[snprbob86]

Personally, I think Facebook would be broken if every message every person or group I'm connected to made it directly into my feed. The feed has been algorithmic for a very long time and paid placement is neither a surprising nor nefarious input to that algorithm. Paid posts are clearly labeled and, even if paid, don't guarantee distribution volume, but do provide analytics. If you don't like the results you're getting, then don't pay for them.

If you think that you can complain "But they are my fans! They belong to me! I deserve the right to be in their feeds" then be happy that Facebook is smarter than you: All those lovely fans would be gone in a heartbeat if Facebook didn't protect the advertisers from themselves. If you and all your advertising friends had it your way, you'd spam users until there were no users left to spam.

[guelo]

That is not what users expect. It is called a timeline for a reason. Twitter works that way and nobody thinks it's broken. If someone spams your timeline it's really easy to unfollow and solve the problem.

[tobyjsullivan]

> That is not what users expect. It is called a timeline for a reason.

Timeline and Newsfeed are two very different things. The feature in question is the newsfeed.

If you go to somebody's timeline (previously "wall") you will see every post they've made in roughly chronological order.

[andrewflnr]

I don't want to have to go to all my friends' walls to see what they're saying. I want it to be in my feed, unless I explicitly remove it, or give Facebook permission to choose. I'm not holding my breath, though.

[aeturnum]

My impression of Facebook's feed algorithm is that it takes your activity and the popularity of posts into account. If you look at the feed often, you'll see all the content. However, if you've been away for 5-10 hours, facebook will show you the most popular stuff of that time period. It may be that they stick the rest in "under the fold" of feed, but I'm not sure.

[brazzy]

No, you really, really don't. Because then your feed would be totally worthless, dominated by whoever pumps out the most stuff.

[RestlessMind]

You are correct. But then, how does it help me when my feed shows posts just because someone paid Facebook to promote those posts? If a post is going to create bad experience for me, it will be a bad experience irrespective of whether its paid or free.

[brazzy]

The thing is: there's going to be a lot fewer such bad experiences when they cost the person wanting you to have them money. And it may provide an incentive to make promoted content a less bad experience, because in order to maximize revenue, Facebook had to balance the price of promoted content with its acceptance by users: content that is a better experience will cost less to promote because more of it can be shown to users before they get annoyed and leave Facebook.

[snprbob86]

> That is not what users expect. It is called a timeline for a reason.

Is that reason because things are roughly sorted by time?

It's a timeline of interesting events in the recent history of your friends and interests. Being a "timeline" doesn't mean that it has to include everything. Should a timeline of the history of the USA include every event in the history of China? Not if you actually want to succeed in communicating any subset of the information on the timeline effectively...

People expect to sign in and see stuff about their friends. They don't expect to have to hand manage every single connection they ever make to decide who is or isn't worth paying attention to.

> Twitter works that way and nobody thinks it's broken.

1) Twitter has extremely different use cases.

2) I think Twitter is horribly broken. I rely on non-broken external clients to sort and filter tweets; most high volume users do.

> If someone spams your timeline it's really easy to unfollow and solve the problem.

Again, Twitter is a totally different use case. I might not want to unfriend my Aunt, who loves me very much, but I sure as hell don't want to see her every little post. I don't interact with her messages, so Facebook stops showing them to me. That problem seems solved to me...

[Semaphor]

>Again, Twitter is a totally different use case. I might not want to unfriend my Aunt, who loves me very much, but I sure as hell don't want to see her every little post. I don't interact with her messages, so Facebook stops showing them to me. That problem seems solved to me...

People whose FB posts annoy me, I can easily remove from my newsfeed without unfriending them or waiting for the algorithm to kick in.

[tomasien]

That's because nobody who uses Twitter meaningfully follows 1150 people. Or at least it's not the norm.

[ryguytilidie]

You're kind of just arguing that one scenario is better than another. Why not a third scenario?

[obviouslygreen]

They've made a distinction between 'friends' and 'fan' etc. pages. It seems logical that providing a full/friends-only/fan-page-only set of feeds would be a good way to manage spam, with the existing ability to unsubscribe from fan/friend pages. With all the resources and experience at their disposal, you're right, it's a bit ridiculous to suggest there's no way to avoid killing usability/usefulness without satisfying both users and companies.

[cowholio4]

Well they do have a specific feed for pages.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/feed

[obviouslygreen]

Well played, Trebek.

Really, though, it's good that they have this. It'd be much better if this and a friends-only feed were the main way they distributed content.

[tedks]

Since I discovered that this existed, I've slowly stopped going anywhere else on Facebook. I care about new music from the bands I like on facebook far more than the mundane crap going on in my friends lives.

[nilkn]

In an ideal product, this would just be left up to the user to decide. You should have control over your own news feed.

[robryan]

Ideal for a small percentage of users, horrible in general. Facebook already has to many ever changing options related to privacy that people don't get. It already has things like lists and close friends people can use to control their feed further but don't get.

[tomasien]

And it is. You can set all sorts of defaults. Facebook has just chosen the default default that tends to maximize engagement, THEN built a monetization platform on top of it.

[anonymoushn]

Is there a button available to users that will cause stories posted by pages and friends to actually show up in the news feed? It seems like there is no solution available on the receiving end.

[bradleyjg]

If you make a friends group that includes all your friends it will post everything in chronological order with no in feed ads or crap from pages you've liked. It's far superior to the news feed IMO.

[scopendo]

Not the simplest UI but: goto the friend's timeline. There should be a Friend button with a tick next to it. Hover over the button. On the pop-up menu the "Show in News Feed" option is probably already ticked. Once it is, choose Settings and then choose "All Updates" or whatever as appropriate.

[ajross]

AFAICT there is no solution on the receiving end. Your feed is going to be filtered or delayed by the Facebook gremlins and there's nothing you can do about it.

The internal heuristics generally seem to get it right eventually: I see true friend and family posts with essentially random delays of sometimes up to 2-3 days, but I don't actually miss any (I don't think).

I don't even bother trying to follow stuff I'm interested in on Facebook anymore. G+ does that sort of thing better anyway, at least for all of my interests.

[snprbob86]

"Sort By: Most Recent" ?

[dpatrick86]

Nope. This worked for a while, however.

[criley]

You can control the level of access a friend or page has. You can set it from None - Some - Most - All of their posts.

[ChrisCinelli]

Sure, but I would like to be able to set if I want by default see New feeds or Most recent post.Currently if I change to "SORT BY: MOST RECENT", it goes back to TOP STORIES after a day or so.

[cocoflunchy]

Yeah this is really annoying, but fortunately there's a Chrome extension that takes care of it.