Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation | Hacker News Reader

Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

sfchronicle.com

19 pointsanimeseinfeld22 comments

I want to go to Facebook to keep connected with friends and family, not to see cringy memes and clickbait 'news' articles. Zuckerberg made the right decision to focus on users instead of publishers, and I think these changes will change Facebook for the better.

Unfortunately, a lot of the times it's friends and family that post these cringy memes.

This is certainly true. But at least with my friends and family, I learn them over time.

With “news” sources it requires a constant pain to vet them.

Also, with FB I can just block shares by source so over time I’ve blocked out my relatives’ stupid posts by Brietbart and Being Liberal.

And each required explicit acceptance of a friend request.

As opposed to a gaggle of news sources that crop up whenever.

The gaggle of sources needed you to either like their pages or have friends who like or comment on them.

I have to say that this is almost completely the opposite of what I want from Facebook, given that "cringe memes and clickbait" is an orthogonal issue. To me, great value lies in the opportunity for people to organize into smaller communities and post various things about those communities, be they political or not, and at the same time being able to receive feedback (in the form of comments). Unfortunately, the sad truth is that this is the only platform for such an activity for most of those communities.

I'd say those two are compatible. For me what matters is getting updates from friends, family, and groups I care about. If my feed was limited to that, the new articles would instantly be less clickbaitey or cringey.

We really just need RSS. Everyone on Facebook should get an RSS feed and you just subscribe to who you want to follow.

News publishers already have feeds. So you can mix in as you like to get NYTimes right next to Uncle Jim’s fakenews.

There’s no algorithm, just based on publishing order. Maybe mix in some flags that let you see if others have disliked things with that same URI.

We need more protocols and less platform.

We used to have RSS. Why did it not stick around?

When Google Reader was killed, my account was just a stressful pile of thousands of unread items. The occasional gem was drowned in the noise.

RSS is still here, but the major platforms don’t publish RSS feeds and make it hard to scrape into feeds. Facebook and Twitter don’t allow it. Google usually doesn’t.

I use RSS extensively to follow blogs and news sources. There are even many that put ads into my feed, which is cool by me.

RSS is technically still here, but it seems to me you're the exception here, not the norm. RSS is not quite as mainstream as it used to be

That's how I feel about social sites, unlike RSS I have no control about items, they just disappear in a sea of tweets. To me it sounds like you subscribe to a lot of spammy feeds.

An algorithm is desperately needed though. Sources have varying publishing rates and quality. Aggregating across them and culling is crucial. For the most part I've thrown up my hands and delegated this job to hacker news and Reddit subscriptions, but it's still not well personalized.

An algorithm is desperately needed though

An algorithm that weaponises jealousy, FOMO and outrage will always out-monetise a benign or no algorithm at all, over any financially viable timescale. The algo doesn’t “know” of course. It just knows that showing you X has historically made you spend longer on the site than Y.

The only way to win is not to play.

I do fine without an algorithm, everything appears at the rate it is published in chronological order, if I dislike a feed or discover I rarely read it I remove it.

I don't think we need an "algorithm" just better RSS readers that let us filter things easily.

Or ideally more effort put into feeds by sources, so we get better curation of the feeds to start with.

I would love to see an RSS reader that was smart enough to follow links and make a 'source graph' so it the NYT and Slashdot write articles about the same source they both appear in the same 'thread' about that source. To me that would be the killer app for RSS.

Even though I like RSS and use it daily, I think it cannot act as a replacement, since Facebook, as a platform, allows two-way communication between parties (e.g. when someone or some group shares a post, people can give feedback on it).

> Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

... or, at least, hurts sfchronicle.com ad revenue.

Does Facebook really need to take on this role of news publisher? I get that people are accustomed to it now, but wouldn't it be easier for everyone to undo this, let Facebook be the place where you go for the occasional family photos and local event updates, and let news be somewhere else? We don't need Facebook to be a newspaper at all, people were doing fine before it.

> Does Facebook really need to take on this role of news publisher?

Facebook did everything in their power to take online e traffic from news sites. The begged papers to host articles on Facebook, begging publishers to put that stupid like button on every page, or to use Facebook comments. And now that they have captured all the eyeballs, they are going stop showing legitimate news.

Of course a news site owned by Hearst would say this. They’re probably going to see a pretty big decrease in all their social metrics.

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