Little cats: more cute than little chats

You see, I have just arrived home to discover the latest changes to what you think I want to see in my news feed, Facebook. As is probably implied by the fact I’ve written a blog post entitled as this is, I’m not exactly enamoured with the changes.

The core problem is basically this:

Your algorithms do not know me as well as I do, Facebook

You seem to think your algorithms can deduce what news items will be of interest to me based on two factors; what news items are of interest to other friends of mine, and which people I manually tell you I want to see more from. Possibly which people I interact with on there too, with IM sessions and such.

And that’s just a wee bit short-sighted, Facebook

  1. There’s certain people who don’t post much of anything. Will I even still see their stuff, or must I now manually go and tell you I want to?
  2. I have 257 friends, apparently. Their interests and what matters to them isn’t necessarily what matters to me. There’s no way to say that everything that’s popular with them, collectively, is something I care about.
  3. A fair whack of these 257 people may post stuff that most of the time I’m not fussed about; not being insulting here, I’m sure a lot of my own e/n bullshit whistles by most peoples’ eyes too. Every once in a while there’ll be some gem that does pique my interest, so to see these now, must I indicate that every friend I have is someone I want “top stories” to appear from?
  4. I’ve had one-off interactions with many people on assorted topics, and with this “wisdom of crowds” approach there’s no way of knowing if such obscure one-offs would happen now, because who’s to say some obscure post of mine/theirs will make the respective “top stories”?
  5. Besides, semantic understanding and classification of text is nowhere near the stage where you can reliably determine what a given news item is about, and whether I’m interested in that.

Basically, it’s just dumb, Facebook

I’m a nerd. I’m a massive nerd. I’m maybe the biggest nerd I know (depending on a few factors, but even adding this parenthesised bit strengthens my case OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE-).

Even I, with my love of organising shit and making things “clever” and “integrated” know that stuff like this just does not work as intended. It’s flippin’ annoying.

Give me control over what I see, Facebook

Or I may just have a cry, Facebook

;_;

Does short-sighted even need a hyphen?