Facebook Now Cares About How Long You Look at Stuff in Your News Feed

http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/12/facebook-now-cares-about-how-long-you-look-at-stuff-in-your-news-feed/

by zhuxuefeng1994 • 11 years ago

27 20 11 years ago

imh• 11 years ago

I wonder what unintended consequences this could have, like attractive people showing up in more people's news feeds more often.

fapjacks2• 11 years ago

No wonder people keep posting on my wall! ;)

joshmn• 11 years ago

I was wondering when they would do this.

I find myself scrolling down and glancing for things. If I spot something that might be intriguing, whether a picture, article, or cat pic, I'll scroll back up. I can't be alone in this.

TheBiv• 11 years ago

I may be in the minority, but I had figured they'd been doing this for years

druska• 11 years ago

Me too. It was surprising to me that this is new.

barsonme• 11 years ago

I agree. I figured it'd be pretty simple to do, especially for the iOS/Android versions.

modeless• 11 years ago

I assumed they were already doing this. As a result I started to deliberately modulate the amount of time I spent looking at various people or things. I guess now it will actually be effective.

minimaxir• 11 years ago

There's a stupid trend going around where Facebook Pages post word searches and hidden object games about whatever brand they're promoting.

I guess we now know why.

monksy• 11 years ago

Thats a good thing I use the facebook feed eradicator. I love it. No more posts that I don't want to see.

nikanj• 11 years ago

The reason I spend so little time looking at things is the fact that they're yesterday's news. There's "top stories" and "most recent", which is really "top stories" wearing a different hat. No way of getting just the new updates from my friends in a chronological order.

As a recent example, my friend A posted that they're going out for drinks and are looking for company. Instead of showing me this quite time-sensitive piece of news, FB wanted to tell me that my friend B liked the picture of C from 2013.

The drinks invitation became visible three-four days later, when it started to get comments about people seeing it too late. Now it's been stuck to the top of my "most recent" for at least a week.

chestervonwinch• 11 years ago

yes. I miss when facebook was more of a social message board than... whatever it is now.

onedev• 11 years ago

It's a self promotion tool now :)

fapjacks2• 11 years ago

I hate this so much. So much. I am not used to having posts from six weeks ago in my "news" feed, so often I'll post a reply in a conversation that actually ended weeks ago. I'm used to being the awkward, weird guy, but this makes it so much worse. This mechanic is actually responsible for about 60% of my drive to quit Facebook recently.

scarmig• 11 years ago

Socialization with your friends in meatspace is clearly secondary to the important thing, which is Facebook converting your social bonds into profits for shareholders.

adjwilli• 11 years ago

You'd think there could be a way that they could track the times between pulls for the newsfeed as you scroll and get a lower resolution view of the same phenomena, basically how long you looked at those posts but without as specific data as tracking a javascript timer.

em3rgent0rdr• 11 years ago

to neuter this, you can use the mobile site and disable javascript. I used to also use fbcmd (via commandline), although it seems the maintainer has left.

SocksCanClose• 11 years ago

Worth reading Zelikow and Allison's "essence of decision" -- now that they have evolved into a complex bureaucracy with multi-level masters to serve (middle managers, shareholders, political actors), they quite literally can't do anything except maximize profit by driving traffic via click optimization. Bureaucratic process and palace politics (models 2 and 3) are driving outcomes, not executive vision (ie Zuck, model 1)... Time for sadface.

shpx• 11 years ago

At this point I spend more time on https://www.messenger.com/

discardorama• 11 years ago

"Dwell time" (as it is known in the industry) has long been a feature at major search engines and news portals. It is a pretty good signal of relevance.

Qantourisc• 11 years ago

Or they could add a button "Care" ?

Facebook Now Cares About How Long You Look at Stuff in Your News Feed

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