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Facebook Overhauls News Feed in Favor of 'Meaningful Social Interactions' (theguardian.com)
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."
nobody posting here knows what meaningful social interaction means
Who get's their news from Facebook anyway?
Are they going to stop sending me an email every day begging me to log in if I go on vacation for a couple weeks? It smacks of desperation.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
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".
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Prehaps you should just use another site.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
I suggest you take anything the WaPo publishes with a grain of salt as big as that needed for Alex Jones's lies. Their vendetta against Trump has resulted in their getting caught again and again and again in printing flat out lies hidden under the claim of anonymous sources.
I don't trust Jones but neither do I trust anything from the WaPo. It used to be a respectable newspaper, now it's a tabloid.
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.
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.
You can't improve the news feed if you've hidden everyone from showing up in your news feed. Noteworthy that this trick also removes advertisement from your news feed.
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.
Prehaps he should just use "unfollow"
And old Uncle Joe? He's a-movin' kinda slow.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
The only smart way to interpret news is not to implicitly trust any of them.
If you want the news, you know where to find it. I dropped off fb years ago as my feed was no longer about my friends and what they were doing but about politics and click bait like I Fucking Love Science. I liked my friends a lot more before they started sharing how stupid they are. The one thing I miss about fb is it reminded me to visit Penny Arcade, which I guess if I was still on these new changes would eliminate that.
... 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 is great news, if they actually implement it. FB used to be keeping up with friends and family, now it's a small targeted group of friends or family that FB's algorithms have decided I want to follow while the others only pop into my feed occasionally. It's unending clickbait articles put onto my wall because a friend liked it or commented, not shared it with me but liked or commented on it. Supposedly FB was going to fight clickbait and fake news, but it still dominates the newsfeed.
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.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Name a single thing in recent years that has proven to be a lie (not simply "other officials publicly denied it, without providing any supporting evidence for their denial") and for which no retraction was issued. Officials from an administration that publicly lies on average six times per day.
It was recently attempted to trick the Washington Post into posting face news against Republicans, so that they could be denounced for putting a "vendetta" over truth. It failed miserably due to WP's fact checking and investigative reporting.
Seriously, if Facebook is concerned about my well-being
monkeys WILL fly from your butt
...reminded me about the great advertisement deluge marking the transition from the Yahoo-ocene to the Googleocene era a long long time ago..
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.
So Facebook wants people to go into a flame war instead of actually having news.
I am not surprised.
Anyways, shouldn't be looking at Facebook for news. Stick to AP a local newspaper site.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
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.
On Facebook?
Seriously?
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.
^(oo)^pig~
There's more to Facebook than the birthday reminder emails?
BlameBillCosby.com
I would just be happy if FB would stop asking every 3rd article if i want to be a friend with zuckerburg or a friends, friends, friends 3rd cousin. Meaningful interactions would give me the ability to turn all the crap I dont want to look at.
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 'time spent' on IG now has now gone up significantly as well, because every 5th post is an ad or some other nonsense, so I have to spend even more time scrolling past that as well, so 'bravo', missing accomplished. (Well, a 'success' until I stop using IG as well, like I how stopped using FB about 8yrs ago because it increasingly took more time to peruse. Doh.)
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 issue it has.
So how does facebook fix it? By again, continuing the same problem. Turn facebook back into a feed mechanism.
This change has two benefits for Facebook: 1) Seeing more family and friend updates, and less business page posts, makes for a more enjoyable experience for users. This means they'll come back more, which in turn means more opportunities for Facebook to show them advertisements and make money. 2) Less brand Page posts means brands have to spend more on paid advertisements if they want to be seen by the more than 1.3 billion people that log on to Facebook daily. Again, more money for Facebook. Facebook always tests these changes on a number of regions or states before choosing to roll them out across the entire network. If they're making this change, it's because they've seen positive response from their testing.
Except for old people and fake ID's for commenting, do people still use facebook?
Seriously? When have they been caught printing "flat-out lies?"
I want it reverse order chronologically. Nothing else. Unfortunately, they not only make "relevant" the default, they prevent you from setting it chronological permanently, changing it back when they damn well feel like it. STOP telling me how I should interact with my social circle. If I want to see what happened the MOST recent in time, that's what I want to see. Now, Facebag is just a way to hear from old friends and extended family. If I want to chat with actual friends, I text them or hit them up on Instagram.
#!/Jerald
Where "people" is defined as "shareholders."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
We'll see if it does what you think it will, but I think your head is in the right place on this one.
Professional news is tainted by amygdala hijacking nonsense ever since we invented the 24 hour cycle. News long ago became 'Words'.
If facebook fully banned 'news', their users would be better off.
It should be a place where people reconnect, chat, and plan events. Period.
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 Snoopy memes, but I do want to block those that he posts, because he over-does it, and I do want to see his real posts. Similarly with Friend C, who posts dozens of cute puppy and kitten pictures a day.
Friend D lives 3000 miles away, and posts a continuous stream Lost/Found Pet notices. I want a proximity limit on Lost/Found Pet alerts.
I want to block absolutely and completely certain political screed sites, right left and center. Facebook only honors a block when a screed site story is shared, but not if it's a share of a share. When I block a site, I want it gone from my feed, no matter how many levels of nested shares it is.
Most of all, I want Facebook to NEVER NEVER EVER EVER zip to the top of the feed while I'm reading a dang story, rendering the story I was reading un-findable ever again without spending ages scrolling down searching for it, and most of the time not being able to find it at all.
Yeah... I want Facebook to be Usenet with trn 4.0.
WaPo: Russia hacked the US power grid!
Real story: A laptop owned by one electric company that was never connected to anything important was found to contain a generic malware of written by Ukrainians
That's otherwise known as a mistake (based on bad information provided by the utility to WaPo), and unlike some outlets (*cough*Fox*cough*), Washington Post corrects the record when new information becomes available.