KatsBits Community

General Category => Blog => Topic started by: kat on October 06, 2014, 08:20:02 PM

Title: Social Media & following your favourate sites
Post by: kat on October 06, 2014, 08:20:02 PM
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 (https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Organic-Reach-on-Facebook), 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;
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
Title: Re: Social Media & following your favourate sites.
Post by: ratty redemption on October 06, 2014, 08:53:56 PM
rabbit and i were recently talking about this very issue, which was news to me as i don't use facebook hardly at all nowadays. and to be honest i think i'm better off without a lot of social media sites. i'd rather manually visit a small number of sites, such as yours, and choose what i want to read, look at etc, than have an algorithm choose it for me.

the main site i spend my time on nowadays is deviantart, mainly because it's where i upload most of my work to. and i've heard rumors the owners want to turn it into another facebook clone, which i hope does not happen. da has it's flaws but i personally like it the way it is for the most part.
Title: Re: Social Media & following your favourate sites.
Post by: kat on October 06, 2014, 10:31:02 PM
If DeviantArt does it the best approach would be to follow what Twitter and others do and let content authors pay for additional reach beyond their current subscription base. If they do it the other way like Facebook, well that's just one of the many reasons people are leaving the service, it gives a false impression the no-one is using it - feeds stop coming in, people start to think Jimmy isn't using it and they go to other sites to find Jimmy's activity (all of which is at odds with the stats FB report, 1.4 billion 'active' user monthly [define 'active']).
Title: Re: Social Media & following your favourate sites.
Post by: ratty redemption on October 06, 2014, 11:23:38 PM
that all makes sense, and i wouldn't object to an opt in service.
Title: Re: Social Media & following your favourate sites
Post by: kat on November 09, 2014, 06:45:35 AM
Just a followup. Where Facebook is concerned Zuckerberg addressed this issue at a recent 'event' where the question was posed (http://youtu.be/gsYe304soTM?t=15m39s) (c.16 minutes in). The answer wasn't exactly concise.
Title: Re: Social Media & following your favourate sites
Post by: kat on April 22, 2015, 07:55:33 PM
So yet again Facebook has issued another update that changes the way news-feeds and timelines work. Details can be found here, just in case it was missed (likely it was) - https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/04/news-feed-fyi-balancing-content-from-friends-and-pages/
Quote
"The goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you. This means we need to give you the right mix of updates from friends and public figures, publishers, businesses and community organizations you are connected to. This balance is different for everyone depending on what people are most interested in learning about every day. As more people and pages are sharing more content, we need to keep improving News Feed to get this balance right."
Correct this if it's wrong, but aren't we supposed to "filter content that matters" to us subscribing to, or unsubscribing from, pages and/or people we like or want to follow, not be told that by a third-party proxy?. Otherwise what's the point of the "Like", "Recommend" etc. buttons, unless those are there just to track and trace page and user activity (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1717563)?
Title: Re: Social Media & following your favourate sites
Post by: ratty redemption on April 22, 2015, 08:51:38 PM
this reminds me of the recent bookmark manager update to chrome.

not only did google apparently remove the very useful feature of organizing a folder's content by name, they also added a "auto folders" list. which although at a glance does appear to be relevant to my personal bookmarks, it appears to be using some meta data as it created a folder called "playstation 4" which i have little to no interest in. except inside that folder, it put links to all the bookmarks from one of the yt let's players i follow. and i can't find a way to rename the auto folders or even delete them.

thankfully we can for the time being still manually create our own folders and organize our bookmarks how we want them. what really bothers me is if one day google decide that enough users aren't capable of using the manual folders, so they disable that feature and force all users to use the auto folders.
Title: Re: Social Media & following your favourate sites
Post by: kat on April 22, 2015, 11:24:12 PM
It fits into a larger 'philosophy' that says (but doesn't really mean) "we know you're too busy these days to manually do things yourself so we'll do it for you". It's a subtle way for services to take control over the service provided so they can feed you what they want whilst chipping in the odd thing or two you might recognise so you feel whatever it is they're doing is tailored to your needs when it's not. The bottom line is about their getting paid content in front of people (adverts).
Title: Re: Social Media & following your favourate sites
Post by: ratty redemption on April 23, 2015, 09:16:39 AM
agreed, it's definitely not for the user's benefit.