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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting line of the press conference: "We're going to try something new. We're going to put the news items in chronological order."

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Something new? Hopefully that was said with a bit of wink-wink-nudge-nudge, as that's the way it used to work and the "top stories" algorithm (and the way it keeps being set as the default despite me setting "most recent" every few days) has been infuriating.

It always drove me nuts that I had to repeatedly set my news feed BACK to 'Most Recent'.

Maybe the fact is that most people were constantly having to set their feed to "Most Recent," and there was little takeup on their special sauce sorting. If the special sauce sorting dies silently I doubt anybody except the implementors will miss it.

... and everyone that uses it and has no idea to click on the tiny 15x150px area that exists to change it.

I thought the same thing. Isn't that what they SHOULD have been doing all along? I know they had the drop-down to switch from "most recent" and "top stories", but I was interested by that also. I wonder if they meant something more "grey".

Whether they should have been doing it depends on how you use Facebook, I think. I tend to log into it once a day or so, so a non-chronological view actually suits me great. It'll be a shame if it goes away.

Whether chronological makes sense is a product of the number of times you log in and the number of 'friends' you have (and the number of posts they make).

I have 140 friends. I log in a couple of times a day. I have filtered all their crap. I want chronological order.

If I had 1000 'friends' who posted all day, then I would want a way more filtered and special-sauced feed.

I found the references to "personalized newspaper" most interesting.

Using the newspaper comparison, I imagine a front page with a promoted gizmodo story surrounded by ads for things facebook thinks I care about with a whole bunch of quick meme images "below the fold" liked by people I know.

Maybe if I flip through the eternal september fluff that floats to the top of the personalized newspaper long enough I just might see a relevant post from a friend with a low edge rank about how her daughter's cancer responded positively to treatment and is now considered in complete remission.

This is great news. Along with a feed that shows you EVERYTHING the people you follow post.

And Groups and Pages!

So they are taking back the change that required pages to pay if they wanted their posts to show up?

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