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On moves and algorithms...
Aug. 25th, 2020 08:05 amI 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.
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.
