Post #10

Talking about news feed algorithm of facebook. I'll start with a bug first and then the actual topic.

The Bug: When you accidentally or deliberately click some feed which you really not looking for then FB's model takes this as a new parameter and starts rendering posts accordingly onwards and no doubt same model is being used by Instagram

This actually not a bug because its after all a machine which listen to our written commands but accidents should not become a "feature" that's the goal

Feed Logic: suppose you have thousand friends and they post 10 posts a day then it becomes 10k post a day for your visits right.

Do you have enough time to see all those posts? Ofcourse not for me!

They first measure every post and rank them based on content, category and instant reach and finally set them with a rank number(not primary key). it's a total independent batch job

Once that step finished, it starts serving posts using "order by {rank} DESC"

Now the interesting point: suppose one of my friend posted a technology post and it appears on top of my feed however theres 9999 already.

This is because of prediction algorithm they have been working for long. They use hundreds of parameters from our activities and form almost a virtual personality of ours. That virtual personality is nothing but a json object which represents us and tells Facebook database what I'm looking for and that's where accident becomes another feature to that virtual personality

(Image attached has the chief architect of Facebook feed algorithm with the team at Menlo park)

Thanks for reading 😊