The recent updates to the Facebook news stream have me all disgruntled and in a bunch. The sorting and prioritizing filters they’ve applied make little sense to me and I’m spending more time trying to figure out what’s what than actually enjoying what people are posting.
At this very moment I have a “Recent Stories” section followed by a “Top Stories from the Last 15 Minutes” section and then another “Recent Stories” section. What makes it ad-nauseam worse is that these real-time-updates are constantly shifting right before my eyes. I can’t pay attention to what’s there because it keeps changing.
Whatever machine learning they’ve applied to determine what’s “Top News” and what nots just isn’t working. The “All Updates”, “Most Updates”, and “Only Important” got me wondering just how Facebook decides what’s important to me and what’s not. What’s the algorhythm? If I know them at least I have a chance to game them.
A computer trying to guess what’s important to me will always fail simply because what’s important to me changes daily, sometimes hourly. Sometimes I change my mind mid-thought.
Some days I’m big into games so The Force Unleashed is what I care about. Other days I’m watching every episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia that I can find. And my dear Facebook developers, you’ll never know which day I’m on or what my flavor of the month may be.1
At the end of the day, I just wanna see the most Recent Stories on top. If some body/thing/group annoys me, I either hide them completely or un-whatever them. I’m an all or nothing kinda person.
Re: the new floating side bar. This floating, scrolling crap is just getting on my nerves and in my way. So what if I miss a comment somebody made on a photo I uploaded. So what if I miss a comment on a post that I wasn’t involved with to damn start with. So what fucking what? I don’t need to know damn everything about damn everything that’s going on. Life moves too fast to absorb it all and Facebook is now trying to shove all this information down my throat.
Take a cue from your good friend Google and Gmail’s Priority Inbox - give me settings to display the data how I want it displayed. I like chronological data for sorting information that I may or may not care to see. It makes sense.
Twitter does it right. Keep it simple. People are dumb.
1 However, I bet your advertisers do.
If this actually worked, M.’s views on marshmallows would have been at the top of the page; Facebook doesn’t have a clue what I want to read. I’ve always preferred the chronological order. I think I like the new “more of this person, less of that person” settings though.
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I'm not sure what exactly "more" would entail though. It makes me think they're hiding something that I might want to see. That's why I like to hide or not to hide settings.
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