HYDERABAD: Even though Facebook was built on the idea of connecting people with their friends and family, users often miss out on posts of their dear ones.
While people are often bombarded with updates from pages, they are able to see posts from only some friends and that is because Facebook decides who is important to you based on your recent online interactions.
The machine learning-based news feed ranking algorithm controls how we interact with friends and decides what is important to us on Facebook.
This algorithm identifies the friends you have had the most interactions with online and tries to cut down the noise from others, assuming that the updates from others are not significant for you. Consequently, posts from some people are not visible unless you explicitly visit their timeline.
“I have completed eight years on the platform. Over the years what I stopped seeing is status updates from friends, but I see more of advertisements, videos and posts from Facebook pages. The social network should not think that because I don’t interact with my friends online, their posts don’t matter to me. It looks like a one-way medium where I just see but do not interact,” said a user, Rakesh Mehta.
Fewer people seeing your posts mean fewer likes, comments, and shares and eventually less conversations.
Understandably, this has annoyed a lot of people and so at the onset of 2018, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg decided to prioritise posts by friends and family members over public content by publishers and brands by making changes to the news feed ranking algorithm.
At the Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2017 Results Conference Call of Facebook Mr Zukerberg said, “News and video will always be an important part of Facebook. But when people are spending so much time passively consuming public content that it starts taking away from the time people are connecting with each other, that’s not good. So let me be clear: helping people connect is more important than maximising the time they spend on Facebook. As a result of this update, you will now see more content from friends, family and groups that lead you to interact with people, and less public content that leads to more overall time spent.”
FB loses traction due to mundane posts
Facebook, one of the most popular social media platforms, is losing its audience. While it is adding on monthly users, existing users are spending less time on the platform because of the proliferation of ads, games and viral posts.
An example of how this stuff can become annoying to users online, is images of the popular ‘wink’ by an actress recently, which has gone so viral that users’ entire newsfeed is filled with only that video or images related to that particular event.
“Very few friends really post anything meaningful while others update continuously with mundane stuff. I get a lot of updates from the pages I liked. It is more of a passive activity,” said user Preeti Goswami.
The proliferation of videos, jokes and related content showing on the home page instead of updates from friends has made the social platform boring, users say.
“There are increasingly weird apps which tell about the the kind of person you are, whether ‘angel or devil’, or which celebrity the person resembles and so on, which is very annoying to be honest,” said Saima Ambareen, an avid FB user.
Moreover, teenagers are leaving Facebook because their parents and grandparents are on it now! While the medium is making its interface user-friendly for audiences of all ages, the next generation audience is migrating to Instagram and Snapchat.
