Have you even wonder where such and such has gone? They used to post news all the time about the thing they were doing. You remember constantly seeing, and reading, and linking/liking/tweeting their posts. Right? Remember? So you go back to their website to find out what's going on only to find they
have been posting, tonnes of stuff as it happens, over the time you thought they weren't. What's going on you ask.
It turns out the 'fault', if that word can be used here, is to do with the way Social Media Services like Facebook, Twitter et al, filter
the stream. They reckon on our your not being able to filter the items you subscribe to yourself so they do it for you, automatically ignoring posts their algorithms don't calculate by "thousands of metrics" as being important ("relevant") to you;
Facebook in particular is annoyingly aggressive in this, and it's why a lot of sites you 'Like' often seem to disappear from your feeds.
There are a number of concerns with this (aside from those of the Tin-Foil Hat variety), a couple of major ones being;
- Someone else is telling you what they think is important to you (when they don't know you or your actual interests).
- Authors post more often attempting to be picked up by these sorting/filter systems only to be removed as spam.
It's a
Catch-22 for sure, one in which the only real winners seem to be Services providers - sure people don't
need to use services like Facebook and Co., but the fact is they do, for good reason; being able to consolidate all their interests and related communications into one place (or as few places as possible compared to RSS subscribing to dozens if not hundreds of individual websites).
Aside from all the 'conspiracy theory's' one could ruminate over on this, the only solution for the moment seems to be to double-check your Social Media settings to make sure your streams and feeds are not being too aggressively filtered (if that option is even available), or to check back with the site you originally sub'd to, or Liked, or Twitted about to make sure they are indeed still alive as opposed to their apparent and grossly misrepresented deaths through absence.
This post is #666 on the "Most annoying things about the Internet" list O.o
