This overload means it now makes little sense to ask for the ‘chronological feed’ back. If you have 1,500 or 3,000 items a day, then the chronological feed is actually just the items you can be bothered to scroll through before giving up, which can only be 10% or 20% of what’s actually there. This will be sorted by no logical order at all except whether your friends happened to post them within the last hour. It’s not so much chronological in any useful sense as a random sample, where the randomizer is simply whatever time you yourself happen to open the app. ’What did any of the 300 people that I friended in the last 5 years post between 16:32 and 17:03?’ Meanwhile, giving us detailed manual controls and filters makes little more sense - the entire history of the tech industry tells us that actual normal people would never use them, even if they worked. People don't file.

This is the logic that led Facebook inexorably to the ‘algorithmic feed’, which is really just tech jargon for saying that instead of this random (i.e. 'time-based') sample of what’s been posted, the platform tries to work out which people you would most like to see things from, and what kinds of things you would most like to see. It ought to be able to work out who your close friends are, and what kinds of things you normally click on, surely? The logic seems (or at any rate seemed) unavoidable. So, instead of a purely random sample, you get a sample based on what you might actually want to see.

Unavoidable as it seems, though, this approach has two problems. First, getting that sample ‘right’ is very hard, and beset by all sorts of conceptual challenges. But second, even if it’s a sucessful sample, it’s still a sample.

Looking at the first of these, there are a bunch of problems around getting the algorithmic newsfeed sample ‘right’, most of which have been discussed at length in the last few years. There are lots of incentives for people (Russians, game developers) to try to manipulate the feed. Using signals of what people seem to want to see risks over-fitting, circularity and filter bubbles. People’s desires change, and they get bored of things, so Facebook has to keep changing the mix to try to reflect that, and this has made it an unreliable partner for everyone from Zynga to newspapers. Facebook has to make subjective judgements about what it seems that people want, and about what metrics seem to capture that, and none of this is static or even in in principle perfectible. Facebook surfs user behaviour.

It’s useful here to compare the newsfeed challenge with the Google’s search results challenge. Google has to work out the best 10 results to show, using all sorts of judgements about what signals work best and what signals matter more, just as the newsfeed does - it can’t just show you the results by some objective measure like date or file size. It can offer complex controls and filters to fiddle with, but like Facebook it has to get things right without such controls because most people won’t ever touch them. And also like Facebook, of course, it has people trying to game the system. Unlike Facebook, though, Google has explicit intent - you told it what you wanted to see. And so if Google shows me exactly what I told it I wanted, it’s succeeded, even if I ‘shouldn’t’ have searched for that. Facebook has no such direct signal. There are things it ‘shouldn’t’ show me, even if my uncle did share them. But what are those things, and who should decide, and what does the weighting look like?

This is the challenge to getting an algorithm right, but there is also the second problem - that it’s always still a sample. Facebook has done so much development and outreach and ’growth-hacking’ to get more stuff into the feed and to make it frictionless to share that there is now far more content available to me than I can look at. It tries to show me a sample of that, and a sample that’s better than ‘whatever was posted in the last 45 minutes’. It might or might not succeed at being better, but there remains the question - do people want a sample at all, anymore?

One basic problem here is that if the feed is focused on ‘what do I want to see?’, then it cannot be focused on ‘what do my friends want (or need) me to see?’ Sometimes this is the same thing - my friend and I both want me to see that they’re throwing a party tonight. But if every feed is a sample, then a user has no way to know who will see their post. Indeed, conceptually one might suggest that they have no way to know if anyone will see this post. Of course, Facebook’s engagement teams won’t let that happen - if I feel too much that I’m shouting into the wilderness I’ll leave (this is one of Twitter’s new user problems), and so I’ll be rationed out at least enough exposure to friends and engagement feedback to keep posting. Until you don’t. But if something was really important, why would you put it on Facebook?

I think one could suggest that this is some of what’s behind the suggestions of systemically lower engagement on Facebook newsfeeds, and behind the obvious growth of person-to person chat (most obviously WhatsApp, iMessage, FB Messenger and Instagram - three of which Facebook of course owns). The social dynamics of a 1:1 chat work much more strongly against overload, and even if one person does overshare they're in a separate box, that you can mute if you like.

Meanwhile, you could propose that the Stories format that Snap invented, and Facebook... continued to invent, is also a way to address overload: by bundling what you want to share into one unit instead of many separate items, even if you do then still share that to many people any feed is more manageable. That in turn makes easier a key Snap thesis - that though you still share things asymmetrically, there shouldn’t be an algorithm between you and your friends. That is, maybe Stories mean you share more things, but by bundling them into one thing you place less load on your friends and reduce the need for a filter. You put the structure into the content instead of the display of the content.

There are clearly also other trends behind any swing from newsfeeds to messaging. Messaging can be more private, have less social pressure, and be more fun. A Snapchat story isn’t a permanent record and has less pressure to show off your perfection. Stickers and filters are more fun and spontaneous than Facebook’s rigid blue boxes (and the days of throwing sheep at people are gone alone with Facebooks’ platform). And some of these offer light-weight ways to interact without obligation, which was also a feature of Facebook's model, but deliver that piece of Maslow in different ways.

The catch is that though these systems look like they reduce sharing overload, you really want group chats. And lots of groups. And when you have 10 WhatsApp groups with 50 people in each, then people will share to them pretty freely. And then you think ‘maybe there should be a screen with a feed of the new posts in all of my groups. You could call it a ‘news feed’. And maybe it should get some intelligence, to show the posts you care about most...