The listed authors were “Zuckerberg et al.” and the product was the News Feed.
The concept of showing users streams of activity wasn’t entirely recent— photo-sharing website Flickr and others had been experimenting with it— however the change was massive. Before, Facebook users would interact with the positioning mainly via notifications, pokes, or looking up friends’ profiles. With the launch of the News Feed, users got a continuously updating stream of posts and standing changes. The shift got here as a shock to what were Facebook’s then 10 million users, who didn’t appreciate their activities being monitored and their once- static profiles mined for updated content. Within the face of widespread complaints, Zuckerberg wrote a post reassuring users, “Nothing you do is being broadcast; moderately, it’s being shared with individuals who care about what you do— your mates.” He titled it: “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.”
Hearing user complaints wasn’t the identical thing as listening to them. As Chris Cox would later note at a press event, News Feed was an fast success at boosting activity on the platform and connecting users. Engagement quickly doubled, and inside two weeks of launch greater than 1,000,000 members had affiliated themselves with a single interest for the primary time. The cause that had united so many individuals? A petition to eradicate the “stalkeresque” News Feed.
The opaque system that users revolted against was, in hindsight, remarkably easy. Content mostly appeared in reverse chronological order, with manual adjustments made to be certain that people saw each popular posts and a spread of fabric. “To start with, News Feed rating was turning knobs,” Cox said.
Twiddling with dials worked well enough for a bit of while, but everyone’s friend lists were growing and Facebook was introducing recent features reminiscent of ads, pages, and interest groups. As entertainment, memes, and commerce began to compete with posts from friends in News Feed, Facebook needed to be certain that a user who had just logged on would see their best friend’s engagement photos ahead of a cooking page’s popular enchilada recipe.
The primary effort at sorting, eventually branded “EdgeRank,” was a straightforward formula that prioritized content in accordance with three principal aspects: a post’s age, the quantity of engagement it got, and the interconnection between user and poster. As an algorithm, it wasn’t much— only a rough try and translate the questions “Is it recent, popular, or from someone you care about?” into math.
There was no dark magic at play, but users again revolted against the concept of Facebook putting its thumb on what they saw. And, again, Facebook usage metrics jumped across the board.
The platform’s advice systems were still of their infancy, however the dissonance between users’ vocal disapproval and avid usage led to an inescapable conclusion contained in the company: regular people’s opinions about Facebook’s mechanics were best ignored. Users screamed “stop,” Facebook kept going, and all the pieces would work out dandy.
