[mikeash]

Why is it so terrible that they control the order of the feed? If the feed was just sorted by date then it would be unusable for most people. I feel like a lot of objections to how Facebook does things come down to thinking Facebook is something different from what it is. It is not, nor is it intended to be, something that shows you every single post from every single friend.

[marricks]

I tried to spell out why, but here you go, my personal experience is this out of order sorting meant that if I tried to post anything besides vapid updates few people saw them. If Facebook wanted to go from chronological to some other transparent metric, like hotness, I'd be more okay then whatever this is. The fact this is on the feed, my profile, and heck, even searching for events last I saw, is disturbing.

Also, sorted by date was great for many years when they initially got popularity. I (and others IIRC) were pretty unhappy when it changed to this.

[ncr100]

Hypothetical solution: Wrap your serious posts in vapid trimmings.

[marricks]

That could be fun...

> "Look at this cute cat pic, the time for the proletariat to rise is nigh, so cute!"

[L_Rahman]

I have actually started doing this. I write a text post, but then include a topical, memey, feed friendly image with it. Engagement is much higher.

[majewsky]

I'm seeing this with blog posts, too. Where a serious topic is discussed, but it's illustrated with appropriately-captioned meme images. I wonder if they do it to please today's meme-craving reader, or just to avoid overly long sections of text without any breaks (what Germans lovingly call "Bleiwüste", i.e. "lead desert").

[delecti]

Because there's no way to ensure you have the option of seeing everything unless it's in chronological order. Even if there was just the option of sorting chronologically then a different sorting being the default could be fine, but when you click "sort by most recent" it doesn't, not really anyway. Currently when I click that option there are zero posts displayed. That's not a typo or exaggeration, literally zero posts display under "most recent".

[ikeyany]

"sort by most recent posts that we approve of"*

Why isn't this being talked about by various media outlets? It's blatant social engineering via dark patterns and deception.

[ballenf]

Another way to put it -- it's not so much that ordering by something other than date is an issue, it's that ordering by date is (one of) the only neutral ways to sort. Anything else introduces a bias to some degree. Popularity of posts may be another way, although this gives older posts undue weight.

Sorting by an opaque algorithm gives FB the power to control the conversation.

[jbreckmckye]

> Why is it so terrible that they control the order of the feed?

Because for more and more people, social media is becoming 'the news', and this gives Facebook certain obligations to treat content fairly and act transparently.

Whether this state of affairs is intentional or not is moot - FB knows its power and reach. (Though I struggle to believe FB really is just some naive company that suddenly had greatness 'thrust upon them' - they've spent a good ten years proselytising their "platform", after all)

[ashark]

Not knowing how/where/to-whom my posts would show up (and how/where others' posts or status updates or whatever could be seen) was my biggest (non-privacy-related) problem with Facebook when I briefly tried it back in '09 or so. Their UI was so damn confusing that I quickly gave up on it. Seems like it's only gotten worse, but I guess most people don't mind not knowing what a given action will actually do. It felt to me like a giant step back as a communication tool, adding levels of uncertainty and chance for no good reason.

Add the fact that their weighting of posts also shapes conversations in possibly-unpredictable (or predictable, deliberately-manipulative) ways and yeah, I object to it.

Then again I also find Twitter's UI to be fairly confusing (and really stressful, god it's messy). Less so, but still. So maybe I'm just bad at understanding GUIs. Back to SMS, IRC, and Basic HTML GMail for me.

[derwiki]

This isn't referring to the general Newsfeed, where sure, they can reorder. It's referring to the fact that on _my profile_ FB will rearrange my stories, so most recent isn't always on top.