Benedict Evans:
If you’ve friended 300 people, and each of them post a couple of pictures, tap like on a few news stories or comment a couple of times, then, by the inexorable law of multiplication, yes, you will have something over a thousand new items in your feed every single day.
And:
We’re ‘supposed’ to post stuff, but by posting stuff, we overload each other’s feeds. Facebook’s Growth team was too good at its job.
This overload means it now makes little sense to ask for the ‘chronological feed’ back. If you have 1,500 or 3,000 items a day, then the chronological feed is actually just the items you can be bothered to scroll through before giving up, which can only be 10% or 20% of what’s actually there.
Though the core of this post was about Facebook, it applies equally well to Twitter or, I suspect, to any free-form social platform. In a nutshell, as you follow/friend more and more people, the complexity of your feed grows exponentially, making more than a handful of follows impossible to keep up with without that app taking over your life. And if you have multiple social networks, yeesh.
This is the logic that led Facebook inexorably to the ‘algorithmic feed’, which is really just tech jargon for saying that instead of this random (i.e. ‘time-based’) sample of what’s been posted, the platform tries to work out which people you would most like to see things from, and what kinds of things you would most like to see. It ought to be able to work out who your close friends are, and what kinds of things you normally click on, surely? The logic seems (or at any rate seemed) unavoidable. So, instead of a purely random sample, you get a sample based on what you might actually want to see.
Unavoidable as it seems, though, this approach has two problems. First, getting that sample ‘right’ is very hard, and beset by all sorts of conceptual challenges. But second, even if it’s a sucessful sample, it’s still a sample.
Someone is going to solve this problem. A new model will emerge that allows us to keep up with our friends/interests more efficiently and with less stress.
Interesting post from Ben Evans, right to the heart of the problem.
Posit: The world would be a better place if Facebook switched to a chronological feed, even if that does mean it’s just a random sample for most people.
The issue to me is that not all of us have 300 people who post daily. FB and Instagram both, I have only about 100 people I follow, and maybe half of them post daily. It’s quite easy to scroll to the last update when it is in chronological order. I think the real heart here is that I’m not the type of user FB or IG want, they want the ones that are adding 1,000 people to their feed.
Probably, but that would come at Facebook’s expense since it would pretty much have to be less engaging for the majority of users, unless you believe that the smart people at FB are so bad at their job that it is right now showing you posts that are literally LESS interesting than the average one in the set. So people’d spend less time on Facebook since it would be less interesting. Good for everyone but Facebook, lol.
Meh, they don’t really care if you have a manageable hundred or 1000 friends, as long as you spend plenty of time on the website viewing ads and letting them accumulate data on you!
Doesn’t e-mail solve this “problem”?
Yes, of course Facebook would make less money. But if Zuckerberg actually cares more about making the world a better place than making money then he should consider it.