[Zak]

According to Wikipedia, Facebook had a news feed in 2008; it was added in 2006, before which it was necessary to view a user's profile to see their posts. The switch to an algorithmically generated, rather than chronological feed started in 2011.

Facebook's decline, for me was not due to the feed being algorithmic. I think it got better around that time; showing original content from people I like to interact with first is a positive experience. What's not positive is showing me most things other than original content from my friends.

I'm not sure why the change happened, but at some point it did. Most of what I see posted on Facebook now is not original content from my friends. I mostly don't want to see third-party content. The share button was there long before I noticed this trend, but people are using it a lot more. I just went and cataloged 50 algorithmically-chosen posts. Here's the distribution:

Shared third-party post or link: 24

Original text: 9

Original image: 9

Directly-posted image of third-party content: 3

Promotion of a physical product by a page I follow: 2

Promotion of media by a page I follow: 2

Promoting own event: 1

[xg15]

I have the strong suspicion that Facebook often decides first that it wants to show me some post, then does some graph-walking and invents a "reason" after the fact why that post was somehow related to my friends list.

At least that would explain why a video that some friend of a friend watched 3 days ago is suddenly at the top of my newsfeed.

[Zak]

I repeated the count with a chronological feed, which is possible to get in a desktop browser with facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

Shared third-party content: 16

Original text: 5

Promoting own event: 4

Original image/video: 11

Directly-posted image of third-party content: 0

Page promoting product: 1

Page promoting media: 5

Group activity: 8

What would really make Facebook better for me is an algorithm that prefers original content. It might not be enough if that was something I could enable myself because what gets interaction from others affects what people post.