How to Improve the Facebook Newsfeed
Towards a more humane social-capital slot machine
2020 Note: I originally wrote this in 2018. Nowadays, I think that the biggest problem with social media is the emphasis on individuality and the corresponding lack of tools for communal accounts and expression. For instance, one can imagine multiparty posts that attribute authorship, or multi-party comments, or posts where the discussion is only open for a certain time each day.
Refresh the Facebook newsfeed too many times in a row and you’ll come into contact with the oleaginous feeling of capitalism. It’s the same feeling you can get when you see nothing you like on Netflix, when you walk into a supermarket with fluorescent lights, or when you inhale the toxic gas (aka the “smell”) in a new car.
This feeling is the product of being on the downstream end of what I call “denovation,” or frustrating incremental improvements that weren’t made with your well-being in mind. It’s the feeling that you are being used on some level while enjoying the process on another. And it is usually worse if the company is publicly traded. Look — if Netflix really cared about you, they wouldn’t have uploaded Marvel’s IronFace to their servers.¹
As for the component of the oleaginous feeling specific to Facebook (FB), I suspect that this is…
