Inside the Facebook Algorithm Most Users Don't Even Know Exists

First time accepted submitter catparty (3600549) writes An examination of what we can know about Facebook's new machine learning News Feed algorithm. From the article: "Facebook's current News Feed algorithm might be smarter, but some of its core considerations don't stray too far from the groundwork laid by EdgeRank, though thanks to machine learning, Facebook's current algorithm has a better ear for 'signals from you.' Facebook confirmed to us that the new News Feed ranking algorithm does indeed take 100,000 weighted variables into account to determine what we see. These factors help Facebook display an average 300 posts culled from roughly 1,500 possible posts per day, per user."

Comments

Bubbles

[i kan reed]

Social media helps keep you in a nice little bubble, where you're never exposed to information you might not like.

Psychology tells us we(in general) don't like information that challenges our biases. Is anyone else afraid that Facebook and Google are unintentionally driving us all towards ignorance?

No conspiracy necessary: happy people pay more attention to ads(citation available if anyone cares), they try to make us happy, trying to make us happy keeps us dumb, and it all serves everyone's short term interests, and no ones' long term interests.

Re:Bubbles

[Lab Rat Jason]

1. It is not possible to exert mind control over an intelligent and reasonable person simply by throttling their social media streams.

See: Russia, Iran, Syria, China... need I go on?

Re:Bubbles

[i kan reed]

Positive Mood and Susceptibility to False Advertising

Even though you're more aware of the fact that the advertising is false, you're still more likely to form a positive image of the brand as a result of being happy. I have, without being fully informed about "true" advertising, mentally extrapolated that to apply to all advertisements.

This idea is at least a little corroborated by this older study which suggests happier moods implies a greater uptake on simple advertising messages.

Re:Bubbles

[rolfwind]

Have you seen so-called "World News" with Diane Sawyer lately on one of the big networks?

It's embarassing. 3/4 human interest stories at least. Mostly domestic. A few minutes of human interest human interest stories.

Or when you watch the olympics. Very few competitions anymore on the networks. Especially not when foreigners are competing. And we need everyone's tearjerking backstory now.

It hasn't always been like this. People don't need social media to stay ignorant. Their own mass media does it for them.

Re:Bubbles

[znrt]

1. It is not possible to exert mind control over an intelligent and reasonable person simply by throttling their social media streams.

yeah but it's hivemind control. hivemind oriented individuals are a majority, so hivemind control is actually a reality. and a pretty obvious one if you ask me. now for example you may not be buying this bullshit but it is your hive, and you can't escape: these hivelings may be your relatives, your friends, people you like or love. you screwed, bro. in other words: controlled.

of course the problem itself points to the way out. let's not despair!

Re:Bubbles

[bbsalem]

Business and the economy is based on the fact that a majority of people are stupid. If that weren't true than the informal fallacies in most advertising would be laughed off the air and out of print. "Stupid" means correctly unaware, so that very bright people can be stupid, since processing ability is not the same as knowledge. So, the whole economy is based on people being lazy to some extant, to want convience and ease, and wishful thinking. That is why cons are common in business. Not all business is deceptive but much of it is or is based on subliminal messages. Think of how much appeal comes from the impression that someone offering a service rally cares about you more than getting their asking price, when the latter is really all they really care about. I am not being cynical. really, I am just stating that people operate on impressions that do not stand up to critical tests of motivation and that most people are not used to thinking critically.

Human vs. crowd

[mi]

While each of us is as unpredictable as a molecule, once you put enough humans together, the crowd becomes as predictable as gas. Google, Facebook, Twitter, (/.?) and other companies with massive user bases can do some pretty interesting things with their users.

Whether it is ethical or not is another story, but it is certainly interesting.

Because

[heezer7]

just showing shit in chronological order is too easy.

Re:Because

[wisnoskij]

Well I think the idea is that for 99% of accounts that is not possible. There is more content than you could ever read (1500 posts per day). So FB can either filter out the content based on chronology. Or it can take an educated guess like, he always reads, and often comments on John's posts, so instead of hiding them, we will put them right at the top of his feed when he logs in. And he had never even paused scrolling when confronted with a post from the official Coca Cola page, so maybe he cares less if we filter these out. I do not know about you, but I do not want to miss some major announcement for my best friend, simply because I liked coca cola and they posted 20 things after he made the announcement.

Re:Because

[Lab Rat Jason]

The trouble here... and the reason I don't use facebook... is that just because I like coke, doesn't mean I "Like" coke. If I want to express my affinity for a product, that doesn't mean I want to be constantly marketed to by that company. Likewise, the sleazy practice of making someone like your product before you can see some kind of content (say a video for example) that has gone viral... but until you watch the video, you aren't sure whether you "Like" (or even like) the product/company... pisses me off.

Facebook operates under the pretense that it's a good way for you to keep in touch with your friends... but their quarterly financial statements argue for the fact that it is a good way for companies to market to individuals under the pretense of them keeping up with their friends.

Your description of the myriad ways in which your feed is broken and fails to satisfy you is a proxy for the myriad ways in which Facebook is making money off you.

Re:Because

[scottbomb]

Exactly. It's extremely annoying having FB pick and choose what I see. I keep my news feed on "Most Recent" all the time. But every once in a while, without warning, they pull the ol' switcheroo and change it back to what they think are the "Top Stories". No FB, I actually know everyone in my friends list and I like to keep with with all of them, not just the few I communicate with most.

Re:Because

[Andy_R]

Exactly, I've found that the only way to get Facebook to work the way it should work â" showing everything posted by people I know and pages I've liked â" is to install the FBPurity browser extension (from fbpurity.com) and to manually select 'receive notifications' from a hidden drop down menu when I 'like' a page.

The iPhone app just keeps getting worse, it does have the ability to show things in the right order, but it conveniently forgets that setting every time you open the app, and now the app has stopped showing everything after the first few characters when some sends you a message, begging you to install an extra app (but you don't need to, just open facebook.com in the phone's browser and you can read and respond to messages there).

Re:Because

[_xeno_]

There is a chronological order option, but it's hidden in a drop-down by the news feed link in the list on the upper-left portion of the Facebook UI. It also tends to randomly switch back to "Top Stories" mode as well as showing a little link for "back to Top Stories" at the top of the feed.

As another AC mentioned but I think deserves reiterating: that option merely sorts the Top Stories in chronological order. It does not show you all posts from all your friends. If Facebook has decided you don't want to see a post, you will not be seeing it. If they've decided you want to see fifty copies of various people posting some annoying Facebook quiz result even though you've hit the little "don't show me this" option a thousand times, well, you will be seeing fifty copies of that Facebook quiz. (After all, stupid Facebook quiz makers are important (paying) Facebook partners, and your friends are just more losers to show important (paying) Facebook partner content to.)

The only difference is that in Most Recent, they'll be in chronological order and not ranked by Facebook's "how much did the content publisher pay us?" algorithm.

Re:Because

[_xeno_]

Exactly. It's extremely annoying having FB pick and choose what I see. I keep my news feed on "Most Recent" all the time. But every once in a while, without warning, they pull the ol' switcheroo and change it back to what they think are the "Top Stories". No FB, I actually know everyone in my friends list and I like to keep with with all of them, not just the few I communicate with most.

The article actually mentions this: that doesn't do what you think it does. All that does is sort the Top Stories feed in chronological order.

Users mostly rebelled against this because they peeked behind the curtain and realized that Facebook is indeed controlling the content we see. Naturally, Facebook placated the naive with a button that lets us view posts in chronological order. The illusion remains intact!

It's still the filtered view.

Re:Because

[darkain]

Something else I've personally noticed, and this is consistent with everyone I've asked about the issue...

"Top Stories" for desktop viewing vs mobile viewing are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. I have to check FB on both my desktop AND my tablet every day just to get an idea of what going on with my social circle. This is just stupid bad. What is even worse is that there is next to zero intersection between these two separate news feeds from the same account. It is as if Facebook decided to split timelines in half, one set for mobile, the other for desktop.

I like to dick with FB

[OzPeter]

Yes I have a FB account (for various reasons) but when ever I get the chance I always flag ads as being sexually explicit with the hope that it wastes more FB resources than they gain from me. Yeah, it may not actually do anything, but it keeps me happy.

(Likewise I also report unsolicited emails from major companies as spam)

Re:I like to dick with FB

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because they are able to analyze almost everything about your behavior but could never catch on that all your reports are crap? Its also very unlikely that they would even care about your report if you are the only person reporting.

Come on, can you really be that naive? Do you really think that during the design of the report functionality they said to themselves "a few million people will see this and might click on it, so we probably should handle everything manually and not find a way to filter out trolls, this is the internet after all and everybody is always nice here".

If you don't want to help facebook, then you don't join facebook. Simply being on there makes the whole system better for other users. Unless you are there but nobody ever contacts you on it or friends you.

And yet

[bananaquackmoo]

And yet it still sucks at presenting me with any news I'm interested in. I think I've clicked on a news story from that feed only once and by accident. Hint : I don't have any interest in sports, politics, celebrity gossip, pop music, old news, and pretty much anything else they've recommended.

Yeah, I'm still annoyed

[PJ6]

that I don't have the choice to tell Facebook to just stop randomly hiding shit on me.

Some of us don't have 1200 "friends" and don't want a filter.

The real News Feed algorithm

[DigitAl56K]

if (session.timeelapsed() > 1800 || rand() % 3 == 0)
        newsfeed.setmode(TOP_STORIES);

Re:Most Users

[Chris Mattern]

...and that's exactly how Facebook likes it.

Re:Real OG

[Hillgiant]

You realize all those "chicks" are actually spam-bots using images culled from inactive instagram accounts, right?

And since when do "gangstas" post on /.?

Re:Real OG

[is as us Infinite]

Heh, that's because the longer you spend on a persons profile and looking through their photo albums the more likely it is those people will show up on your newsfeed. All that time spent looking at their pictures tells Facebook those people are important to you so it presents you with their other posts, too.