How Facebook Posts Turn Information into Knowledge
Create an account and submit content into their system. Describe the data they capture.
What taxonomy or categorizations did they give the user to be able to group their content?
Notice the options:
· Writing something on your wall
· Filming a live video
· Uploading a photo or video
· Uploading a feeling or activity you’re doing
For this article I will only focus on writing a post.
How did they display your content? What did they emphasize; what hierarchical structures did they use to give your content meaning? What navigation or filters did they add to allow finding, sorting, and filtering of this content?
When using the ‘Create Post’ feature Facebook gives you many additional options in two primary categories:
1) your intended audience
2) adding media and/or other links to your posts.
When you click on the Public button to the right of your profile avatar, you get several options:
The hamburger menu (…) located at the top right of the “Post” CTA button gives you several options for adding to your post:
You can create hierarchical structures by:
- tagging friends
- checking in
- Hashtagging pertinent topics. Examples: #election2020, #megantheestallion. Hashtags are essentially search key terms so they enable people to search the content they desire.
When searching for “#election2020” you get a different result than searching for “election 2020”:
As you can see, using “election 2020” as a search term yields more options than just posts in Facebook groups. You get:
- a list of suggested groups to join
- videos
- news articles
How did user flows contribute to keeping the data relevant or actionable?
Facebook obviously puts in a lot of work in creating their user flows and then performing usability testing on their wireframes before publishing. They provide a lot of options to add media, locations and interactive options into your posts. They also provide many filtering and search options such as joining groups, searching for people’s posts, events and many others:
Where will they improve, what can users expect in the future — can you hypothesize how their platform will evolve?
Information has always been tightly controlled by the richest, most powerful people on Earth. They’ve always propped up lies and propaganda and buried the truth if it suited their purposes. They still do the same thing today and this will never change. I’m not one of them, so who am I to judge? Maybe I’d be the doing the same thing if I were in their shoes.
The internet, however, has made controlling information a more difficult endeavor. There’s also the problem of huge amounts of misinformation from every political side on the internet. As Weinberger said information becomes believable when it stands up through meticulously document accounts of rigorous conversation and experiments.
In this Scientific American interview (Links to an external site.) Weinberger stated that we as individuals are “so limited by our own perspectives — that the most likely way to advance is through the clash of different perspectives, different data sets, different prejudices, different blind spots.”
Weinberger quotes John Wilbanks, the head of science at Creative Commons, when he stated that “we really need to have your nerds argue with my nerds.” Weinberger believes that that’s how we can get rid of most erroneous data out of information systems.
How did they reward you, the user, for contributing content (they aren’t paying you)? Why would people come back?
If you have many followers your post will likely get many reactions. These reactions could be from likes, emoji reactions or comments. These feels incredibly rewarding for us as it hits our dopamine sensors.
Facebook also lets you promote your posts. This is done, of course, for a fee. This allows you to target your intended audiences in an even more specific way. You can focus on users of a specific set of demographics, locations and other criteria.