[ivanbakel]

It's interesting to see how Facebook is taking increasing control of news and publicity on its service. In a sense, we're long past the point of questioning whether it's ethical, since they've obviously been influencing content for a long while, but this is one of the strongest arguments for FOSS alternatives like Mastodon.

Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more level playing field, and the users will follow.

[dickbasedregex]

I left FB ~4 years ago. One of the straws that broke the camel for me was that it was obvious FB was "curating" my feed for me. Without notifying or consulting me. Posts from friends wouldn't show in my feed and vice versa. The privacy issues were bad enough but when I couldn't trust the platform to fulfill the only need I had for it, I walked.

I'm far better for it.

[jandrese]

The worst part is you can switch it back to the chronological view, but Facebook will undo your change at their earliest convenience. You have to make a bookmark to the correct feed to keep it showing up properly.

It is annoying, but I'm not a power user. I only check it once every few days to keep up with the relatives, maybe post once a week or so. It's pretty low maintenance.

[jasonjayr]

And worse -- they seem to have recently capped the chronological view to 24 hrs. with just a tag at the end "to see more, add more friends" :-/

[username223]

AFAICT even the "chronological" view is not chronological. I don't know -- I switched over to mbasic.facebook.com because it works without JavaScript -- but I remember posts randomly appearing and disappearing.

[ss64]

There is no chronological view You have either: 'Most recent' = filtered or 'Top stories' = heavily filtered

[autokad]

my favorite part is when facebok switched to prioritizing popularity of posts, and not time.

Now I see from my friends "I'm going out to devil's den in 20 minutes if anyone wants to join me - 23 hours ago"

yeah, thanks for that facebook. i really needed cat videos and political rants triaged ahead of that for a whoel day.

[derwiki]

If it is a complete machine-learning backed algorithm (I have no idea if it is), it could learn that if you find a time sensitive post after the deadline, it gives you FOMO and you start checking FB more frequently. That is, the algorithm is optimizing for engagement.

[logicallee]

Given that you were frustrated by not seeing all of your friends' posts and their not seeing all of yours, how are you better for it now that you see 0.0% of your friends' posts of any kind and now that you can now share your own content with only 0.5% of them (personally or through email etc)?

[VLM]

To answer your question, the only thing worse in practice than no news, is fake news.

There are relationship negatives to censored personal news. My wife was tangentially involved in a family feud where facebook randomly promoted or hid various attacks and defenses and apologies of the two major factions. Its just not a platform useful for social interaction anymore. The censorship of the family feud and the resulting weird interpersonal drama reminds me of some incidents in the meme-war on facebook leading up to the election of Trump which is interesting.

Superficially it sounds awful to have family drama increased by hiding half the posts, much like playing a board game where half the moves are deleted sounds terrible. However, for a short period of time, until the users are completely alienated, FB made money by increasing the depth and length of that family feud by increasing readership during the height of the feud. In the long run people won't use FB at all, of course.

[twelvedogs]

i'm in this situation as well, i've moved to a slack group with my work friends and direct messaging with others, facebook was just a shitty way to talk to people i don't really care about where my posts were spirited away almost immediately

0.5% is being generous, i had almost no interaction with people i cared about while i was on there and i'm glad i've switched to other platforms where they aren't as interested in feeding me their stuff and just letting people talk

[inetknght]

FYI Slack could easily do the same thing. And indeed, being a closed system, what protection do you have against it?

[VLM]

That would utterly annihilate its corporate use if there was even a rumor they randomly censored content like operations and QA/QC discussion. My company also pays extra money to slack for the "we log everything for your e-discovery enjoyment" so there would be substantial legal issues if they randomly started hiding stuff we're paying to be e-discovered. Slack has problems, but weird censorship stuff isn't one of them.

Weird as it probably sounds, FB sucks for humans because its users are people not corporations.

[germinalphrase]

Depends on how he reacted to the change. I started talking to my friends on the phone more often. I probably also reduced the overall number of friends I have - but then are they really friends if you won't make the effort to contact them? Maybe I'm just old enough to feel comfortable letting past friends, colleagues, etc. fade into the past in favor of focusing on the people right in front of me.

[inetknght]

What makes you think I see 0.0% of my friends' posts? What you're actually saying is that people who have left facebook see 0.0% of stuff on Facebook.

That's not a problem.

Friends will share important stuff outside of Facebook because that's how friendship works.

And there are many other platforms where things can be shared too. People can post the same or similar things to multiple platforms quite easily these days.

[adrian1973]

Perhaps those 0.5% are the ones who matter. There are friends and then there facebook friends.

[jpalomaki]

Facebook is likely trying to maximize the time people spend on browsing their feed. Surface too many "boring" news articles in a row and user might go away. Put a nice mixture of news, goofy stuff, updates from friends, some fake news to provoke action and user remains.

Hundreds of millions of people stare the news feed on weekly basis and interact with it. This creates a spectacular opportunity for employing machine learning to optimize things. Facebook has huge amount of data and it is easy to run various tests automatically to see what works in practice.

If this is the case, then it may be difficult for the others to compete. Facebook might be doing exactly what customers want - even if they don't know it themselves.

My thoughts were influenced by this article posted on HN some weeks ago: http://www.truthhawk.com/is-facebook-a-structural-threat-to-...

[marcosdumay]

Assuming they aren't selling this "boring" evaluation (or submitting to any other kind of pressure for making suboptimal decisions), keeping users reading their feed is still not necessarily what users want.

Facebook is doing what maximizes revenue, but there's no evidence that is the same thing that will encourage users to keep using it in the long term.

[jpalomaki]

That's a very good point that I did not think about. Even if they would be able to hit the right buttons in my mind to keep me browsing, I might find the overall experience dissatisfying and quit the whole thing. Like does anybody really feel "good" after spending one hour browsing Facebook or imgur?

[nerdponx]

Agreed. They want to sell ads on Facebook.com, and they can't do that if you aren't glued to Facebook.com all day.

[kalleboo]

Exactly, I remember when the main complaint was "there's too much irrelevant spam on my timeline". Now I only hear the opposite "I missed this and this important announcement"

[baking]

I don't see how these are not the same things. I see lots of posts from people I don't know that are liked by some of my friends, but often never see original posts by other friends. And I only have about two dozen friends that I follow.

[criley2]

I think your model is completely reversed. Content follows users, not the other way around.

You can't beat Facebook by getting good content into some user-less alternative.

Users don't follow content. Content follows users.

[ivanbakel]

I don't think it's exclusively one that follows the other. Users push for content migration, and content encourages user migration. However, there's not much draw for users right now to move away from Facebook, so we're more reliant on content to make the shift.

[snowwrestler]

If content follows users then how did Facebook develop such a big user base? Every single Facebook user chose to create an account there. Why? Because of the content they knew they would find there.

"Follow the users" is a good way to decide where to do some content marketing next week, but it's incomplete if you're looking at how the overall information ecosystem evolves. You have to account for how new services attract users, in order to understand what established services are doing to try to keep users.

[makomk]

The other reason why we're long past the point of questioning whether it's ethical is because pretty much the entire press insisted that it was a moral imperative for Facebook to take control of news on their service because of people sharing "fake news". There weren't really any dissenting voices on this point from what I recall.

[ams6110]

The perils of depending on someone else's service, especially when you have no contract with them that defines what they are supposed to be doing for you.

[ganfortran]

Big business loves censorship, they go straight demands it if not offered, look at the Youtube boycott that is happening right now. They are surely not fan of FOSS or freedom of speech.

[chatmasta]

They love it until it causes them to lose control over distribution or user retention/acquisition. See: "native articles" and how poorly received they were by news publishers.

[rm_-rf_slash]

Business likes anything that helps profits, and hates anything that hurts profits.

The threat of communist takeover permeated most of the 20th century as the ultimate threat for private enterprise, but the military-industrial-complex had a wonderful time.