[spankalee]

I would strongly disagree with classifying the feed as a Gruen Transfer mechanism.

The feed as a basic concept is great. It's basically an inbox, and no more of a Gruen Transfer enabler than an email inbox. Hell, it's no more inherently an enabler than an aisle in the store. It's not the existence of the feed, it's what's in it.

Facebook's feed is what allowed me to see what my friends were up to without clicking on every single profile. That made Facebook hugely more useful to me than MySpace.

But there are eyeballs on the feed, and money to be made by showing ads to those eyeballs and capturing more minutes of attention to in turn show more ads. That's the incentive.

I doubt that feeds are case of you can't find what you were looking for. I don't think most users are looking for anything in particular when they browse a feed. Now jamming more things in the search page may count. And Twitter's nasty habit of shifting around what you're looking at so you can't find a post surely counts.

[dmazin]

Yeah, if look at the definition of Gruen Transfer, it's the design of the mall itself that causes the discombobulation. The fact that there are screaming, attention-grabbing things all over the mall isn't the transfer itself. The fact that it's hard for you to find what you were originally going to do, and then you get distracted by the attention-grabbing things, is.

So Instagram, etc's overall design might have Gruen Transfer, the feed itself is merely the place your attention goes when you struggle to figure out what to do.

[bityard]

Right in the article, the author states that their feed (and mine too) only ever contains a handful of updates from friends, the rest of it is infinite doomscrolling garbage. If yours is not the same, then you haven't been on facebook in the last 6-7 years.

[spankalee]

Yes, I stopped using Facebook in 2016, but regardless it's not the feed but what's in it.

The feed wasn't created to disorient, it was a great organization feature actually. It helped you see the most recent updates from friends and actually saved time at first compared to manually clicking around and getting lost on other parts of profiles.

[SonOfLilit]

Twitter and Facebook both used to have feeds with an obvious collection basin and an obvious sort order. The moment the obvious tool was replaced with "the algorithm", the feed became a Gruen Transfer.

I mean, originally supermarkets weren't laid out in a confusing way, right? But they are now.