
Facebook Now Cares About How Long You Look at Stuff in Your News Feed - zhuxuefeng1994
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/12/facebook-now-cares-about-how-long-you-look-at-stuff-in-your-news-feed/
======
nikanj
The reason I spend so little time looking at things is the fact that they're
yesterday's news. There's "top stories" and "most recent", which is really
"top stories" wearing a different hat. No way of getting just the new updates
from my friends in a chronological order.

As a recent example, my friend A posted that they're going out for drinks and
are looking for company. Instead of showing me this quite time-sensitive piece
of news, FB wanted to tell me that my friend B liked the picture of C from
2013.

The drinks invitation became visible three-four days later, when it started to
get comments about people seeing it too late. Now it's been stuck to the top
of my "most recent" for at least a week.

~~~
chestervonwinch
yes. I miss when facebook was more of a social message board than... whatever
it is now.

~~~
onedev
It's a self promotion tool now :)

------
TheBiv
I may be in the minority, but I had figured they'd been doing this for years

~~~
barsonme
I agree. I figured it'd be pretty simple to do, especially for the iOS/Android
versions.

------
minimaxir
There's a stupid trend going around where Facebook Pages post word searches
and hidden object games about whatever brand they're promoting.

I guess we now know why.

------
modeless
I assumed they were already doing this. As a result I started to deliberately
modulate the amount of time I spent looking at various people or things. I
guess now it will actually be effective.

------
imh
I wonder what unintended consequences this could have, like attractive people
showing up in more people's news feeds more often.

~~~
fapjacks
No wonder people keep posting on my wall! ;)

------
joshmn
I was wondering when they would do this.

I find myself scrolling down and glancing for things. If I spot something that
might be intriguing, whether a picture, article, or cat pic, I'll scroll back
up. I can't be alone in this.

------
discardorama
"Dwell time" (as it is known in the industry) has long been a feature at major
search engines and news portals. It is a pretty good signal of relevance.

------
monksy
Thats a good thing I use the facebook feed eradicator. I love it. No more
posts that I don't want to see.

------
adjwilli
You'd think there could be a way that they could track the times between pulls
for the newsfeed as you scroll and get a lower resolution view of the same
phenomena, basically how long you looked at those posts but without as
specific data as tracking a javascript timer.

------
shpx
At this point I spend more time on
[https://www.messenger.com/](https://www.messenger.com/)

------
SocksCanClose
Worth reading Zelikow and Allison's "essence of decision" \-- now that they
have evolved into a complex bureaucracy with multi-level masters to serve
(middle managers, shareholders, political actors), they quite literally can't
do anything except maximize profit by driving traffic via click optimization.
Bureaucratic process and palace politics (models 2 and 3) are driving
outcomes, not executive vision (ie Zuck, model 1)... Time for _sadface_.

------
em3rgent0rdr
to neuter this, you can use the mobile site and disable javascript. I used to
also use fbcmd (via commandline), although it seems the maintainer has left.

------
Qantourisc
Or they could add a button "Care" ?

