Time, gentlemen, please

...stop trying to sort my news by 'interestingness'

A new trend seems to be spreading through the world of computing and I have to say it is one I deplore as it is technology for the sake of it and actually makes the user experience worse in my view. Not so long ago, your news feeds would be organised in a simple chronological order with the newest stories at the top, so you could scroll down until you saw a post you had seen before and instantly know you had seen all the new content and everything below was older. All nice and simple and everyone understands the concept of time, but that isn't good enough for many technology giants as sorting by time is basic stuff that doesn't show off their talents. Nowadays, there is an increasing trend to implement algorithms that deliver content organised by relevance or 'interestingness', which while technically clever do nothing to enhance usability and are a solution to a problem that doesn't appear to exist.

The trend seemed to start with Facebook's controversial 'EdgeRank' algorithm that uses some mysterious unexplained (and no doubt needlessly complex) methods to sort the news feed content by a perceived relevance score, and is now being followed by other applications, LinkedIn being one notable recent convert. Creating such algorithms must be keeping the developers busy and testing their skills, but are they really necessary at all and what is wrong with the traditional way?

The problem with these algorithms is that they tend not to properly distinguish between read and unread content, so they repeat things you have already seen while hiding new data lower down in the feed, resulting in a mess of today's stories mixed in with those from days or weeks ago seemingly at random. This makes it virtually impossible to single out the new content and ensure you have seen it all, and increases the chances of missing something that is important to you but was not deemed important by the software and hidden away somewhere in the feed. These algorithms are fundamentally flawed in that they require a lot of feedback from the user to determine what he/she considers relevant, and users aren't always willing to reveal that information so they appear to resort to pseudo-randomisation in the absence of useful data. This can cause a lot of confusion, for instance when one story is a follow-up to another and they only make sense when viewed in the right order but the algorithm separates and mixes them up so you see one without the other.

One memorable example was when Facebook decided my most relevant story was one that I had seen 15 hours previously and had no further comments or likes since then, so as an unchanged story it should have been pushed well down the feed. The cynic in me suggests this was chosen for purely geographical reasons as it was posted by my friend in Palo Alto, California, which just happens to be the location of Facebook's headquarters! A further example of these algorithms' silliness is that my LinkedIn feed is currently displaying an old story from four months ago above activity in the last few minutes, and also contains a message from my university that their website was offline for a few hours ten months ago, which is completely irrelevant now! The fact that the 'relevance' scores seem to change every time the news feed is loaded also makes it very difficult to find content again as chances are it will no longer be in the same place as it was before, so many minutes of tedious scrolling may be necessary just to find the post you're interested in.

I don't know about other platforms but the Facebook app for Android does actually still have a sensible chronological news feed, labelled 'Most Recent'. They seem to be doing their utmost to discourage its use though as it is hidden away in the midst of a large menu and easy to miss, when the app is loaded it always defaults to the standard news feed, and (most annoyingly) after viewing a story from the 'Most Recent' feed it doesn't go back there but moves to the standard feed instead. How long will it be before this is removed completely and the 'top stories' nonsense forces jumbled feeds on everyone with no choice? One only has to look at the variety of third-party apps that change the news feed behaviour to realise these algorithms are not popular - yet another case of the software company trying to dictate user requirements and violating a fundamental rule of development.

Please, software companies, I implore you, stop all this nonsense as computers really don't have the intelligence to make decisions like this for their users. Time is understood by everyone but relevance is not a universal concept and an individual user's idea of what is relevant may be very different from your software's idea, so please don't force your perception of relevance on everyone. A nice simple chronological feed with the new stories at the top provides a far more pleasant user experience and more importantly allows the user to decide for themselves which are the most relevant stories they want to read.