Facebook Overhauls News Feed in Favor of 'Meaningful Social Interactions' (theguardian.com) 95
Facebook said late Thursday it will begin to prioritize posts in the News Feed from friends and family over public content and posts from publishers. The company will also move away from using "time spent" on the platform as a metric of success and will instead focus on "engagement" with content, such as comments. From a report: The social media platform will de-prioritize videos, photos, and posts shared by businesses and media outlets, which Zuckerberg dubbed "public content," in favor of content produced by a user's friends and family. "The balance of what's in News Feed has shifted away from the most important thing Facebook can do -- help us connect with each other," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post announcing the change. "We feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren't just fun to use, but also good for people's well-being."
not a /. Story (Score:5, Insightful)
nobody posting here knows what meaningful social interaction means
Re:not a /. Story (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on my feed, it seems to mean "Continually battering people with your political beliefs on a social network"
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Then add me on FB and I promise to post pics of kittens and what I've just had for dinner.
As a "foodie" with foodie friends, I actually miss the days when people would share the interesting meals they'd made. Far better than selfies and endless reposts of non-original crap. At least it was personal and creative.
This proposed change actually has me intrigued. I'm very doubtful it will actually improve things, since the suggestion is that they'll reduce commercial advertising, which is how they make money. But maybe I'll check out Facebook again in a few months.
And thanks for the offer, but even i
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Re:not a /. Story (Score:4, Insightful)
nobody posting here knows what meaningful social interaction means
Meaningful social interaction is when my cat greets me at the door when I get home after work.
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Bullshit. I flamed a post that I didn't like, and I even sincerely meant every word of my hate! How is that not meaningfully socially interactive enough?!
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I know.
Facebook is a platform for me to publish my amateur photographs and to admire the works of others.
Also, the hidden "Family" Group works a lot better than email.
News from Facebook? (Score:1)
Who get's their news from Facebook anyway?
Re:News from Facebook? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the geriatric equivalent of getting your news from late night "comedy" talk shows.
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Re: News from Facebook? (Score:1)
I think this confusion arises from news commentary which has become so ubiquitous most don't even differentiate news and news commentary anymore.
When it comes to news commentary, late night/comedy shows provide a memorable and more enjoyable delivery mechanism as opposed to daytime commentators building speculation upon speculation in a tower of cards approaching conspiracy theory and consulting everyone's opinion.
When it comes to real news reporting without pushing side commentary, neither late night more
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Re:News from Facebook? (Score:5, Insightful)
You may not, I may not, but people do. Sadly.
Facebook 2004 was awesome. It was about meeting people around me in college. I'm trying to remember if we had pictures other than our profile photo.
These days it's a cesspool agglomeration of the Eternal September, forwards from grandma and AOL chat.
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Snowflake
I like how being unique and thinking for yourself and not following groupthink is now somehow an insult.
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Redefining what term? I'm pretty sure if we go back 5 years, the definition is a lot closer to what I said.
Now, can you explain to me why the term is being redefined as an insult? It doesn't make sense.
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I did. And sometimes when I went home I wanted to continue to talk to them. We had AIM for chat.
We also used it to discover people to talk to. They had a function where you could enter your class schedule and it would bring up everyone else who had that class, so you could reach out and make study groups ahead of time.
Smart phones didn't exist as such, so we weren't buried in facebook at the bars or everywhere else.
what about nagging? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:what about nagging? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd put up with that if they'd go back to the days before they assumed that all of their users are 12 years old. I can't begin to express how annoying it is when I'm in a chat display and the screen gets flooded with animated hearts, or I hold down too long when scrolling and the interface tries to make me randomly insert an emoji. My phone has accidentally sent way too many emojis, often in completely inappropriate contexts. FB has also entirely thrown out the notion of "screen real estate", deciding that the goal is to fit as *little* info onto the screen as possible.
Oh, and let's not forget the incredible "walled garden" annoyance wherein they try to make you use Facebook as your web browser on cell phones.
And as for the "public content" reduction, sounds like they're just trying to encourage providers of "public content" to pay them, otherwise their posts get hidden. I "like"d various public content pages because I *want* to see their posts; if I didn't, I wouldn't have liked them :P
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But how else would I know that I'm missing out on some really exciting stuff that's been going on recently - like the 2 pokes I've got. From ~10 years ago.
Please give me professional news instead of family (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, if Facebook is concerned about my well-being, then when I look at a news story, I want something from journalists, not uncle Joe's regurgitation of what he heard on Alex Jones.
The Washington Post has been far less harmful to my mental health than the shit my family and friends have shared and called "news".
Re:Please give me professional news instead of fam (Score:5, Insightful)
Prehaps you should just use another site.
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Prehaps he should just use "unfollow"
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The only smart way to interpret news is not to implicitly trust any of them.
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And old Uncle Joe? He's a-movin' kinda slow.
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If facebook fully banned 'news', their users would be better off.
It should be a place where people reconnect, chat, and plan events. Period.
Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been hoping for something like this for quite some time. Virally shared videos and news articles have their place, but the primary thing keeping me on Facebook is interacting with people. For every original post, I see a dozen random shared articles from the same two dozen people, and end up missing things I actually care about.
Really, I would love Facebook to allow me to very directly configure what I see, because the options are so limited - if I didn't 'subscribe' to certain people, I'd never see them. I can't prioritize original posts, or text-only posts, or images over videos...all of which should absolutely be available. This is at least a start. I'll take it.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
What I want is a checkbox that lets me turn off ALL shares. I ONLY want to see content that was originally created by people that I know.
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I really hope this happens. At the moment I manually block all shared sites... about as successful as swimming up a waterfall.
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Try a browser extension called "F.B.Purity". It does exactly that, and fixes a lot of things in the Facebook interface.
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Seconded. It's pretty flexible, so you can tune it to take out the worst junk or almost everything. Mine is set to still allow shares, but it helped cut way back on ads and other spammy stuff.
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I'm almost on board with that. But extended family or family of friends are people I don't want to follow, but I might be interested in seeing posts they originally created if it's shared by someone I'm friends with on FB.
Re: Finally (Score:1)
Yes! Where is that share button when you need it?
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I started spending a lot of time trying to curate my feed -- blocking most third party articles and re-shares. But then I started going directly to friends walls and realized [i]almost everything[/i] was just a re-share.
Fb was a huge time sink and I'm glad to be done with it. Now I can spend more time on the Internet's largest message board for transsexual gun owners.
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If they did that in their current business model they'd start losing a lot of money. FB sells visibility on the users' feed at a premium, the whole core business is in being the largest and most in depth segm
Re: Finally (Score:1)
Newsfeed (Score:1)
Now we could just limit the "friends" who post useless news. I only really care about pictures of people I know, or status updates. The rest is just crap, primarily the reason I dislike facebook.
Is this the beginning of the end? (Score:5, Interesting)
I started using Facebook about 2009 and until the last couple of years found it a fairly entertaining way to waste time and keep up with old friends and family. I was bothered by Facebook's occasional lapses in privacy control, but not overly so.
I've quit using it for the last six months and what really drove me away was the relentless partisan bitching. Gone were the random food snapshots, the ephemera of people's daily lives and humorous observations. In their place was a relentless sharing of political memes, "news" articles and sociopolitical scolding and partisanship.
And I mean by both sides -- lunatic right AND left wing bullshit. I live in a liberal community and by default know more liberal people, so it was worse from that side of the equation but there wasn't a shortage of right wing bullshit either.
My sense is that the turning point was the ability to re-share unoriginal content. Somebody taking the effort to cut and paste a link and hopefully comment is mostly fine, but too much is low-effort resharing and not enough original content. I think this nicely set the stage for partisan ranting and bitching.
I also think it creates a false social dynamic. While it seemed great to keep in touch with people I didn't get to see too often, the reality is I don't see those people or stay in touch "manually" for all kinds practical and probably social reasons. FB lets you stay in touch, but to what end? I didn't actually end up seeing 90% of those people.
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Worse, it is the end of the end.
Yes, BSD is finally dead.
:-(
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Things will get better. The partisan bitching over the past six months (more like a year) is because of one major factor, and he's not looking too healthy, thank god.
Everybody's out of sorts at the moment.
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The problem will be resolved long before 2020.
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Gone were the random food snapshots, the ephemera of people's daily lives and humorous observations.
The flip side of this is that people only cared about trivialities instead of things that have significant impact. A lot of people criticized Twitter for being nothing more than what everyone had for lunch today. There have been jokes for years now about how more people vote for American Idol than vote for President.
I do agree, though, that it shouldn't be 100% serious, and plenty of the partisan junk is stupid and pointless.
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People at least are experts in the trivialities of their life.
Literally nobody I was FB friends with was an expert in politics.
All I want from the newsfeed is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... a persistent Recent Posts First option, with a persistent option for family/friends only. I want facebook to stop messing with what I see because all they do is screw it up.
This... Just display what is posted in chronological order without ads.
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... a persistent Recent Posts First option, with a persistent option for family/friends only. I want facebook to stop messing with what I see because all they do is screw it up.
Yes, please. Just show me everything and let me decide what's important.
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YES!!! That is the main reason I seldom go to FB. Any other site, I can see what's new, decide it's crap, and leave. On FB, I see a bunch of old crap, miss the new crap I want to see, and just get pissed off at the whole thing.
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Good, if they actually do anything. (Score:3)
But will they actually change anything? Of course not, they don't make money from me liking my a picture of my sister's dinner. No they make money when I click on a clickbait article they've managed to make me think a friend shared, when in fact the friend only reacted to that article. Or often just because the friend likes the page that paid FB for permission to spam it out. FB is not going to cut into their revenue stream.
Grrrr this makes me angry! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the main issue, is the public comments on the news.
A lot of news, while interesting and useful isn't very worthy of comments or reactions of people. However nearly anything that goes on there will be a number of people with a strong feelings towards it, but with the size of a population a small minority will make a lot of noise. So there is a lot of noise from these small groups making them seem like the larger community is more polarized then they really are. Then this unfortunately loops back on people instinct to belong to a group, so they will support the nut jobs that they will side with on that topic, and they will support your or my crazy ideas on the topics I feel strongly about. Then we isolate the other guys and push them away from supporting details on your side.
If you talk to a politically polarized person, about a problem that hasn't been politicized yet, they often would think of rather moderate solutions for an off the cuff problem. However once it has been politicized their stance will change to be inline with their team.
Why do you think we have Flat Earthers?
Evolution Deniers lead to Global Warming Deniers lead to Moon Landing Deniers to Flat Earthers. Because it became a competition on who is more Anti-Science enough to join the Anti-Science group.
There are many other types of group of people who seem to want to be the most of that group, despite going too far.
morons start building around bad metrics (Score:1)
Meaningful interactions is a bad metric. Try "healthy" interactions. Health can be measured. Meaning is subjective.
If you build around "meaningful interaction" then you are building for failure.
Flame Wars (Score:1)
I am not surprised.
Anyways, shouldn't be looking at Facebook for news. Stick to AP a local newspaper site.
Facebook. (Score:3)
If they'd just let it stay at "Most Recent" after I select that, I think that make me a thousand times happier than anything else they could do.
It's really tiresome to have to select the option or use a special URL just to NOT get some random historical posts and junk from groups at the top of my page, rather than a list of the most recent things people and groups did/said.
Meaningful? (Score:2)
On Facebook?
Seriously?
Net Opinion Neutrality (Score:1)
While Facebook / Google et. al. are fighting for Net Neutrality, I am wondering whether Net Opinion Neutrality should be. Policing public opinion should not be the duty of any company. Otherwise, we will have money controlled opinion policing.
A big question is who can scope the legal boundary of online corporate opinion policing.
Hold on a second (Score:2)
There's more to Facebook than the birthday reminder emails?
FB updates (Score:1)
"Time spent" was the metric?? (Score:2)
Seriously, 'time spent' using FB was what they considered a successful metric?
So of course screwing up the timeline, adding in a ton of unwanted stuff is going to 'succeed' by that standard. So would slowing down the scroll speed and increasing text size. Faaaaaawk. Who is moron in charge of thinking up these things?
Suddenly 'engagement' is what's valued? Seriously? It took this long to figure out that's a better sign of a user experience? When they stop and participate in a post? Seriously? SERIOUSLY??
My '
How to really fix facebook (Score:2)
The problem with facebook, is facebook decides what you see. Its not like a newsgroup or forum, where every post is in order.
Facebook goes out of their way to alter feeds instead of giving groups.
How about offering, friends, family, businesses, entertainment, groups. if I click the friends feed, I want all my friend's posts in order from new to last, not facebooks algorithm messing with my feeds. Facebook has many issues, but facebooks intentionally messing with my feeds, picking what I can see, that's the
Double Win For Facebook (Score:2)
The feed already sucks (Score:2)
"... good for people's well-being." (Score:2)
Where "people" is defined as "shareholders."
Kudos, Zuck (Score:2)
My many issues with Facebook. (Score:2)
I want to read stuff on Facebook in forward chronological order, starting with the oldest one I have not yet read.
I want filters. Flexible, customizable filters.
Friend A is an over-the-top enthusiastic evangelist for Bariatric Surgery. 90% of her posts are about the glories of bariatric surgery, and support groups for such. I want to see none of that, but I very much do want to see the other 10% of her posts.
Friend B posts every Snoopy meme that he encounters, a dozen a day. I don't want to block all Sn