Deciphering Facebook’s Software Philosophy
“If you could look through thousands of stories every day and choose the 10 that were most important to you, which would they be? The answer should be your News Feed.”
.. Underlying this question is the conviction that the News Feed shouldn’t just entertain users, but that it should entertain them against replacement. That is, it should provide significantly more meaning and entertainment than an average piece of entertainment. (In the U.S., that means it should be more fun than, say, watching an episode of NCIS.)
.. Meaningfulness is stock, not flow.
.. Facebook will now promote posts from users’ friends and family above all other kinds of content.
.. this change seems related to a Facebook-wide decline in “original sharing.” That is, regular people are posting fewer and fewer statuses and photos—a potentially catastrophic issue for the social network. It’s plausible that showing more of those “original” posts would trigger more original posting.
.. That’s why if it’s from your friends, it’s in your feed, period — you just have to scroll down.
.. It’s not making any promise that what one person finds informative will be accurate (nor do I think it could). It’s only promising that it will supply … content that … informs.
.. What does “authentic” mean?
.. Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain, think Facebook should be asked to go one step further: It should let anyone run their own News Feed-like ranking algorithm on Facebook. In other words, Facebook would provide the raw material (the generic mass of posts from friends and pages), and users could bring their own algorithmic editor.