Here's a thought I've been having.
One of the things that Twitter does right is it allows you to customize and subdivide your news feed. If you want to make a list of only people you actually know, you can do that. If you want to have a list of just feminist film critics, you can do that. If you want to have a list of just ginsing growers in Laos, you probably can do that (assuming that there are actually ginsing growers in Laos with twitter accounts, which would not surprise me in the slightest). Google plus has something similar, allowing you to add accounts to one or more custom-made circles that you can check independently. Facebook, though, is all or nothing. There used to be an option to set a given contact to more or less frequent appearances on your wall, but those controls seem to be removed, and instead we see what the FB sorting algorithm thinks we want to see. There are no options that I can find to create specialty lists, and the only option to affect the frequency of a particular poster appearing on your wall is to block their posts entirely, in which case, you might as well not be following them. (You also can set your FB to show most recent posts rather than top posts, but I find that it seems to reset itself frequently, and that the result is flooded by even more garbage posts from pages you liked once four years ago and forgot about)
Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, Facebook's algorithm is designed to serve the dual masters of telling us what our friends are doing and making money for Facebook, to the detriment of the former. In particular, the feed prioritizes high-engagement content with lots of likes and shares. Among a group of friends, this might lead to more people seeing important posts like engagement announcements and the like. When a user follows both friends and other pages, however, the balance seems to become badly skewed toward pages. It's hard for anyone I know in real life to compete with Cracked and The Lion King and Al Jazeera English for post engagement, meaning that the people I actually know and care about are buried beneath posts from national and international pages. Furthermore, even posts from popular pages are filtered by their engagement. Felicia Day has blogged about the problems this causes for her - that it incentivizes her to post things tailored for higher traffic (read: pictures of her being attractive) and makes it harder for views - artistic, social, intellectual - to compete with 'mainstream' views; in effect, Facebook becomes an enforcer of the societal status quo. And that's a problem.
I've noticed this on my own page. Many of my friends, especially from high school or college, have not made an appearance on my FB wall in months or years. Those posts that do appear tend to be high-traffic posts about weddings and job changes, and while I appreciate being alerted to these life milestones, that doesn't mean I'm not interested in all the other things these people are posting. My feed instead is largely populated by posts from different media pages and celebrities, including currently the first 8 posts on my wall. (I should mention that Facebook does have an option to show most recent posts rather than top posts, but I find that it seems to reset itself to top posts, and that the result is flooded by even more garbage posts from pages you liked once four years ago and forgot about. Just because I'm dissatisfied with the FB filter doesn't mean I care to have no filter at all.) Worse, because many of these are in fact posts that I find interesting, I often click on them, telling Facebook that they should show posts like this on my wall even more often. This is why NPR and AJEnglish show up ever dozen posts or so, and why I had to unlike Haaretz a month or two back, a few weeks after liking them in the first place; they posted so frequently, and were so frequently placed in my news feed, that they choked out nearly every other kind of content on my feed.
And here's the thing: by and large, the content that Facebook is popping onto my newsfeed is interesting stuff. The reason NPR and AJEnglish show up so frequently is because they frequently post content that I want to read. That's what makes this tricky; if Facebook was simply saturating me with crap from people and things I don't care about, I could just unfriend/unfollow them and move on. What I've come to realize, though, is that while I can get these high-traffic links and posts and information from any number of sources, I can only get the social information my friends post to Facebook in one place, and that's Facebook.
Because despite my frustration with Facebook, it remains far and away the best option as far as the 'social' part of social media goes. Google plus has some nifty features, but fewer by far than the much more fleshed-out Facebook, and in any case only half a dozen or so of my friends actually post there on a regular basis. I've said before about Twitter that it is a service for the transmission of information from popular people (not me) to not-popular people (me); while I appreciate the granularity Twitter allows with who and how you follow, it has much less to offer as far as actually interacting with people. Most people, at least who I follow, tend to use Twitter for much more inconsequential things, too; while I get a lot of funny jokes and snarky observations via Twitter, rarely do I see anything from my friends that merits actual intellectual or emotional engagement expressed in 140 characters or less. Tumblr would be helpful if it had an option to just search for posts by the person instead of just looking at all the content from someone else that they've reposted, YouTube only has content from people with the determination and know-how to shoot and edit movies, and all these and many more share the fundamental weakness of low population: only Facebook is used consistently by all or nearly all of the people I actually want to pay attention to.
So I've been considering two options. The first that came to mind is to split my Facebook presence; create a new page for all my 'follows' - the news sites, the celebrity accounts, even the movies and books (which I would regret, since having those on your page is a useful part of how you define yourself on social media, but I don't know that it would be worth going through and individually setting to blocked every movie, book, band and TV show that I've ever liked is worth the trouble). This has the advantage of continuity, since no other source will have all the same information that I find interesting on my current Facebook page. The disadvantage is that it would be more of a pain to check, since it would involve logging in/logging out each time.
The second would be to kill off all the non-friend content on my Facebook and move all of that elsewhere - most likely Twitter. The advantage is that Twitter, as noted above, allows you to create your own follow lists and that most groups posting on Facebook will also be posting on Twitter. The disadvantages are that unless I want to make a lot of very specific lists or port only a fraction of my Facebook page follows over, I'll wind up with an unmanageably large list, and without the problematic but still impressive sorting algorithm of Facebook, I'd more likely miss things I would find important. Too, even companies and celebrities that post both to Facebook and Twitter generally post more fleshed-out and informative content on Facebook, simply as a function of not having a character limit.
One way or another, though, I want to restore my primary Facebook page to being primarily about keeping in touch with actual people. The other day, I was inspired to check to see how many of the people who'd been in the cast of a musical I performed in during high school were still friends on Facebook. The answer? Three. While the number probably was never enormous - I didn't even get on Facebook until the summer after that performance - it definitely used to be higher than three. Perhaps if Facebook had kept me in the loop on their lives, and they on mine, we wouldn't have reached a point where one or the other saw no value in continuing the 'friendship' as manifested on Facebook. It's now been three years since I graduated college; I'd rather not look in four more years and see that the number of friends remaining from some of my college activities have also dwindled to three. Facebook can help me prevent that, but it won't do it on its own. First, I have to make some decisions about what Facebook can do for me and how to make sure that I'm getting the information I need - as opposed to want - from my social experience.
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