Facebook Subscribe Is Ruining the News Feed

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Facebook Subscribe Is Ruining the News Feed

January 31st, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

You know who I’m tired of seeing on Facebook? Me. Whenever I post an update, no matter what idiotic thought pops into my head, it jumps right to the top of the pack.

That’s because back in September I signed up for the Subscribe feature on Facebook, which lets me run a feed for readers who know me through Mashable. The Subscribe program has been successful beyond my wildest dreams. I have 39,000 subscribers at this writing and I got them in about four months. I’ve been on Twitter for more than four years and have around 8,000 followers there. Because of all those subscribers, my posts tend to get more comments than average (often in foreign tongues) and, thanks to Facebook’s ranking method, dominate other people’s news feeds.

While this provides a nice ego boost, there’s a downside to Subscribe as well. No, I’m not just talking about the porn, spam and irrelevant messages that others have noticed. Since I subscribed to a bunch of other journalists and have a lot of journalists as friends, my News Feed looks more like Google News than Facebook.

Meanwhile, I almost never see what my non-journo friends and family are up to. Since Facebook tweaked its feed back in September, it’s like more than half of my Facebook friends have disappeared. Others have experienced the same phenomenon. Right after Facebook posted a blog item about the switch, thousands of people protested via comments. “Facebook, you’re not near as smart as you think you are. Your algorithms for deciding what I want to see, who I want to talk to or what I think is important are 99.999% of the time the exact polar opposite of what I want,” wrote Facebook member Raymond J. Schlogel.

Evidence

Anecdotal evidence supports this. A coworker recently told me she missed a friend’s engagement announcement on Facebook because it was lost in her journo-heavy feed. Kevin Cate, an entrepreneur, has also rolled out a Facebook app called Really Huge News that scours your Facebook feed to find the earth-shattering life events that the app’s name promises.

“Personally, there was just a breaking point this summer where I was overwhelmed with status updates and unable to keep up with my friends and family,” Cate says. “So it was either figure out a way to deliver these buried but important updates that my friends and families cared about, or be a bad friend. When I approached the eventual Really Huge News team, we all had the same issue.”

The fact that such an app exists shows that some believe that Facebook’s feed isn’t working as promised. However, the company hasn’t heard much criticism about the News Feed, says rep Michael Kirkland. “It’s tempting to take a personal experience and apply it,” he says, “but with 800 million people, it takes a lot to constitute a trend.” However, Kirkland notes that Facebook’s News Feed is a “work in progress and it’s always been.”

Do This

Nevertheless, I have a proposal for Facebook: Just as there’s a wild card berth for tournaments and playoffs, Facebook should modify its algorithm so that, say 30% of your feed is randomly chosen. In other words, apply the current method of choosing items (based on the number of responses a post receives) to 70% of the feed, but let the occasional oddball update slip through.

Another idea is to somehow divide the feed between public people like me and private people who don’t offer a Subscribe option.

I realize there are ways to do this manually. I could, for instance, put all my reporter friends into one group and my “for real” friends into another, but I’m too lazy to do that. I could set the feed exclusively to “most recent.” But that’s too random for me. I like the idea of having Facebook search for the most “relevant” stories. I just don’t want them to all be relevant, because over time, that’s making Facebook more irrelevant.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, 4fr

This story originally published on Mashable here.