer brands that I like? Why? Because I want to hear more from them. They are a part of my life, just like my friends, so they should be included in my feed. I also follow Fox Soccer and ESPN FC because it's easier to have content pushed specific to my interests rather than go to espn.com and click on the soccer tab. I follow businesses as my business because I want to build a profile. I also follow competitors and peers because I want to stay in the loop. It's just a large RSS feed really.

c4mden 12y ago
Except, with an RSS feed, you can be assured that you are receiving ALL of the content that is being published by the site you are following. With Facebook, you are at the mercy of a black-box algorithm that decides which posts you want to see. Those local breweries are going to have to pay FB in order for all of their followers to view any specific post.
- potatolicious 12y ago
  But I don't want to receive ALL the content. Unfortunately social media "consultants" and "experts" have decided to conflate spamminess with user engagement, and many businesses I legitimately want to hear from have taken to broadcasting every minutiae of what they do. The black-boxiness of the algorithm is non-ideal, but some algorithm is required.
  - nhangen 12y ago
    What FB has done is force people to game the system in order to appear in the feed, which results in more content than people are able to consume, which results in the fact that we don't want to see it all because some of it is junk. This is a problem that Facebook has created, and one they will wrestle with until they either fix it and save their business, or are displaced by an upstart.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  You can tell Facebook to deliver all the content from a particular brand or person. There is a setting.

by nhangen 12y ago

c4mden 12y ago

Except, with an RSS feed, you can be assured that you are receiving ALL of the content that is being published by the site you are following. With Facebook, you are at the mercy of a black-box algorithm that decides which posts you want to see. Those local breweries are going to have to pay FB in order for all of their followers to view any specific post.

potatolicious 12y ago
But I don't want to receive ALL the content. Unfortunately social media "consultants" and "experts" have decided to conflate spamminess with user engagement, and many businesses I legitimately want to hear from have taken to broadcasting every minutiae of what they do. The black-boxiness of the algorithm is non-ideal, but some algorithm is required.
- nhangen 12y ago
  What FB has done is force people to game the system in order to appear in the feed, which results in more content than people are able to consume, which results in the fact that we don't want to see it all because some of it is junk. This is a problem that Facebook has created, and one they will wrestle with until they either fix it and save their business, or are displaced by an upstart.
snowwrestler 12y ago
You can tell Facebook to deliver all the content from a particular brand or person. There is a setting.