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Comment by jeffrogers | Hacker News Reader

What do you call it when you make a post that you assume your friends can see and only some are presented your post?

What do you mean by presented? If I have a friend who has 4000 friends and I am their 4000th most important friend, I would sufficiently believe that a generic post of mine would not appear at the top of their feed and they might not see it.

I get the idea of not having all the "so and so friend liked so and so's post" which feel low quality in a feed, but part of a custom feed is prioritizing updates from people you actually want to see updates from

If you were making the choice as to which friends you wanted to hear from or updates you wanted to receive from you're friends, then I take you point. When someone else, or their algorithm, makes these decisions that is something else and it may actually veer into censorship.

Hm. This argument falls flat to me. A feed is considered editorialized by you, but nearly any combo of content is editorialized to some degree. A magazine makes editorial decisions on where in the magazine articles are placed... this does not mean its censorship, it just means you haven't read the whole thing.

Also, the tools exists on all of these social media products to actually go and check on your friends' pages where you can see their updates. Nothing stops you from doing that and consuming the content you wish.

Well, however someone might consider feeds, we don’t have the ability to truly take control of them. At least in the case of Facebook, they mostly decide what we see and they very deliberately make the case that they are not a media company like the magazines. They are claiming they are not editorializing because the machines are making the decisions. (Albeit with instructions from their engineers.)

Listserv? Distribution list? Phone tree?

Those are different. In those cases content is sent to the intended recipients. Whether they see it or not is up to the receivers. In the case of some social media platforms, the platforms decide who should be sent the content, regardless of the sender’s intent.

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