In Defence of Top Stories

From time to time a post shows up in my Facebook News Feed which says something like "Facebook, stop filtering my newsfeed! Just show me all of my friends' posts in order! Blargghababll" (paraphrased).

You see, Facebook by default uses an algorithm to determine what to display in your News Feed - it's called Top Stories. No, it doesn't show you everything. Personally, I don't think that Top Stories is as bad as all that. Here's how it works.

For a start, Facebook assumes that you have a lot of friends. Personally, I have 193 friends, and I'm quite particular about who I add as a friend. I don't add someone if I don't know who they are, for example. Facebook also assumes that your friends engage with Facebook and post a fair bit. I also have Liked 361 Pages, and each of those pages will be posting as well. I don't think these numbers are too far of representative of the population as a whole - I know people who have less, and I know people who have a lot more. So let's make an assumption about the average Facebook user (note: this assumption may be wildly inaccurate, but I don't think that matters too muck for my argument)

Say I have 200 friends and 300 pages, and they each make an average of five posts per day. I think that's a reasonable assumption - in fact I think it's conservative. That's 2500 posts every 24 hours - a little more than 100 posts per hour, or one every six seconds. There's absolutely no way I can read all of that, even if I spend all day simply scrolling down my News Feed, which I don't. Nobody does. Hence, Facebook filters the list.

For a start, it shows me more posts from people and pages that I've engaged with in the past. This means people or pages whose posts I have Liked, Commented or Shared. People and pages I generally ignore don't get shown to me as often. I don't think that's wrong.

Secondly, it shows me more posts that have been engaged with by others. Again, this means posts that other Facebook users have Liked, Commented or Shared. These posts are obviously more popular, and it's likely that I'm going to want to see them too.

A lot of people seem to complain about how Facebook works without actually demonstrating any understanding of how Facebook works. There's also the security thing, but that's totally another topic. Some people seem to want Facebook to read their mind while not engaging with it in any meaningful way - specifically, not Liking, Commenting or Sharing the things that they like and want to see more of. Complaining about seeing peoples' food photos, when they choose to see them by going to Most Recent.

Oh, and you can also block games and ads that you don't want to see. That's another thing that people are constantly complaining about, apparently without realising that this problem is easy to fix.