3. TIL Mark Zuckerberg said a voting mechanism that says whether posts are good or ...

TIL Mark Zuckerberg said a voting mechanism that says whether posts are good or bad is 'not something that we think is good for the world'

There are 2 issues at play here. One is the ability to express an opinion about a particular post. I get the logic behind only providing a positive mechanism.

The other issue is the filter and ranking mechanism. Voting mechanisms provide some level of a meritocracy for content. Popular content rises to the top, the rest falls. Facebook's algorithms for determining what you see does not take direct input from users at all but instead tries to determine that input based on behavior around postings.

Case in point. A few months ago I shared an image (original content) with a couple sentences of description on my page, it got reshared by some friends and was ultimately shared by a single user with a ton of followers and received on the order of half a million likes, all still connected to my original posting (i.e. not copied and pasted and essentially a new posting that would loose logical links back to me). You'd think that my friends and certainly my followers (I still dont get what Facebook's aim with the concept of followers is) would see this posting due to its popularity, but no. No one seems to be able to figure out how Facebook's filtering and promotion models work.

Facebook retains complete control over not only the algorithm which controls this but all inputs to it as well.

This really impacts Facebook's usability as a tool and has forced it to take a backseat to other more immediate tools like Twitter. Many Facebook users are unaware of this.

A National Weather Service office did a test a few months back where they put a test message out on their Facebook page and asked folks to give them feedback on when and if they saw the message. Responses were all over the map. Some saw it immediately, some saw it days later, some never saw it at all despite following this page and having past interactions with it (posting there and/or sharing content on their own pages). Bottom line, Facebook retains all the control and changes it frequently. They are not interested providing any conduit for users to influence what you see in your feed.

/r/todayilearned Thread Link - techcrunch.com
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