While Facebook provides a “like” button to indicate approval of news feed posts, there is no indication that this feature is used to filter news feed content.  Facebook does provide an option to block news feed posts of designated friends, but this is a very coarse grained filter.  More recently, Facebook presented an interesting analysis of news feed posts.  This study identifies post topics that are more likely to be “liked” or commented on by friends as well as identifying post topics that are correlated with high friend  counts.  While the Facebook study analyzes post content, it only compares against metrics inherent to Facebook itself, such as “likes” per post, number of comments per post, age of posters, and friend counts.  The study neither attempts to quantify the news feed topic preferences of Facebook users, nor does it attempt to identify a Facebook user’s best or worst friends based on friends’ news feed posts.

Design

As previously mentioned, the main idea is for each FeedMod user to moderate each news feed post in a manner similar to Slashdot post moderations.  Each news feed post is assigned a moderation which consists of an integer value score and descriptor string.  For this experiment, I chose the following moderations:

Value	Descriptor	Examples
-2	Troll	Rants or politically charged arguments; I really can't stand these, hence the -2
-1	Spam	Advertisements, such as requests to attend an event, donate money, or to come to a friend's place of business to buy something
-1	Redundant	Endless duplicate announcements, typically on holidays and birthdays
-1	Indifferent	Stuff I really don't care about, such as random song lyrics or sports posts about teams that I don't follow
-1	Unintelligible	Something posted out of context, usually by someone with whom I'm out of touch
0	Normal	I assign my posts to this, otherwise I use it rarely
+1	Funny	Self explanatory, but I found myself only using it when I was about to fall out of my chair laughing
+1	Insightful	Anything that gives insight into the highlights of a friend's life or a well formed argument on a topic
+1	Informative	Usually updates on what someone is doing
+1	Inquisitive	Someone posing a question to his or her friends
+2	Interesting	Usually news articles or a post about something I hadn't heard of or thought about before (these posts are the best, hence the +2)

By moderating the status updates of all of my Facebook friends, I am then able to assign a score to each friend based on those moderations.  I can even moderate status update comments made by friends and non-friends alike.  The score, similar to Slashdot’s “karma,” is created by summing the moderation values for all of a friend’s posts.  In this way, I can see the balance of how positive or negative a friend’s posts tend to be.  The advantage of this method is that friends with a large number of good or bad posts will stick out.

Implementation and Facebook API

My original idea was to use the Facebook API to modify the news feed and allow me to moderate friends’ posts.  A month ago when I started this, I had no experience with the Facebook API and did not know if it would even allow me to do such a thing.  While I did achieve what I wanted in being able to moderate friends’ posts, I can say conclusively that the Facebook API is seriously lacking.  I have two major issues with the API: 1) an inability to customize the Facebook website, forcing developers to reinvent the wheel for even the smallest applications, and 2) limited access to information easily accessed on the main Facebook website.

What I really wanted to do was to be able to modify the existing Facebook news feed and insert a moderation select list next to each status update.  When a FeedMod user selected a moderation, the post-moderation pair would be stored in a database.  Unfortunately, Facebook does not allow developers to modify any portion of the Facebook website, including the news feed.  It would be much easier if Facebook allowed this since I wouldn’t have to recreate the entire news feed.  This lack of customization is a serious barrier to developers who have an idea for a simple application that makes use of the existing Facebook website.

The Facebook API does, however, allow you to query status updates and friend information for use on your own website.  What I learned was that apps within Facebook are actually remote websites running within an iframe on the main Facebook website.  Unfortunately, Facebook limits the information you can get: news feed items are restricted to status updates, links, videos, and photos — you cannot retrieve time ordered taggings, newly added friends, profile picture updates, and likes, among other things.

Interface

While I found the Facebook API disappointing, I was able to recreate the Facebook news feed on my own webserver, using the Facebook PHP toolkit.  Finally, with a database backend to store moderations, I was able to produce a customized news feed with the ability to moderate friends’ posts:

News Feed with Moderation Select Lists

To the right of each status update, I included a select list to moderate the post.  I also display the current moderation total for the friend, the friend’s moderated post count, and the percentile rank out of all friends (the friend with the most negative moderation total is 0%, the most positive is 100%).  This way, at a quick glance it is easy to see how many good or bad posts a friend has made to date.

I also created a statistics page, which ranks friends by the number of posts as well as lists of the top ten best and worst friends based on their moderation totals.  I also breakdown the moderation total and display the leaders of each moderation attribute (for example, who has the most “spam” posts).

Evaluation

After finishing the implementation, I then moderated posts for a month and now present an analysis of the results.  During a one month period, I moderated over 2,000 posts with 250 individual posters.  Some other interesting tidbits:

• 67% of my friends posted at least once within this one month period
• 64% of all moderated posters were friends; the remaining are non-friends commenting on a friend’s post
• 93% of all moderated posts were made by friends

Here is a breakdown of all moderated posts by their assigned attributes:

Moderation attributes by percentage of all moderated posts.

From the figure, a clear majority of posts are positive, while 35% are negative.  Out of all negative posts, the “indifferent” and “unintelligible” categories are used the most.  On the whole, I find most posts that I don’t like to be something I don’t care much about (and don’t want to read) or something that I don’t understand (usually it’s something taken out of context), hence the pervasiveness of the “indifferent” and “unintelligible” categories.  The “informative” category dominates the positive posts, followed by “insightful” and “interesting.”  My experience is that a significant number of posts (almost 40% to be exact) are status updates announcing what a particular friend is doing.  While most of these are mundane, I don’t really find them to be bothersome, hence the positive score.

Next, we look at how many posts each Facebook friend created during my one month evaluation:

Most friends post very little, but a few post all the time.

This figure shows the number of posts made by each friend that posted at least once.  A little less than 40% of my friends posted once, while about 3% posted more than 40 times in the past month.  One friend posted almost 120 times, or roughly four times per day!  Clearly, my news feed is dominated by posts from the same handful of friends.

Next, we look at the distribution of moderation scores across all of my Facebook friends:

Most of my friends have slightly positive moderation scores.

This figure shows that most of my Facebook friends (the ones that posted at least once) have a slightly positive moderation total. Since most of my friends do not post very much, the lack of extreme scores makes sense.  A small number of friends have very bad or very good scores — 3% have have a total less than -6 and another 3% have a total score greater than +20.  Those 3% that have the worst scores clearly stand out from the majority of my friends and are definitely good candidates for defriending.  Conversely, the top 3% go a long way in keeping my news feed enjoyable.

Lastly, we look at both post count and moderation total:

Friends that post more tend to be more positive, but there are some outliers.

Here, we see the quantity and quality of posts made by each Facebook friend.  Some friends have identical (post count, moderation total) values, hence the z-axis indicating the number of overlapping friends.  Like the previous two figures, this shows that most friends have slightly positive moderation totals and low post counts.  It also appears as though friends with higher post counts tend to be more positive.  However, there are some friends that buck the trend and have very negative scores for relatively high post counts (as identified previously, these are the ones that should be defriended).

Conclusions and Future Work

After struggling with the limitations of the Facebook API, I was able to implement a moderation system for Facebook news feed posts. This moderation system quantifies the contributions of each friend to the news feed and clearly identifies the friends with very good and very bad posts.  Using this system, it is possible to filter the news feed based on friends’ moderation scores as well as filter the news feed based on previous moderation of similar content.  It is also possible to extend the moderation system across a user’s social network, identifying friends whose posts are well liked by everyone.

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.

I’ve found many of these infographics to be packed with spelling and grammatical errors.  For example, try to find the error in this visualization of U.S. debt holders.  With enormous font sizes and few words, any spelling or grammatical error really stands out.  Such easily identifiable problems make me question the integrity of the statistics (and implicit arguments) these infographics present.  Where did the data come from and how reliable are the sources?  Many infographics do not provide references, so how am I to know that it isn’t just some ten year old kid making this stuff up?  What if multiple sources produce conflicting results?  In such cases, it’s almost guaranteed that the infographic creator just picked the result/data that best furthered his or her argument.  Lastly, what information is not presented?  When reading an infographic, I always wonder if I am seeing the whole picture.  With so little information actually presented, I have no doubt that most of these infographics leave out plenty, especially stuff that hurts the creator’s argument.

I admit that infographics pique my interest in a subject to which I haven’t given much thought.  However, with minimal content and questionable integrity, they may be no more than chartjunk.

The prevailing attitude of drivers comes in two flavors.  First, they argue that the speed differential is too great to make cycling safe.  This may be true, but shouldn’t drivers be paying enough attention to deal with any potential obstacles?  Any driver should prepare to see a downed tree around the next corner or be aware that an oncoming car could turn left in front of him.  As a cyclist and driver, I think about these things constantly on the road, but it seems that most drivers do not.  Despite being the most dangerous method of transportation, most drivers think that accidents happen to other people but not to them.

The second argument is that cyclists do not obey the traffic laws.  Several of the comments in the above article whine about cyclists blowing through lights and turning in front of cars.  I admit I started out as one of the cyclist mavericks drivers complain about.  It wasn’t long before I realized that if I wanted to stay alive, I couldn’t just go through a light despite the lack of cross traffic.  A car I couldn’t see would more than likely appear out of nowhere.  Even as I follow the rules, plenty of cars come out of nowhere and now I pretty much expect oncoming cars to turn in front of me and to pull out in front of me when I approach an intersection.

There seems to be a double standard when it comes to drivers and cyclists.  If I so much as tear through a yellow light, someone will yell or honk.  I could almost guarantee that driver probably blew through several red lights himself in the past week.  Just sit at a busy intersection in Virginia Beach and just count the cars that go through red lights, turn right on red without stopping, or don’t use their turn signal.  I’ll bet that within a few minutes there would be more violations than those performed by all cyclists in the city for that day.

An ad-hoc report linked from the Freakonomics blog seems to back this up: in studying over 2,500 cyclist-involved accident reports, vehicles were at fault more than 90 percent of the time.  Most cases occurred when a car stopped at a stop sign or red light would pull out in front of a cyclist who had the right of way.  This happens to me at least several times per week.  The study was performed by a Canadian physician and the police reports were from Toronto, so I could only imagine the situation is worse in the United States.  The report goes on to say that Toronto cyclists are six times more likely to die than a cyclist in the Netherlands.  It also reports that despite the existence of poor weather, Ontario non-cyclists are most discouraged from getting on their bikes due to the lack of bike-friendly infrastructure and antagonistic drivers.  Lastly, the report cites evidence linking the lack of cycling to an increase in health problems and obesity.

Of course, the study was performed by a cyclist, posted on a cycling team website, and was not peer reviewed.  The statistics may be an upper bound for the number of driver-induced accidents.  There is also the DOT-endorsed Hurt Report, which was a similar study involving motorcycle accidents in the Los Angeles area.  In the Hurt Report, drivers were at fault 66 percent of the time in motorcycle-involved accidents.  In this case, all of the investigators just to happened to be motorcyclists, so it also may be difficult to draw valid conclusions.

Regardless of whether or not the statistics are valid, it pays to be extra careful when cycling in the age of texting and driving.  As drivers have become more distracted over the past years, I definitely have experienced more near misses.  The extra vigilance I have gained while on the bike has also been a significant help as a driver.  If today’s antagonistic drivers had spent more time on their bikes as kids, they probably would make the roads a much safer place.

I recall a discussion in the locker room after cross country practice about a teammate I had never met.  I don’t recall his name, but this guy had graduated before I even got to college.  John, one of the well respected fifth year seniors said this guy wanted to go to NCAAs as part of the seven-man travel squad, but only “wanted to travel to the course, warm up with the team, and get a t-shirt.”  He did not want to actually run the race.  This guy never made the travel squad to NCAAs.  To him, and many others, it’s all about instant gratification without any of the work.  Running competitively isn’t like a movie where all the hard work is abstracted away and all that’s shown is the glorious win over the evil opponents.  To date, our team has qualified for every national meet since 1997, one of only five schools.   To do that takes considerable effort and years of training for hours every day.  You can’t just fast forward to the good parts.

The zeitgeist of today is marked by a lack of intrinsic motivation to undertake any long term efforts.  In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell cites James Flynn’s work on how Asian students work harder and longer on problems than their American counterparts.  Given a tough math problem, most American students will work on it for only a short while before giving up.  This ethos carries over into other areas.  An article in the New York Times states that 95 percent of blogs are abandoned, many of which only have one post.  The torrents of traffic and commenters envisioned by these blog posters just doesn’t happen overnight.  They think blogging fame will come immediately, but it doesn’t.  It takes time to build a reader base.  More to the point, the blog also has to have content that people are willing to read.  I’ll be surprised if many people read this post or others like it concerning my opinions and everyday life, but most of my traffic comes from my software troubleshooting/debugging and knee microfracture posts.  Even in my little corner of the Internet, I have made gradual traffic gains over the months.  People just don’t swarm in overnight:

Apparently, the same is true for Twitter: most users either abandon their account after signing up or just make one post.  Again, the problem boils down to effort: few are willing to make the effort and post meaningful content at frequent intervals.  Followers just don’t appear because you signed up.  Like blogs, it isn’t just the frequency of posts, but the value of the content: I really don’t care what you ate for lunch today.  I especially don’t care that you got a front row seat at the Apple Developer’s Conference after waiting in line since 4 AM.  Most Twitter posts aren’t much better than spam.  To attract followers, the posts have to carry some value to those beyond a small circle of friends.

Everyone just wants the massive blog readership or the Twitter following, but couldn’t care less about the content required to generate such traffic.   Sometimes, when the desired outcome can’t be achieved with lackluster efforts, many try to lower the bar.  Currently, there’s an effort in Virginia Beach to relax the public school grading scale from 7 point to 10 point.  Parents think this will even the playing field with other school systems that have switched to a 10 point scale, but it’s really just lowering the standards.  Parents want their kid to get in to his or her college of choice and to do it by studying less.  Also along these lines, a state representive recently proposed that more in state students should be accepted to Virginia public universities because a constituent complained that the acceptance standards were too tough and he didn’t get in.  I’m guessing that this “constituent” was probably the representative’s kid.  What is the real secret to getting in to your college of choice?  It isn’t done by getting easier As or by pushing out extremely well qualified out of state students.  Work harder, and anything can happen.

It’s pretty bad that so many people give up when they realize some effort is involved.  It’s worse when people lower their standards of success when their current efforts are clearly lacking.  Believe it or not, there are even worse characters out there that will do anything to get instant gratification: cheaters.  Instead of working hard for ten months researching state-of-the-art, tweaking out a system design, implementing the design, testing the design against existing works, and finally writing and submitting a research paper, some people are willing to cheat.  A recent study reports that an astounding  2% of researchers fake their results.  In a similar instance, some colleges are willing to fudge the statistics to improve their rankings.  They play with class sizes and give peer institutions poor reviews to improve their standing.  Instead of improving the school in an honest way, taking the time to hire more and better qualified faculty, increasing employee pay, and attracting better students, Clemson faked its way up 16 places in U.S. News reviews.

What is the real solution to this lack of motivation?  How can more people motivate themselves to post regularly on their blog?  How can people stick with something and work hard enough to achieve just rewards?  Some slick researchers tried paying students for earning good grades.  This approach improved state test scores by nearly 40 percentage points.  Did money provide the motivation for these students to work harder and longer on their math problems and not give up?  Apparently.  Proponents of this system argue that the “real world” functions much in this way: perform better and get paid more.  But money can’t be added as an outcome in every scenario.  How many blogs or Twitter accounts are raking in the dough?  Almost zero, I would guess.  Instead, people need intrinsic motivation to produce results over the long term.  I don’t write this post because I envision piles of Internet surfers reading and commenting on this.  I do it because there’s satisfaction in organizing my thoughts and ideas and writing them down.  I don’t care that nobody else will read this, but if someone else finds it interesting, then more power to them.

Aside from writing these inane blog posts, it is intrinsic motivation that keeps me working on long research projects.  It’s what gets me up in the morning with the hope that I’ll be able to run normally again after knee surgery.  I run slow, go out every other day,  only go ten minutes, and feel terrible, but I know if I do it enough I’ll be able to run faster and longer.  By keeping at it and going one step at a time, things will get done.

My initial thoughts of Wolfram Alpha are that it just doesn’t have enough data to make interesting results of most search queries, but the name search is interesting. Plugging in my name shows a quick rise and fall of its popularity, peaking right around my birthday. I guess my parents really bought into the Matthew hype. It’s like buying a new car and commenting that suddenly all the cars you see are the exact model you have. There is a chapter of Freakonomics that analyzes the popularity of birth names and how they rise and fall in cycles. They argue that the more well-to-do give birth names to their kids that may sound unusual at first, but then catch on with the general population. Eventually enough people are given the name that it becomes too popular and burns out.

It also reminds me of another analogy I read somewhere: “Why am I always in the longest checkout lane in the grocery store?” These popularity musings are mainly based on a self-centered perspective: every individual claims everyone else is doing the same thing, whether it be car choice, birth name choice, or checkout lane choice. Using a global perspective, it becomes clear why everyone else seems to think the same way. If I were to choose one person at random in the entire world, the odds are that he would be Chinese (again making use of Wolfram Alpha). Do the Chinese wonder why everyone else is Chinese? Using this perspective, think about the grocery checkout lanes: if you had to pick out one person at random in all of the lanes, the odds are that he would be in the lane with the most people. If someone is in a checkout lane, the odds are greater that he is in the longest line in comparison with all the others . This can also be applied to birth names: if a plurality of people are named Matthew, then the odds are that I would be named Matthew over any other name.