Facebook insiders have admitted that it is. Mike Allen, Facebook's first president, said this in an interview:
“The thought process was all about, ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’,” he said. “And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments. It’s a social validation feedback loop. … You’re exploiting a vulnerabilty in human psychology.”
So that underscores their general attitude towards user behavior. The 'every once in a while' piece applies to the newsfeed too - it's designed to keep you searching for things you care about, and they carefully mix in things you don't, so that you're never too satisfied or unsatisfied, just constantly craving more.
Source (a slightly clickbaity-looking place, go at your own risk): https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...
Does that give it less weight or more weight? It's hard to see what you were going for here.
That quote reminds me of Louis CK's interview with Conan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c) where he says about mobile phones:
"You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product... and then you die."
There's almost always at least a software developer (or technical person of some sort) calling out "Hey, are you sure we should rank by $X? It will have this edge case in situations $Y and $X?". Usually they get steamrolled by a "product" person who's invented some new terminology for whatever shady shit they are pushing now. "It's just growth hacking" "complimentary contextually relevant ads will improve the user experience".
People know. They always know. They just choose to feign ignorance when they get busted.
There's been hand-wringing about Youtube funnelling users to extremist content, and it always comes to down to "the algorithm" as if there's nothing that can be done about it.
Someone had to choose to implement the algorithm. Someone had to choose the metrics it was optimized to meet. Someone had to go, "Children are being drawn to extremist videos after watching PewDiePie and that's okay."
It's also why Twitter wants to 'curate' your timeline, instead of simply displaying tweets from people you follow in temporal order.
I've given up every platform that forwent the chronological timeline because other feed algorithms are just frustrating, and Twitter is the only one I miss.
I've turned off the "show best tweets first" option, and I stick with using Tweetbot. But, like most people seem to indicate here, about Facebook (which I don't use at all), my continued use hangs by a thread. It wouldn't take much for me to cancel my account. Again.
As far as I can tell, Twitter doesn't hide anything from, instead showing me tweets from people I don't follow.
Other networks I watch, they still do the same thing. On the NHL Network, you'll see a story about a big trade coming up and they will continue to shuffle it down during commercial breaks until its one of the last stories they cover before the end of the broadcast. It's the same thing with highlights. You'll see your team's game in the left hand column like they're about to show the highlights. Come back from a commercial break and suddenly two more stories have shifted above your local team's highlights. Same thing with several ESPN shows like PTI (Pardon the Interruption).
It can be incredibly frustrating to watch sometimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planogram
You always want dairy and fruits/vegetables on opposite sides of the store since they’re perishable, hence they get purchased the most often, and you want people to walk past all the other aisles every time.
