Increasing the haystack

An article, posted almost 11 years ago filed in information, twitter, facebook, algorithm, information overload, timeline & newsfeed.

Facebook is doing another tweak on the timeline algorithm because they want "to show people the most interesting stories at the top of their feed". Ok, sounds fair.

But then their announcement says: "Through testing, we have found that when people see more text status updates on Facebook they write more status updates themselves."

In other words: updates invite updates. It doesn't work for pages, though, as they "noticed that this effect wasn't true for text status updates from Pages." Guess people want to be as noisy as their friends. We're social animals. But pages are not animals, so we won't be as noisy as them. Hence we'll receive more animal/friends-updates and less from pages. Even though some of the pages you'll probably follow/liked because they're so damn informative, more informative than your ever bullshitting friends :)

Anyhow, recap. So Facebook changed the algorithm to show people the most interesting stories and hence they tweaked the algorithm in such a way…

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