Oct 6, 2018
Something, Somewhere, Sometime
Okay, so obviously I have thoughts on all the political stuff that’s been happening, but I don’t really have anything to add to that conversation other than to once again point out that the party system should be done away with because tribalism (I used to say the two-party system but that implies that there is an x-party system that would somehow be better and there isn’t).
On to the subject at hand: Facebook has been in the news lately for being generally terrible in every way. Which is great. But what no one seems to be talking about is how Facebook has destroyed the space-time continuum.
This is stating the obvious, but I don’t have a lot of friends. So I find it pretty easy to catch up on my Facebook feed in a relatively short amount of time even if I check it just 2-3 times a day. Since I’m a completionist and like to know that I’m seeing every single thing, I use the “Most Recent” option for my “News Feed.” You might not even know this option exists; the “News Feed” defaults to sorting by “Top Stories,” so in order to get it to sort by most recent you have to click on the 3 dots next to “News Feed” on the sidebar and select “Most Recent.”
Now, this used to work pretty well. Any time I’d check Facebook I’d sort by most recent and scroll through until I hit something I’d already seen, and thus know that I’d covered everything that had been posted in the time between then and now. And then things started getting weird. A few years ago, I noticed that posts weren’t quite in exact chronological order. So a post from 4 hours ago might appear above a post from two hours ago. It was relatively uncommon, and seemed to rarely affect the ordering of posts I’d already seen, so it was basically just slightly reorganizing the posts I was looking at in a given interval without actually affect what I saw. Still, it was disconcerting.
Fast forward to today when I scrolled through posts from a few hours ago, then multiple posts from 1-3 days ago that I hadn’t seen when checking Facebook on any of those days, then getting to posts from 16 hours ago that I’d already seen, and then getting to posts from 1 hour ago. There is now no way to view Facebook posts in chronological order.
What I don’t get is, why? “Most Recent” was basically a power user option*, so why mess with it? I can guarantee you whatever algorithm is running this feature is a lot more complicated than “show all posts** in descending chronological order,”*** so it’s not like they’ve simplified or saved themselves work. I can only conclude that Facebook hates me and/or loves chaos.
But seriously, I do think this issue deserves some consideration. The “Most Recent” feature maybe wasn’t used by a whole lot of people, but it was at least an option, a way to make sure that Facebook was still anchored to definite chronology, and a way to make sure you weren’t just seeing what the algorithm wanted you to see. Now, the algorithm is the only reality, and since Facebook hasn’t signaled this change in any way (like by changing the name of the feature to “A Bunch of Posts from the Last Few Days in Seemingly Random Order and Also Some of Them We Were Maybe Just Not Showing You for Whatever So Get ‘Em While You Can Even Though You’ll Have to Dig Through A Bunch of Ads and Posts You’ve Already Seen To Find Them”) a lot of people, some of whom might even care, don’t even know it.****
*Power user options are optional features of software that the average consumer is unlikely to use, either because they don’t know how to or it wouldn’t significantly improve their experience. Given the more specialized nature of these features they are usually not advertised or visible within the basic interfaces of the software, often requiring the access of unobvious menus or submenus, or digging through “Advanced Settings” etc. These features are often not updated in future versions of the software, and might even be taken out to reduce size, performance requirements, permissions requirements, risk of the average consumer screwing something up, etc., with the knowledge that most users won’t complain about the missing feature because most users didn’t even know it was there. While I’m not necessarily a power user in most cases, I do support the inclusion of such features, and there are a few specific power user options that I’ve been a big fan of and gotten really annoyed when developers take them out or reduce their functionality. Such as the one I was writing about a paragraph-long footnote ago.
**Or, to be more accurate, actions, as the news feed also includes likes, comments, etc.
***I took a class on algorithm design and wrote a whole paper on sorting algorithms specifically, and sure, I don’t remember any of it, but that still means I definitely know what I’m talking about, like how attending Yale Law School thirty years ago means you’d be a great Supreme Court Justice despite your obvious partisanship, lack of even temperament, lack of good judgement, lack of honesty, lack of integrity, and obvious guilt(iness? I’ve lost track of the format a bit) of sexual assault. (Like I said, I have thoughts.)
****All of those scare quotes were intentional, nothing is as it seems.
Certain of Eventual Failure 