« Back to blog

Dear Facebook: Please Build a Better News Feed Before We All Start to Hate Each Other

Yesterday I wrote about Unbaby.me, the Chrome extension that will block baby photos from appearing in your Facebook feed. I was surprised and dismayed that multiple writers took issue at the existence of the tool, seeing it as a sign of some kind of insidious anti-baby or anti-parent culture. To me, it looked like just a better filter.

Within minutes of posting, I was pointed by a friend to this article in Jezebel, in which author Tracy Moore makes the valid point that baby pictures aren’t a special case:

Hey there kids, lissen, lemme make sure I got this straight, though: Posting a picture every couple weeks of my kid is unbearable, but 87 photos of your home-brewing phase is totally coolzville? Don’t get me started on Mustache May, the facial hair equivalent of a baby.

It’s a great point. I might want to block baby photos, but I’m quite certain that most of my Facebook friends want to block the political articles I post not infrequently.

Which brings me to my point… Facebook’s News Feed is still, after all this time, a terrible filter. It knows something about who I care about, but seems to know almost nothing about what I care about.

To account for its terribleness, I’ve slowly but surely been teaching it, by selecting to see “Only Important” updates from lots of my friends. But my sense is that most people don’t do this, perhaps because Facebook hardly advertises the feature. And, in any case, it’s a really blunt way to improve my feed.

Social news filters work through a combination of algorithms that guess what you like based on your behavior and by simply asking you what you like. Beyond asking me who I’m friends with and what brands I like, Facebook does almost none of the latter. Compare that to Twitter, where the primary impetus is on the user to craft the perfect feed, with algorithmic recommendations a secondary feature. (Facebook has tried moving to a subscription model for public figures, but it is not the core experience.)

In an ideal world, Facebook would know the people whose musical recommendations I want to know about, the ones whose political opinions I respect, that I care about a restaurant recommendation only if you live in my city, etc.

In the meantime, all our vanity, our self-absorption, our niche obsessions are left on full display. We start to hate each other for posting baby photos or epic party recaps or preachy articles. And then some among us blame a culture of over-sharing, even though that’s not the problem. There’s a technical solution for all of this, in the vein of Unbaby.me. We need better filters, and quickly.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/08/15/dear-facebook-please-build-a-better-news-feed-...