The anger and frustration
With typical users adding new friends and liking more pages each year, while spending the same amount of time with their News Feed, something has to give. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is receiving a ground-swell of criticism in recent days due to the filtering that it is forced to engage in in order to continue to inform its users. That, of course, includes advertisements which only began last year and those same ads are glaring when you’re missing news of your sister delivering birth only to miss the announcement of your nephew.
Perhaps most famously angry was Eat24 whose letter to Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) breaking up went viral. The site deleted its account and 70,000 plus likes in a fun, yet angry letter recently. The closing paragraphs illustrate the frustration users are feeling with Facebook:
It makes us think all you care about is money. Why should we have to wade through a dozen promoted posts about how to lose belly fat (are you trying to tell us something?) and requests for Candy Crush (NO! Just no.) and suggesting we like our arch nemesis’ page (seriously, WTF) before we can finally find the perfect Doge meme, It really seems like you’ve lost your way and have become nothing more than an ad platform.
Yeah, you’re right. We made mistakes too. We actually paid for some of those annoying promoted posts. You were all like, “Dude, you gotta try out promoted posts, It’ll help you make more friends and then more people can enjoy your LOLZ.” So we tried it because we loved you. Also, YOLO.
While one can understand their frustration, its equally important to remember that Facebook IS a business, NOT a charity organization for brands, companies, bands and actors.
How does Facebook choose?
There are over 100,000 factors that determine what you see in your News Feed and Josh Constine at TechCrunch recently sat down with Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) News Feed Director of Product to Management Will Cathcart and asked him to point out the big factors that Facebook uses. The following is a sampling of what Mr. Constine learned.
Posts are weighed by:
- How popular (Liked, commented on, shared, clicked) are the post creator’s past posts with everyone
- How popular is this post with everyone who has already seen it
- How popular have the post creator’s past posts been with the viewer
- Doe the type of post (status update, photo, video, link) match what types have been popular with the viewer in the past
- How recently was the post published
Until Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) properly “pulls back the curtain” on its algorithms, expect more, by that I mean less, of the same.
via: TechCrunch
