Facebook News is filled with stories too mainstream to do well on the rest of FB

If I have interesting content, that I wish the maximum number of people to see, then why wouldn't I make it internet-accessible?

Consequently, what's left is (a) people who actually want access to the userbase (e.g. advertisers) and (b) people too technologically limited to avail themselves of other options.

You can tweak the engagement algorithms all you like, but boring content is still boring content.

The resulting noise keeps users reliant on the algo for a coherent experience.

When everyone sees a chrono feed by default, their own conduct is informed by the behavior they like/dislike in others. For example, I remember ~10 years ago when posting a picture of your lunch every day was widely understood to be poor form, precisely because it diluted everyone else's experience. It's a bit ironic that it's become a legitimate use case for instagram.

I get to feeling almost persecuted and then I look at someone's posts in context chronologically and it seems quite normal. Just by selecting a small fraction of posts, there is an illusion of a personality that doesn't exist. Context matters so much. It's not humanly possible to overcome the effect of what you don't see other than by challenging it, going out and looking for a more representative sample.

On a more serious note, I deleted my account several years ago. This after coming to the realization how much I was passively scrolling past misinformation, polarizing political discussions and curated self-promotion from acquaintances I barely new.

It was funny to have people who never talked to me, complain to a mutual friend that they didn’t what was going on in my life because I was no longer on Facebook, but then never once reached out via any other channel to catch up.

I don't know about Facebook specifically, but every time I see something I don't like on Google News (on my phone), I tell it I never want to see that news source again, but then it started to give me news stories that collect a large number of sources together, without the ability to get rid of them all at once.

Trying to curate this stuff is like sculpting fog.

There's a need for longform journalism, synthesis of information, bias and persuasion. It's hard to consume just that without also consuming the daily noise.

Longer stories will look less engaging unless facebook also tracks how long you spend reading each site.

They can optimize only for engagement with no curation, but they shouldn't. It shouldn't be done that way because people won't understand that this is the mechanism for content selection. They will think that because content shows up in a news section it has factual merit, and that the content being presented is an accurate representation of the current world context. If you only prioritize engagement, what you will create is a propaganda section masquerading as a news section because the most inflammatory, baseless, bullshit content is what draws the most engagement. That is in no one's best interest long term and it undermines the credibility of news media in general. If they want to create this, it should be labeled as entertainment, not news.

> Must Facebook control what news people are reading?

No, only what news they promote to their network. I don't care if FB manual curates the list or uses an algorithm, they're involved in the design and so they're making an editorial decision here.

Because what most people engage with can't be accurately described as "news".

>That's what people want to read. Must Facebook control what news people are reading?

Much more likely Facebook is trying to hide from the world just how vapid and dim most of its users are.

It is based on what makes people the most upset. That’s what makes people stop what they were doing before, and click.

That’s what Facebook is built to do: elevate content that “stops the thumb”. This is a direct quote from a FB rep advising my employer on how to perform better on Facebook. Here’s another one: “don’t be reasonable, be extreme. You need to stand out.”

Imagine if you picked anything else that way. Only making friends with people who make you the most upset. Only eating foods that make you the most upset. Only dating people who make you the most upset. Is that a good life or bad life?

America went through the founding of Fox News, creationism (religion over science victory), the birth to the tea party because the children born of slanted news reporting thought the republicans weren’t extreme enough, all the way down to the Trump election. Breitbart, Steve Bannon, Roger aisles are avowed propaganda outlets aimed at converting people.

For the right, science and reason themselves are a threat. They’ve been at war a lot longer than the left even realized how deep the rift was.

Around the world, the Fox News playbook has been copied and reason/science based approaches are being pushed back.

America’s left wing isn’t even that far left, the emergence of Bernie and like minded politicians is only recent. Antifa was just the past few years.

The left has always been reacting, weakly, to the mainstream radicalization and Grass roots organization on the right.

Whereas the Facebook popular list has nothing explicitly about the Trump/Biden race.