Have social media websites be reverse chronological posts by friends/pages you follow instead of what AI thinks you're interested in (and yet somehow not explicitly following, yet you get it in your feed anyway)
It's like if you build a typewriter and give it to a few humans, they'll write on it a few times a week maybe, not that much. Sometimes a supermarket list or a letter to a friend. This is what I'd call "quality engagement". There's a person doing a valuable activity for themselves, where time using the thing isn't relevant.
Then you give the same typewriter to a monkey and every time the monkey finishes a page he gets a banana. He'll stay there all day every day. Lots of engagement and just gibberish on every page.
Advertisers are buying monkey engagement.
And platforms don't care so right now all the typewriters are made for a monkey hand to type all day every day, and you can no longer write your normal letters without feeling annoyed at why it got better for the monkey instead of leaving it alone for you.
Plenty of trash there of course but YouTube also has very good quality content (if you know where to look for, both as a user and as an advertiser).
This in turn is why there is so much more money into YouTube than other social media: because there is also highly qualitative content and thus viewers there. YouTube gets insane amounts more money and attention from the industry because of this.
Focusing on one particular company distracts from the fact that this is a result of systemic incentives. It is the incentives that need to change, not any particular company. Facebook / Instagram is crap, but so is Tiktok, Youtube, Reddit, etc.
The fundamental problem is the business model where money is parasitised from people's attention. You want change? Make these companies responsible for the negative externalities they impose on society, just like companies that pollute the commons are held responsible.
We don't need another Tiktok ban; we need industry wide regulation. Shortsighted focus on single companies is simply a distraction from this fact, which only benefits these companies and allows most of them to continue as before.
I will just point out Facebook has been accused of gaming metrics (among other things, autoplaying videos)
Which can lead to websites like Reddit making unpopular changes to try to match Facebook's market cap (I think I've read they were specifically trying to do that)
If you create fake metrics everyone else will copy you in a race to the bottom
No other CEO begins the company with "If you need info on people at Harvard, just ask, they trust me, dumb fucks"
>Because Zuckerberg has a generally weasely reputation and also I don't see the other platforms being nearly as scummy as Facebook has been
Have you not looked at Musk recently? Or is supporting AfD (the German far-right party) and adopting the persona of "kekius maximus" (a right wing meme) somehow less scummy than whatever it is Zuckerberg is doing?
Mind you, Zuck pulls some fucked up crap -and some of it may well be worse. But my point remains ...he's not alone. All of the Social Media platforms are corrupt and toxic and in many cases...Musk, Spez..their owners are as well.
I’ve developed this tic where anytime I’m on Facebook I aggressively block all the non sponsored suggested content in my timeline. I’ve blocked literally thousands of pages at this point. So the recommendations have gotten really weird, last week it thought maybe I was gay, then I started recommending Chinese state sponsored pages, now it’s recommending all 50 National Geographic pages. It’s always pages over a million “likes” whatever that means. I'm curious what’ll happen if I manage to block all of them.
Honestly probably something lame where the recommendations just get weirder and weirder (which I guess is happening now)
i have a burner fb account that i use to follow a local lost-pets group and check hours for restaurants that refuse to have normal webpages.
this account has no friends and just the one group membership so my feed if 100% platform-promoted swill. and it is bad. the current fad is for there to be accounts that repost screenshots of successfull AITA reddit posts to engagement farm.
the sad part is that it works. they get a ton of comments and likes
What a coincidence! I have done the exact same thing but on Instagram instead of Facebook and have had similar results to yours. Since both belong to Meta, we can safely assume that they use the same or very similar backends to serve ads.
I think it would be interesting to do a large scale experiment to see what can happen.
I've been doing this for a couple years. My feed is better, but they still have plenty of garbage I'm not interested in. I make it a point to scroll until I have blocked two of these - that is my signal that it is time to read. Hopefully if more of us start that rule of two eventually it will be populate enough that they notice and add a mode for those like to better see our friends thus keeping us a little longer (I doubt it, but it would be nice).
They're just different, it seems. Seems like sometimes it shows my friends posts with 2 or 3 things in between, but now it's started recommending sports, it's like it switches topics every few days, sports, then maybe I'm gay, then maybe I'm African, it's just all over the place. Note I don't do this with sponsored, only with the junk that I didn't voluntarily follow in my feed. The stuff is definitely getting weirder and less promoted, like random pages about container houses and there's like apparently 50 of them, all with bad AI art, and tons of cooking stuff.
I know people like to hate on X but the feed on there is hugely more interesting, topical, and relevant to my interests compared to what's getting interjected into my Facebook feed.
This is solveable. For every high frequency poster, show them in the feed at the time of their oldest of a batch of posts in duration X. Reveal all these posts with ui at that point in the timeline. Tune duration X.
Well, you make it only the posters you follow, and then go through your posters and only show the most recent unread one from each of them before cycling back around.
You can access those simpler chronological feeds in Facebook under More > Feeds. They still insert sponsored posts in that feed, but you can block them with browser extensions.
The annoying part is that if you load the feed url from a bookmark, at least on mobile, it reloads to the home page anyway. So you need to navigate to it manually each time. Never used to be this way. I guess they’ll remove the “feeds” feature soon enough anyway.
Most users don't want reverse chronological feeds. They say they do but they really don't, and fail to appreciate how that would actually work. First, that would incentivize posting more low-value crap just to stay on the top of everyone else's feed. Second, if you don't log on for a while you're likely to miss some major life events (birth, death, marriage, divorce, move, new job) that people most want to see.
Probably depends on your usage pattern. I think most would prefer it, but "engagement" measurements will make it seem like they hate it, because they spend less time on the page. If companies like Facebook actually wanted to know, they'd make the setting "sticky" rather than constantly reset to algorithmic, then measure over 3 - 12 months how many switches to either one and stays there. The fact that you can set your feed to permanently be chronological tells me that Facebook REALLY doesn't want you do use this feature.
"Power users" may prefer the algorithm, due to the volume of posts they'd see, while many casual users prefer reverse chronological and then just check in every other week. Seriously the last year I was on Facebook, that was my usage. Block everything not posted directly by a "friend", sort by date, read the five posts from the past two week and logoff. Took me just a few minutes a week to catch up. I just don't think that usage aligns with Facebooks business model.
Nah. It's mostly just the HN bubble that claims to want a chronological feed. The casual users are actually the ones who most prefer the algorithm so that they see posts about major life events at the top even when they haven't logged in for a while.
> First, that would incentivize posting more low-value crap just to stay on the top of everyone else's feed
For 'social influencers' sure, but normal users don't care about that. Removing the engagement hacked platform that primarily benefits social influencers would be a significant improvement for most users on most social media platforms.
Have social media websites be reverse chronological posts by friends/pages you follow instead of what AI thinks you're interested in (and yet somehow not explicitly following, yet you get it in your feed anyway)