Facebook regularly makes changes to user agreements and it’s platform that outrage it’s user community. But somehow most people don’t leave the mammoth social site.
Here’s a look back to an interesting Post from September of 2011 on the CNN Tech blog.
Here we go again.Facebook has made big changes to users’ pages, and people are responding in droves with their metaphorical “dislike” buttons.
News Feeds were popping with not-so-gentle complaints Wednesday as many of the social-networking behemoth’s 750 million users began seeing the overhaul.
“This is absolutely the worst of the many wrong-headed ‘improvements’ you have made, and that’s quite a feat,” a user named Franklin Habit wrote on the site’s official Facebook page. “I think Facebook’s usefulness to me has now been outstripped by its lack of ease in use.”
Others were more succinct.
“This sucks,” wrote user Brandon Howell. “That is all.”
To be fair, griping about Facebook changes is a time-honored hallmark of the site. Change is hard for some people, and users grumble every time Facebook revamps their pages.
And it’s perhaps a touch on the ironic side that many of the current complaints are coming from folks who, in turn, complained in December when the current format was rolled out. Or the time before. And the time before that.
Which isn’t to say that the changes aren’t pretty dramatic.
Instead of defaulting to your friends’ most recent posts, the News Feed (which people hated when it was introduced) is now topped in many cases by what Facebook calls “Top Stories” for you. It uses an algorithm that combines such factors as which friends you interact with most and which friends’ posts have the most comments and “likes” on them.
That algorithm, of course, was in its infancy on Wednesday, leading many users to say the top stories that Facebook suggested were random, at best.
“The ‘top stories’ needs to be gotten rid of,” wrote user Kristy Montaney. “They’re out of context and I want to check my News Feed from most recent to oldest, none of this ‘top stories’ stuff.”
In a post on The Facebook Blog, developer Mark Tonkelowitz said the idea is to help people who may not log in to the site all the time find the best content, not just the newest.
“Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper,” he wrote. “You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top.”
