
Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation - animeseinfeld
http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Letter-to-Mark-Zuckerberg-Facebook-News-Feed-12495018.php
======
quantumwannabe
I want to go to Facebook to keep connected with friends and family, not to see
cringy memes and clickbait 'news' articles. Zuckerberg made the right decision
to focus on users instead of publishers, and I think these changes will change
Facebook for the better.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
Unfortunately, a lot of the times it's friends and family that post these
cringy memes.

~~~
paulddraper
And each required explicit acceptance of a friend request.

As opposed to a gaggle of news sources that crop up whenever.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
The gaggle of sources needed you to either like their pages or have friends
who like or comment on them.

------
prepend
We really just need RSS. Everyone on Facebook should get an RSS feed and you
just subscribe to who you want to follow.

News publishers already have feeds. So you can mix in as you like to get
NYTimes right next to Uncle Jim’s fakenews.

There’s no algorithm, just based on publishing order. Maybe mix in some flags
that let you see if others have disliked things with that same URI.

We need more protocols and less platform.

~~~
SomewhatLikely
An algorithm is desperately needed though. Sources have varying publishing
rates and quality. Aggregating across them and culling is crucial. For the
most part I've thrown up my hands and delegated this job to hacker news and
Reddit subscriptions, but it's still not well personalized.

~~~
gaius
_An algorithm is desperately needed though_

An algorithm that weaponises jealousy, FOMO and outrage will always out-
monetise a benign or no algorithm at all, over any financially viable
timescale. The algo doesn’t “know” of course. It just knows that showing you X
has historically made you spend longer on the site than Y.

The only way to win is not to play.

------
_rpd
> Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation

... or, at least, hurts sfchronicle.com ad revenue.

------
Mahn
Does Facebook really need to take on this role of news publisher? I get that
people are accustomed to it now, but wouldn't it be easier for everyone to
undo this, let Facebook be the place where you go for the occasional family
photos and local event updates, and let news be somewhere else? We don't need
Facebook to be a newspaper at all, people were doing fine before it.

~~~
sundaeofshock
> Does Facebook really need to take on this role of news publisher?

Facebook did everything in their power to take online e traffic from news
sites. The begged papers to host articles on Facebook, begging publishers to
put that stupid like button on every page, or to use Facebook comments. And
now that they have captured all the eyeballs, they are going stop showing
legitimate news.

------
dawnerd
Of course a news site owned by Hearst would say this. They’re probably going
to see a pretty big decrease in all their social metrics.

