9 years ago
10
Finally! Facebook Changes News Feed
Facebook is finally giving its users the power to rank the friends and pages they want to see at the top of their news feed.
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http://www.stuff.co.nz
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Ah, I thought this was a visual redesign, because the app and website still look pretty terrible, all these years later.
Ah well. This is pretty good too, at least.
It's very interesting how we now seem to be moving away from the algorithm-determined world. Apple spent half their latest conference talking about how Apple Music is "built by humans, not machines", and now Facebook is letting you determine what you want to see, rather than what Facebook's algorithm wants you to see.
Facebook's timeline is awful. I am only on there because my family is all there.
I am frequently confused by Facebook. I am mostly on it because you can't seem to live at University and not have a Facebook profile, and be semi-active on it, and yet I don't understand why they have such a monopoly on life. I guess it offers a variety of tools for managing friendships, and because it had these and was good a few years ago, everyone has facebook, so it doesn't require signing up to different/better services.
For example, if I want to organise an outing to the pub, I'll make a facebook event and invite my friends, purely because all of my friends are on there and can see who else is going/organise/discuss plans. It makes friendships and organisation a lot less painful, yet the timeline has been slowly growing less and less friend-oriented to crap-oriented - most of the posts on my timeline are from "Best of Tumblr" and "The Lad Bible", even though I don't like either of these pages.
It's really great to organise things with people that you're not exactly close to. For example, our year at uni has a facebook group and people ask questions, put solutions to old exams on there or organise events. I dont have most of these even as friends on facebook and yet I can reach pretty much everybody out of my year nearly instantly. I dont really check my newsfeed much though.
Definitely. Our course also has a group per year (unofficial, but one seemingly always gets made), and we've found out quite a few things this way. The collective brain is always good. Without Facebook, I doubt this would have happened anywhere else in such an organised way.
It's a very rational thing to do, the better and more relevant the news feed is for you the more time you'll look to it so facebook can show you more ads and make more money.
Not to mention the algorithm was really just a way to create a revenue stream out of thin air by charging pages to promote posts if they wanted a boost. I have always been kind of unhappy about having a good chunks of friends pushed off my feed unless I made sure to constantly engage to keep their posts visible. It just became a poor user experience for me so I cut my use way down and just use it as a chat mostly.
Facebook is just a giant social experiment.
I'm sure it wasn't originally intended to be, but it most certainly is now.
How is this different from the "Close Friends" system?