Facebook Is Culling More Of Your Feed Than You Think!!!

We need to stop depending on Facebook for our news.

Did you know that Facebook Is Culling More Of Your Feed Than You Think!!! We all know they're filtering out ~80% of what we subscribe to, but it seems like they're now even filtering out some of the pages they deign to even show us now.

It seems obvious that despite all their pitches about looking out for you, Facebook Could Really Give A Sh* About You

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Do you remember when Facebook finally pulled the trending topics column a few weeks/months ago? Well, that trending column would have come in handy the other day when there was a shooting in Houston. But when I first got wind of this, I jumped on Facebook and instead of finding any information about the shooting, my Facebook feed was hard at work filtering what I saw and I had zero posts about the shooting because it was full of useless humor, animal images and cute videos. But NOT ONE WORD about the shooting that was being covered by every media outlet outside of Facebook.

How's that good? Even though I've liked and follow news pages, their posts did not show up in my feed, at all. Facebook's algorithm has fully filtered them from me.

But wait, it gets better. Much better.

We all know that Facebook filters our feeds so we only get updates from sites/pages we interact with. It seems that we may only see about 10-20% of the posts of the pages you subscribe to and the people you friend and follow.  Go ahead, check your list of pages you liked and see how many you haven't seen any updates from lately.

Well, it gets worse than that.

The other day I saw a post of one the pages I actively interact. I interact with it so I would not miss any posts. But on this one day, for some reason I not only interacted with the post in my feed, but I went off to the page itself.

To my surprise I found that Facebook was even filtering posts from the page I liked and was getting updates from. I found that this FB page had many more posts than I've been seeing. After going through the page's stream, it seemed that Facebook has only been showing me one out of every four or five posts from this page. In fact I went back to the page today while writing this piece and found that 25 posts have been published since the last one I saw, but I never saw them in my feed.

W.T.F. Facebook?

So let's get this straight...

I've subscribed to pages and interact with them but only see 10-20% of their posts?

Our feeds are being actively filtered to the point where we only see at most, 20% of what we follow, like or who we friend. Yes... even our friends.

To top that off, when you are a FB Page admin, all you get are spam feed notices and emails from Facebook about how if you spend money with FB, x more people can see your post or page. But all I see is that if I send money to FB, only 20% of x people will see my feed.

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I knew that FB filtered my feeds, but when all the news stations I follow DID NOT SHOW up on my feed when there was huge news going on was surprising. Well, I have another word for it, but it's not a nice word. Had I had my trending topics column on FB, I would have seen the news. But instead, I have to go outside of FB to get news.

Not only am I OK with going outside Facebook for news, I'm thinking I need to stop depending on FB to give me any kind of relevant information from the day's news. At one point, I thought I was at least seeing all posts from pages I was seeing, but I have been lied to. Or at least my expectations were highly disappointed.

But can we stop using Facebook for a better service?

Unfortunately Facebook has worked hard to dig their digital fingers deep into our lives, having us friend so many people that leaving FB would be a detriment to some of our lives. But to be honest, Facebook is really nothing but a big ME Book. Sure, we stay in touch with each other this way, but there are other ways. But it may be too late to change up how we socialize with each other online.

But there is always hope. AOL came and went. My Space died. But I think FB took its lessons from their failures and have tried to build their customer base accordingly, as they tease users to be friends, make friends, suggesting friends or 'people you may know,' as we all connect to each other, and thus, our profiles, making our info fodder for FB's advertisers. Face it, Facebook is a free platform to us, yet it makes billions. You do the math and connect the dots between us and their advertisers.

I won't even go into how the app hears what we say around our phones then starts pitching ads based on our conversations to us. (Yes, it's happened too many times to count now.)

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Comments

  1. As an independent author it’s incredibly frustrating to be at the mercy of the Facebook algorithm. It’s pay-per-view or live in obscurity. And then when you do pay for an ad, they quickly get routed to their third-party platforms appearing on dumb mobile games, etc, where if they’re clicked they’re clicked out of annoyance rather than like. As you point out, the service Facebook provides is highly curated, but people don’t seem to notice :(

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