Plenty of people complain about Facebook, how it treats its users, how it influences society at large, it’s loose tax-paying habits, any number of things. Those are all beyond our individual control, but the other thing that people also complain about—our personal experience of it—can be modified a lot, and doing so can produce unexpected results, something I recently found out for myself.
About a week ago I got an alert from Facebook at the top of newsfeed. It invited me to take part in a survey of Facebook users. So, I did. And, I wasn’t particularly kind, especially about their trustworthiness, whether they cared about their users, those sorts of things. I bet they were all pretty common responses.
However, it also asked what they could change about the user experience (though I don’t think they called it that), and I answered that they should stop showing me old posts from the same people rather than new posts from other people. I knew they’d ignore it, just as they’ve ignored me telling them repeatedly to allow users to permanently change the newsfeed to “Most Recent” rather than “Top Stories”.
Naturally, there was no direct reply, however, a few days later there was another alert at the top of my newsfeed telling me I could prioritise who to see first. Users can select people and the pages they’ve “Liked” to appear in their newsfeed literally first. So, I selected numerous news sites whose pages used to be in my newsfeed all the time before some “upgrade” that Facebook did. I often got blog post ideas from the things those sites posted to Facebook.
As a result of the change, those news sites are all back. There are so many now that it’s almost too much to take in. The same people I interacted with the most were still in the mix, but, as before, none of the Facebook friends that I seldom interacted with were in my newsfeed.
One unexpected result was that with all those news sites in my newsfeed, I suddenly didn’t mind Facebook nearly as much. I still see posts from the people whose posts I want to see, but I’ve found it’s suddenly much easier to ignore posts that annoy me or that I might have been tempted to comment on, later realising the post was a day or more old (see complaint above).
Moreover, I also eventually didn’t care about skipping those posts, and, over a few days, I moved to not caring about checking Facebook at all. Instead of checking it several times a day, I might now check a couple times a day. On my first visit, in the morning, I click on story links I want to read, a bit like reading a newspaper—and that’s about it. I can imagine that there will be days I don’t check it at all.
Similarly, I don’t feel any need to post anything to my personal Facebook, which I think is because I don’t feel like visiting Facebook as much or spending a lot of time on it.
This may or may not turn out to be a permanent change, but it’s interesting to me that it happened at all. It’s not just how unexpected it was, but also that there was no self-control, self-restraint, or deliberate change in behaviour that was required. It all sort of just happened. I doubt Facebook will be happy this simple setting change has had this result.
In any event, I think it’s easiest to make the changes on the desktop rather than using an App (where it’s all buried in Settings and Newsfeed settings). On the desktop web page, click on the three dots next to “Newsfeed”, choose “Edit Preferences, then choose who you want to “See First”. It may take some trial and error (I don’t know that my settings are quite right yet), but they’re easy enough to change.
I’ll see where this goes. So far, so good.
2 comments:
Hmm - I had meant to fill that out but my busyness precluded it.
It usually does for me, too. There just happened to be a favourble alignment of the stars at that moment.
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