One of the interesting problems with Facebook is the way it filters your friends feed.

[randomness]

We had a conversation last night during which one of my friends (PQ) complained that no one in Boston seemed to have seen her post that she was flying in from the Netherlands. Another friend in the conversation (BB) reported that only about a tenth of PQ's posts were showing up on her feed, and that when BB went back to look at PQ's personal page she saw all these posts that she had never seen before.

Later, it occurred to me that this might be a function of the number of people one has friended on Facebook. I have all of 34 friends on the Facebook account corresponding to my name here, and I fairly reliably see most of what they post, although there are occasional dropped posts. It does help when I use the "most recent" option, but I still don't know if that gets them all.

Facebook's algorithm for showing posts on one's feed is obscure but it does seem to try to reduce the number of posts one gets to what they consider a manageable number. Evidently they have decided that simply forwarding all the posts one's friends have written is overwhelming for people with many friends. Overwhelming the advertisements, no doubt.

In any case, if I needed any more reasons to stick with LJ/dw as my primary platform, this is yet another.

Comments

[karakara98.livejournal.com]

I think filters make a good metaphor for the ways the economy of ideas is changing. The old model of filters (newspapers, TV networks, publishing houses, record companies) was overwhelmed by a wave of cheap information on the internet and totally undermined. A new set of filters is trying to come into being. Gmail filters my emails. Facebook filters communications with my friends. Hulu and Netflix are vying to become filters for TV. My problem with all of these is that I have so little control over what they give to me and less over what they take from me. They seem to be deliberately obscure. This new model really bothers me, especially as the traditional editing and nurturing of new talent performed by the old economy does not yet seem to have found a model in the new economy.

In other words, I miss editors who were clearly editors.