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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
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'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.
It's the geriatric equivalent of getting your news from late night "comedy" talk shows.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
The late night comedy shows often have more actual news content than some programs that purport to be news.
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