Making Groups for Kid Pictures

 May 17th, 2018
facebook, kids, kidsgroup
Facebook tries really hard to show people what it thinks they want to see, but it still has major problems dealing with a pretty common situation: baby pictures. If I post a cute picture of one of my kids, Facebook first shows it to people that tend to like what I post. Many of those people are more interested in blog posts about contra dance, effective altruism, music, or other things, however, and don't want a Facebook feed full of kid pictures. Other people will 'like' the picture, though, and Facebook learns both that they reacted positively to the photo but also that they tend to react positively to my posts. The next day, when I post a boring blog post Facebook thinks it should show the post to the people who 'like'ed the kid picture, and not the people who usually read my posts, it doesn't get shown to anyone who actually wants to read it, I don't get the helpful comments I usually get. Not a good outcome all around.

What I've wanted for a while is some way for to give guidance to Facebook about which friend clusters are likely to enjoy what things. This way contra dance posts are more likely to go to contra dancers, EA posts to EAs, etc, but everything is still public.

I don't have a solution to the general case, but in the case of kid stuff the difference in what people want to see is really strong, so it's worth figuring something out even if it's not ideal. What we've been doing is keeping a group for pictures etc of our kids. Several other parents we're friends with do this too. It works pretty well, but the main failing is people who would like to see kid stuff but don't know about the group. So, in addition to describing the problem and our awkward solution, this post also serves as notification that this group exists.

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