I disagree that Facebook users do not want their feed to be filtered. It's the difference between 100's of posts I don't care about vs 20 I do.
It's analogous to saying Google users don't want their search results to be sorted by relevance.
Most Google users NEED Google to sort their search, and Facebook is doing the same thing.
And hey, search on Twitter lately? Twitter only shows you SOME of the relevant results in the default view (top results). You have to click "see all" to see them all. Everyone's doing it because it HAS to be done to show you things you are interested in vs spam.
And don't you hate how only the best stories appear in the default view of Hacker News? Of course not. You can go to the "new" tab if you want, but most people don't.
Facebook users may well NEED their stories filtered, but in most cases they don't realise it. The expectation is that FB operates like a newsgroup or a web-forum, where every post appears in the feed.
By keeping the filtering process opaque, FB have concealed the value of what they do, so users don't appreciate it. Now, they are fiddling with the unwanted, secret algorithm in a way that benefits them and hurts users - not a good long term strategy.
I don't mind it being filtered, I mind when the filtering gets it wrong. It's frustrating when something that I do care about doesn't get shown, and you only find out about it weeks later - the expectation is that if you're only going to show some stories, they should be the correct ones.
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I disagree that Facebook users do not want their feed to be filtered. It's the difference between 100's of posts I don't care about vs 20 I do.
It's analogous to saying Google users don't want their search results to be sorted by relevance.
Most Google users NEED Google to sort their search, and Facebook is doing the same thing.
And hey, search on Twitter lately? Twitter only shows you SOME of the relevant results in the default view (top results). You have to click "see all" to see them all. Everyone's doing it because it HAS to be done to show you things you are interested in vs spam.
And don't you hate how only the best stories appear in the default view of Hacker News? Of course not. You can go to the "new" tab if you want, but most people don't.
Facebook users may well NEED their stories filtered, but in most cases they don't realise it. The expectation is that FB operates like a newsgroup or a web-forum, where every post appears in the feed.
By keeping the filtering process opaque, FB have concealed the value of what they do, so users don't appreciate it. Now, they are fiddling with the unwanted, secret algorithm in a way that benefits them and hurts users - not a good long term strategy.
I don't mind it being filtered, I mind when the filtering gets it wrong. It's frustrating when something that I do care about doesn't get shown, and you only find out about it weeks later - the expectation is that if you're only going to show some stories, they should be the correct ones.