Facebook Now Cares About How Long You Look at Stuff in Your News Feed

[nikanj]

The reason I spend so little time looking at things is the fact that they're yesterday's news. There's "top stories" and "most recent", which is really "top stories" wearing a different hat. No way of getting just the new updates from my friends in a chronological order.

As a recent example, my friend A posted that they're going out for drinks and are looking for company. Instead of showing me this quite time-sensitive piece of news, FB wanted to tell me that my friend B liked the picture of C from 2013.

The drinks invitation became visible three-four days later, when it started to get comments about people seeing it too late. Now it's been stuck to the top of my "most recent" for at least a week.

[fapjacks]

I hate this so much. So much. I am not used to having posts from six weeks ago in my "news" feed, so often I'll post a reply in a conversation that actually ended weeks ago. I'm used to being the awkward, weird guy, but this makes it so much worse. This mechanic is actually responsible for about 60% of my drive to quit Facebook recently.

[scarmig]

Socialization with your friends in meatspace is clearly secondary to the important thing, which is Facebook converting your social bonds into profits for shareholders.

[chestervonwinch]

yes. I miss when facebook was more of a social message board than... whatever it is now.

[TheBiv]

I may be in the minority, but I had figured they'd been doing this for years

[barsonme]

I agree. I figured it'd be pretty simple to do, especially for the iOS/Android versions.

[druska]

Me too. It was surprising to me that this is new.

[minimaxir]

There's a stupid trend going around where Facebook Pages post word searches and hidden object games about whatever brand they're promoting.

I guess we now know why.

[modeless]

I assumed they were already doing this. As a result I started to deliberately modulate the amount of time I spent looking at various people or things. I guess now it will actually be effective.

[imh]

I wonder what unintended consequences this could have, like attractive people showing up in more people's news feeds more often.

[fapjacks]

No wonder people keep posting on my wall! ;)

[joshmn]

I was wondering when they would do this.

I find myself scrolling down and glancing for things. If I spot something that might be intriguing, whether a picture, article, or cat pic, I'll scroll back up. I can't be alone in this.

[discardorama]

"Dwell time" (as it is known in the industry) has long been a feature at major search engines and news portals. It is a pretty good signal of relevance.

[monksy]

Thats a good thing I use the facebook feed eradicator. I love it. No more posts that I don't want to see.

[adjwilli]

You'd think there could be a way that they could track the times between pulls for the newsfeed as you scroll and get a lower resolution view of the same phenomena, basically how long you looked at those posts but without as specific data as tracking a javascript timer.

[shpx]

At this point I spend more time on https://www.messenger.com/

[SocksCanClose]

Worth reading Zelikow and Allison's "essence of decision" -- now that they have evolved into a complex bureaucracy with multi-level masters to serve (middle managers, shareholders, political actors), they quite literally can't do anything except maximize profit by driving traffic via click optimization. Bureaucratic process and palace politics (models 2 and 3) are driving outcomes, not executive vision (ie Zuck, model 1)... Time for sadface.

[em3rgent0rdr]

to neuter this, you can use the mobile site and disable javascript. I used to also use fbcmd (via commandline), although it seems the maintainer has left.

[Qantourisc]

Or they could add a button "Care" ?