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

[gosling.livejournal.com]

This is exactly why I intensely dislike Facebook. I read it, because seeing at least some of what my friends post there is better than seeing nothing of what my friends post there. I don't post there, however, and I know from experience that I will miss all kinds things I wish I had seen.

[bloodstones.livejournal.com]

I've found that ruthlessly hiding people that I'm not particularly interested in generally means I see more things from people I am interested in. Or at least I have that illusion because the ratio of interesting to not interesting is better.

[persis.livejournal.com]

I have similar feelings, but every time I am just fed up with fb picking whose posts I should be seeing, I get comments from people I have not heard from in months. For me, it is quicker to post pictures and quick posts from the road... but there are a few quirks that I have only today started noticing that are annoying, not the least being not seeing posts from ALL my friends.However, I think I need to do more posting here on LJ/dw as well. BTW, I also noticed that I am not seeing PQ's posts, and I used to see them all...

[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.

[nathanjw]

It's an interesting problem, as annoying as the implementation currently is, but I don't think they're wrong to be heading in this direction. Here's why: Even assuming that right now I can keep up with all of the posts from all of my friends, at some point that will not be true - too much will be posted, or I'll have less time to read, or I'll go away for a while. What's the right thing to show me, in that case?

1. The full feed, but only the most recent things as far back as I have patience to read (what LJ, or any other naive new-posts-at-the-top system does). This causes me to see certain consecutive stretches of posts but miss some other consecutive stretches of posts, somewhat randomly chosen as it's based on exactly what moments I happen to look at things, and not based on the posts themselves.

2. The full feed, from when I last read, as far forward as I have patience to read (what most email clients do). I fall further and further behind, most likely, and eventually declare "bankruptcy" and miss some large consecutive set of posts and start over.

3. "The important stuff". This could be a lot better than 1 or 2, because there are lots of signals present that could tell the system what's important to me - people commenting a lot on a post, friends of mine in particular commenting on a post, posts by people I've interacted with more in the past, and so on. I think that's what Facebook is currently approximating, and I expect it to get better. The knob that I want here is one to expand the quantity of posts that it's willing to show me - basically, the quality/importance threshold - and perhaps a way to make it clear where (in the timeline?) there are buried posts that are currently below the threshold, in case I do have the time to dig into them.