[lanerobertlane]

When people argue against the 'news feed algorithm' they mean anything other than a reverse chronological feed of posts from the people they follow. status updates, and interactions between people/pages you both follow.

This article mentions that they turned the news feed off but people were still hiding posts from pages they don't follow, which friends had commented on. These shouldn't appear in a news feed that is not curated as they are not following that page, and is one of the things people are complaining about in the algorithm.

They didn't test the algorithm vs no algorithm, they tested the current algorithm vs another algorithm.

[winternett]

Also, if the user base is conditioned to seeing things and posting things to serve a particular type of timeline, it's not easy for everyone to transition to a completely different method and for that method to stabilize/work quickly.

When Facebook started changing their timeline and messing up the chronological order of posts it had a really strange effect on reality. Old news stories and posts were showing up for many months late, and they were reminding people about their pets that died years before as well, many people have forgotten that.

The best option would be to abandon the ideal that one single news feed is best for everyone and give control back to users along with an option for a truly chronological time line. Thy should also make multiple pages that rank posts based on taxonomy that users can browse content that is most liked by everyone on the platform.

The only reason why Facebook wants to be able to have singular time lines is so that they can push targeted ads without it becoming obvious to their user base, but if the taxonomy pages were titled and organized properly, the ads would be somewhat more relevant by nature, and not require them to invade everyone's privacy like they have been doing thus far.

[hn_throwaway_99]

100% agree. In addition, look at their metrics. When it comes to "meaningful social interaction", calling Uncle Joey a stupid ass because he posted another semi-racist Obama meme is the same as telling Cousin Jane you like her baby pics.

I should HOPE "meaningful social interactions" go down with a reverse-chron, friends-only feed.

[sam0x17]

Aren't those both equally meaningless? Maybe this is why I don't participate in social media anymore XD

[strken]

They might do sentiment analysis, in which case you'd have to put thinly veiled sarcasm in your reply to Uncle Joey to be counted.

[jacurtis]

> "Without a News Feed algorithm, engagement on Facebook drops significantly, people hide 50% more posts, content from Facebook Groups rises to the top, and — surprisingly — Facebook makes even more money from users scrolling through the News Feed."

Yes, it is confusing when they say they "turned off the algorithm" because what it sounds like is they are still using an algorithm here, just a far worse version of one, maybe an earlier version of the algorithm.

But if posts are "rising to the top" and "they saw double the amount of posts from public pages they don’t follow, often because friends commented on those pages". This still sounds like an algorithm is ranking posts, just in a "worse" way.

Removing the algorithm to me would mean seeing posts in a reverse-chronological order as they happened. Everything would appear equally. Maybe some controls are given to users to hide certain types of items, such as 2nd degree pages (pages your friends follow and comment on, but you do not follow), group posts, and so on.

But as soon as you re-order posts, you are using an algorithm. It is very disingenuous to claim you removed an algorithm when all you really did was replace it with a worse algorithm. Then justify your actions because the worse algorithm performed worse (wow shocking i know).

[novok]

I think it's still legit to think of what they did was turning off the algorithmic filtering, but did not turn off the algorithmic event generation. To be fair although, group and friend posts are things people explicitly subscribed to, it's only the friend comments that they didn't explicitly subscribe to. Which makes me think, did they do a version of the experiment without "people commented on X" items and see what happened?

I think the results would be somewhat similar although, because group activity will still dominate. Knowing a place like FB although, they probably tried all the combinations to see what happened. I'm curious what those results are too.

[chadlavi]

it seems like they're using algorithm to mean "a more complicated means of calculating what to show you," and they're saying there is no algorithm involved when they use a simple means of determining what to show you. Which is of course also an algorithm -- when a person the user is friends with interacts with something, show that in the user's feed. But algorithm somehow means magic nowadays.

[jaywalk]

It seems Facebook is so far up their own ass that they actually think this "no algorithm" test they did is what people are clamoring for.

[threeseed]

Except that it is exactly what people have been asking for:

Simple reverse chronological order feed with no ranking.

[jaywalk]

Did you even read the comment I replied to? BS like "we're throwing this post in your feed because one of your friends liked/commented on it" is not part of what people have been asking for, but that was still part of their "no algorithm" test.

All they did was get rid of the ranking, but that's only part of the issue.

[sokoloff]

I am some non-zero amount interested that a Facebook friend of mine liked or commented on some random post. I’m not as interested as something that they posted originally, but clearly non-zero interested in many of those.

[jaywalk]

That's perfectly fine. Me personally, I am not at all interested in it. But Facebook could very easily allow us to tailor our individual Newsfeeds to our liking, so you can have what you want and I can have what I want.

But that's not what Facebook wants, so that's not what we get.

[dataflow]

I can't tell if they want us to believe none of their brilliant minds realize this, or that they deliberately wanted a test that would give them an excuse to keep things as is.

[wussboy]

Which one is more likely? There’s your answer.

[timbit42]

FBPurity is a browser plugin that lets you decide what to see on FB. You can decide to only see what friends post and not what they like, share, or comment on, etc.

[Oddskar]

Wow. Comparing with this addon and without is pretty jarring. I might actually start using the newsfeed again with this addon.

Holy cow do FB just shove a bunch of shit into the feed.

[pishpash]

Doesn't seem to work, won't filter out Sponsored posts despite the option being selected...

[CompuHacker]

Facebook changes the way Spοnsored content is formatted on a moment to moment basis, sometimes in a way that breaks accessibility software, to foil exactly this kind of software, and ad-blockers.

[timbit42]

I don't see sponsored posts but perhaps that's due to Ublock Origin, not FBPurity.

[civilized]

And as Twitter shows, it's not hard to offer both options and let users choose.

Twitter also implemented a timer so that, if you choose simple reverse chron, it forces you back into the ranking algorithm after a certain period of time.

Hmm, I wonder why they'd go to the trouble to do that? Maybe these social networks have motivations that override user experience?

[sam0x17]

FB isn't going to do anything that doesn't affect at least 30% of users. As always this is all about revenue.

[civilized]

I'm sure FB has done many, many things that affect less than 30% of users

[sam0x17]

OK name something they added that they actually kept in the current version of FB that is used by less than 30% of users in the life of their account and isn't there for regulatory reasons. They use way too much A/B testing for anything like that to survive longer than 2 years.

[mzs]

I have no algorithm again, at least until FB decides to break it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004489

[forgotmypw17]

Sadly, that link is not available on mbasic, the only version this computer can handle.

[saurik]

Expand your mind to "a reverse chronological list of actions taken by my friends"? I don't want to--and don't need to--miss out on my friends replying to stuff just because I don't want to have an opaque content filtering and recommendation algorithm curating my life.