https://twitter.com/Hellchick/status/942863353403150336 tl;dr, "my friend died but Facebook hid the post from me so I had no idea." Facebook employees, how does the company react internally when it fails to meet its mission? Do people feel bad? Does it inspire teams to do better? Does anyone even hear about incidents like these? Does anyone care? This isnt a new problem, fwiw. People have been reporting this kind of algorithmic information theft for a long time. Is anyone actively working on this?
The worst part is FB pushes you the stuff you've already read again and again. So you keep refreshing the feed and its all the same, but apparently there is a whole bunch of staff they just don't show you no matter how eager you are to read.
Do people feel bad about incidents like these? Yes. Does it inspire them to do better? Yes. Is anyone working on this? Yes. Lots of people work on news feed ranking. They're hiring in Seattle, Menlo Park, and NYC in case you want to help. It's not a new problem but it's a subtle, difficult problem.
There's a close friends feature. There's a "See First" feature. There's a feature that allows you to create lists of friends and with one click, see all posts related to them. It seems the author didn't use any of these features. But that's okay. You're still supposed to see posts from friends you've interacted a lot with near the top of the feed. That's the only signal FB has on whether you're close to someone or not, apart from you specifically saying so. The author also says: "Now, I'm a meticulous FB feed peruser. I always set it to Most Recent and browse until I see the stuff I saw last time. I keep up." Could that be what caused them to miss the post in the first place? If you're always setting your feed to Most Recent you make it harder for Facebook to gather signal on what's most important to you. Plus, although they say they "always browse until the stuff they saw the last time," we all know the chances that they do that 100% of the time are pretty low. Maybe they missed the post that way? I don't know why/how they missed it. It is definitely sad and I wish it had turned out differently.
Is a signal really required to indicate that somebody should be notified of a high priority post? Everyone wants to know if a friend is in the hospital, or suicidal, or otherwise needs help, no signal required. That should be the default. This is a circumstance where the algorithm should be bypassed.
How do you expect it to identify which posts are "high priority"?
If the first response is to blame the user, you've already failed. You have to do the right action regardless of how the user behaves. Systems need to fail gracefully, right?
Wow, thanks for sharing. the stories are scathing. Hospitalizations, being shot in Vegas, PTSD/ suicidal and help seeking. Facebook should have a close friends override for feed.
Sounds like they didn't use the feature.
That needs to be default behavior, not something that a user has to configure. Anything else is antisocial.