Facebook News Feed Settings: Random or Not, Biggest Secrets Revealed - The Daily Beast

Good post. (It’s from Oct 2010, though. But it’s probably still relevant) I’d noticed that I never see updates from certain friends and wondered why. Turns out: It’s complicated. And it’s completely up to Facebook’s filtering system.

Some highlights:

• Facebook Has a Bias Against Newcomers
• Facebook’s Catch-22: To get exposure on Facebook, you need friends to interact with your updates in certain ways
• “Most Recent” News Is Censored, Too.
• “Stalking” Your Friends Won’t Get You Noticed.
• Having Friends Who Stalk You WILL Help Your Popularity.
• Links Trump Status Updates.
• Photos and Videos Trump Links.
• The Power of Comments. If items you post attract comments from a few friends, it clearly raises your visibility overall.

This all kind of sucks, actually. I hate not seeing an update from one of my friends only to find out it’s because Facebook didn’t consider it IMPORTANT enough.