Facebook news feed: The algorithms, A/B tests, and surveying that make the social network so addictive [Slate]

Final paragraphs from a timely Facebook data mining reality check

"For a lot of people, the knowledge that Facebook’s computers are deciding what stories to show them—and which ones to hide—remains galling. Avid Twitter users swear by that platform’s more straightforward chronological timeline, which relies on users to carefully curate their own list of people to follow. But there’s a reason that Facebook’s engagement metrics keep growing while Twitter’s are stagnant. As much as we’d like to think we could do a better job than the algorithms, the fact is most of us don’t have time to sift through 1,500 posts on a daily basis. And so, even as we resent Facebook’s paternalism, we keep coming back to it.  

And just maybe, if Facebook keeps getting better at figuring out what we actually like as opposed to what we just Facebook-like, we'll start to actually like Facebook itself a little more than we do today."

Facebook news feed: The algorithms, A/B tests, and surveying that make the social network so addictive.