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kottke.org posts about Thomas Weber

How Facebook decides what to show you

Thomas Weber attempted to reverse engineer the algorithm that Facebook uses for its “Top News” feed and learned some very interesting things about what Facebook chooses what to show (and not show) their users.

1. Facebook’s Bias Against Newcomers. If there’s one thing our experiment made all too clear, it’s that following 500 million people into a party means that a lot of the beer and pretzels are already long gone. Poor Phil spent his first week shouting his updates, posted several times a day, yet most of his ready-made “friends” never noticed a peep on their news feeds. His invisibility was especially acute among those with lengthy, well-established lists of friends. Phil’s perpetual conversation with the ether only stopped when we instructed our volunteers to interact with him. A dynamic which leads to…

2. Facebook’s Catch-22: To get exposure on Facebook, you need friends to interact with your updates in certain ways (more on that below). But you aren’t likely to have friends interacting with your updates if you don’t have exposure in the first place. (Memo to Facebook newcomers: Try to get a few friends to click like crazy on your items.)

This bit at the end is particularly interesting:

All the while, Facebook, like Google, continues to redefine “what’s important to you” as “what’s important to other people.” In that framework, the serendipitous belongs to those who connect directly with their friends in the real world-or at least take the time to skip their news feed and go visit their friends’ pages directly once in a while.