
The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem - pmlnr
http://boffosocko.com/2017/07/11/the-facebook-algorithm-mom-problem/
======
ryanbrunner
I find a lot of sites feel like they're overtuning their recommendation
engines, to the detriment of using the site. YouTube is particularly bad for
this - given the years of history and somewhat regular viewing of the site, I
feel like it should have a relatively good idea of what I'm interested in.
Instead, the YouTube homepage seems myopically focused on the last 5-10 videos
I watched.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Youtube is definitely over-weighing the last few videos. Then again, it's
likely optimized for a different market segment. Especially with how many
children are given tablets. Like, brief intense fascination with many subjects
in general is genuinely _hard_ to optimize for, especially when a huge portion
of your market has long-lasting intense fascination with a few subjects.

~~~
rhizome
YouTube would rather you fall into a trance of continuing your recent viewing
habits rather than providing a personalized library. It just makes better
business sense.

~~~
icebraining
Why does it make better business sense?

~~~
quadrangle
Because they aren't trying to help you enjoy videos over the long-term,
they're trying to keep you from going over to Facebook where _their_ addictive
algorithm will take over and reduce your likelihood of returning to YouTube!

It's a classic race-to-the-bottom. If YouTube lets Facebook keep you addicted,
you won't get to the long-term.

[http://timewellspent.io/](http://timewellspent.io/) is good for perspective

~~~
icebraining
Yes, but that has an unspoken assumption that recent habits are more additive
than longer term ones. I find that suspect; after all, you've already shown
that you'll go back again and again to these kinds of videos, whereas you
might spend a couple of hours watching a bunch of videos of a kind that you'll
never be interested in again.

Personally, I find YouTube terrible at keeping me engaged. Even when I _want_
to keep watching videos, their sidebar fails to show me anything I want to
click on at least 1/3 of the times.

~~~
rhizome
_Yes, but that has an unspoken assumption that recent habits are more additive
than longer term ones_

This is too fine a point. A user will "select" a default choice by doing
nothing, and it's in YT's interests to provide default choices that reward the
company. This has been researched for decades and is supported by, among other
things:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias)

------
danso
tl;dr, as I understand it: when family members Like your Facebook content in
relative quick succession, FB apparently interprets it as a signal that it is
family-specific content. I didn't see any metrics but this seems plausible.

I think I'm more of a fan of FB than the average web geek, probably because I
used it at its phase of peak innocence (college years) and have since weaned
myself off to the point of checking it on a less-than-weekly basis. I also
almost never post professional work there, nor "friend" current colleagues.
Moreover, I've actively avoided declaring familial relationships (though I
have listed a few fake relationships just to screw with the algorithm). But
wasn't the feature of making yourself a "brand page" and/or having
"subscribers" (which don't count toward the 5,000 friend limit) supposed to
mitigate this a bit? I guess I'm so used to keeping Facebook solely for
personal content (and using Twitter for public-facing content) that I'm out of
touch with the sharing mechanics. That, and anecdotal experience of how
baby/wedding pics seems to be the most Liked/Shared content in my friend
network.

~~~
bad_user
> _But wasn 't the feature of making yourself a "brand page" and/or having
> "subscribers" (which don't count toward the 5,000 friend limit) supposed to
> mitigate this a bit?_

If you have a page, Facebook wants to milk you, so they've got this weird
algorithm that pushes your posts to only a small fraction of the page's
followers, expecting you to start "promoting" them.

Basically they screwed "organic reach".

Oh, and about 3 days ago I created a second Facebook account with the purpose
of connecting with software developers and my English-speaking friends (I'm
Romanian). I did this thinking that I don't want to share semi-private
pictures of family with strangers, or to spam my family and friends with
programming stuff.

But only 24 hours later they've disabled my account because of "security
concerns", without notice and now I'm waiting on their support to reply after
I've sent them my picture for validation.

And another thing - the online parents group from my son's school is on
WhatsApp. They tried a Facebook group, but the problem is that when important
announcements happen, not all parents receive notifications, so they resorted
to something that works.

Facebook is freaking terrible.

~~~
ProblemFactory
> If you have a page, Facebook wants to milk you, so they've got this weird
> algorithm that pushes your posts to only a small fraction of the page's
> followers, expecting you to start "promoting" them.

While this does enable Facebook to force brands to buy advertising, it is also
an user-friendly change.

Nobody who I have spoken to about this thinks that "like/follow" = "I want to
see everything they post" on Facebook. People like restaurants they had a nice
dinner at and want to publish their support, it doesn't mean they want to see
the daily special every day. Even if they "follow" you, it doesn't mean it
should show up before a friend's holiday pictures today, and tomorrow there is
already new content.

The reality is that most facebook users do not care about the posts from pages
they like/follow, even if they pressed the button some time ago. An automated
filter that keeps these posts from showing up is good for the user experience.

It's the same as "facebook friends" \- they aren't real friends, just people
you met once at a party in college. It might be interesting to see a post from
them once in 10 years when they get married or move to a new country, but not
their daily life. The same applies for brand pages - a like should give you
once in 10 years access to their feed, but not more.

~~~
specialist
I wasn't aware that facebook does partial publishing/pushing from Pages.

I'm co-admin for an org's official Page (and Group). Our bylaws require
advance announcement of various things, like meetings and resolutions. We've
been using our official Page just like our mail listserv, assuming all our
subscribers are getting all of our announcements.

Frankly, this sucks. Minimally, it violates the UX design principle of least
astonishment.

~~~
ValentineC
> We've been using our official Page just like our mail listserv, assuming all
> our subscribers are getting all of our announcements.

They will get it if they access your page directly, or subscribe to
notifications from your page. It's the same with a personal profile, I believe
— not everyone will receive your posts on their news feed unless you've
interacted with them a fair bit.

------
filleokus
Site down for me:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FcwargQ...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FcwargQcuogJ:boffosocko.com/2017/07/11/the-
facebook-algorithm-mom-problem/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=se&client=safari)

~~~
timsayshey
Not all heroes wear capes -- thank you!

~~~
frenchie4111
Someone should make a browser extension that will automatically (or provides a
button to quickly) load the cached version when a site is down

Edit: I just made a super simple bookmarklet that does it:
[http://mikelyons.org/2017/06/12/Google-Cache-Javascript-
Shor...](http://mikelyons.org/2017/06/12/Google-Cache-Javascript-
Shortcut.html)

~~~
Kubuxu
You can also write `cache:` in front of the URL. Works in FF, probably also in
Chrome.

~~~
DeltaWhy
Looks like this is a Google search feature - didn't work for me in FF with
DuckDuckGo as default search engine, but worked when I added !g to the end.

------
mrleinad
I'd like Facebook to have an option to see all posts, without filtering, just
as they're posted. It's not hard, it's a simple UX, but it's just not there.

~~~
ianhawes
I believe that option already exists[0].

[0] [http://imgur.com/a/gg2DH](http://imgur.com/a/gg2DH)

~~~
artur_makly
not on ios mobile

~~~
delecti
If it's anything like the Android version, it's hidden in the settings.

Hamburger menu > Scroll way down to the "Feeds" section > "Most Recent"

------
siliconc0w
I feel like these are just shitty models. A good recommendation model would
get features like "is_mom" and learn that "is_mom" is a shitty predictor of
relevance.

Similarly with Amazon, products should have some sort of 'elasticity' score
where it should learn that recommendations of inelastic products is a waste of
screen real-estate. I mean, I doubt the model is giving a high % to most of
those recommends - it's likely more a business/UX issue in that they've
decided it's worth showing you low-probability recommends instead of a cleaner
page (or something more useful).

Youtube, on the hand, seems to be precision tuned to get you to watch easy to
digest crap. You consume the crap voraciously but are generally left
unfulfilled. This is a more difficult problem where you're rewarding naive
views rather than a more difficult to discern 'intrinsic value' metric. As a
'long term' business play the model should probably weight more intellectually
challenging content just like fast food restaurants should probably figure out
how to sell healthier food because by pedaling crap you're only meeting
consumer's immediate needs, not their long term ones.

~~~
soperj
I feel like Youtube's algorithm is horrible. My kids were listening to kids
songs on it, and there's an advertisement for a Son Of Sam podcast.

------
pmlnr
Yesterday I sent one of my friends a link to an old - 4.5 years old, from 2013
dec - entry he wrote as a Facebook note. There were 70+ likes, 30+ commenters
and 110 comments on it.

He added a new comment yesterday - I only saw it, because I randomly decided
to read through the comments.

Those who commented on it should have received a notification - well, in the
end, 2 people got something.

This is how you effectively kill conversation - which dazzles me, because
keeping conversations running = engagement, which is supposed to be one of the
end goals.

I get the "need" of a filter bubble, even though I'd simple let people choke
on the amount of crap they'd get if follow would actually mean get everything
- they may learn not to like things without thinking.

But not sending notifications at all? Why? Why is that good?

~~~
hutattedonmyarm
On the other hand, I get more (and less relevant) notifications the less I’m
active.

$friendINeverTalkTo has commented on $PostByPageIDontFollow is NOT something I
want to get notified about. Neither is

XYZ has uploaded a photo

~~~
SapphireSun
My guess is the point of those notifications is that it gives them an excuse
to add points to the addictive little red number. It's not because they think
you'll actually care.

~~~
realusername
I saw that as well. If you click on of this useless notification, they invent
a new one around 30mins later which would not have existed otherwise.

------
kromem
Facebook also has a serious problem in that its news feed is a content
recommendation engine with only positive reinforcement but no negative
reinforcement. So you end up with a ton of false positives even when actively
interacting with the content, and their system doesn't even know how wrong it
is.

And should you really not like some content, the solution is unfriending the
poster, rather than simply matching against that type of content (political,
religious, etc).

The fact there isn't a private dislike button (that no one sees you clicked
other than Facebook), is remarkable at this point. It's either woefully
obtuse, or intentional so that a feed of false positives better hides
moderately targeted ads.

~~~
dghughes
That's like YouTube lord help you if you click on a video you don't like by
mistake you'll never see the end of it in the recommended section.

It's to the point now where I just log out so I can see what's available
rather than a continuous feedback of what I already watched.

~~~
doppelganger27
You can go to the "History" page on youtube and delete the video from your
watch history. It seems to stop youtube from using it for recommendations.

------
paulcnichols
Honestly, if FB was just me and my mom I'd probably get more value out of the
site. Smaller radius is better IMO.

~~~
chickenfries
Pruning my friends improved my experience, but they grow back over time as
people rediscover you or you make new acquaintances. I wonder if you could
make a game or website that forced you to prune your facebook friends down,
perhaps by looking at your social graph and telling you that you haven't
messaged with a person in x years or something, or that you've never even
"liked" something they posted. Some heuristics to determine who you really
wouldn't miss. The problem with unfriending is that Facebook's UI makes it
almost impossible to do in batches, and it feels kind of rude to "unfriend"
someone, even though I personally wouldn't care if someone I don't talk to
unfriended me.

~~~
delecti
Here's a trick to constantly pruning down your friends list. Don't worry about
pruning down your whole list, just check the people who have birthdays every
day you log in. I just checked; there was a single friend who had a birthday
today, and I haven't had any contact with her in years. That makes for a nice
easy prune.

Of course the downsides are that you risk disappointing someone who
obsessively checks their friend count on their birthday, and that it only
really works if you log in every day.

~~~
hellbanner
If you don't care enough to talk them in a year, then I doubt you care about
"disappointing someone who obsessively checks their friend count on their
birthday"

~~~
delecti
Agreed, and it's never stopped me, but a couple times I've told people that
and their response was along the lines of "on their birthday? harsh."

~~~
hellbanner
You can't please everyone.

------
ianhawes
There is a very simple solution for this issue. Create a Facebook Page for
yourself as a brand, post links to your articles on that page, then share it
from your personal Facebook page.

~~~
creaghpatr
It would be interesting if Facebook allowed personal users to access the brand
tools that pages get (impressions, distribution, etc).

This won't happen because facebook wants you to think everyone is seeing your
posts. People would be livid if they knew just how low of a % of friends were
actually viewing their stuff due to algorithmic meddling.

~~~
athenot
I think that's why there's been more and more images posted as video, to track
viewership (FB shows the number of views on videos but not pictures).

~~~
creaghpatr
I agree, people want validation and it steers them to post a higher ratio of
videos. A subtle way of altering user behavior.

------
chjohasbrouck
Some proof or data to back up the article's claim would be great. I'm not
really buying it.

If moms auto-like every post, then how is that a relevant signal? Everyone has
a mom. That would mean every post is getting penalized in the same way (which
effectively means no posts are getting penalized).

And if circumventing this was as simple as excluding his mom, wouldn't the
effect be even greater if he excluded all non-technical friends and family?

Which pretty much just means you're posting this for the greater public, which
presumably a lot of users of Facebook's API already do. Since his intention is
for his content to be seen by the greater public, then... go ahead and tell
the API that?

It's a great angle for an article, and it's very shareable, but he provides no
data (even though he seems like someone who would have all of the data).

~~~
saym
Have you ever had a post that ended up being liked by an odd subset of your
Facebook friends? I certainly have had posts, that for some reason, only my
high school friends end up liking.

I know this is only another anecdote and real data would be preferable. But
I'm convinced that the described behavior absolutely happens.

------
aeturnum
I'm pretty sure this description is wrong. My impression is facebook shows
your content to a subset of friends and then classifies it based on likes
received. If your mom 'like's 9/10 posts and your other friends like 3/10
posts, then 60% of your posts /are/ family content. Even if they're about
mathematical theories.

~~~
emodendroket
It seems like what he is claiming is that his mom instantly clicks like on
everything and so the post gets gated before his other friends ever have the
opportunity to indicate whether they like it.

~~~
aeturnum
A lot of this seems like it comes down to how that initial pool of users is
treated. If they show it to 5 users and his mom is the only one (ever) that
likes it, then it makes sense to show that content to people common to him and
his mom. If the other users like it, they should distribute it more widely and
maybe include users from other non-overlapping networks. That all seems good.
If mom likes 90% of the posts, then show that 90% to the family and maybe they
care and maybe they don't. If it gets engagement from other people, share it
more widely. That seems like a good approach.

The wrong way to do it would be to show it to 5 people and as soon as his mom
likes the content, decide the content won't be interesting to the other 4
people they showed it to. I haven't seen any evidence of that happening, and I
don't think the article points to any (anecdotal or otherwise).

~~~
emodendroket
Well, like I said to the other guy, I don't know how you account for the fact
that he gets engagement from other people if he hides the posts from his mom
then.

------
compiler-guy
For every social media site XX:

Question: "Why does XX do things this way?"

Answer: "Because it increases engagement."

Why does the Facebook algorithm do this? Because it increases clicks. Why does
Youtube use autoplay? Because it increases watch time.

For every single social media site.

~~~
Nition
This article is about how while Facebook's _intention_ is to increase
engagement, it backfires in this specific case because the algorithm takes his
mother's Like and interprets that as "this post will get the most engagement
from family" when actually it was more targeted to outsiders.

~~~
Bakary
For all we know the author's experience is a fringe case and Facebook's policy
in this instance is successful.

~~~
Nition
For sure. I just thought it sounded like compiler-guy hadn't quite understood
what the article was claiming.

~~~
compiler-guy
I understood it very well. The issue is that his case is an edge case and
facebook likely doesn't care--the algorithm creates more engagement than it
destroys.

------
mullingitover
I generally hold facebook in contempt for the forced filtering that they
subject me to. Making the 'sort posts chronologically' flag come unstuck is a
dirty hack that they should be ashamed of.

------
anotheryou
Any proof of this happening? And does it utilize the user-provided
relationship data or just group people?

------
robbles
I'm not a machine learning expert, but isn't this an easily solved problem?

Similar to TF/IDF, where you mitigate common words by dividing by their
overall frequency, you should be able to divide the weight of any particular
"like" by the frequency of likes between the two people. That way a genuine
expression of interest by an acquaintance is weighted far higher than a
relative or close friend that reflexively likes everything you post.

------
type0
> I’d love to hear from others who’ve seen a similar effect and love their
> mothers (or other close loved ones) enough to not cut them out of their
> Facebook lives.

I think the bigger issue is family members, friends and relatives who do cut
out their non-fb using closed ones by ignoring all other methods of
telecommunication. "Oh, you didn't knew we planned a wedding, too bad you're
not on fb!"

------
firasd
Even aside from complicated questions like the Newsfeed algorithm, when a
friend started hitting Like on nearly every post of mine I appreciated their
caring but mentally discounted the meaning of their Like in terms of being a
reaction to the content of my post. It's like "Like Inflation". So the algo
should probably do the same about indiscriminate likes...

------
harry8
Dump facebook, it's sucks for basically everything. Ring your mom, tell her
she's awesome and you love her. Wish I could ring mine...

Post a blog post to a real blog under your control. If you want a colleague to
see it, email the link and ask for feedback.

There solved. It's a good algo too.

~~~
Sleeep
Um, the author does post to their blog as well:

>For quite a while now, I’ve been publishing most of my content to my personal
website first and syndicating copies of it to social media silos like Twitter,
Instagram, Google+, and Facebook. Within the Indieweb community this process
is known as POSSE an acronym for Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

YMMV on if Facebook sucks for you, your experience is probably the exception.
Personally, I find it very valuable despite it's many flaws. It has made
making new friends a _lot_ easier (and I absolutely needed local friends after
I relocated). I've used it to reconnect with a couple childhood friends which
has been absolutely amazing and I'm super grateful for that.

Also, my mother is very toxic and abusive so I'd really rather not call her,
however, I can acknowledge that my experience calling my mother is probably
the exception. Additional values comes with being "Facebook friends" with my
mom, it reduces her need to pick up the phone and harass me.

------
_greim_
> Facebook, despite the fact that they know she’s my mom, doesn’t take this
> fact into account in their algorithm.

Wouldn't it also be possible to analyze the content of the post to determine
if it's family-related? It seems like with a math or technical post, that
should be easy for FB to do.

~~~
isoskeles
What if mom is a mathematician?

~~~
wutbrodo
Why would that imply that the rest of the family would want to c it? The
suggestion here isn't hiding it from mom, it's avoiding interpreting a click
from mom as "this is something primarily family cares about."

------
iplaw
No joke. My mom is the first person to LIKE anything that I post -- and then
make an inappropriate comment on it.

I have added all of my family to a family group. I'll see if I can post to
friends/publically and exclude an entire group of contacts.

------
SadWebDeveloper
Offtopic: It always baffles me when people "suggest" better ways to customize
their "internet feed" because they don't realize how much information the
"system" need to know about you (or those persons close to you) in order to
make it useful and when confronted/informed about it, they explicitly denied
such permission because it undermines their privacy.

------
warcher
Unrelated but worse problem: top of feed livelock. If you're below the fold,
cause, I dunno, you got shit to do, you are only going to get viewed by heavy
scrollers, which overly favors (IMHO, as somebody with shit to do) folks who
get on the thread first. Even a one-dimensional "rank by number of uplikes"
filter still doesn't calculate your likes/views ratio, which is what you'd
actually care about.

~~~
warcher
This is probably not a facebook problem, as facebook serves you content based
on.... god only knows what. But HN? Reddit? Tweeter? Rampant. Real bad for
engagement, as anybody looking at a post with more than a few comments knows
not to even bother. Gots to get that engagement, you know?

------
rainhacker
I feel it's not limited to family. Empirically I've noticed liking of a post
factors in how much someone likes the poster then just the contents of a post.

------
smrtinsert
Beyond a 'mom' problem, this seems like a highly plausible cause for the
incredibly silo-ed content on Facebook.

------
arikrak
I haven't found Facebook to be very good at recommending things. They often
don't seem to be able to tell what people are interested in, and they don't
really let users control who they're posting to. For example, they should make
it easier to just post to people who live in the same city...

------
pdevine
I'm pretty sure they're using a machine learning algorithm, and it's
determining the way to handle your post. Can someone who understands the ML
algorithms better than I explain how this would interact with the feature
weights? I'd be curious as to how we think that would play out.

------
erikb
I also have a problem with social media in general, especially with following
people instead of institutions/groups. Usually what 99.9% of people like is
totally not what I like. So if you base the content I should consume on the
assumptions that I like what my connections liked you are nearly going the
opposite direction of what I want.

PS: Maybe some of you have the experience of having an active following. I
notice that many social networks like Twitter, FB, Youtube, allow comments.
But almost never does the content creator/sharer actually react to comments.
Some may use comments in future content, but some don't react at all. Are
these people not even reading the comments? Why are people commenting when
it's so obvious that it's just going down a black hole? For instance, on
Twitter a share with additional text is nearly the same amount of work than a
comment. And it's obvious that you reach more people by share-commenting
rather than simply writing your comment underneath the content. So why do
people do that? And why does Twitter has the option to comment even?

------
minademian
Had an aha moment reading this post. It makes sense now. This sentence mirrors
my own recent experience: "These kinds of things are ones which I would relay
to them via phone or in person and not post about publicly."

------
viraptor
I find this interesting: So much talk about the technical solutions both in
the post and in the comments here. Yet, it doesn't seem like he asked his mom
not to like his tech posts. If that's the goal - why not start there?

------
jondubois
It's a more general problem than that. Maybe Facebook should penalise posts
written by popular authors, celebrities or recognizable brands to offset the
popularity (rich-get-richer) factor and select only for quality.

------
piker
Interesting post. I clicked thinking someone had coined a clever new "NASCAR
Dad" moniker about parents who read and parrot their Facebook echo chamber at
Thanksgiving, but was pleasantly surprised.

------
Beltiras
I like the idea of "embargo from group for n days".

------
jrochkind1
Kind of fascinating.

------
husamia
our interests are different based on our daily interactions outside of
facebook. How would an algorithm define that?

------
carapace
I've said it before and I'll say it again, FB users are a kind of digital
peasant or serf.

To me it feels like we're seeing the genesis of the divide between Morlocks
and Eloi.

~~~
dredmorbius
"Digital Sharecropping" is Nicholas Carr's term.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/connect...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/connecticut-
tax-inequality-cities/532623/)

[http://www.roughtype.com/?p=634](http://www.roughtype.com/?p=634)

~~~
carapace
Cogent, cheers.

Personally I find the power differential more disturbing than the economic
aspect (which is still pretty disturbing.)

FB (and Google and Amazon and ...) have enormous power with only the crudest
of checks, an their users cannot fully understand _how_ that power works and
affects them.

------
EGreg
Simple solution: hide post from family :)

~~~
isubkhankulov
this. facebook has targeting tools, the OP must not have used them?

~~~
detaro
He describes his solution using said targeting tools in the post and you think
he "must not have used them"?

------
45h34jh53k4j
Facebook is disgusting.

* Delete your account * Convince your mother to delete her account

~~~
dang
Would you please not post unsubstantive comments here?

If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise
please don't comment until you do.

~~~
45h34jh53k4j
Im sorry dang. its become a bit of a dirty habit to throw shade on FB whenever
it comes up. I hate it with a passion.

My goal is to get as many people to question their usage of FB and if it
really enhances their lives.

Ill try to be more constructive with my comments.

~~~
rconti
Judged by this thread, I enjoy Facebook posts far more than your comments.

Ergo, in my opinion, Facebook is the signal and your posts are the noise.

I know it's not fair to compare a couple of 'activist' comments to an entire
social network, but I felt it was worth pointing out that this style of
"content" is more destructive to many audiences than Facebook is.

------
AznHisoka
This is not a problem, and I certainly hope Facebook does not fix it. Why?
Because it forced the OP to narrow down his audience and show the post only to
those who would enjoy it.

That's a much better experience than everyone trying to push everything they
publish to you.

~~~
rigden33
The problem he is referring to is not that facebook narrows down the audience
based off of likes. His problem is that his mom, and consequently other family
members, always immediately likes his posts regardless of the content which
narrows the audience down to his family members instead of the intended
audience. He wants Facebook to take into account that the person liking his
post is his mom before narrowing down the audience to family members.

~~~
AznHisoka
But the content is not intended for his mom, so he shouldn't have targeted it
to everybody.

~~~
ramzyo
The post is intended for an audience including his mom (she interacts with his
posts by liking them). The author's argument is that Facebook's algorithm is
(incorrectly) assuming that her interaction is based on interest in the actual
content, rather than her association with the author.

------
rickpmg
>.. shame on Facebook for torturing them for the exposure when I was
originally targeting maybe 10 other colleagues to begin with.

Seems like the facebook algorithm is actually working for the users by in
effect blocking insipid idiots from posting their crap trying to game the
system.

You don't 'target' colleagues.. colleagues are people you work with and
respect.. not try to spam.

~~~
pmlnr
Geez.

Target in this case: stuff that will most probably interest that specific
group of people.

How about reading the authors' publications before making assumptions next
time?

~~~
rickpmg
He's clearly on a mission to be 'known'... he spends an awful lot of time and
effort worrying about how his posts rank and perform... to me, that's
disingenuous.

>Could you fix this algorithm problem please? I’m sure I’m not the only son or
daughter to suffer from it.

He's asking facebook to fix his mom? The algorithm isn't broken.

------
mamon
You are obviously giving Facebook to much information to act upon. Some
suggestions:

1\. Don't use Facebook :)

2\. If you use it don't tag your family members as such. Or your close friends
as FB "close friends"

3\. Never tag anyone in photos

4\. Never set "relationship status"

5\. Never add info about where do you live, work, etc.

6\. Having separate public profile for your company/work related stuff is
probably a good idea.

7\. Never post anything you wouldn't want to see in CNN news :)

~~~
tjr
See also: [https://stallman.org/facebook-
presence.html](https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html)

------
andreasgonewild
It's simple really, just stop participating in that evil experiment. From the
outside, you look like morons; talking to opposite sides of an algorithm while
interpreting what comes out as reality. It's been proven over and over again
that consuming that crap makes everyone feel bad and hate each other. There
are plenty of alternatives, but this one is mine: [https://github.com/andreas-
gone-wild/snackis](https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis)

~~~
wutbrodo
> It's been proven over and over again that consuming crap like this makes
> everyone feel bad and hate each other.

Consuming posts about theoretical math? Because that's them only content that
the article talks about. I'd love to see the research that claims this.

~~~
andreasgonewild
I was rather thinking about consuming bullshit lies about other peoples
fabulous lives, algorithmically arranged for maximum impact. But yes, bragging
about the size of your intellect falls in the same basket. Google it if you
desperately need authority to back up common sense. Most of the stuff people
post on Facebook just wouldn't be posted in a less twisted medium, and we
would all be better off. I know I'm growing tired of watching adults,
companies and even authorities do anything for a few like-clicks. It's sick
and corrupting, and it needs to stop.

~~~
wutbrodo
If you think that posting things that interest you is bragging about your
intellect, I think that says a lot more about deep-seated problems you may
have than it does about Facebook.

The thing is, I agree with you that many people's Facebook usage probably
isn't particularly good for their psyche, but that doesn't mean that it's
impossible to use it healthily (at its core, it's just a communications
medium) and the assumption that articles about theoretical math is "bragging
about the size of your intellect" is honestly just pathetic.

