News Feed at Launch, and Today

Clive Thompson’s book titled Coders is about the people who write software (aka coders):

“Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet… The decisions they make guide our behavior. When they make something easy, we do a lot more of it. If they make it hard or impossible to do something, we do less of it.”

In other industries, there would have been some adult supervision. Not so in software, with its startups by kids still at college. Which is why his book delves at length at the amount of influence they increasingly wield on society. And the problems that arise because coders are overwhelmingly engineers. And guys. And white. And young without enough (any?) life experience…

 

We take Facebook’s News Feed for granted today (It’s the name for how info shows up on your Facebook page, one post below another etc). But in 2006, News Feed did not exist. You had to click on each of your friends’ name/page to see if they had posted anything new. Yikes!

 

An Indian, Ruchi Sanghavi, implemented the News Feed algorithm (In case you’re wondering, she had to come up with the algorithm to decide what to show on top? Whose posts did you care more about? etc). When it went live, writes Clive Thompson in his book:

“People hated it.”

“This sucks” was the most common reaction. Users started threatening to leave the site. Protest groups on Facebook were formed with names like “Ruchi is the Devil”. The problem wasn’t that her algorithm was bad and showed you irrelevant things. The issue, to quote one person was:

“Very few of us want everyone automatically knowing what we update. News Feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque.”

Yes, back then, people liked the idea that their updates weren’t immediately available to all their friends but only to those who clicked on their page. It gave them time to change their minds, to change a post. Hard to imagine, right?

 

Facebook thought about how to respond. One set wanted to remove the feature. Sanghavi didn’t (obviously):

“I’d just spent nine months of my life on this, and there was no damn way I was going to get rid of it.”

Luckily for her, Mark Zuckerburg felt users would get used to it. But he had to give in to his users on some front. So he gave them some privacy settings:

“He was right. The feed was unsettling and shocking, but it was also captivating. There was, it turns out, enormous value in seeing a little gazette of your friends’ doings.”

Today, News Feed’s “effects can be seen everywhere”. From influencing whose feeds you see to what kind of views you are shown to… of course, politically motivated content.

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