<story><title>Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts</title><url>https://medium.com/@kurtgessler/facebooks-algorithm-isn-t-surfacing-one-third-of-our-posts-and-it-s-getting-worse-68e37ee025a3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ivanbakel</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s interesting to see how Facebook is taking increasing control of news and publicity on its service. In a sense, we&amp;#x27;re long past the point of questioning whether it&amp;#x27;s ethical, since they&amp;#x27;ve obviously been influencing content for a long while, but this is one of the strongest arguments for FOSS alternatives like Mastodon.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more level playing field, and the users will follow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dickbasedregex</author><text>I left FB ~4 years ago. One of the straws that broke the camel for me was that it was obvious FB was &amp;quot;curating&amp;quot; my feed for me. Without notifying or consulting me. Posts from friends wouldn&amp;#x27;t show in my feed and vice versa. The privacy issues were bad enough but when I couldn&amp;#x27;t trust the platform to fulfill the only need I had for it, I walked.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m far better for it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts</title><url>https://medium.com/@kurtgessler/facebooks-algorithm-isn-t-surfacing-one-third-of-our-posts-and-it-s-getting-worse-68e37ee025a3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ivanbakel</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s interesting to see how Facebook is taking increasing control of news and publicity on its service. In a sense, we&amp;#x27;re long past the point of questioning whether it&amp;#x27;s ethical, since they&amp;#x27;ve obviously been influencing content for a long while, but this is one of the strongest arguments for FOSS alternatives like Mastodon.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more level playing field, and the users will follow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jpalomaki</author><text>Facebook is likely trying to maximize the time people spend on browsing their feed. Surface too many &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot; news articles in a row and user might go away. Put a nice mixture of news, goofy stuff, updates from friends, some fake news to provoke action and user remains.&lt;p&gt;Hundreds of millions of people stare the news feed on weekly basis and interact with it. This creates a spectacular opportunity for employing machine learning to optimize things. Facebook has huge amount of data and it is easy to run various tests automatically to see what works in practice.&lt;p&gt;If this is the case, then it may be difficult for the others to compete. Facebook might be doing exactly what customers want - even if they don&amp;#x27;t know it themselves.&lt;p&gt;My thoughts were influenced by this article posted on HN some weeks ago:
&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.truthhawk.com&amp;#x2F;is-facebook-a-structural-threat-to-free-society&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.truthhawk.com&amp;#x2F;is-facebook-a-structural-threat-to-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>