Facebook’s news feed: The beginning of a recommendations dominated web | Hacker News Reader

Facebook’s news feed: The beginning of a recommendations dominated web

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49 pointswheels20 comments

I think they're working on the assumption that everyone likes the same kinds of news items as their Facebook friends. I don't think that's really true.

I think this will change the atmosphere of the site. Currently the news items are mostly about things going on in friends' lives. So when you "like" an item or comment on it, you're expressing an interest in that person. If Facebook gets cluttered up with news articles and videos, the metrics available to Facebook will also become cluttered. I'm afraid Facebook will start showing me technology stories submitted by classmates and stop showing me what's happening in my siblings' lives.

In my opinion, that's essentially a ranking problem, not a conceptual block. There's no doubt a wide-open field of "how to get recommendations right" once things have moved over in that direction. One of the key ways of doing that will be figuring out how to weigh different sorts of interactions -- it won't just be so-and-so-likes-this, but also taking into account profile views, messages sent and so on.

Yes exactly. I don't want to see what's merely been "liked" a lot - my newsfeed is going to be dominated by witty quotes and pictures of cats. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not actually important to me. Already people are saying they're missing stuff in the News Feed that they wish they'd seen, and having to trawl through the Live Feed parsing it manually.

In the old days, FB had sliders to say what you were more or less interested in (e.g. I had more photos and events, less relationship news) and people you were more or less interested in (more close RL friends who I didn't have a lot of FB overlap with, less work colleagues). Bringing that back could make this work...

I really don't like it. I don't want to see which of my friends' status updates are "hot". That's not how we use the site. Maybe my friends are attending some event, and I miss it because nobody commented on the status or "liked" it.

Social filtering is great for interacting with strangers on the internet. Strangers are weird and noisy. However I don't want to filter my real friends.

Oh... I see.

It confused me for a second whya 22 hour old post was top of my home page with other randomly ordered stuff below it.

I dont think they have their algorithms right to be perfeclty honest; currently top of my list is a popular status update (4 likes, 9 replies) from a person I barely know and with whom I have no (Facebook) friends in common.

Hmmm.

Anyone figured out a way to set it to Live Feed by default again?

Click the "View Live Feed" link at the top. This is sticky (i.e. will cause the Live Feed to show up by default the next time you log in).

No doubt, but they're trending in a direction pioneered by Yelp and similar.

So my question is... when's Yelp going to get acquired and by whom? Google or Facebook is my guess. Microsoft probably won't be quick enough. When's a second question for investing purposes...

FWIW I don't like the new feed (yet). I don't think removing items is a good way to go about this. Certainly make the UI such that recommeneded items are more obvious, maybe roll-up the 'boring' items in the timeline, but don't remove them all together :/

Also at the moment it's just confusing, since the news feed isn't ordered chronologically. I assume it's ordered in a reddit/HN type way, but that's certainly not obvious.

Maybe I'll get used to it idk. At the moment it seems quite random.

I think they need a method to feedback also - upmod/downmod - show me more/less of these types of updates/from this person.

I think many people prefer this pattern of news discovery already. Here I am on HN reading this article because a bunch of people have upvoted--recommended--it for me...

Up-votes and five star scales are just early experiments in recommendations. "Also bought" is an even earlier one. It clearly works in silos (Reddit, Netflix, Amazon) and, perhaps covertly, on the open web (Page Rank, personalized search), but there is still a lot more research to be done. I'm excited about it :-)

It works here and on Amazon, etc. because there is so much noise that most people only want to see the highlights. On Facebook, most people want to see every update from the friends (except all the junk apps like Farmville). I'd rather have a feed that shows me everything except stuff that's been downvoted by people picking "hide this".

I have my Facebook statuses feed piped to RSS and then filtering out the people that write the most useless stuff. That folder in my mail client currently has 1347 unread statuses, and that's just since the last time I marked "set all as read" a couple months back. I seriously question if people want to see everything. And I have a lowly 115 friends. Now take into account that more and more data is being pushed through that channel and I think it becomes obvious that eventually "show me everything" becomes virtually useless at some point in the future.

This isn't new at all. They're just bringing it back. Facebook used to be entirely like this, with popular items reappearing in the news feed, before the switch to the strictly chronological stream of updates. Am I wrong?

This actually has some interesting implications for Facebook in terms of performance requirements. Since they show you "popular" or "well liked" posts there is no need to constantly update the stream which in turn allows them to be a bit lazier on synchronizing servers and propagating new posts.

I wouldn't be surprised if this (along with many other things) contributed a significant amount to their decision to go this route.

I would assume that it does have performance implications, but that they go in the other direction -- I commented on this here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879952

what would make you think that popularity isn't real-time?

It takes some time for a post to be voted over another one. So you don't have to propagate it immediately when it is first published.

Used to be less confusing before since it was presented in chronological order. Think I'm going to be sticking with the "Live Feed" option for now.

Does it make you nervous to know that a company with tremendously more resources is moving into your pond?

Nah, if it did I wouldn't be calling attention to it. :-)

Facebook is a walled garden. Whether or not we could beat them on their home turf isn't something we've put a lot of thought into. Fortunately the rest of the web is big.

The thing that solidified this for us at one point when we were trying to pick our target sectors was thinking through the fact that Google can't index Facebook (or any of the other major walled gardens) either and still manages to pull together a pretty cohesive picture of the web.

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