4/5/2023 0 Comments Newstream games![]() So Facebook users seem to be constantly on edge, tightly coiled and waiting to explode when the company reveals its next plan to get them to share a bit more. It’s two steps toward the so-called Zuckerberg’s Law, which says that people share twice as much every year as they did the year before, and one step back. He concluded that “Facebook may have an irreversibly bad brand.” This may be due to Facebook’s method of dragging its users into the future, which follows a now familiar pattern: Facebook announces a new product or feature that exposes a bit more of users’ lives or activities than before an outcry erupts from a vocal contingent of users part of the feature is often rolled back or modified. ![]() A more striking example is this post by the Branch founder Josh Miller, detailing how his fifteen-year-old sister felt about various social services Miller noted that his sister felt “poorly” when she used Facebook. The New York Times columnist Nick Bilton wrote last week that engagement with his followers had noticeably degraded over the last year. Though not easily quantifiable, it appears to be quite real. It supposes that if users have been going to Instagram for a stream of photos, Foursquare for where their friends are, and Spotify for what their friends are listening to, why not bring all of those streams into Facebook?īy maintaining the fundamental architecture of the news feed, however, Facebook is either missing or ignoring the opportunity to address a more essential problem: Facebook fatigue. The revamped news feed embraces the ubiquity of the convention of the stream and assumes that users do, too. The news feed’s new architecture hones that strategy, splitting a single potentially overwhelming stream into a series of smaller constituent streams that are more broadly tailored to the type of content a user wants to see. Though it might not seem like it, Facebook has long attempted to manage noise in the news feed by engineering our feeds to automatically show the things that we care about based on a variety of signals, along with providing levers to adjust our feed to our liking. Every annoying post is an invitation to go somewhere else on the Web. The problem that Facebook has is that, as the technology columnist Farhad Manjoo put it, the service doesn’t want users to “miss stuff.” But most “stuff” is noise-games we don’t want to play, songs we don’t want our friends to know we are listening to, ads and sponsored posts-so Facebook faces a monumental task: ensuring us that we see every single thing we want to see, and nothing we don’t. (User complaints that the news feed is “overwhelming and cluttered” have existed as long as the feed itself, with Zuckerberg specifically mentioning that grievance in his 2006 mea culpa this is Facebook’s first real attempt to deal with those concerns.) The news feed’s architectural overhaul allows users to switch between a handful of different streams, siloed by content type: photos, video, music, games, following (for pages that users “like”), and “all friends.” One stream has been replaced by many. The redesigned news feed is both visually rich and spare, with bigger, wider photos, videos, and maps set against vast expanses of pleasantly neutral space. And it rendered more visible than ever how much of users’ lives were pouring into Facebook’s servers.įacebook’s starkly redesigned news feed partly acknowledges what’s become true since 2006: we’re swimming in streams. The feed also liquefied individuals-everyone melted into the flow of the stream. ![]() Aggregating every update from every friend into a single scannable stream was so powerful that it was genuinely startling to Facebook users: with little warning, every update was suddenly transformed into a true broadcast, even emotionally raw moments like breakups. It was one-to-one, and it required real attention. If you wanted to know what was happening with your friend, you had to visit her page and ascertain what was new, scanning her profile for highlights-sort of like stopping by for a chat. ![]() “Pages” were still the dominant metaphor of the Web, and that was the case on Facebook, too, until the news feed. While blogging, by 2006, had popularized reverse-chronological flows of content, and hardcore users had tapped the power of RSS, the makeup of the online lives of the masses had not yet been molded into a series of single-column streams-Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Tumblr, and Vine didn’t exist then. ![]()
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