In my last post, I wrote about the shortcomings of email and why I think it should be replaced to reduce spam and misuse. Someone then commented that he found Facebook spam to be much more of a pain than email spam, considering that Gmail did a solid job of spam filtering. While the focus of my post was more on curbing misuse rather than spam, the comment got me thinking. First, I wondered how this guy got spam on Facebook. I never get any poorly written posts on my news feed or in my inbox begging me to buy some Viagra knockoff. Then, I realized that perhaps the commenter’s definition of spam is different than my own.
Within the past few days, my news feed has been jammed with these “numbers” posts. For the most part, it’s been people who I haven’t seen or talked to in years posting a status update with a number followed by a random out of context comment that makes no sense to me. It’s been getting so bad that one of my Facebook friends posted that he would defriend anyone that posted another “numbers” status update. While these people aren’t trying to sell me Viagra, the effect is the same as email spam: annoyance and frustration.
It’s no surprise that the top reason for defriending is “frequent, unimportant posts.” Others, as well as myself, are getting frustrated with junk like these “numbers” posts and are on the brink of defriending the perpetrators. To solve this, I propose FeedMod, a Facebook news feed moderation system to remove the garbage and push the good stuff to the top.
Disclaimer
I have absolutely zero experience with the Facebook API, so I have no idea how much of this is possible. We’ll see.
How it works
My proposal is to borrow from the Slashdot moderation system. Facebook already has a “like” button, but it’s inconclusive that by clicking it, similar posts will be given priority in the news feed. There is also an “x” for each post, but clicking this seems heavy-handed, since it appears to blot out most posts from that particular friend. Instead, FeedMod participants will moderate each post with a positive, neutral, or negative descriptor. The results of this moderation is to flush out the good posts and hide the bad ones.
Unlike the Slashdot system, every news feed post can always be moderated by a FeedMod user. With Slashdot, the goal is to have publicly acceptable posts float to the top, hence the need for randomly selected moderators to avoid gaming the system. With FeedMod, however, the goal is to have posts acceptable to individual users float to the top, so users should be able to moderate everything in order to provide as much training information as possible. Perhaps later the moderation can extend across groups of friends so that certain Facebook users can be recognized as having posts liked or disliked by all of their friends.
Label each post as good, bad, or neutral
I would keep all the positive Slashdot post descriptors: informative, insightful, interesting, and funny. I would keep one neutral descriptor, such as “normal” or “neutral.” Also, I would modify the negative descriptors from what is used on Slashdot so that they are more appropriate for social networking and individual preferences: out of context, spam, unintelligible, and troll. Most news feed posts that annoy me either fall into the “unintelligible” or “out of context” categories: posts that make no sense due to poor writing skills or lack of background information since I don’t live every minute of my life with the poster. Stuff like the “numbers” posts would fall into the “spam” category and posts from friends looking to incite others (usually politics) would get labeled “troll.”
Customized News Feed
As a FeedMod user labels each news feed post with a descriptor, the news feed becomes customized to the user’s preferences. This is the tricky part, because I’m not sure if the Facebook API will allow me to rip out the text of each post and store it in a database. If I’m able to do that, I can try to model a user’s feed preferences based on the friends they mod as mostly positive or negative and the likelihood that a new post from a particular friend will be acceptable. I could go a step further and find keywords or topics that are found in good and bad posts, allowing new posts to be shown or hidden in the feed based on their content.
If all else fails, defriend
I should definitely be able to rank a user’s friends by the number of positive, neutral, and negative posts. That way, after a few weeks of modding posts in the news feed, a user can have a top 5 and bottom 5 list of the most liked and most offensive friends. Then, the user can just defriend those bottom 5 and see an increase in the news feed quality. There can also be rankings by each specific positive or negative descriptor as well as ranking by post volume.
What’s Next?
When time permits, I’ll try to figure out what the Facebook API is capable of and hopefully be able to attach moderation descriptors to each news feed post. With that, I’ll be able to find the friends whose posts I like the most as well as the least. Learning preferences will be more difficult, especially if the API has limitations on what can be accessed in a user’s news feed. Why Facebook hasn’t already implemented a better news feed moderation system is beyond me. I’m sure they’ve at least considered it.
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