[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.