[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.