Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation(sfchronicle.com) |
Facebook News Feed change hides news, hurts nation(sfchronicle.com) |
With “news” sources it requires a constant pain to vet them.
Also, with FB I can just block shares by source so over time I’ve blocked out my relatives’ stupid posts by Brietbart and Being Liberal.
As opposed to a gaggle of news sources that crop up whenever.
News publishers already have feeds. So you can mix in as you like to get NYTimes right next to Uncle Jim’s fakenews.
There’s no algorithm, just based on publishing order. Maybe mix in some flags that let you see if others have disliked things with that same URI.
We need more protocols and less platform.
An algorithm that weaponises jealousy, FOMO and outrage will always out-monetise a benign or no algorithm at all, over any financially viable timescale. The algo doesn’t “know” of course. It just knows that showing you X has historically made you spend longer on the site than Y.
The only way to win is not to play.
Or ideally more effort put into feeds by sources, so we get better curation of the feeds to start with.
When Google Reader was killed, my account was just a stressful pile of thousands of unread items. The occasional gem was drowned in the noise.
I use RSS extensively to follow blogs and news sources. There are even many that put ads into my feed, which is cool by me.
... or, at least, hurts sfchronicle.com ad revenue.
Facebook did everything in their power to take online e traffic from news sites. The begged papers to host articles on Facebook, begging publishers to put that stupid like button on every page, or to use Facebook comments. And now that they have captured all the eyeballs, they are going stop showing legitimate news.