As a user of Facebook, and completely (I’d like to believe) divorced from my e-political/iPolitical views- I’m a little worried about the drop off in quality of the news feed lately. Roughly speaking, the new feed mostly seems to contain boring stuff from people who’re distant acquaintances, rather than all the cool stuff my close friends are up to. This has also resulted in a drop in my daily fbook usage to ~5mins a day (I think), where it previously would have been larger than I’d care to admit to on this blog.
4 hypotheses. In no particular order:
1. Stage of Life Theory: The feeds are the same ‘quality’- it’s just that I’ve aged a little (nearly 30, almost married) from the stage of life (early 20s, single) where I care about what ‘certain’ other people are doing (trendsetters, opposite sex), and this reflects in my interest in the feeds.
2. ‘Friends’: Where I once had maybe a 100 or so friends, I now have nearly 800 ‘friends’ on facebook (and I’m not even that popular). Roughly anyone I have ever met times the probability that one of us was proactive about friending the other. It could be that this is simply too many more people than I care about, and facebook can’t separate the people I care to know more about from the others. Maybe it’s a bit like approval voting : voting for everyone is like voting for no-one.
3. Quantity vs Quality: It used to be that people had to go to facebook and type stuff in, so they only did it when they had something interesting to say. Now, it’s a free for all- people share articles right from the page they’re on, there’s 4square checkins, FPlaces checkins, facebook likes being reported, tweets pulled in, instagrams posted and other technologies even I haven’t heard of. And as marginal cost goes down, so does average quality. (HT:PP)
4. Nothing’s changed with the feeds: I’m just a hater making stuff up (quite likely, but I try not to be too obvious in public).
Which is it? I’m genuinely interested…
i think its #2 combined with the fact that your “good” friends are disproportionately more likely to get off this whole FB thing. Therefore in some sort of perverse separating equilibrium, the only people left using the thing are those who find taking inane tests interesting.
yes, that’s possible- a lot of my close friends are also in (1) category and have stopped doing nearly as much on fbook… actually one of these facebook ‘research firms’ claimed fbook’s numbers dropped in north america last month. i don’t know if it’s true (mostly because i’d suspect most people would just stop visiting rather than deleting their accounts). but that’s a blog post i’ll leave in my pocket before i cement my fbook haterreputation.
I’d say #2 and #3. Facebook does try to separate the people you’re interested in from the people that you’re not, but it does a terrible job of this. I’ve solved the problem for myself but creating a friend group within the news feed that I read through. Otherwise, some of the posts by people I actually care about wouldn’t show up at all.
yeah i thought about that, but it’s the sort of thing they should attempt to solve algorithmically. it also strikes me that since i have a facebook blocker extension on chrome, it doesn’t have as much browsing data about me as about most others- though i don’t know how sophisticated they are about using this…
Its just not high cc anymore
I especially like options 1 & 3. There’s so much junk in the newsfeed these days it’s I can’t help but stick to twitter over fbook. Guess my ‘friends’ don’t interest me like they used to.
The key to maintain a sustained quality of feed is to consistently block off all the app feeds. This way the feed remains mostly of updates and tags, and does not flood the whole of the feed. Seems to work for me..
The algorithm works for me — I blocked apps and boring stuff long ago (with the x’s on the right of each item).
Yeah I blocked all the apps… I’m not complaining about spam: it’s just that what’s left isn’t that interesting either! Basically pretty banal stuff written by not so close friends more often than not.
I propose an alternate hypothesis: your news feed is boring because your friends are boring, your friends are boring because they are getting older. So it’s not a change in your preference but rather a change in your friends’ activities.
Also maybe, as a percentage, you have more economists friends than before….
Yeah I was politely insinuating that via 1 3. Point about economists well taken though 🙂