![\"dog-2Bwedding\"](\"http:\/\/jeremyvarner.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/dog-2Bwedding.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAnd your twitter feed is full of gems like this.<\/p>\n
Truly, the dumbening of society has set in. And, considering I just used \u201cdumbening\u201d as if it were a real word, English may never recover. <\/span><\/p>\n But where did all the content worth looking at go? When you search the internet you know it\u2019s still out there and there are some that you go back to time and time again. It\u2019s just mysteriously vanished from your social media accounts as if they never there in the first place, replaced by an endless wave of photos, stupid quotes, and invitations to play games you never want to play.<\/p>\n Where the hell did it go? What\u2019s been done to it to make it run away from your social networking feeds? Didn\u2019t you start following things like \u201cI Fucking Love Science\u201d? Shouldn\u2019t your page be full of fantastic knowledge of the physical world by now?<\/p>\n Well no, clearly not, and it\u2019s hard for a lot of people to understand this. But I\u2019m going to let you in on a secret, it\u2019s easily understood when you realize guys like this:<\/p>\n Aren\u2019t super geniuses<\/b><\/i> like you thought they were.<\/p>\n For Twitter, the phenomenon is actually quite simple. Twitter has no filter, both in its programming and in the minds of its users. Is someone sitting at a restaurant staring into space? Gotta share my random thoughts with everyone. Are you on the toilet with nothing better to do? Maybe someone can suggest listening music for you. Did you just get so high that you start questioning the existence of your eyes? It\u2019s time to get you a movie deal, son.<\/b><\/i> It all shows up on the feed and nothing can stop the flow of it.<\/p>\n Because that\u2019s the nature of the beast, you\u2019re probably not going to notice a whole lot going on anyway. Even if someone starts to say something truly mind blowing and lay on you a philosophy that could change your very life, it goin 2 be swept down da river & look sumthin lik dis b\/c it only has 140 char. 2 do it in. U will probly not understand wat it was sayin as it flys by. So whatevs.<\/i><\/p>\n And that\u2019s a little demoralizing to think about. After all, while Jaden Smith isn\u2019t saying anything close to a complete thought, he does say it in semi-complete sentences because he has nothing complicated to say. But then there\u2019s something else on his side that ensures he\u2019s going to be the thing you know from social media \u2013 a ton of retweets.<\/p>\n It often gets overlooked by the average twitter user, but every tweet you see is really only visible in the sea of characters for about 10 to 15 seconds before it gets lost entirely. You may think everyone who follows you sees what you\u2019re saying, but you know you can\u2019t possibly be seeing everything someone you<\/b><\/i> follow is saying. So everyone may as well be talking to themselves more often than not. This changes when someone sees it and decides to click the retweet button. At that point, your fifteen seconds of fame may just turn into 30.\u00a0 And every time someone else passes it along, it increases your visibility. The problem is that stupid things get retweeted often<\/b><\/i> because people are shocked they happened and want others to see the crazy shit that just went down. Before long, the damn thing has gone viral.<\/p>\n But how often do you read something and finish it, then forget about the tweet that originally sent you there? All the time, right? You\u2019ve read it, it\u2019s not something you really need to read again, out of sight, out of mind. It\u2019s this, more than retweeting stupid things, which causes the feed to be so full of stupid things. Because every time you forget to retweet something solid, you\u2019ve fallen asleep at the wheel.<\/p>\n \u201cBut wait,\u201d you say, my fictional friend, \u201cI have almost as many Facebook friends as I have people I follow on Twitter. Why isn\u2019t that feed constantly flying by?\u201d<\/p>\n Simple, they filter it. Your wall, when you first open your Facebook page, is covered in only a small fraction of the information flying out of your friends and family. Their posts, their pictures, their links \u2013 all of it has to go through the Facebook filter to get to be part of the small fraction that you\u2019re shown at the end of the day. And how does it do that? Through something called an algorithm<\/b><\/i>.<\/p>\n Now an algorithm is a simple concept \u2013 it\u2019s basically just a math equation that determines how something is supposed to function after a set of calculations have been completed. Do you need to have a machine repeat a task over and over with perfect accuracy? Time for an algorithm! Do you need to solve that fucking Rubik\u2019s Cube? There\u2019s an algorithm for that. Do you need to have your machine predict outcomes? Algorithm!<\/p>\n So, wait, did you notice that last one about predicting outcomes? Has it ever occurred to you that almost all of the stuff you end up seeing on your wall is roughly in the same categories as other stuff you happen to see except for a few small outliers? You know, the unholy quartet of games\u2026<\/p>\n …baby animals….<\/p>\n …weddings…<\/p>\n …and click bait?<\/p>\n Well that\u2019s because that\u2019s what Facebook\u2019s algorithm has decided you like! You might also have a few things like I Fucking Love Science slip in there, but that\u2019s not what you really like. No, you like to see links from your conspiracy theorist cousins about how Obama\u2019s a terrorist.<\/p>\n You see, Facebook takes the number of likes and shares that anything gets from anyone and starts to figure if the public in itself generally likes that. If they find that a lot of people like something, even if it\u2019s batshit crazy or completely asinine, Facebook\u2019s filter is going to decide that\u2019s what you want to see too. A room full of programmers needed to figure out how to prevent your wall from being completely flooded with trivial shit and never realized the thing they programmed ensured that\u2019s all<\/b><\/i> you\u2019ll ever<\/b><\/i> see. They were so busy figuring out what people clicked \u201clike\u201d on that they didn\u2019t bother realizing why they clicked it.<\/p>\n Which is why so many content creators on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, or anywhere with a social media angle start to ask people to click like, share, retweet or anything else by default<\/b><\/i>. Without this gentle prod, a lot of people are going to go on without doing it and that\u2019s going to skew their chances of ever being seen again. In other words: if you don\u2019t<\/i> share the thing you just read to someone<\/b><\/i>, no one else is going to likely see it \u2013 especially if Facebook\u2019s dogorithm has its way.<\/p>\n Now, by this point, you\u2019re probably starting to realize I\u2019ve plastered this post in nothing but pictures of dogs. Why have I done this? Because, statistically, this is probably the way that I make sure you\u2019ve all seen this. As one of the unholy quartet, it is likely that there is going to be someone who clicks a like somewhere along the line just because it has a dog-based thumbnail. Or, I guess paw-nail, since we\u2019ve surrendered the internet to those without thumbs.<\/p>\n For a long time, we\u2019ve seen people bemoan the fact that their social media feeds have been full of drivel while interesting things can fly by unnoticed. And the problem is, it\u2019ll keep doing that. Facebook has actually said that all content creators on their site should expect to see a decline in activity over time due to the fact that their algorithm will slowly start to filter them out as they get fewer likes and they\u2019ll naturally get fewer likes as they start to be filtered out. That means, if you really do fucking love science, one day you\u2019re going to see that \u201cI Fucking Love Science\u201d just stops appearing on your wall, overtaken by animals.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nWTF: Why The Filter?<\/h1>\n
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