(no subject)

[randomness]

Also: I feel like I'm swimming upstream against Facebook's algorithms, because when I post something cute about Maurice Sendak's reply to a child's fan letter, I get literally dozens of likes, and when I post a well-researched article on the Koch brothers withdrawing from national races in 2016, I get...three.

(I didn't post the Sendak post here only because it was a repost from someone else on my Facebook feed. If there's interest, I'll repost here.)

Edit: I have evidence that people thought that Koch brothers post was interesting because of the traffic it got on LiveJournal. Again, it's hard to tease out what is audience and what is algorithm, but on LJ I don't have to guess what an algorithm is doing to my posting visibility.

Comments

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Even if The Algorithm makes an independent rating for each keyword in a posting, given the general correlation between various elements of political opinion, and also with various demographic factors, it would hardly be surprising if there were substantial statistical correlations along a "liberal-conservative" axis.

Then again, you're going to get the most reaction on Facebook on items that require the least depth and effort to process. Someone would have to think a while to figure out "What do I think and feel about the conservative stalwart Koch brothers not taking sides in the 2016 presidential election?" IIRC, in journalism, that's called a "think piece", and that doesn't imply "ratings gold!!!".