The Facebook Problem
Technically, it’s two related problems:
- The Facebook Problem (a.k.a. The Reddit Frontpage Problem)
- The FB Marriage Problem
I’ll start with the first one:
The Facebook Problem (a.k.a. The Reddit Frontpage Problem)
How do I, the server, show you, the user, the “best” posts?
The answer usually involves engagement of other users. However, this often lets low-quality posts clutter the page. On Facebook, this usually consists of anything political or daily baby photos. For Reddit, we just call them “shitposts”, and they’re usually highly upvoted by an entirely distinct subset of users than those who comment (the comments often make fun of the people who upvoted the post for being the complete morons that they are). Letting other users decide what gets into the “front page” sort of works, but fails when you have significantly different interestes than most of the people who engage with a post. Facebook baby and wedding albums from people I added when we were both in high school are prime examples of highly-engaged posts not being at all relevant.
However, this all requires having a large pool of new potential content from which to choose. If you only check the website once a day or so, things work smoothly. If you check it excessively, you run into the following problem:
Related: What should I do if you refresh the page before there has been any new “worthwhile” content?
On Reddit, this manifests as users complaining that their frontpage has been stuck with the same posts all day. The same problem occurs on Facebook, but with fewer posts complaining about it.
Both sites have the problem that most users are subscribed to streams of vastly unequal posting quantity. If you simply filled the gaps with new posts, you’d get your frontpage spammed with the same people’s (or subreddit’s) content as punishment for refreshing too often. Facebook also has the option to show you posts from fan pages or the absolute garbage posts about your friends interacting with other posts, which you should block with F.B. Purity.
On Facebook, in specific, the extra slots for posts are usually filled by fan page posts. You can tell you’ve ran out of genuine content once you start running into a wall of posts from pages you’ve liked.
Facebook, however, has the additional problem that it is more likely to show you posts by friends with whom you’ve previously interacted with often. This exacerbates stale content problem, since it artificially limits the post pool unless one of your “less connected” friends got married, engaged, or pregnant within the 15 minutes you didn’t refresh your home page. I feel like Facebook is determined to show from the same 15–25 people every time unless someone got married, which really adds truth to the idiom that “Twitter is where you go to wish to be friends with complete strangers; Facebook is where you go to learn you would be better off without most of your friends.” You can even confirm this by noting how it’s almost always the same pool of people who like your posts unless they get really popular or it’s your birthday.
Maybe it’s Facebook’s way to pushing me to stop bothering with checking what anyone has to say and only keeping it around to use Messenger. That is a genuinely compelling feature: a chat app that contains almost everyone with whom I’d need to communicate with their real names. No screen names to remember and no realising that you’ve been texting the Supreme Leader of Iran for the past six months because someone changed their number and the Supreme Leader didn’t think to let you know you had the wrong number. If it weren’t for Messenger, I’d quit Facebook entirely and then wonder why I can’t login to half of the apps that have quick sign-ups anymore and go spam their support pages until they migrate my old account to my new one with a real login credentials.
The FB Marriage Problem
Who is this lady (it’s always ladies until the tradition of women taking their husband’s last name changes) and how do/did I know her?
As much as I complained about wedding photos from strangers above, they are useful notifications that someone may be about to change her last name. However, that doesn’t help any when the person in question gets married before adding me as her friend, nor do I usually remember at all even when I did see the wedding post.
Realistically, I should use these as opportunities to prune my friend list. More realistically, I just don’t care about being on Facebook (as in I’d be actively happy if I found out I got banned one day) that much to bother maintaining an accurate friend list. Leaving them as “friends” is also handy on the contingency that you would ever need to message them someday. A “suggested unfriends” prompt would be pretty nice. Simply auto-marking them as acquaintances and then hiding 99% of their posts makes it hard to use or to remember to do any friend list maintenance.