| Time and time again I see the complaint that people want a 'Most Recent' news feed instead of algorithm-chosen and that's why they don't use Facebook anymore. This type of feed would be unusable for the vast majority of users. Why? Because of Page Likes. I struggled to find quantitative data on this, but I myself like over 600 pages, and I'm selective. Many people like over 1000. With a Most Recent news feed, those hundreds of pages would be posting multiple times a day vying for your attention. 100% reach, organic and zero cost? It's a marketers dream come true. Add to that, I really only want to see posts from maybe 20% of my 'friends', and I believe this to be representative of the average user. "Curate your friends list and page likes!", I hear you say. No. I'm not bothered unliking hundreds of pages and neither is the average user. Not to mention, I did chose to hear from these pages for a reason. For friends, it's mostly socially unacceptable to unfriend people even if you haven't talked to them for a few years. Hence, the algorithm that does the curating for me, because there's really no other way around it. ps. I'm taking some liberties here speaking for an average user. I welcome data that shows I'm incorrect. The best I could find was from 2013 so is irrelevant. |
Then people would simply only "like" things that they really liked and really wanted to see. This is a non-issue.