Facebook is fooling around with your friends.
And with you.
Did you know?
If you don’t, you should. It’s already old news!
When you “friend” somebody on Facebook, you’ll be able to see their posts on your News Feed forever, right?
When you post a Status update on Facebook, all your friends see it on their News Feeds, as long as they haven’t opted to “Hide” your posts, right?
It’s possible to know who’s seeing your status updates, right?
Wrong, wrong and wrong!
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The truth is that Facebook recently started using secret criteria to decide whether or not you’ll maintain this News Feed relationship. If Facebook’s software doesn’t like your relationship, Facebook stops delivering News Feed messages without telling you.
Those criteria probably involve the frequency with which you message, chat, post, comment or interact with each friend.
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In fairness, Facebook “edits” your News Feed to improve the user experience. If you have hundreds of friends and never chose to “Hide” any of them on your News Feed — and if Facebook didn’t block any of the messages — you probably wouldn’t like your News Feed very much. You might be overwhelmed by both the quantity and the irrelevance of the messages pouring in.
Facebook has no doubt learned that the general public (and when you have nearly 600 million users, you are in fact dealing with the most general of publics) is more likely to stop using Facebook than endure the suffering of a News Feed that functions as a fire hose of relationship spam.
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What’s bad about Facebook’s approach is that it leaves users in the dark.
Most users don’t know any of this is happening. And if they do know it’s happening, they don’t know how to fix it. And if they do know how to fix it, than cannot know the criteria Facebook uses to block their own updates, nor can they ever know who is seeing their posts.
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The problem is that Facebook users “friend” people at minimum in order to see each other’s Status updates. That Facebook quietly severs these connections without telling users is an unhappy surprise to most people I’ve revealed this to.
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The ugly reality is that, although Facebook might claim to be responding to your social activity, they are changing it.
Facebook actually shapes and directs the evolution of your social life without telling you.
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We don’t pay for Facebook, and therefore users are not customers. Advertisers are customers.
But Facebook is much more than an online service. Its ubiquity has motivated people to replace other forms of communication, and rely instead on Facebook.
Well, that’s a lengthy excerpt from a lengthy post. But he’s right.
And that closing sentence above ought to shake us with its import.
Well, the fix for Facebook’s folly this time is very simple (if they play by the rules, anyway):
Click Edit Options either at the bottom of your News Feed or in the Most Recent dropdown at the top of your News Feed.
Click the Show Posts from dropdown.
Make your selection. (Friends and pages you have interacted with most is Facebook’s choice for you!).
Click Save.
Now you might want to ask your friends to do this so they’re sure to see your updates. Until Facebook sneaks another change past its users.
And if this post on Facebook’s latest travesty brings out the Google Buzzards™© (aka GooBuzzards™©), me thinks they’re deluded. 🙄
What I want to know is how to fix the postings permanently to “Most Recent” instead of “Top News” – I hate having to chnge it all the time!!!