Do you trust the Facebook algorithm to serve you the information you really want or need? I pose this question because I’ve noticed that some posts on this page are getting extremely low numbers. The low numbers may stem in part from the posting hiatus I took recently but, nonetheless, the discrepancy between posts that get viewed and those that don’t is greater than it has ever been in my experience. Take, for example, the gap between the over 4,000 views that a post about fashion in Kumamoto got vs. the 18 views (as of this writing) for a post about an actual party that is going to be held tonight. The fashion post got a lot of views largely because several people decided to share it. That makes sense to me. On the other hand the mere 18 views for a post about an actually event that people in Kumamoto might choose to attend troubles me. Even though over 1,000 people have chosen to “like” (subscribe to?) this page, Facebook’s algorithm seems to have decided that most of them don’t need to be shown certain posts.
The “people reached” numbers in the images are only shown to page owners and moderators. As a Facebook user, I think it’s important to understand that what you wind up viewing depends to a very large extent on what Facebook’s algorithm decides to show you. If you want to make sure that you don’t miss anything, you can choose to get notified whenever a post is made but, well, in this age of information overload, how many people will be willing to do that?
Thanks for reading this. Sorry to carp. I just wanted to share my thoughts about what to me feels like the whimsical, hit-and-miss nature of the Facebook world.
– Kirk
P.S. I happen to be a fan of RSS. RSS shows me the headings for all of the posts of the feeds I’m subscribed to. I only actually read a very small percentage of the items (blog posts, news articles, etc) but I know that I have scanned everything. Personally, I prefer RSS to Facebook because I feel like I have more control over what I choose to read and what I choose to skip.