Facebook users - did this most recent move on Facebook's part (Trending) make any sense? To me, it makes it far less useful.
Late last week, Facebook changed the ‘Trending’ box (upper right).
It used to say a news headline in bold, like “Volcano erupts near Hawaii” and then follow it with a sentence or two of summary, so as to give some clue what the story was about. It also gave a count of how many people were reading the referred article.
Last week’s change shortened the headline – it might now say “Volcano”. They got rid of the explanatory sentence, and only show the word ‘trending’, for example: ‘56K people are talking about this’.
What a waste. It is utterly immaterial to me how many people are talking about one thing or another. Dropping the sentence that gave context – Do I really want to read this? – is, to me, a huge loss.
I know Facebook is free and they can do anything they want, but this seems even more boneheaded than some of the other things they have done.
Have you noticed?
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When you hover on the trending topic, it displays a balloon with a fuller explanation. I hadn’t really noticed the change and have never found the Trending stuff particularly useful.
There was that brouhaha a month or so ago about Trending skewing moroe to liberal news but mine has never particularly displayed political news. The change may be related to that but the vagaries of FB are always a mystery.
I hardly pay attention to the “trending” tab, so I’m really not sure I could be more ambivalent about this change.
@si3tech It is actually not censoring, it is the opposite. Trending Topics is now governed by an algorithm.
I didn’t notice that section in the first place, and only knew about it because someone pointed it out to me.
But yes, what you say makes a lot of sense.
Sadly, for many decades (at least) there has been a line of thought of some people that popularity or perceived popularity is worthwhile and fascinating and somehow good and worthy of magnifying the attention something actually has, regardless of its merit or, as we see here, even bothering to distinguish its actual content.
I think you’re right to point to this Facebook example as excessively mindless and foolish and practically meaningless. Facebook has many things that are mindless and foolish and practically meaningless.
Haha. Nuclear Blasts. Yeah, I can see how that could be a bit disconcerting—until you click open the article:
“Above-ground nuclear blasts were banned by a treaty signed between the US and Great Britain on this date in 1963.”
^ See, my first thought would have been related to the record label, Nuclear Blast.
Not relevant to above question but Facebook is playing all the cards to woo more and more people to increase its revenue.. like the contact info sharing from WhatsApp to FB which it initially said it won’t but did it eventually .
I don’t like it and I’m less likely to click on it and screw up my place in the scrolling feed.
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