Disruptive Conversations

Have you wondered why you haven't seen anything from certain friends on Facebook in a while? Have you thought perhaps some friends just aren't using Facebook any more? Maybe they are too busy? Have you been feeling like you've been seeing a lot of messages from a certain circle of people?

Guess what?

Facebook is filtering out many of your friends!

If you scroll down to the bottom of your NewsFeed and click the "Edit Options" button:

You will see the option "Show posts from":

With the option set by default to "Friends and pages you interact with most".

What this means is that if you don't "Like" or "Comment" on updates from a friend or a Page over a certain period of time... then updates from those friends and pages will STOP appearing in your NewsFeed.

The fix is, of course, to simply change the option to "All of your friends and pages".

To Be More Relevant?

I am guessing Facebook did this in order to help your NewsFeed "be the most relevant to you". After all, if you are interacting with certain friends and pages, it would make sense to show you their posts. But in my mind...

this is what the "Top News" link at the top of your NewsFeed should be for.

However, this default option removes people from your "Most Recent" NewsFeed as well as the "Top News".

Facebook is effectively disconnecting you from your friends, or, at least, the ones that don't write much or with whom you don't interact much.

The thing is that while I do interact with a certain subset of people, I enjoy reading updates from other people, particularly some who may not post updates all that often. I may not "Like" or "Comment" on them, but I enjoy reading them.

Screwing Page Owners Yet Again

Notice, too, that this is also for Facebook Pages. So if you are a company or organization that has invested time/energy/money in building out a Facebook Page... guess what? Many (most?) of the people who "Like" your Page are probably no longer seeing your updates! So it doesn't matter if you have 1,000 people who like your page, because maybe only the 20 that have either "Liked" or "Commented" on a recent item on your page will still be seeing updates from the Page appearing in their NewsFeed.

Nice going, Facebook.

The only good news for Facebook Page owners, I guess, is that you do have the ability to send out an "update" via a Facebook message to everyone who "Likes" your page. Of course, it shows up as an "update" type of message and may be ignored by many. But at least Facebook Page owners have a way to notify "Likers" that they may be missing any updates.

Facebook's Communication Black Hole

In typical Facebook style, I don't remember ever hearing about this change in settings. Was this perhaps a subtle change in the new profile layout that was forced upon all of us?

Did I miss some notification? I only learned of this setting when I saw a Facebook Note that was shared by a friend (Evan Leibovitch) who still does show up in my NewsFeed.

Why wouldn't Facebook default this the other way... and give me the option of enabling this filtering?

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