Only tangentially related to the article, but I've been trying to understand lately why Facebook wants us to view our 'top stories' feed over 'most recent' stories. Facebook has gone from setting 'top stories' as the default when you log in, to hiding 'most recent' stories on the mobile app to the 'more' tab, to pushing old stories that get a random like or comment to the top of your 'most recent' stories feed. This is incredibly annoying, as when I log in to Facebook, I want to see news that is new, not the same posts I've already seen multiple times. Does anyone know why they do this? Does it somehow drive increased user engagement?
I'm guessing they've done at least some A/B testing on this...so yes, I imagine that despite what users think they want, FB has found that their imperfect "Top Stories" algorithm is more engaging than just the raw feed by "Most Recent".
As a user's FB usage grows over time, it's likely that their network of friends will grow, sometimes exponentially. What does not grow is the screen-space for the newsfeed, nor the user's ability to scroll through the increased number of updates. While it's true that some newsfeed updates get tracking because of advertising play...such as "Jon Smith Likes Candy Crush!"...that's still less annoying than, "Jon Smith scored 54304 points in Candy Crush and earned Legendary Candy Cane +1!"...which could feasibly dominate your newsfeed depending on the gameplaying habits of your friend.
Now, of course you could manually filter these things out, e.g. "Ignore all Candy Crush posts by Jon Smith" or even "Defriend Jon Smith"...but this requires manual work by the user...and if it becomes more work than leisure to enjoy one's news feed...then it's likely that FB's A/B tests have found users preferring the filtering to be automatically done, even if it lets some shit through.
Keep in mind that FB has long had the ability to create custom groups...so that you could, for example, see your feed according to people you've put in the "My university friends" group. There is even a "Close friends" group that you can manually curate, or that FB automatically fills for you. FB has basically buried the group filters...probably because users weren't actively filtering things themselves...and in terms of the "Close Friends" group...FB considered manual filtering to be redundant...after all, FB can detect how often you message/chat with another user, how long you wistfully page through their photo albums, etc. etc...if those metrics aren't key factors of the people whom you really care about...well, it's pretty damn close.
Because normal users with 3-400 friends don't care about most of the updates around. Your feed would be full of pages and comments and pictures that these people are liking. "Friend A likes comment by person you never heard of in an open group about something you don't know what is" would be littering your feed.
Obviously you want some sort of filter on this data. You wouldn't want a live feed of all subreddits combined. At least not for normal consumption.
