Welcome Back to the Facebook Newsfeed... and why this is great for Steemit

Zuck announced big changes that are coming to the Facebook newsfeed. He wrote:

We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That's why we've always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.

But recently we've gotten feedback from our community that public content -- posts from businesses, brands and media -- is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.

I saw an interesting headline about it on Inc. Goodbye, Facebook News Feed: 9 Things Publishers Need to Know About the News Feed Armageddon and I thought This isn't goodbye... this is WELCOME BACK!!! Of course, it may be that I was thinking about it as a consumer (as I usually use Facebook) and not as a marketer (as I occasionally use Facebook).

Remember when you first got on Facebook? You connected with friends and family. You tracked down your exes, traded a few messages, and never spoke to them again... well, or you married them like someone I know. And to post to the newsfeed you wrote in a box that displayed "David is" (but it would be your name and not mine). And do you remember the uproar when they removed "David is" from the textbox?!?

What went wrong?

Zuck continued:

It's easy to understand how we got here.

Um, yeah... there were big ad dollars from catering to publishers and other advertisers. BIG MONEY. And Facebook went after it. I don't blame Zuck or the rest of the team. They had both the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and a big financial interest in the company succeeding by making a lot of money off of the content we supply for free. (Yes, things are different here.) There's an old adage on the internet: If you're not paying for it you're not the customer, you're the product. That's the simple answer of what happened.

A quick sidenote: Statustalker

When Facebook apps first came out, I had an idea. It started because I was so frustrated that I couldn't comment on my friends' statuses. Really. You couldn't do it. I had to email them. It wasn't very soical. So a couple of buddies and I build an app called statustalker. (A pun between status talker and status stalker.) I guess Facebook liked the idea so much that it incorporated it into the newsfeed and the rest is history... as is statustalker.

How you can fix this yourself

Between (1) all of the stuff Facebook was trying to force on me and making it several clicks/taps to get to the reverse chronological order newsfeed and (2) all of the hate that pours in from the political echo chamber, I started tuning my newsfeed by unliking pages and changing the priority of friends in my feed.

Priorities for what shows up in your feed

See First: These should always appear in your newsfeed near the top.
Default: This lets Facebook's algorithm decide what you will see and in what order.
Unfollow: You'll still be friends with them but you'll never have to see their annoying posts again unless you willfully go to their page. And they'll never know.

What does this mean for Steemit?

Honestly, Steemit still is so small it won't mean much. And Steemit is structured more as a blogging platform like Medium than as a social network. Most posts here aren't personal except for when Steemians write about their passions. So it means that we can go to Facebook to see what our friends and family are up to and come to Steemit for everything that's going on in the world.