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Facebook Overhauls News Feed in Favor of 'Meaningful Social Interactions' (theguardian.com)

Posted by msmash on from the shape-of-things dept.

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."

3 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Finally by Voyager529 · · Score: 4, 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.

    1. Re:Finally by tripleevenfall · · Score: 4, 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.

  2. Is this the beginning of the end? by swb · · Score: 4, 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.