[Gratsby]

This thread makes it seem like the general opinion is that an automatically generated news feed would be better.

It wouldn't. Not for end users anyways. It would be a marketer's dream.

If you feel like that's the way things should be, write one. Make it popular. Sell it to Facebook. (And use the money to buy stock in your roommate's new online marketing firm)

[auntyJemima]

That's not the point, most people have the impression that the trending news is automated and generated by some sort of algorithm. It's highly misleading. The trends should really be called "Facebook's Top Picks" instead.

[spinlock]

Do intelligent people believe this? That's as nieve as thinking hacker news' front page is determined solely by the up arrow. Or that product hunt isn't controlled by insiders.

Children believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Is it shocking that they're wrong?

[joslin01]

Are intelligent people the only people worth looking out for?

Trending implies humanity cares about it, which to the lowly average-joe means humanity cares about it, so s/he should too. This is the part that feels disingenuous on Facebook's part.

Of course even average-joe knows (though probably can't express) that everything around him just wants to consume his attention, so I'm also not overly concerned about it.

[c_c_c]

naive or naïve

[AznHisoka]

Google understood this long ago. You need human editors/curators who can manually flag spam. Otherwise your index will be filled with spammers who gamed the algorithm correctly. Those that argue differently never was responsible for such a large-scale search/media operation.

[mtberatwork]

Google News claims to be entirely machine run without human intervention.

"The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program." [1]

[1] https://news.google.com/

[MasterScrat]

I would guess Google News uses fewer and more trusted sources, such as the homepage of well-known news websites.

I doubt Facebook marketers have the same kind of standards.

[awqrre]

Google News source selection is pretty broad and I don't think that the sources are selected by humans...

[MaysonL]

The thing is that that computer program gets tweaked, and tweaked, and tweaked again. See for example Google Panda update.

[dredmorbius]

Sources and deselection may be otherwise, and the statement doesn't exclude the possibility.

[gozur88]

>It wouldn't. Not for end users anyways.

That's true. The issue here isn't that Facebook tried and failed to implement an automatically generated news feed. The issue is they were called out for bias in the news feed, and then tried to deflect by blaming it on a computer.