Inside the Facebook Algorithm Most Users Don't Even Know Exists 130
First time accepted submitter catparty (3600549) writes An examination of what we can know about Facebook's new machine learning News Feed algorithm. From the article: "Facebook's current News Feed algorithm might be smarter, but some of its core considerations don't stray too far from the groundwork laid by EdgeRank, though thanks to machine learning, Facebook's current algorithm has a better ear for 'signals from you.' Facebook confirmed to us that the new News Feed ranking algorithm does indeed take 100,000 weighted variables into account to determine what we see. These factors help Facebook display an average 300 posts culled from roughly 1,500 possible posts per day, per user."
Bubbles (Score:5, Interesting)
Social media helps keep you in a nice little bubble, where you're never exposed to information you might not like.
Psychology tells us we(in general) don't like information that challenges our biases. Is anyone else afraid that Facebook and Google are unintentionally driving us all towards ignorance?
No conspiracy necessary: happy people pay more attention to ads(citation available if anyone cares), they try to make us happy, trying to make us happy keeps us dumb, and it all serves everyone's short term interests, and no ones' long term interests.
Human vs. crowd (Score:4, Interesting)
While each of us is as unpredictable as a molecule, once you put enough humans together, the crowd becomes as predictable as gas. Google, Facebook, Twitter, (/.?) and other companies with massive user bases can do some pretty interesting things with their users.
Whether it is ethical or not is another story, but it is certainly interesting.
I like to dick with FB (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes I have a FB account (for various reasons) but when ever I get the chance I always flag ads as being sexually explicit with the hope that it wastes more FB resources than they gain from me. Yeah, it may not actually do anything, but it keeps me happy.
(Likewise I also report unsolicited emails from major companies as spam)
Re:Because (Score:5, Interesting)
Something else I've personally noticed, and this is consistent with everyone I've asked about the issue...
"Top Stories" for desktop viewing vs mobile viewing are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. I have to check FB on both my desktop AND my tablet every day just to get an idea of what going on with my social circle. This is just stupid bad. What is even worse is that there is next to zero intersection between these two separate news feeds from the same account. It is as if Facebook decided to split timelines in half, one set for mobile, the other for desktop.
Re:Bubbles (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you seen so-called "World News" with Diane Sawyer lately on one of the big networks?
It's embarassing. 3/4 human interest stories at least. Mostly domestic. A few minutes of human interest human interest stories.
Or when you watch the olympics. Very few competitions anymore on the networks. Especially not when foreigners are competing. And we need everyone's tearjerking backstory now.
It hasn't always been like this. People don't need social media to stay ignorant. Their own mass media does it for them.