Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts
medium.com
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Well, turns out people paid less attention over time, or seemed too. Those posts got fewer likes and shares. Well, perhaps people just got turned off to my "activist" posting, bored, etc? If I posted a stupid life update about getting a new strainer though, fucktons of likes of course... Decided to ask my girlfriend and a couple family members if they even saw my posts on privacy or what have you, nope. It was buried or not shown on the feed when it came out.
It's not just the feed either, the ordering is bleeding elsewhere. When I asked my girlfriend if she could see specific posts she went directly to my profile and couldn't even find them often times because Facebook now controls the order of items on someone's feed. They show "trending items" and them semi ordered older ones.
I think this article, and some personal experience, shows some of the consequences of being tied to a social platform that controls just the order of news on your feed. It is trivially easy for them to bury topics either because they just don't like them or think they "hurt user engagement." It's a sort of super stealthy shadow ban, where sure, you content is "visible" but only in the loosest meaning of the word.
I had misgivings about Facebook initially from a privacy standpoint, but how much power they have to moderate content, virtually imperceptibly, was one of the final straws that got me off of it. We're not just giving away personal information, we're giving away our ability to persuade and connect in meaningful ways.
Some people are extremely happy to binge watch an entire season of star trek in precise order. I loved that and in my opinion its really the only way to enjoy the much maligned DS9. DS9 is essentially the seven year epic adventures of Garak, its the only Trek where the main character isn't a human star ship captain. Sisko is weak and boring because he's a minor supporting character, not like main character Garak.
Everyone hates it and flips out when they want option A or B and "the man" refuses them and gives them the opposite of what they asked for. About half the population hates facebook, may even be a majority. Note that once you narrowcast enough you can drop user engagement until the survivors 100% love what you're doing, even if 97% of the population refuses to watch it, which ironically is the state today of legacy TV, such as "Survivor" the TV show.
Also, sorted by date was great for many years when they initially got popularity. I (and others IIRC) were pretty unhappy when it changed to this.
> "Look at this cute cat pic, the time for the proletariat to rise is nigh, so cute!"
Sorting by an opaque algorithm gives FB the power to control the conversation.
Because for more and more people, social media is becoming 'the news', and this gives Facebook certain obligations to treat content fairly and act transparently.
Whether this state of affairs is intentional or not is moot - FB knows its power and reach. (Though I struggle to believe FB really is just some naive company that suddenly had greatness 'thrust upon them' - they've spent a good ten years proselytising their "platform", after all)
Add the fact that their weighting of posts also shapes conversations in possibly-unpredictable (or predictable, deliberately-manipulative) ways and yeah, I object to it.
Then again I also find Twitter's UI to be fairly confusing (and really stressful, god it's messy). Less so, but still. So maybe I'm just bad at understanding GUIs. Back to SMS, IRC, and Basic HTML GMail for me.
Why isn't this being talked about by various media outlets? It's blatant social engineering via dark patterns and deception.
if Facebook is personalizing everyones feed based on what they click, isnt the clicker to blame for the result of personalization, not the technology provider. it sounds like your friends didnt engage with your posts, they did engage with other posts, and the facebook feedback loop built them a filter bubble of things they liked more than your posts.
I agree with the grandparent about Facebook killing engagement, but the place I noticed it first was Last.fm. I used to spend tons of time on Last.fm looking up music. I made sure every track I played was scrobbled, and I listened to their recommendations all of the time.
As time passed, the recommendations got worse. Mind you, the recommended songs were closer to what I was listening to, but I appreciated when Last.fm used to recommend music that was somewhat off the wall. If it was a draft, I guess you could call that kind of recommendation a flier.
I personally blame machine learning. The recommendations I get in Last.fm now sound a lot like music I'm already listening to. Not only is it boring, but it's stupid, in the sense that finding music that sounds almost exactly like music you already like is easy.
I want content to be curated the way a friend would curate it for me. For instance, I had a friend recommend the band Sleigh Bells to me, because he knew I listened to punk all of the time, but that I really loved pop (and noise). Last.fm has never recommended me anything remotely as great as that.
I'm almost loathe to like anything on social media anymore, since it basically means I'm going to get similar posts shoved down my throat until I completely give up on the site.
That said, I agree with you that this kind of "finding the closest match" model is quite silly for recommendation systems. And you can see the same problems with ad matching too.
Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at by putting 'curation' in single quotes. It's not really curation if you aren't specially choosing things. For instance, if I used Google to search for "bands that sound like [x]", nobody would claim the results are 'curated'.
These systems are basically search functions that return the most similar results that are distinct from the ones you already know about.
I think the fundamental issue is that Markov Chains are actually really terrible at curating content in the long term, but in short-term they are fantastic.
personally i somewhat agree with you. watercoolers like drudge report, techmeme, aldaily, redef show everyone the same page, not some regurgitation of their past. you experience new things by being shown something other than timehop.
People already complain young people are superficial and self interested, algorithms feeding into/fueling that narrative sure doesn't help.
Facebook filter should be an opt-in.
I have suspected that facebook punishes your visibility if you don't post frequently (like a few times a day). Have you tried posting much more often than two times a month? Try two a day and see if your average engagement increases.
Facebook is not a newsreader, it's a place where I go to see "stupid life events" from my friends and family that I don't get to see very much. There are a million other places I can go to read the news, I'm glad Facebook is nuking priority on external article posts, I wish they would do it more.
Anyway, the problem is that Facebook pretends that it wants to make people "more connected", yet they also want to be the place where people get their news, and the only comments on current events that ever bubble up are the first handful of inflammatory nonsense. Post anything even 30 minutes after the fact, and the likelihood it gets seen drops drastically. Note that this mostly applies to comments made on posts from the media. Make a non-vapid comment on a friend's post, or make a post that's more than a sentence long, and it may never get seen. There were plenty of times when I made posts or comments that should have offended my friends, but when asked if they sae that activity, they had no idea what I was talking about. Yet they somehow always know about my family photos when I add them.
I'd be okay with it if Facebook wasn't also full of shit about being a place for discussion and for aggregating news. Sure, you and I can get our news elsewhere, but most people will continue to use the trending posts as a lens to view the world with. For things that arent vapid, I am going to move to Minds.com. I'm getting sick of Zuckerberg.
How about we all just go back to writing letters, so we can take months to compose an air-tight, well-considered, face-on reply, without that being uncouth?
I don't think I was alone in spending too much time on Facebook thinking I was connecting to my "friends" talking about important things. Facebook seems to have intentionally or unintentionally stifled that, so I left.
If you view it as a "vapid" place to share, and do important talking elsewhere I think that makes sense, I find it hard to separate those though, and think many do.
Facebook is the place where I can see posts from all my high-school/college/work acquaintances and my extended family. Do I like these people? Sure! Do I want to know what they think about anything? Please, no; every time that happens I end up liking them less! And do I want them to know a single thing about me? Even less! Giving them even the slightest awareness of my actual interests would be a moralizing disaster for everyone involved!
Now, my friends, I have a Discord server for. There, we share all the stupid things we would say to one-another in person, but never ever if it was going to be on a big searchable record somewhere where my Grandma might see. I have some of those same friends added on Facebook, but none of us ever post there. There's no need.
I wouldn't "delete Facebook", as I actually do value keeping up with acquaintances and relatives... from a distance. It's very easy to keep it separated from my "important talking"—because nobody I'd ever want to do any "important talking" with would ever see anything I wrote there.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...
It covers how FB uses "influencer" activity to determine what a "viewer" would see. There's nothing new here that I see, but for all the people talking about and trying to understand FB I don't see anyone reading their patents.
It's a lot of work and takes some practice parsing things out, but there is value there in understanding the general direction FB is going or where they are spending their r&d dollars.
Side note: all the people asking why a good FB alternative hasn't arisen should take a look at these patents to realize how much of what we take for granted that FB does is prohibited for a competitor. FB is defining and locking out competitors from what the worlds thinks a social network is.
Every now and then I try to use Facebook to check out what people are doing because I'm interested in their life updates but I don't really have a clue. I see some random posts from some friends, but not all nor necessarily the important posts. There are friends whose postings I haven't seen for ages, and when I go look back on his/her wall Facebook gives me a curated view with most posts hidden by default so I can't skim through the most recent twenty-or-so posts and make up my mind myself.
And don't get me started on posting to Facebook myself. If I want to say something it's an equally mystic selection of friends who might see it, or "see" it if they downloaded the post but never browsed that far. I think that the post saturation is close to 10%, at most: that many of my friends might actually see my posts.
I grant that Facebook is trying to solve a hard problem. I have a Facebook list that contains all my friends and looking at that list of chronological posts exhausts me before I exhaust the list. So there needs to be a filter, however, the algorithm to filter posts should be known to users. I would probably settle for "Most liked posts from recent days from each your friend", or something similar. Something that is finite and defined. The current views are none of that.
Pair this with Zuckerberg's potential future political aims, the role of segmented social media advertising in this past election and privacy, that should be very concerning for one person to have so much power.
The only parameter you control over this, is your social network. But that's a pretty imprecise control frequently at least somewhat orthogonal to your interests. And in the last few months, I'm seeing more "promoted" content that none of my friends are specifically posting.
Giant funnel. Lowest common denominator.
I keep my network pretty small and limited to "real friends." I see enough of their posts to keep coming back; it leaves me at least a little in touch with their daily lives.
But I find myself increasingly motivated, if not compelled, to stay away from FB.
Giant funnel. Lowest common denominator.
Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more level playing field, and the users will follow.
The threat of communist takeover permeated most of the 20th century as the ultimate threat for private enterprise, but the military-industrial-complex had a wonderful time.
Hundreds of millions of people stare the news feed on weekly basis and interact with it. This creates a spectacular opportunity for employing machine learning to optimize things. Facebook has huge amount of data and it is easy to run various tests automatically to see what works in practice.
If this is the case, then it may be difficult for the others to compete. Facebook might be doing exactly what customers want - even if they don't know it themselves.
My thoughts were influenced by this article posted on HN some weeks ago: http://www.truthhawk.com/is-facebook-a-structural-threat-to-...
Facebook is doing what maximizes revenue, but there's no evidence that is the same thing that will encourage users to keep using it in the long term.
You can't beat Facebook by getting good content into some user-less alternative.
Users don't follow content. Content follows users.
"Follow the users" is a good way to decide where to do some content marketing next week, but it's incomplete if you're looking at how the overall information ecosystem evolves. You have to account for how new services attract users, in order to understand what established services are doing to try to keep users.
I'm far better for it.
0.5% is being generous, i had almost no interaction with people i cared about while i was on there and i'm glad i've switched to other platforms where they aren't as interested in feeding me their stuff and just letting people talk
Weird as it probably sounds, FB sucks for humans because its users are people not corporations.
That's not a problem.
Friends will share important stuff outside of Facebook because that's how friendship works.
And there are many other platforms where things can be shared too. People can post the same or similar things to multiple platforms quite easily these days.
There are relationship negatives to censored personal news. My wife was tangentially involved in a family feud where facebook randomly promoted or hid various attacks and defenses and apologies of the two major factions. Its just not a platform useful for social interaction anymore. The censorship of the family feud and the resulting weird interpersonal drama reminds me of some incidents in the meme-war on facebook leading up to the election of Trump which is interesting.
Superficially it sounds awful to have family drama increased by hiding half the posts, much like playing a board game where half the moves are deleted sounds terrible. However, for a short period of time, until the users are completely alienated, FB made money by increasing the depth and length of that family feud by increasing readership during the height of the feud. In the long run people won't use FB at all, of course.
It is annoying, but I'm not a power user. I only check it once every few days to keep up with the relatives, maybe post once a week or so. It's pretty low maintenance.
Now I see from my friends "I'm going out to devil's den in 20 minutes if anyone wants to join me - 23 hours ago"
yeah, thanks for that facebook. i really needed cat videos and political rants triaged ahead of that for a whoel day.
I live in Chicago and subscribe to the Sunday edition. I also read the digital edition, and have found it lacking, particularly since inauguration. In recent months Michael Ferro became the majority shareholder in the Tribune, a person obsessed with celebrities and not so much in local or even national news coverage. He's the guy that fired all the Sun Times photojournalists and mandated reporters use their iPhones instead.
The paper has struggled to find its place in trying to be like the NY Times or Washington Post, covering important national issues, but without the same resources. Meanwhile, hyperlocal sites like DNAinfo have filled the niche, which has strong FB engagement because it provides content people are interested in, but the Tribune isn't providing.
Instead of blaming a third party which bears no obligation to send traffic, the Tribune would be better served in providing better local news coverage and less in areas which aren't compelling (celebrity gossip) or where it can't compete (national coverage like NYT).
There are content issues for sure, but I suspect their presentation strategy isn't helping either - the Trib reacted to the growth of digital readership by putting up paywalls and obtrusive ads, essentially driving away digital readers... straight to their competitors.
PS. But it still has to be weird for a big newspaper that owned its own distribution and sales channels, to now be so dependent on an opaque third party distributor, which is so in control that it doesn't even bother to tell them when it's altering its distribution, and they have to reverse engineer it from traffic patterns...
The Trib has always focused on very local stuff - city and state politics, the midwest, local sports teams, the spike in murders, etc. I don't think that is going to change. I think the editorial board would like to believe it has a higher national profile since we live in the 3rd largest city in the country but in reality we're very regional. We also own the LA Times which actually does have a higher national profile. But I digress.
I'm not going to dispute some of your legitimate gripes. I'm not a fan of celebrity gossip either. I only know a couple of journalists but I suspect they would agree with you. Facebook or other 3rd party does not have any obligation to us.
But the simple truth is our print circulation is declining at a rate faster than our digital circulation is rising. All newspapers are dealing with this issue.
The NYT and WashPo has done much better with revenue and digital circulation, 2 papers that do an excellent job of covering subjects of substance. However those rises are directly related to Trump. Even we have seen a rise in subscriptions at the CT as well as LA Times due to Trump. And The LA Times does a really great job of the kind of coverage you are looking for.
I feel like you are missing the point of the article. More eyeballs hopefully leads to more advertising revenue, which leads to more money for better coverage, or at least pays the salaries of reporters who provide that coverage. If a third party that previously was delivering more eyeballs is declining that is a concern. All the quality coverage in the world will not change that. It's a legitimate concern for us.
The latter either start non-working, or become non-working once the money/interest runs out, and they shut down.
You're right in that I did miss the point of the article, but not entirely. The fb engagement on what the Trib seems to cover (national/international focus) has likely decreased because of Trump, while resulting in more clicks on WaPo/NYT. While it's likely fb changed their algorithm, content also makes a big difference in what gets surfaced. And I think the original article ignored the role that it may have played.
It sucks that journalism and livelihoods can suffer because of a monolithic walled garden, but there is probably more to the story.
I'm not here to whine. The news business is what it is. We rely on outside sources to drive our traffic. Traffic means eyeballs which translates into ad revenue, hopefully anyway.
When google changes its algorithm that might hurt our web traffic we have to respond accordingly. SEO people have all kinds of discussions, and write articles, when google makes a change. This article is something similar.
It seems like facebook has been changing their algorithm determining what appears in a user's feed, which is effecting our traffic. The same efforts we put in 6 months ago using facebook are having diminishing returns. The point of the article is its effecting us, and apparently not just us.
Whether facebook will address this issue, either in public or private remains to be seen. However I see there is an advantage of talking about it publicly, to determine if it is just us (it's not) or if its affecting others (apparently it is) and what can be done to remedy the situation.
On a side note I like DNAinfo as their content is hyperlocal. It's probably harder for the Chicago Tribune to do that.
If I run a shop that sells magazines, and I order a four magazines to fill some rack space in the shop the distributor does not decide to send you two and black hole the rest of your order.
They send you what you ordered.
Facebook is not a distributor. They are acting as gatekeepers, too.
More alarming is how this trend is matched with the move away from hard news towards 'pundit celebrity' commentary by almost all networks.
I think there's something in the human psyche where the best feelings come from confirmation of your own biases. This hack wasn't useful when only a few network news programs had to appeal to mass audiences, but it's provided really useful as media has splintered and become personalized.
I have this weird personal exercise where I pull up 5 different news tabs all at once. It's AMAZING how different the world looks from different websites, all coving the same events from drastically different perspectives. There has always been slant, but it's become 10x worse in the last decade.
So this is a fundamentally hard problem to solve. You can already prioritize posts from a page to appear at the top of your feed if you really don't want to miss posts.
The real issue is that people underestimate the amount of content they're going to get with a like.
I'm also curious if the end of the elections had an impact on newspaper story interactions? Sure, there's no end to stories after Trump was elected and sworn in, but maybe people are just tired of wall to wall politics coverage?
> We went from roughly 20 posts per day to 24 posts per day.
If you post that many articles to Facebook then I'm simply going to unfollow you. Imagine I have ten sources posting that much, or one hundred sources. You think I'm going to engage with everyone? Heck no. Post one thing a day, two absolute tops. Ideally one thing a week but obviously that's not many sources ideal model.
If I really want to follow you I'll add your RSS feed to my reader. Facebook, Instagram, et al, have become one big screaming match and this is only going to get worse until people realise that less is more. If they decide to change their feed algorithm, well, sucks to be you.
But the screaming match drives me nuts. What good is 100,000 views anyway if only 100 people actually click through and engage? Better to have 1,000 views and 200 click through/engage. Target better, stop throwing shit at walls.
Just as an example - I recently had a little project featured on one of the top 10 photo channels on YouTube - 300k+ subscribers. The video currently has had 13,000 views in three weeks, and in it I get a full minute long feature + a link to my site. How many sales have I made through the feature? Zero. When I first posted the project on a niche site, a couple of years ago, I had ten sales within the space of a couple of days.
However, Facebook’s formal guidance is 24 to 48 posts per day.
I agree that this is probably the root cause. The top of the FB newsfeed is a zero sum game because each person has a finite amount of time.
Since the pixels of a newsfeed is always filled with <something> instead of being empty, it means there should be a corresponding "something" that increased in frequency which in turn, diluted the frequency of the Chicago Tribute. E.g., a person "likes" Marvel films and NFL/NBA/MLB sports so they get more of those posts which crowds out the newspapers' posts. It can either a rash of "new likes" or a FB algorithm change that re-prioritized them.
Kurt Gessler is only able to see the audience stats from the vantage point of Chicago Tribune instead of total stats from the audience perspective. Therefore, it's like the proverbial blind men feeling around the elephant.
Getting a wider perspective seems to be exactly why this post was written. The main call to action at the end of the blog post is to other content creators, to see if they're experiencing the same thing. Get enough data points, and you can start to form testable hypotheses about what's being prioritized now.
I'm not a FB analytics expert but to me, it seems like it would be better to get statistics from a bunch of "bots" that saw posts from the audience side. Correlating with other creators still seems to be a very limited form of analysis.
Of course, one wouldn't have to do any of that if Facebook cooperates and transparently explains to the publishers how the zero-sum game has been reprioritized against them.
The level of total control is the same - the mechanisms are different. Nothing else.
Browsers of the Facebook feed themselves have any number of ways of accessing information, which they did not have before. If I want sports news on teams from Chicago, I'm no longer beholden to Chicago Tribune or even Facebook for that, I can download something like Bleacher Report TeamStream and have a customized feed of what I find interesting and nothing else.
It's probably not massively difficult to work out the kind of content that makes people like, share and click at scale on Facebook - humans are humans after all - but it's probably not consistent with the output of the Chicago Tribune (national stories that are covered in greater detail elsewhere and content which is probably only of any real interest to Chicagoans).
This is probably even more the case at the moment with so much of the action politically happening at a national level - Trump is a once in a generation kind of news story.
It seems they have two options:
- Accept that Facebook is a pay-to-play platform and that they will have to pay to narrowcast news to Chicagoans
- Accept that Facebook is going to account for an ever-declining share of their traffic.
Either way, I'm not sure there is a way forward for online media that doesn't involve a huge rethink about what the product they serve up is. Blaming the algorithm seems incredibly fruitless.
Or only postings from other feeds that I follow.
There is all of this garbage that I don't want, so as a result I rarely look.
Twitter use Tweetbot seems to work a lot better in this regard as I can follow those groups I wish to follow without the junk.
Because, Quarter after quarter post-IPO management (at Facebook, Google and others) are denting the returns and eating into ROI margins across worldwide industries and services of an endless spectrum by converting free organic "reach" or "impressions" or "time spent" into advertiser ones. At some point GOOG and FB will stabilize at some market capitalization, defined by their ability to maintain a steady revenue stream from advertisers.
[-] http://www.adweek.com/digital/how-brands-and-agencies-are-fi...
One thing I have noticed is that the friends with whom you engage the most - chat, like, comments - in turn get to see your posts often and engage with them.
Anyone with whom you have not interacted in a long time - more than a few months - will never see any of your posts. I don't see any point of being Facebook friends with anyone with whom I haven't interacted in a while. You aren't getting their updates and they aren't getting yours. Facebook is a social network which I mostly see as a place to broadcast life events to all my broader friend networks and acquaintances.
For close friends and family I always prefer medium of communications that are more intimate in nature - phone calls, video calls.
Of course. That's the whole premise of the FB Newsfeed. It started in late 2011 - up to that point the news stream was in chronological order and you saw all posts (depending on your geographic the feature was enabled maybe on a different date). Then the newsfeed showed what FB algorithms provided you depending on your click-, browsing-, friend- and like-history. It's called a filter-bubble, you suddenly see just mote of the same, no variation. It marked the tipping point of FB as social network tool (at least for me).
Maybe Facebook is targeting the smaller people by having the algorithm push their posts over larger companies. This might be a good thing. Do you do better with 1000 duck sized advertisers or 1 horse sized advertiser?
Does the newspaper increase/decrease revenue with better surfacing?
If so, how much? Or conversely, if they don't bother tracking this (& spend $ on a human resource ) will there be any appreciable decrease in revenue.
Or is this one person asking the world, "hey, have you also seen this?"
Better Facebook surfacing = more clickthroughs to newspaper content.
More clickthroughs = more readers, more ad impressions.
More readers also = greater pool of potential conversion to print subscribers, email newsletter signups, etc.
Better surfacing also = greater brand awareness.
So yes there are both quantifiable revenue benefits + less quantifiable but still important journalism & marketing benefits.
"Because if 1 of 3 Facebook posts isn’t going to be surfaced by the algorithm to a significant degree, that would change how we play the game."
Reporters may be motivated to report news, but newspapers are only motivated to get readers and advertisers.
Even if you want to be uncharitable about that, it's pretty clear the author is talking about Facebook and not Journalism.
They have to play to survive. Sure, this could be fixed in a myriad of ways, each having their own set of issues, but most of us aren't in a position to do that.
It's no wonder that the mainstream has been adopting more and more of the tactics of content farms with clickbait headlines and articles that are more about generating outrage and "shares" than anything else.
A "great" article is defined by how many shares it gets. It's no wonder that high quality, long form, real journalism is slowly fading away. It doesn't pay to do any of that when the only money left is chasing FB shares all the way to the bottom.