Ask HN: Why are social networks all moving to “what you missed” feeds? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are social networks all moving to “what you missed” feeds?

5 pointsspike0213 comments

I use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. All three have stopped using (for the most part) chronological feeds in favor of a "what you've missed/what you'll find most interesting in the past few days" feed.

The problem is: I'm finding that nowadays I almost rarely actually see posts from the day of when I'm looking at an application's feed. For instance, today I spent about 10 minutes on my lunch break scrolling through Instagram and I don't recall seeing a single post from today; all the posts were 2-5 days old.

I hate to say it but right now the best thing going for Snapchat and the main reason I actually use it is because they still show posts/snapchats in chronological order. If I want to stay up to date on friends, I just need to go through my Story feed.

It seems like for all other networks I either don't have the option at anymore to return to chronological order, or the setting never persists (looking at you, Facebook). I don't want to be required to go to specific friends' profiles on x/y/z networks just to see what's going on with them.

I feel that rather than this new movement improving my social networking activities, it's just bringing them down and wasting my time. I prefer to use social networks to see what's happening _right now_ and not what I missed two or some N days ago.

What true benefit is there to forcing this kind of feed on users? I'm certainly not experiencing any.

This is commonly called an 'algorithmic timeline'.

Some of the potential advantages (not always realized) for users:

- Based on your like/share/visit/interact history, certain people's content will be prioritized, because the algorithm thinks you like it

- You see these 'what you missed' posts, which is content from a friend that attained more likes/shares than usual, and theoretically represents 'gems' your friends produce. This allows popular content to bubble to the top, producing a feel of accomplished virality for the producer, and encouraging more engagement

Some of the advantages for the site operator:

- It encourages users to interact with content they actually like, to feed the algorithm's dataset and build a better profile of what everyone likes

- It destroys the expectation that all available content will be surfaced chronologically, obfuscating the true quantity of actual content on the user's timeline, thereby allowing a higher density of ads and other sponsored content to be displayed to the user

If they don't do that your feed will be overwhelmed by social media enthusiasts and companies, and somewhere in there was your real friends rarely posting stuff you really want to see.

niftich's got a pretty good answer.

Most social network feeds are organized using machine learning algorithms. The ideal case is to see the latest non-trash content, but that requires the machine to interpret natural language / photos in the post. We're not quite there yet, so instead, algorithms rely on meta-data. I.e. views / shares, and match them to similar character models to yours.

This is one layer removed from the actual content, but in order to assess its entertainment value, it needs context, which takes time to collect. The results in delay in reaching your feed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com