On moves and algorithms...

[ephraimjohn]

I made public my intention to move away from FB yesterday, and some of you have connected with me here. Hello! And thanks! I don't expect that this signals any mass movement. FB is ingrained in people's lives, and has a certain way of seeming necessary. Indeed, I've found myself engaging with it still, partially to see the reaction to my last post and partly to see other's sharing their DW details. But still, there's a force of habit for me to break.

Intriguingly a friend highlighted a thing, yesterday, that I was always aware of, but that seems ever more crude in its implementation. She had posted a link to an article on the heartbreaking investigation into links between Covid and deaths in the BAME community in the West Midlands, and it had received very few reactions or comments. She'd also posted a crappy meme about olives. This had many more reactions. Indeed, my news feed ad shown me olives, but not the serious article. Before I did my charity thing earlier in the year, I posted several times to try to generate donations for it. Always the reactions were slow to come and low in numbers, where my trivial posts get a lot of fast reactions and in high numbers.

So something feels off here.

Either my friends don't care to react to serious stuff, in which case it feels like FB is good for only trivial dialogue. Now I get that articles that require actual reading and take an emotional toll aren't going to be as popular; but are we so worn down by the world that people do not react at all? Are people so put off by the idea of my doing a small thing for charity that they move past with no reaction?

Or, the other option is a little more tin-foil-hat-like (in my defence, I spent the weekend larping a lonely conspiracy theorist), and that's that FB's algorithm demotes these posts. We know that it is making constant decisions on what to place into people's feeds. As anyone who has tried to convince it to show "most recent" posts knows, it does what it wants, often at odds with the desires of the user.

Perhaps it's a combination of the two? As people see a constant stream of content, some will be trivial and some will be significant. If engagement is down on the valuable content, and up on the trivial, then perhaps the algorithm will decide that memes and quizzes are what its users really want and prioritise them. Either way, it is an issue that seems to be getting worse, and I'd like to find a way to opt out. Hopefully, DW proves to be a little more straightforward.

Comments

[smokingboot]

Hi John, good to see you here.

Re FB, I think you're right about something being off. After reading the above, I just went on to your FB page, only to have missed loads of posts from you. Very odd.

[ephraimjohn]

A part of it must be down to just numbers. I have 1300+ friends on FB, they have to choose to order the posts somehow... and if cat pics get many likes and serious political discussion very few (such as there ever is any serious discussion on FB), then I guess it's natural that we all see more cat pics. But still...

[smokingboot]

Memes and cats are easy to like. There's a kind of mental fatigue re the political madness around us, and people want to laugh, buy, party, watch fun things, not think too hard... some of it may be defensiveness, but I suspect a lot of it is emotional exhaustion.

That's a Shiny Hat You Have There!

[varjohaltia]

I've noticed similar things. My post about moving away from FB has gotten next to no attention, and a silly product from Wish is all the rage. Anecdotally and from a limited and biased pool of observations, anything where I hope for real conversation gets much less traction than things which are easily shareable, likeable, and don't require intellectual engagement.

Conversely, I read someone's suggestion that the way to use FB wisely is to manually go to the feeds of people you want to keep in touch with. And indeed, for me FB keeps showing the same nonsense, which quite often is not the kind of content I want to see. I feel like this has been getting worse as time goes by as well.

[aitch_pea]

Thanks for making the jump to another platform. I've been dissatisfied for a time with FB but have not invested time in exploring other options. I've begun to curate my social media experience a little more intentionally, but this is a good place to try something new/old and see how it fits with what I'm looking for.

Hello

[thoughtcrim3]

I am sure that Facebook's algorithm is designed to make best use of the platform for the advertisers and as such that it prioritises anything that gets serious engagement in terms of numbers, without any real context at all. There are people who connect with and interact with the light-hearted exclusively on FB and there are a lot of people that mostly engage that way, but there are few that are there solely for thoughtful debate, and so the frivolous is the top of the tree.

This place seems more likely to give you and indeed I what we are looking for, given time, so here's hoping...

[caddyman]

I recall something similar from the early days of LJ. I had written what I thought was a reasonably well-thought out piece on what then seemed like an important subject. I can't recall what it was about at this remove, but I was pleased with it.

Not a hint that anyone had even looked at it.

Later the same day, or early the next, I posted something about the impossibility of Spider-man having a secret ID as whenever he walked anywhere it would sound like tearing velcro.

Guess how many comments that attracted?