Facebook News Feed shows you 29% of friends’ posts

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 0 Comment
Facebook's sorting algorithm

Facebook’s sorting algorithm

Before you freak out, that 29% figure is not scientific. It’s from research conducted by the Washington Post’s Tom Herrera, who last summer counted all the posts his Facebook friends produced in a 24-hour period and cross-referenced them with what appeared in his News Feed. No one outside Facebook knows how the News Feed algorithm actually works, since gaming it is a multimillion-dollar industry. But the old Facebook, where you friended people and then saw everything they shared on a homepage, has been defunct since 2008. The new Facebook tracks your behavior on the site and customizes your News Feed to show you only what you really care about—in my case, baby pictures and articles about catcalling.

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Facebook is a cadre, not a service

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment
Facebook

Facebook

A fun thing my brother and I talked about during Combat! blog’s long rest was that Facebook use is declining among teenagers. For whatever reason—we posited that it was because Facebook is all pictures of babies now when it used to be cool bands and people you hooked up with, although that may just be our user experience—kids prefer Snapchat or Vine or Twist or Goob. Which is interesting, because Facebook sold itself as a service. It arguably just pulled off a multibillion-dollar IPO as a service. Facebook is the premiere social network, as we all know from that movie Citizen Kane. But maybe it is the perennial social network of a certain group of people. Facebook isn’t a service; it’s a cadre.

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Here’s what’s wrong with the Daily Kos

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 6 Comments
Commentary

Commentary

Thanks to Facebook’s policy of allowing entities my friends have “liked” to post articles to my news feed, I saw this story in the Daily Kos, headlined “Teen Kills 4; Judge LITERALLY Lets Him Off Because He Is Rich!” First of all, you will know your objective news sources by their uses of exclamation points and capital letters in headlines. Second, you’ll be glad to hear that a Texas judge did not literally let off 16 year-old drunk driver Ethan Couch, because he was not literally on a hook. Certainly, Couch being sentenced to probation after he killed four pedestrians while driving with a blood alcohol content of .24 is infuriating, especially in context of the defense’s claim that he had lived a life of such privilege as to not understand the consequences of his actions. But there is a difference between the local CBS report and the one in the Daily Kos, and that difference seems to be between news and something else.

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Friday links! Will of the people edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 3 Comments
Problem solved.

Problem solved!

As Winston Churchill once remarked, democracy is the second-worst system of government, after security-state corporatocracy. The problem with the will of the people is that people are dumb. They’re especially dumb compared to your average NSA cryptographer, Fortune 500 CEO, US senator or anyone else who might reach a position to decide whether the governed should govern much themselves. But democracy never had a chance like this before. For the first time in human history, we can know the opinions of ordinary people from all over the world almost instantaneously. Today is Friday, and the will of the people is better known to us than ever. Won’t you marvel at its inanity with me?

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On being banned from Sarah Palin’s Facebook

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 5 Comments

The future (artist’s rendering)

Possibly due to my request that she “please stop,” I have been banned from posting comments on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page. My quote from the New England Journal of Medicine regarding what the IPAB actually does has been deleted, leaving Citizen Palin unchallenged in her assertion that “its purpose all along has been to ‘keep costs down’ by actually denying care via price controls and typically inefficient bureaucracy.” It seems unlikely that the Independent Patient Advisory Board was designed to prevent people from getting health care via inefficiency, but Sarah Palin can say what she wants. I can’t say anything back to her, but she is communicating on her own Facebook wall. That wall belongs to her and to Facebook, so they can delete whom they please.

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