What I'd like is facebook without any algorithmic 'intelligence' behind the feed.
I'd really like to keep up on the minutiae of life that people casually post to facebook. I'd particularly like to see posts from people who don't post very often or who I don't interact with very often. But AFAICT there's no way to stop it prioritising, filtering, hiding, reordering as it sees fit. And that's with it set to display "Most Recent" instead of top stories.
I don't 'like' anything, or have hundreds of pages spamming my feed. I have a number of friends somewhere between 50 and 100, most of whom don't post that much, that often. I'd just like the unedited feed of what they post, but apparently that's not possible.
I second this. I knew facebook filtered the feed pretty heavily but I had no idea how bad it was until recently.
A few weeks ago I met up with some old friends and learned that a mutual friend was getting married. We're friends on facebook and she has been posting about her wedding day regularly and yet I had absolutely no idea it was happening because facebook decided for me that she was unimportant.
They really need a way to turn this aggressive filtering off. I use facebook specifically to keep in touch with wayward friends, I don't need a feed full of BS updates from people I speak with regularly.
I think the whole issue is that Facebook prioritizes the "addictive" nature of the feed. That is, their number 1 metric is clicking, so they have a very very narrow idea of what "engagement" means. But, as far as i see it, that is unavoidable...
I have plenty of friends on Facebook where occasionally one of their posts shows up on my news feed and I realize that I had completely forgotten I was Facebook friends with that person. Then I visit their profile and find out they're quite chatty, but it had been over a year since I saw something they had posted, without ever telling Facebook I didn't want to follow them.
If they didn't filter it then it could be even more unlikely you would see your mutual friend was getting married. (unless you are willing to read literally all of your friends updates).
I made a site with the goal of showing just important information about friends, but all of it: getnotably.com. Check it out and let me know if it solves your problem!
This, this, this, this, exactly. It's part of why twitter is so much more enjoyable than facebook -- it's a simple, understandable stream of everything.
My experience is very similar to yours -- even with "most recent" (which is really "bias by recency a bit higher in the selection algorithm," as near as I can tell), I miss all sorts of things I really care about, (while still being bombarded with stuff I don't care about).
I am not, in general, a fan of machine-selection of relevant items. Even for a human to intelligently edit my fb feed would be a challenging job, and until machines begin to approach the intelligence of humans, they will do it poorly.
My feed in twitter (using tweet deck) always has missing tweets that were algorithmically filtered. It's only when I use the mobile app or web feed that I actually get all tweets.
But twitter is nothing but, i'm eating ice cream, going to a movie or to a certain place. If that's what you want fine but what i want is only profile photo change, relationship change, job change, etc.
I'd like it to default to "Most Recent" without new comments bumping it up to the top. Facebook always switches it back to "Top Stories" for me for whatever reason... it's frustrating. There's so many posts that only make sense at a given time and reading them later is just confusing. I can't even tell you how many times I thought I was missing a Flyers game. I've found myself on twitter A LOT more nowadays due to "Top Stories".
For this purpose you can create a custom list of your friends you really want to follow. Update types can be filtered on list pages, for example show only status updates and photos, but no games, comments, etc.
Then bookmark the url of the list page (like https://www.facebook.com/lists/{list-id} ), and use it instead of the default homepage. I use this method for years and it seems much more usable this way.
I couldn't believe it when it was the next big thing and I can't believe it now when people say this seriously.
RSS is some horrible mix of protocol (for developers) and tool (for users). It's like telling someone to SMTP the information to you.
Even today I often struggle trying to get a podocast into my phone because I can't find the (correct) RSS feed on a podcast's website. RSS is a fine way for computers to talk to each other. People talk to each other in tweets, emails, posts, HN comments.. sometimes in words.
I understand where you're coming from, but also the person you replied to.
RSS the idea is great. To be able to stream things in from different sources as you see fit is much better than letting some other person's random algorithm do it for you without you having any control.
RSS the implementation still has some work ahead of it, unfortunately. You click on an RSS feed link somebody has, and it shows you code. Sometimes its hard to find the RSS link. Sometimes there is no RSS feed, and people use something else like tweets or posts. I'd prefer a future where the browser was friendlier to RSS, as well as RSS being better integrated with websites.
Btw, it is possible to get a person's RSS feed for an individual person's facebook feed. I discovered it a while back, but it's somewhat cumbersome.
It'd be cool if a tool could let me give them my FB credentials, and then it automatically grabbed every single friend's FB feed and produced RSS for each, and combined them into one feed while letting me control it. Weekend project anyone?
You can set the feed (on the phone or the website) to "most recent" as opposed to "top stories"; doing this supposedly undoes the EdgeRank filtering and gives you a reverse chronological feed of what your friends are posting. But I find it also throws in random posts from people or pages that your friends comment on, and also keeps bumping your friends posts that are getting comments from your other friends further up in the feed, so it becomes unnavigable in its own way.
> You can set the feed (on the phone or the website) to "most recent" as opposed to "top stories"
No, you can't on the current version of the Android app (they took that out recently), though you can go to a separate "Most Recent" feed from another menu -- the primary feed (and the one that gets a red badge for new messages to draw you back to it) is always Top Stories.
> doing this supposedly undoes the EdgeRank filtering and gives you a reverse chronological feed of what your friends are posting.
"Most recent" gives you a reverse chronological feed (mostly, though I've sometimes observed posts out-of-order in "Most Recent"), but it doesn't appear to undo EdgeRank filtering.
> But I find it also throws in random posts from people or pages that your friends comment on, and also keeps bumping your friends posts that are getting comments from your other friends further up in the feed, so it becomes unnavigable in its own way.
The primary "Top Stories" feed seems to do the same thing, except that it doesn't automatically push the most recent updates to the top -- it does seem to promote posts further up based on more recent interactions from friends.
Same problem in the latest ios app. I uninstalled it and added a bookmark to m.facebook.com in its place. As a bonus I'm no longer bothered by a bunch of notifications from group messages (which you couldn't switch off in that app either since the messages tab just displayed an ad for their separate messages app).
Yup, and it still doesn't show everything from people it decides you don't need to see because you don't interact with them very often. AFAICT "most recent" is just "top stories" in a different order.
Besides which, it seems to switch back to "Top Stories" all by itself every so often.
Putting my tinfoil hat on for a second, I wonder if (and how much) post selection is tuned to maximise advertising revenue.
To give a crude example, if I see lots of posts about people enjoying expensive holidays, I'm probably more likely to click on related adverts. The effect of advertisement-funded media on the style and content of programmes is quite well documented. What if social media had a similar effect on how we perceive our relationships?
The only feed I have on the right hand side of the page is displaying some 'trending' things (I have no interest), a couple of events I'm probably not going to and a couple of 'suggested groups'
As AjithAntony says it appears when your screen is wide enough (appears on my 1200x800 display). It basically shows everything you're friends are doing - every single like, comment, share whether it has any obvious connection to your or not.
It appears the responsive design only shows the giant list of likes (and chat widget) when my browser is wider than 1220px. No obvious way to activate it when narrowed.
Exactly. Every time I read something like that, I think that people seriously underestimate the amount of content that they friends actually post; without this smart filtration, you would just drown in it.
Exactly?? The parent poster didn't actually make a point did they?
Even if it is a large volume, I'd like the chance. I don't have hundreds upon hundreds of friends, and I want to see what the ones I don't talk to all the time are saying.
I'd really like to keep up on the minutiae of life that people casually post to facebook. I'd particularly like to see posts from people who don't post very often or who I don't interact with very often. But AFAICT there's no way to stop it prioritising, filtering, hiding, reordering as it sees fit. And that's with it set to display "Most Recent" instead of top stories.
I don't 'like' anything, or have hundreds of pages spamming my feed. I have a number of friends somewhere between 50 and 100, most of whom don't post that much, that often. I'd just like the unedited feed of what they post, but apparently that's not possible.