
Facebook and its news feed algorithm - piyushmakhija
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/cover_story/2016/01/how_facebook_s_news_feed_algorithm_works.single.html
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hudell
My facebook timeline is the worst of all social networks. I unfollowed 90% of
my friends that I don't care about, so it has very little data to show me, but
instead of showing all of the content of those users, it still filters out
most stuff by whatever criteria they use, so I often go days with the same
content being shown on the top of my timeline (and missing a lot of posts that
I actually wanted to see).

Setting the feed to "Most Recent" usually gives better content, but the option
unsets itself every other day.

~~~
mortenjorck
There are two things, one trivial and one non-trivial, that would vastly
improve the feed for me (and I imagine for a certain cohort of which I am a
member):

The trivial one: Allow me to turn off all links. All of them, globally. I
don't care about the news article you just saw that reinforces your political
views; I don't care about the clickbait editorial you just read; I don't even
care about the moderately interesting piece you just shared because I probably
already saw it on Twitter. No links. Just the pictures and status updates like
before the age of inline expand.

The non-trivial one: Allow me to turn off all images with text in them. Why?
Because these are, with stunningly high frequency, visual versions of the same
political-view-reinforcement article links. I already know if a friend or
family member identifies as a liberal or a conservative. I don't need a
regular stream of smug SomeEECards or Memegenerator pictures to remind me. On
the technical side, there's clearly some fuzziness, but I have to think simply
detecting the presence of text would be a comparatively simple task to what
else Facebook's deep learning systems do.

~~~
dankoss
What you are describing is basically Instagram. No "sharing" or "reposting"
other content, only original posts from friends. Some have found ways around
that but it's not the default.

I'm not familiar with Snapchat but I expect they have a similar mechanic. It
seems like the newer social networks are avoiding the problems caused by
virality, and getting back to the original reason we wanted to join social
networks: to see what our friends are up to.

~~~
randycupertino
Interesting, a bunch of my instagram friends use it to share memes and
reposts. Facebook seems to have more "personal" photos whereas instagram seems
to be (at least amongst my friends) more of where they share cute random
images or pictures of celebs, what bands they like, etc.

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faide
My problem with the news feed is how non-deterministic the results are. There
have been so many cases where I will see a post/photo/video that I find
interesting, but fuck me if I ever want to find it again on a different device
or at some point in the future if I didn't bookmark it or remember who posted
it and when. It always seems like a random shuffling of the deck when I load
the page, and it's incredibly frustrating.

~~~
yeukhon
My biggest problem seems to be a bug, not sure if it is FB or browser. But
from time to time as you scroll down the news feed, FB displays the stuff you
have already seen from the beginning. Sounds like a problem with request
firing off and not able to retrieve and populate stuff from the beginning
again.

There is also no way to "remember this" unless you like the post.

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jlgaddis
Click the little drop down arrow at the top right of each post. On many of
them (maybe not all -- I can't check right now), there's now a "Save" option.

~~~
yeukhon
Ah great! Thanks.

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TheBiv
Title: How Facebook's news feed algorithm works

Second Paragraph: "No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this,
and no one inside the company will tell you."

~~~
askafriend
Xfb here, no one inside the company knows exactly how newsfeed works either.
The infrastructure and all of the components involved in generating and
rendering newsfeed at this point (and for a while) have been far too large for
any single person to understand. It's generally accepted as a mystery, even to
those working on components of newafeed.

I worked on a component of newsfeed for a while, and yet had no clue how the
rest of the system worked despite trying. That's the level of complexity
involved here.

~~~
fweespeech
That honestly sounds like mismanagement. Even if its too hard to understand
the minutiae, there should be a chart/graph/something somewhere that shows
what all the components are intended to do.

~~~
pc86
Understanding what the disparate pieces are and even how they talk to each
other will not tell you how it actually works, unless you understand how each
individual component works.

And:

> _The infrastructure and all of the components involved in generating and
> rendering newsfeed at this point (and for a while) have been far too large
> for any single person to understand._

~~~
kuschku
That’s just mismanagement still.

Each component should have a clearly and strictly defined way to interact with
other components, which you should have in nice diagrams. Tack the diagrams
together, and you get a full definition of how the newsfeed interacts and
which piece does what.

If that is not possible, then you have a very badly managed company, not even
Healthcare.gov was that mismanaged.

~~~
askafriend
Yes those diagrams exist, but you've got to remember that these components are
constantly changing as well as new components being added and others being
removed all the time. It's a beast and perhaps I was a little liberal with my
assertion that "NO ONE" understands it. It's possible to understand at a high
level: eg "...and then the posts get filtered through this ranking component"

But then that ranking component can change week over week so if you thought
you understood all of the ranking mechanics last week, then you probably have
some catching up to do this week.

There's also a lot of people working on this so stuff changes fast and often.
Think about all of Facebook's different products vyying for attention in the
feed. Think of all the PMs with agendas who want their product in the feed in
certain ways.

~~~
earl_gray
Sounds like they need to develop a news feed news feed to keep them fed with
all the latest news about their news feed development.

Plus side: if it works well, they can just replace their current unspeakable
Lovecraftian horror of a system with the meta feed they develop. A new dawn
for all.

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bpicolo
In my experience, Facebook pretty much just shoves all photo (visual) content
to the top. Kind of frustrating. Not actually possible to find people talking
on facebook anymore, it's just single-column pinterest.

The whole internet is sort of evolving into photo content these days it feels
like. Twitter, tumblr, pinterest, reddit...all very photo focused.

~~~
fsckin
This.

I missed repeated posts from a good friend asking for help. If I had seen
them, I would have been there in 10 minutes. They committed suicide exactly 1
month ago. Just goes to show how incredibly important some algorithms can be.

~~~
randycupertino
Fuck man. I'm sorry about your friend. That really fucking sucks.

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mschuster91
That algorithm crap was the reason I use facebook only as a messenger since
they turned off the ability to use a Twitter-like feed.

I don't need fucking "intelligent algorithms" to tell me what is important, I
can read an arbitrary newspaper if I want filtered content.

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noobie
I wonder how they test it.

I've unfollowed all but a couple of my close friends, the stories that show up
are inconsistent (some date all the way back to December 25th but will show up
every now and then). Most of their "liking and commenting" activities show up
in the news feed but not in the close friends list. It's a mess.

~~~
randycupertino
Unfollowing is freaking awesome. I unfollowed a bunch of my old college
friends who "work from home" now and are caught up in MLM pyramid schemes
selling beachbody, energy drinks, arbonne makeup and other MLM junk. It is
awesome.

I actually wonder how popular "unfollowing" is and if facebook is worried
about it, because everyone I know is psyched about the ability to do it!

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gukov
They completely refresh the feed hiding previously visible posts on pretty
much every page load to feed you as much content as possible. Noticed
something else with the corner of your eye right before clicking? Too bad,
it's now gone.

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overcast
I think I managed to unfollow everyone except for a handful of "friends" on
Facebook. End of 2015 I finally unfollowed Facebook by deactivating my
account. It really did not provide anything useful for me in retrospect, so it
had to go.

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kmonad
A lengthy, convoluted article that concludes "It would be premature to declare
the age of the algorithm over before it really began". No shit. For those
wondering whether or not to read it, I'd say it's not really worth your time
as it lays out pretty obvious difficulties in finding what to add to an
individual's news feed, but comes up with really weird "conclusions"
throughout.

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will_pseudonym
I have unfollowed all but about 3-5 people on Facebook. It's pretty great.
It's turned down the junk, but I miss out on stuff so much more often now. Oh
well. The alternative is worse for me, and it makes me seek out real
interactions with my network instead. That's a huge win for me. Facebook could
win back some of my time by allowing me unfollow _topics_ or other entities,
_across_ my timeline.

I LOVE some of my friends, but I hate 99% of any post on the NFL. I'll
certainly never seek it out. I unfollow people because it's just so
frustrating to start to dislike the person ranting about something I don't
care about, just because Facebook isn't smart enough to understand how human
relationships work. In real life, I can tell that person, "Look, I love you,
but you've got to stop talking about the NFL around me! You're showing me
you're not listening to me or valuing me as a person by doing so..." And
that's what Facebook is not doing: valuing me as a person. So, I unfollow
everyone; the NFL is just one example.

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frik
Facebook timeline change late 2011/early 2012 was catastrophic. It rendered
Facebook useless to me. Before you could browse the timeline page in linear
order (ordered by date descending) - no filtering, no bullshit - it was
perfect. Now you see only certain posts of your friends that Facebook thinks
might be interesting for you. Very bad change.

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artpepper
> “Sometimes” isn’t the success rate you might expect for such a vaunted and
> feared bit of code.

... only if you don't understand machine learning.

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ilyanep
Somewhat related: Today, I noticed that the vast majority of the articles on
my news feed are "X liked/commented on Y's post" where Y is someone I don't
know and the post isn't very good. I hope this is only a temporary change, but
I installed a Chrome extension to filter these out <_<

~~~
jgh
Or, worse, it's a thought-provoking article and you want to reply to a comment
but can't.

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franze
a TL;DR would be strongly appreciated, the first page is basically: .... bla
bla .... went to the toilet ...

~~~
tombrossman
You can stop reading at the second paragraph which has your TL;DR _" No one
outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside the
company will tell you."_ but it is an interesting article so maybe give it
another shot.

Bottom line is that it constantly changes just like Google's algorithms for
search change, and if you find one person to explain it to you correctly one
day they will likely have it wrong next week.

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dcole2929
This was a pretty interesting article but as a sports fan I got distracted by
the dig at Deflategate. Especially since the author not only mixed his sports
metaphors (basketball to football) but also because it was an accusation
scientifically proven to be untrue.

It wasn't even relevant to the article really but stuff like that takes you
out of it and you lose interest.

~~~
subie
Yeah I'm a fan of the pats too.

------
balladeer
I have again started to use Facebook since last few months. So I never see
anything that I want to see. What surprises me is I always see exactly
everything I don't want to see.

I get people in friend suggestions that I must have removed (clicking on that
"remove" button) like half dozens of times and they keep coming. I get stories
that are not at all relevant to my taste, search history (even on other sites
- assuming Fb tracks me anyway even with uBlock Origin) or anything I can
attribute it to. I get page and group suggestions are ridiculously tangential
to me as a person. I hide a story and I hide many similar stories and at times
I also mark them spam, report but I still get more similar stories. Then they
have some kind of limit on the number of posts/stories shown to you. At times,
that limit seems to be like as low as 4-5 stories, sometimes more. This is
very random. Then there is this completely irrelevant being shown to me
throughout the week. Also, posts that I hide pop up again. I've not checked
whether it happens all the time.

Then one day I decided to check my friend's walls (the ones whom I have not
unfollowed) and evaluate what I am actually seeing. Well, there were many text
status updates that I would have loved to see, many nice photo shares, very
few article shares (for some reason articles shared on Fb are not really the
brightest imho), decent rants, some excellent political remark, most of these
posts were recent and usually latest post on those walls, but guess what -
they were not shown to me. I was shown posts that would force me to unfollow
more friends and force me to close the Facebook tab a lot quicker than I might
have otherwise. I guess maybe that's a good thing.

As for this Slate article, felt like a paid PR piece.

> No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside
> the company will tell you.

Yeah, I guess, from an end user point of view, no one on the inside knows it
either.

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pmlnr
I wonder is PageRank was applied instead how well would that work.

As for recommendation algorithms, I still believe Last.fm is one of the best
around, so there might be something to learn from those guys.

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thetree1
Funny how they casually throw in the fact that facebook knows how much time
you spend on an article.

