
We might be swinging away from the newsfeed - juokaz
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2018/4/2/the-death-of-the-newsfeed
======
combatentropy
AI is still oh so much like Clippy. In Google, I keep having to change it from
All Results to Verbatim. With Facebook, I keep having to change it from Top
Stories to Most Recent.

Try UI before AI. Purely chronological will suffer the spam of frequent-
posting friends. Group their posts, which can be flicked through as a cluster.

All in all, am I the only one that thinks that the current fashion in page
layout squanders real estate? Make the news feed a huge grid, with each post
smaller, like one of those photo walls in a hip restaurant.

~~~
TACIXAT
I think you just solved a huge grievance I've been having with Google search.
I get absolute trash results that are hardly even tangential to what I
searched. I'm going to try out this verbatim thing.

~~~
ehnto
The issue I have is that if the topic could even remotely sell me something,
those selling or reviewing the thing sold in order to sell it will be the only
results. The communities actually interested and talking about the things have
disappeared from the results.

~~~
Bjartr
One trick that works for some topics is to limit your search to a custom time
range like pre 2005 or so. Specifically this only works for information that
would have been available then, but when that is the case you can avoid a ton
of modern spam.

------
fallous
The reason this problem keeps popping up is due to the mistaken belief that
you can deduce intent via inferred behaviors, and worse that deduced intent is
preferable (or at least comparable) to explicit intent. You can't and it
isn't.

As an example of deduced intent let's envision a system where every action I
commit over the course of a year can be observed and recorded for inference
analysis to determine if I am evil or good. Assume that in all ways I meet the
standard definition of good... I help people across the street, save puppies,
etc. At the end of the year the BEST that you can conclude is that I behaved
ethically (good actions), but that says nothing about MY intentions. I may in
fact be evil and am only ingratiating myself within a community in order to
later kill them all. There is a reason that within philosophy that morality
and ethics are separate words. There is a reason that when viewing demographic
data people say "I can tell you what 9 out of 10 people in the group prefer,
but I can say nothing about any one individual within it."

As to the preference between inferred vs explicit intent, you're placing your
own judgement of the value of inference vs explicit above that of the user
which will inevitably lead to frustrations on the part of the user. In the
simple case of a catalog there are two distinct intent patterns that users
engage in... one is the specific intent to find a known product and the other
is what I refer to as "discovery." Discovery is, as the word suggests, finding
things that the user did not know existed or knew very little about.

~~~
2sk21
Very well articulated. I wonder if there is a difference between a machine
trying to deduce intent vs a human doing the same task. As humans, we may be
able to pick up subtle cues that machines simply lack the ability for.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I wonder if there is a difference between a machine trying to deduce intent
> vs a human doing the same task.

Fundamentally, no. There may be practical difference between specific machines
and people.

> As humans, we may be able to pick up subtle cues that machines simply lack
> the ability for.

Depending on the machine, the reverse could be true.

------
quadrangle
Spot on. Note that the issues are different (and not as bad) for Reddit and HN
type things.

> It ought to be able to work out who your close friends are, and what kinds
> of things you normally click on, surely?

I wish this didn't even seem right to anyone, even from the beginning. It's
different whether I happen to click or be interested in something once than it
being what I want to see again. If I go to a movie, that's not evidence that
it's my sort of movie — I don't know if I'll like it until I see it! Priority
really has to be on the _evaluation_ of things and the _explicit_ desire to
get more, not on reading things into the fact that I was open to something in
the first place.

With the what-I-click approach, one day I am prompted for some reason to click
one sort of thing… then I'm shown that more the next day… then one pretty-
arbitrary starting point is turned into a defining filter for me forever. This
reality means that simply clicking something out of curiosity threatens to
define you and your experience for years.

The ethical way to handle this is to do some mix of (A) giving back control to
the readers for what they _explicitly_ choose to follow (not whatever they
happen to click, and not even what they "like" because liking should not equal
following) and (B) doing the opposite of bubbling and actively insert some mix
of stuff-they-don't-usually-click, i.e. novelty so that people are actually
exposed to new ideas and perspectives they might otherwise not even know
exist.

~~~
ClintEhrlich
Your general concern is well taken, but clicking on something once will not
"define you and your experience for years." The system will respond to your
initial click by introducing similar content to your feed, but if you don't
click on those stories, the effect will be transient. Failure to engage is
itself a form of feedback, for better or worse.

~~~
duxup
I don't doubt that works that way sometimes... but man somewhere along the
line I googled a Nebraska Cornhusker football score and Google randomly brings
it up again and again and again.... even when I give it feedback that I don't
want that information, it comes back later on.

I feel like I've seen this behavior on other sites and systems as well. I've
no doubt the prioritization initially works, but it seems there are other
factors at play that seem to bring up old data.

In my case my team is not nearly as popular as Nebraska so I suspect the logic
very roughly ends up something like "Ok he watches college football and oh hey
this Nebraska story is really popular and stories about that team are big now
so here ya go..."

~~~
washadjeffmad
After a university in another state sent me an unsolicited email offer (never
opened), my google feed started showing me everything about that school, even
going as far as setting up notifications for its class registration calendar.
The feed started to loop in college football and greek life news, which are
incredibly off base for my actual and actively searched interest history.

I spent a year slowly cultivating a pretty decent feed of relevant content on
my Pixel, and it went full Netflix 2010 seemingly overnight.

Early Netflix suggestions, no matter how selective and consistent your
selections over many years, could be instantly subverted by your lonely
sister-in-law getting on your account one Saturday night and watching a few
foreign language romance flicks. After that, you'd never really stop getting
recommendations for "movies starring sexually aggressive male leads" or "films
with actors who look like Antonio Banderas".

I think I'm done being used to train everyone's algorithms.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Heaven forbid you entertain your 6yo niece for a day, and find she's polluted
your Netflix with the most insanely numb drivel that passes for animation
today. It takes months to expunge.

What's wrong with Netflix anyway, that one off-topic movie can sway your
'preferences' so drastically?

~~~
lakechfoma
I find Netflix doesn't recommend anything based on my behavior at all anymore.
Now literally the first 5 or so rows of content on the home page is a random
spattering of "originals". But they definitely do select the title image based
on my past behavior. So not helpful

------
Zak
There's a different problem I want solved. I want the option to see only
original content, nothing shared.

I don't want to see some random cat video Sarah thought was cute. I can go to
/r/kittens myself if I want to see random cute cat videos. I do want to see
the video Jen took of her cat because I know him and sometimes feed him when
she's out of town.

I think I'm not alone in this, and some of the popularity of Instagram is due
to its UX making it easy to upload content directly from a mobile device and
not so convenient to share content not created by the user.

I've used the FBPurity browser extension to create a nearly share-free
Facebook feed. It reduced the amount of content by 80+% and greatly improved
the signal to noise ratio.

~~~
hateful
You're missing one thing. The reason we have the algorithm and not the latest
newsfeed is not because it's better for the users but it's because better for
Facebook to be able to charge the people who create the shared content to
float up in the feed. You see the shared meme about the latest new Netflix
show before your friends Cat photo because Netflix paid Facebook to show it
more often. Netflix is the customer here, you are the product.

Again, if you were able to control exactly what you wanted to see with a
control panel - that's a simple thing to implement, but that's not what
Facebook does/is. It's an advertising platform. "social networking" is double
speak.

~~~
Zak
I'm entirely aware that the only reason there isn't a tab for this on Facebook
is that Facebook doesn't want it. It would obviously be easy for them to
implement it.

It might, however be a compelling feature for whatever displaces Facebook to
offer. It would require a business model that's not identical to Facebook's.

------
keyle
I'm not sure the concept of the News Feed is the problem. I think it's in the
execution. Currently, it's a big algorithm that's thick and opaque to the
user.

A full page grid of posts doesn't solve the problem, if anything it makes it
worse. You'd lose visual hierarchy and no grouping, making posts that are
mostly red or bright get more eyeball time than the rest.

I think a more natural control over your own News Feed without going through a
screen of dials and buttons could be the way to do it. Simple filters at the
top, similar to what the Gmail inbox introduced. Funny/Sad/Deep/etc. based on
the content and the response from other people (like/angry/sad/etc.) And like
Gmail inbox filter, use it or ignore the filtering. You still need some smarts
to nuke down the every-day spammers. And sometimes chronology isn't the best
order, but it's not too hard to work out when a big-deal occurs; e.g. someone
posted 12 pictures of their wedding ceremony, 5 hours ago, and their feed blew
up, making it more important than someone's best ramen noodles they've ever
had 15 mins ago.

~~~
CodeCube
> I'm not sure the concept of the News Feed is the problem.

I'm honestly starting to believe that it is. These are just random on-the-spot
ideas, but I want to start seeing more innovative and different ideas. For
example, if you want to optimize for getting news, let's see some innovation
in journalism. If you want to optimize for being entertained, let's see some
innovation in curated experiences. If you want to optimize for keeping in
touch and connecting folks, let's do something akin to a CRM-for-friends ...
where you still share all the stuff, but instead of showing you a feed, the
site/app would just give you targeted reminders to reach out to folks you
hadn't connected with in X amount of time.

Again, these are just random ideas off the cuff ... but this whole "wisdom of
the crowds" thing we need to rethink, because it's too easy to manipulate by
any number of actors in the system.

------
amirathi
There's a business angle to the newsfeed that's not being talked at all. Your
news feed being "algorithmically controlled" is a huge advantage to the
platform from advertising perspective. Facebook at this point has liberty to
show me a promoted page because one of my 700 friends liked it at some point
of time. If none of my friends has liked it then it's promoted as "Popular
across Facebook".

I believe promoted tweets work in a similar way. If a platform provides any
sort of control over newsfeed it looses the leverage to show you what it wants
you to see.

~~~
gboudrias
Which is exactly why Facebook and Twitter have "blurrified" your content by
making it have no verifiable order by default ("top posts" meaning "totally
arbitrary order").

This, as you highlight, probably brings in the big bucks. This makes me think
Google had something similar in mind when they "personalized" the search
results (a wildly unpopular move), going to show that when you are the
product, there may be no UX too unpleasant to sink to.

The upside of this is that these incremental UX sacrifices leave the market
open for an alternative, either of the same ad-driven kind or, hopefully, of
the more sustainable kind.

Hey, a man can dream.

~~~
ShinTakuya
I fail to see how the ad driven model isn't sustainable. If anything a non ad
driven model is less likely to be sustainable. I doubt what Facebook is doing
is driving away that many users.

~~~
username223
The ad-driven model will show as many ads as possible, while making the user
experience just barely tolerable. Usually, they forget about remaining
tolerable -- see popups, animated GIFs, Flash ads, etc. -- and get slapped
down by technology that actually serves the user. See also the VCR, which let
people record TV shows and fast-forward through the ads. Ad-driven media will
always cannibalize itself.

------
ballenf
The real problem is that we need to be incentivized to pare down our friends
to those we truly care about. But that's exactly the opposite of the
platform's incentive.

The reason for the shift to an algorithm is that FB doesn't want to give you
any incentive to unfriend or unfollow anyone, because that reduces FB's
ability to maximize your engagement. They want to be in control, not you.

If FB just let chronological newsfeeds get out of control, we'd have no choice
but to manage it ourselves avoiding this entire problem. It would cost us a
little time upfront but save hours in the long run and result in a healthier,
less algorithmic experience.

The easiest way to judge what FB believes is in their interest is to compare
various actions by their ease of execution. For example, "liking" a post is
one click and instant. Unfollowing is 2-3 clicks into a hidden menu at the
least. Not to mention that it has an artificial 1-2 second delay built in that
kind of makes you "pay" for the action.

------
Marazan
The newsfeed is a creation of mobilefirst.

Remember old Facebook? The MySpace ripoff with a nice design?

Your homepage populated with widgets? That can easily cope with 200 friends.
You'd just have separate widgets for different types of events. One widget for
a feed of genuine status updates, one for friends' shares, one for likes etc.

Mobile first destroys that. You've only got space for one list.

~~~
zeveb
That's a really good point. As awesome as it is to have a supercomputer in my
pocket, I wonder if it's really a net benefit: mobile computing has led to a
lot of compromises (e.g. the newsfeed) which really aren't good.

FWIW, I don't even have Facebook installed on my phone. My most frequently
used apps are Firefox, Signal & Inbox (in roughly that order), followed
probably by Maps, Google Play Music, KeePass & Authenticator. For everything
else, there's my desktop or my laptop.

~~~
fallous
"Mobile computing" is almost always "mobile consuming," and trying to fit the
requirements of computing into the design of a consumption platform is
necessarily compromising, if not failing outright.

------
skybrian
I vaguely remember a joke about a radio that didn't have a volume knob because
"it's already set to the correct volume".

It's certainly possible to overload people with settings, but I don't see why
we don't see a choice of a few very different feed filters to choose from.
It's not like any single algorithm can be what everyone wants.

This seems more important than more photo filters, don't you think?

~~~
TangoTrotFox
The pink elephant you can't forget is that the feeds on most services are not
designed to benefit you, but to benefit the company. So for instance Facebook
engaged in substantial research manipulating peoples' emotions by making their
feed either more positive or more negative, and seeing how this affected their
posting and sharing trends. This one was widely reported ( _search for
'facebook psychological experiment'_) and demonized.

I think there are a couple of important takeaways from it. First Facebook
wasn't just doing that out of academic curiosity. They're manipulating their
users to maximize their benefit. And the more important point is that that
behavior is, all but certainly, something most of every company that also
relies on advertising is engaging in. Letting you see what you want to see is
not their goal, except if that coincidentally coincides with you being more
likely to stay on their service and provide more personal information to them.

And we might intuitively expect these two goals to be aligned, but this is
improbable. Consider casinos. It's not wins that keep people gambling - almost
nobody wins in the longrun in most games. Instead it's a complex system of
addiction including near wins, and visual-audio manipulation that keeps people
dumping their money in the machines. And so too with Facebook, it's that small
rush of interaction, likes, and so on that also keeps people 'playing'.

~~~
fallous
Actually casinos DO depend on wins to keep people gambling, there just needs
to be more losing over time. If nothing else the psychology of inflating
personal successes and devaluing losses will achieve the needed goals,
although adding all the other goodies you mention optimizes the process.

A casino in which you ALWAYS lost, despite a constant "near win!" incentive
and all the other manipulations would quickly be empty.

------
dilap
i remember instagram pre-algorithmic timeline, and it worked well: because
everyone knew every post would be seen, there was a cultural norm of not
posting more than ~ 1 time a day.

it's not like crazy-amounts-of-posting is some inexorable law; it's a response
to the social networks as they now exist.

even for too much content to read, a time-based sample is arguably still
superior an algorithmic one, because it's _unbiased_. this gives you (1) an
accurate impression of mood and content of your timeline and (2) completely
short-circuits problems with soft-censorship and manipulative influence. (fb
has done various vaguely-evil experiments w/ controlling the emotional content
of your timeline one way or the other.)

lastly, there's an easy fix that gives you best-of-both worlds: simply allow
tagging some sets of people as "close friends" (or any other label!) and allow
filtering posts by that label.

(and, sure, if you want to, go ahead and include an algorithmic timeline view.
or even algorithmic w/ various different criteria for inclusion. the fact that
fb/instagram/twitter won't even give you the _option_ of chronological
ordering suggests that it's more about maintaining control than about creating
a good user experience. /tinfoilhat)

~~~
jamesrcole
> _allow tagging some sets of people as "close friends" (or any other label!)
> and allow filtering posts by that label._

Facebook has this feature. You can tag someone as a close friend, and it will
show you posts by close friends first.

~~~
dilap
in my experience, even with tagging and the "chronological" timeline, i still
don't get a strictly time-based timeline that shows everything. i just get a
"less algorythmic" timeline.

(i havent tried recently, tho.)

------
crabasa
I was fascinated by the "circles" approach Google took with G+. It felt like a
great solution to newsfeed overload and directional sharing.

But then Google+ failed, and we never got to find out whether Circles worked
or not

~~~
abalone
I recall Zuckerberg commented on this. Same reason Facebook groups didn’t take
off in a major way. Nobody wants to manage assigning people to groups.

I also remember this slide deck from some hip product guy who pitched
circles.. 150 slide hot mess.[1]

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-presentation-
that-i...](http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-presentation-that-
inspired-google-2011-7)

~~~
dwaltrip
Lately, I can't help but notice the vast number of ways social media is
deficient compared to real life.

In real life, you get "circles" for free! Whoever you are with in the current
moment is your circle, and only they have access to what you "share" during
that time period.

There is some leaking through the grapevine, but we have an intution for that
and usually handle it decently well. It's often even desired.

~~~
lmm
> In real life, you get "circles" for free! Whoever you are with in the
> current moment is your circle, and only they have access to what you "share"
> during that time period.

And the whole reason Facebook et al are popular is that in real life it's
really hard to get all the people you want in the right "circles" (i.e.
places) at the right times.

~~~
dwaltrip
Facebook doesn't have the circle feature. It's publish to everyone only.

You can send a group message, which I suppose can sort of function like a
circle, especially if it's long lived. But it would hard to manage many of
those.

~~~
lmm
Actually you can create a circle (might be called a list?) and publish just to
that circle. People just mostly don't bother, because managing circles is so
much effort.

~~~
CodeCube
correct ... unfortunately this feature has been super hidden over time in the
FB UX. It's almost impossible to figure out unless you already know about it.
I find it super useful when I specifically want to segment my audience. Don't
do it with everyone that I'm 'friends' with, but for example, I have a 'kids'
list for every underage person I'm friends with (my kids, nephews, nieces,
etc), and I will exclude them from a post if it's non-kid appropriate. But as
you mention, it's a pain to do this for everyone.

------
sparkzilla
This article is based on the false premise that a person with 300 friends will
have 1500 posts a day. This was a lie manufactured by Facebook to sell the
algorithmic feed to journalists, who passed it on as truth to their readers.

As we all know, people with 300 or even 500 friends have nowhere newer 1500
posts a day. Sure, some friends post 10 memes a day, but most people _do not
post anything at all_. In any case, people were able to manage the
chronological feed without any problems. I did not hear anyone complaining
that they had to deal with too many posts, and managing the feed wasn't an
issue.

What was an issue, however, was that Facebook needed to make more money. So
they created an algorithmic feed that pushed posts that engaged people more
(videos and images) and downgraded external links (to keep people on the
platform).

They lied about the 1500 posts a day, and journalists passed it on, and
Facebook made more money. All at the users' expense.

------
gaius
_you will have something over a thousand new items in your feed every single
da_

This is clearly nonsense. Why do people’s “likes” end up in the feed in the
first place? When people say they want a reverse chronological feed they mean
of _actual posts_ , not every possible activity. And everyone knows it, too.

~~~
twanvl
I would love it if you could filter Facebook to only show posts of friends,
and not their likes of clickbait news articles, shares of stupid math puzzles,
or them wishing their third cousin a happy birthday.

Actually, the fact that your friends' likes show up in the Facebook newsfeed
is actively discouraging me from liking anything. I _do not_ want my friends
to see what posts I like.

~~~
coatmatter
I think there is a setting that disables the default option of (edit: some of)
your likes showing up on friends' feeds (ad preferences?) but I know that's
all beside the point now in the broader context.

Before my deactivation, I thought about those in my list whom I wanted to see
or communicate with and to be honest, I couldn't think of that many in
proportion to all those I mostly added a decade ago. Frankly, I found the
"news" to be more interesting than most "personal" posts.

I also didn't want new Friends to be able to easily trawl through my no-
longer-relevant past Facebook life. Upon realising there was no easy way to
control the privacy settings for that and in frustration, I started the
process of deleting Facebook. (Not many realise this, but Messenger will still
work while an account is deactivated.)

It's simply too hard to create a graduated list of different "Friends" on
Facebook (or Google+). While their presented mission might be to "connect
people", real life doesn't work that way. Coupled with an encouragement of
oversharing by design, it's a recipe for not a very good website to spend time
on.

I don't know of anyone within my own friends group who has gotten successful
from using more social media. I also don't plan to be the first, not when
other more lucrative niches exist.

------
Hendrikto
> We’d just invite close family and friends. Then, we actually made a list of
> ‘close family and friends’… and realized why people have 100 or 200 people
> at a wedding.

Then you either have a VERY big family or a VERY broad definition of “close
friends”.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
Having had to make such plans, lists grow fast. Well, we have to invite all
three of my sisters. So their husbands/boyfriends, kids, kids boy/girlfriends,
grandkids. Then most of our friends have families. We have to invite Joe: he
was there on our first date. Justin, for sure: he helped us move in together .
. Crap, now there's ove a hundred people.

~~~
hvidgaard
Then split it. Family and close friends, i.e. people you see regularly for a
traditional party in the evening. For everyone else there is an informal
dessert reception after the ceremony.

There is this idea that for it to be a "proper" wedding, you have to host a
formal party and provide for each and everyone that has had an impact on your
life. It doesn't have to be this way, but if one chose to do so, then the
implications is the planning and cost skyrocket.

------
LeicaLatte
This is why curation is king and a good human editor is a rockstar.

On this algorithmic side Apple and Spotify are leading the way. For example,
Apple Music solves this problems by grouping feeds. Favourites Mix, Chill Mix,
New Music Mix, Friends are Listening To, Radio.

~~~
pmlnr
Spotify is very far from ideal, or even fromwhat last.fm had when it comes to
radio based on song though.

~~~
chrisvalleybay
This might be anecdotal, but I only listen to my 'Discover Weekly' list on
Spotify. Every week I get a new set of songs, and I mostly listen to those
songs every day, until I get a new one. Some of the songs on the list, I hop
onto the album of, and listen to that as well.

That algorithm knows me very well, and it's able to delight me with new music
every week.

~~~
rajeck
I've found this as well. Discover Weekly both gives me old favs as well as
introduces me to new stuff. It's pretty cool.

------
fallous
Think of the problem in this way... you have a butler that is very very
knowledgeable about all manner of things, which surely is a valuable and
useful resource. When you ask him to pack you a tuxedo for attending the
baseball game he responds with "might I suggest a more leisurely attire? I've
noted that most people attending baseball games seem to dress casually." You
may respond "Capital idea, man! By Jove, Jeeves you are a life saver!" He then
packs your jeans and a bowling shirt in your travel bag and you are heartily
satisfied.

Over the course of years you repeat this many times, until one day when Jeeves
decides not to suggest but instead to simply pack your jeans and a bowling
shirt. When you arrive at your destination and open your bag you are aghast
and call your butler. "Good God Jeeves! I specifically asked you for a tuxedo
to attend the baseball game and you packed me this slovenly casual wear!"
Jeeves, in his defense, responds "but sir, for YEARS you've asked for a tuxedo
to attend baseball games and I have suggested casual wear, and you have ALWAYS
chosen the casual wear!" "True enough Jeeves, you presumptuous butler, but
tonight I am singing the national anthem at the game! Without formal attire I
shall be reduced to ruin! You're fired!"

Too many products have opted to be the presumptuous Jeeves, without even
bothering to spend the years our poor butler did learning the eccentricities
of his employer. And yet even with that dedication, poor Jeeves was fired
because he was confident he could infer the intentions of his employer.
Whether it was the arrogance of Jeeves presuming to know better than his
employer, the ignorance of Jeeves in understanding that he lacked crucial
information, or that Jeeves suffered under the delusion that past performance
predicted future results matters not a whit... because Jeeves has been sacked.

Jeeves may find employment elsewhere but if he does not mend his ways he will
eventually find himself unwanted and unemployable due entirely to his own
faults.

~~~
ballenf
Jeeves would have been the one to schedule the anthem singing and would have
given you the choice of a couple suitable outfits for the occasion. Or just
packed both the tuxedo and the jeans. If someone's flying you out to sing, you
probably are in first class and have the upgraded baggage allowance.

The mistake you imagine is _exactly_ the kind of thing competent human
assistants are good at avoiding and AI is terrible at.

~~~
fallous
Jeeves is my butler, not my executive assistant and presuming otherwise will
get Jeeves fired as well.

Competent human assistants know to negotiate formally or informally with their
employers the limits of their authority. Unfortunately those creating products
either do not know or do not care to negotiate clarity on such limits, and end
up like poor Jeeves.

------
qwerty2020
Have been seeing similar overload of information on Reddit as well (HN not
quite there yet, but would imagine it's not too far behind). The front page is
littered with images/gifs of bite size information/memes. A few years ago, I'd
learn something new almost every time I visited the front page.

I created a tool [1] that lets users aggregate top posts from selected
subreddits and receive a daily email summary, but I think there can be more
done in this space. Would also like a better discovery mechanism for things
that I may be interested in that aren't obviously connected to current content
(e.g. someone interested in programming may be interested in art as well, if
fed nice introduction to that information/scene, but current algos just stick
to known interests).

[1] www.storyrake.com

------
jamesrcole
My idea: limit how frequently people can post. E.g. max of two posts per day.
That could certainly help with info overload, though I don't know how most
people would react to the restriction.

~~~
billysielu
I was thinking more like 1 per week :)

------
panglott
Why not just give users more power over their newsfeed, instead of assuming
that the site engineers can get the balance right.

A user could be able to specify "I want 50% of my newsfeed to be from
immediate family, 35% from close friends, 15% from acqaintances." Use a pie
chart slider bar to make it clear. Then let the algorithm figure out how to
interpret that chart.

~~~
bdhess
Because your preferred allocation might not produce updates at Facebook's
desired frequency. FB's revenue is directly related to manufactured urgency
and FOMO.

------
narrator
I like what reddit does. Choose your sorting method
(best,top,new,rising,controversial,gilded) Reading my front page sorted by
controversial has led me to a lot of unusual and interesting content.

------
fiatjaf
Orkut was the biggest social network in Brazil before Facebook.

Orkut didn't have the concept of a news feed. It had just communities, which
were thousands of micro forums people joined and were displayed on their
profiles; and scrapbooks, which were walls of text messages -- people could
post on others' scrapbooks and on their own, so you used it to both message
people and "broadcast" content about yourself, but that wasn't shown to anyone
who hadn't voluntarily visited that scrapbook page.

[https://tiddly.alhur.es/fiatjaf@5apps.com/main/#The%20Orkut%...](https://tiddly.alhur.es/fiatjaf@5apps.com/main/#The%20Orkut%20model)

------
pgodzin
I really like what François Chollet wrote here:
[https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-
about-a...](https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-about-ai-
ed9df072b704)

Instead of having an algorithmic feed that tunes an opaque optimization
problem, we should harness the power of AI/ML and optimize for what the user
explicitly wants - whether it be learning, family, or sports commentary.

~~~
kiostech
let users to set the algorithms they want to use maybe ? e.g sentimental
analysis , fake new filter ...

------
kiostech
I want to build a solution to solve this problem. Back to classic RSS feed ,
but along with evolution algorithm / strategy
([https://blog.openai.com/evolution-
strategies/](https://blog.openai.com/evolution-strategies/)) which means 80%
of the information you usually click + 20% of information you never click
before. It's a good way to acquire news and knowledge out of your comfort
zone.

~~~
kthejoker2
Even this is too much, I don't want a feed, I just want a daily digest about
the cognitive equivalent of the daily newspaper.

~~~
Falkon1313
Your newspaper idea meshes with what I've been thinking. But there's a
problem. Newspapers did have images, ads, and headlines, but they were more
than just that and a few one-line editorials.

In the early days, people posted rather lengthy articles/editorials about what
they were doing, thinking, feeling, who they were, etc. On Livejournal, then
on blogs, even in the early days of Facebook. But those are mostly gone now,
reduced to tweet-sized chunks and making up only a fraction of the feed.
Instead, people mostly just reshare, reblog, retweet, copy memes, add links,
sometimes photos, checkin somewhere, etc. A newsletter with all of that
filtered out, and only the actual content posts would usually be empty.

But if someone could start something like that and start a trend of people
actually communicating on a large scale, and making it as digest/newspaper
style, that could be pretty interesting.

~~~
kiostech
Can you be more specific about "communicating on a large scale" ? You mean
public discussion on social issues / news ?

~~~
Falkon1313
I was picturing larger scale as in more like journal entries or blog posts
than tweets and shares and one-line statuses. Not necessarily lengthy, but
enough to give some context and some idea of the writer's feelings/thoughts
around whatever they're writing about, yet still within the realm of social.
That could include their thoughts on social issues or news (rather than just a
link, meme, or one-line opinion), or just their thoughts about life and
philosophy and what's going on their lives.

------
3chelon
It was Douglas Adams (I think) who described a VCR as a machine to watch TV
for you, so you didn't have to. It's good joke, but joking aside I've been
thinking for some years now that it could apply to social media.

You could have your own AI bot that reads your newsfeeds for you and tells you
only what you might be interested in. The AI is tuned to your own preferences,
not the social media provider's.

Has anyone done anything like this already?

~~~
hzay
These would be browser extensions that work on the feeds, I think? More
complex "viewers" could be devised of course.

------
hliyan
Personally speaking, what I would prefer is a stream instead of a feed. Like
old fashioned television, I see whatever's on the stream at the time I look at
it, and nothing more: there is no temptation to keep swiping down to infinity.
Important items can reappear later if they're missed. The content of the
stream is based on subject subscriptions.

~~~
petercooper
Would something like [https://www.techmeme.com/](https://www.techmeme.com/)
count as that? It's basically a "snapshot" of tech news right now, but the
page basically ends at that.

------
kristianc
Is there not something of an expectation mismatch here?

I don't expect a newsfeed to be an exact representation of everything that I'm
going to find interesting, nor can it guarantee that it is never going to miss
anything - the best that Facebook is ever going to do is a 'best guess'.

A good analogy might be my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist - it is pretty
good, but it isn't a complete encapsulation of my musical tastes, and a lot
more manageable than a chronological representation of everything that has
been released that week.

What Facebook has always been missing is a low friction, invisible way to say
"show less of this kind of thing", without it seeming like I am unfollowing
that person, or the social baggage of it being a 'Dislike' button.

If I need any more granularity than that, it's probably more worth me
contacting the person directly.

------
piccolbo
This is free AI. If you paid for it, it would serve you. This way, it serves
whoever pays for it. Email from top fintech asking me to work on their
"personalized recommendation system that balances engagement, revenue, and our
partner constraints". Do you see the welfare of their users in there? It's
financial clickbait for naive people. Stop saying it's a tech problem, it's
the uncanny valley and what not. This problem is created by billions of naive
cheapskates and a system that rewards moral flexibility.

------
chiefalchemist
> "One basic problem here is that if the feed is focused on ‘what do I want to
> see?’..."

False flag. The Feed is focused on engagement. Period. There is no right or
wrong. Just engagement.

No one can know what the possible feed is, let alone what their ideal feed
should be. Let's face it, that's going change from day to day. We're humans.
It's what we do.

As long as the long arc keeps you coming back THAT is all FB is concerned
about.

------
arkh
> you probably do know several hundred people well enough to friend them on
> Facebook

Different people have different standards for what they call friends.

------
stuaxo
The newsfeed is the ultimate version of the 90s wet dream of "portals": an
corporate orifice to enter and never leave.

------
rahoulb
I use Tweetbot as my Twitter client precisely because it uses a chronological
feed. I will start scrolling and if there's too much to go through I just
scroll to the top, missing hundreds of items. If it's important it will
reappear. If not, I've not missed anything.

------
interlocutor2
The wikipedia android app actually does this well. They separate items in the
feed into different categories. You may opt out of any category:

[https://i.imgur.com/GKqtl3T.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/GKqtl3T.jpg)

------
artur_makly
my only issue with Evan’s article is his generalisation and potentially racial
use of “Russians” ..

> There are lots of incentives for people (Russians, game developers) to try
> to manipulate the feed.

------
msoad
The tree described in the second tweet is visible in Telegram right now. There
are channels that are overloaded with content. I can see Telegram inventing
news feed soon.

------
jesusthatsgreat
We need a new social network that helps make the world more isolated and
disconnected.

------
zatkin
> ‘what do my friends want (or need) me to see?’ feed

Isn’t this what the notifications on FB are for?

~~~
coatmatter
This does work well for Close Friends. However, most of Facebook isn't close
friends.

------
kiostech
Maybe all we need is just a simple news aggregator

~~~
pmlnr
You'd need people to post to fetchable places first, say, their own website,
or at least tumblr.

~~~
kiostech
Looking forward to a new rss feed standard

~~~
pmlnr
Right, cause that will solve it, like it did the first time /s

The last thing we need is yet another standard; we need people to utilize the
existing ones, like activitypub, webmentions, websub, micropub. And grouping
is a client task.

This is not a tech problem in 2018.

~~~
kiostech
How about json rss instead of xml rss . Or even ipfs pubsub

~~~
pmlnr
What problem exactly json solves over xml? How does it address the problem of
people being lazy and still using FB?

------
greggman
does anyone else refrain from posting because you know that each post you may
take up your friends' time?

------
feelin_googley
"There has been an overwhelmingly negative public response to Facebook's
launch of two new products yesterday. The products, called News Feed and Mini
Feed, allow users to get a quick view of what their friends are up to,
including relationship changes, groups joined, pictures uploaded, etc., in a
streaming news format.

...

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded personally, saying
"Calm down. Breathe. We hear you." and "We didn't take away any privacy
options."

Source:

[https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-
face...](https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-facebook-
replies/)

~~~
briandear
The funny thing is that privacy options are worthless -- while they protect
your content from being seen by other Facebook users or the public -- they
don't protect the content from being seen and used by Facebook itself -- which
is the problem. A "hide from Facebook ad targeting or newsfeed emotional
manipulation" option isn't a privacy setting is it?

------
feelin_googley
"And when you have 10 [P2P] groups with [small number of family, friends,
etc.] in each, then people will share to them pretty freely [in each case,
_only_ the content that is warranted for those individual groups]."

...

It's not possible in iMessage - with end-to-end encryption, Apple has no idea
what you're sharing."

[ There is no technicological reason that one company, or _any company_ ,
needs to have control over the management of these "groups" and the
"messaging" that may occur within them.

Two "groups" communicating over internet need not be connected in any way,
bridging them is an option that should be left for the _user_. For example,
each group is reachable only via a separate network interface. Not "networks"
or "interfaces" as defined by marketing copy and buzzwords, but traditional
network interfaces defined by software. The type of interfaces displayed when
a user types "ifconfig" and "ipconfig /all".

The interface used to "surf the web", the one that connects to the sewer of
advertising that is todays web, _is the not same one used to reach any group_.
Think of this like VLANs if you wish but its even simpler. I have been "beta-
testing" such a system, which is not new, for many years. Theres no ads, no
spam, no BS. It works. The "intelligence" of the network, so to speak, is at
the edge, with the user.

Theres no money in this, necessarily. This isnt an elevator pitch. Its called
"a private life". Everyone needs one. The whole point is to escape the
commercial world for a little while. "Clean separation", like those network
interfaces. ]

------
salqadri
Having too many newsfeeds sounds like a good problem to have: perfect
application for Machine Learning to solve!

------
menotyou
I am no FB User. Never was. Never seemed to me interesting enough to join.

When I read these kind of articles I am always amused with which kind of
problems your live is enriched when you are.

Not to mention the occasional article about how much your live improved after
stop using FB.

Fascinating.

