I don't understand your first sentence, but I think you misunderstand where this setting is: at the top of the activity stream. Of course, visiting Facebook itself is its own set of signals, but among those who are still visiting, whether or not they change the sort criteria is a separate measurement.
Furthermore, the unspoken counterpart to "break things continuously" is "fix things continuously," which is a hallmark of software development and release engineering these days. "Release early, release often" is repeated as mantra. Sometimes it breaks, sometimes it doesn't. I'm pretty sure mostly it doesn't, even in Facebook's case.
Lastly: some time ago, months and months after the last big Facebook interface redesign ("where is everything?"), I posted to my wall, "remember back when Facebook changed everything and we all hated it?" Nobody flinched. Consider that you may be substituting your own taste for the majority's when you say people are going to visit less and less as Facebook screws with the site. It has happened several times over the past 5 years and Facebook is bigger than ever.
Yep, sorry I wrote it from the Iphone, and later when I saw the mess it was too late to edit.
What I mean is that if they are doing it like you say (tracking the behavior of the people who changes their filters), they are doing it wrong. I think tracking that users set again and again something, is the wrong metric.
Speaking purely as a user:
- Is very usual to check in and find they have changed stuff around. It makes me difficult to find what I am looking for, its very distracting and annoying.
- They also change the way you see your friends feed, but I didn´t want to change it, give ME the option to change it when I want to(as google does when there is a new layout for example, you keep the old options till you choose the new ones, and if the force it at least they advice you).
- For me it is not about the ads (I find them easy to ignore).
- It is not only me, my friends are visiting less and less, I suppose this is normal after the initial honeymoon, but there is a trend here. They are also annoyed for all the continuous morphing of buttons and functions.
I am familiar with "ship early, release often", but as a user I don´t see much continuity in the Facebook UI. Maybe they release super often, but when I begun using Facebook I had to think much less to find something or do some action it was much more easy to use. They certainly are breaking the "don´t make me think" rule pretty often. I don´t know if there is somebody trying to keep a coherency in the releases of the different teams, but certainly has to work harder.
I love the idea of Facebook, I think it is really useful and is here to stay, but if they keep making it incrementally uncomfortable eventually somebody will replace them.
You say that Facebook is bigger than ever and is true, but the changes they make are not that dramatic now that they have the network effect but could be like global warming changes. You push a little and nothing happens, push a little more and nothing happens again, till you reach a tipping point and all goes downhill fast.
If everything is so good why they keep changing and changing stuff when they still have so many things to fix (like the smartphone app)?. Obviously they have to find the way to monetize properly. I just hope they don´t get lost in their quest.
Furthermore, the unspoken counterpart to "break things continuously" is "fix things continuously," which is a hallmark of software development and release engineering these days. "Release early, release often" is repeated as mantra. Sometimes it breaks, sometimes it doesn't. I'm pretty sure mostly it doesn't, even in Facebook's case.
Lastly: some time ago, months and months after the last big Facebook interface redesign ("where is everything?"), I posted to my wall, "remember back when Facebook changed everything and we all hated it?" Nobody flinched. Consider that you may be substituting your own taste for the majority's when you say people are going to visit less and less as Facebook screws with the site. It has happened several times over the past 5 years and Facebook is bigger than ever.