An Open Letter To: Facebook

An Open Letter To: Facebook

Dear Facebook… and Mark Zuckerberg,

re:  “Top Stories” vs. “Most Recent”

On occasion I’m going to have a semi-regular feature where I write an open letter to someone, usually a corporation or other faceless non-person entity, regarding an issue that they need some help with. Somebody’s gotta tell ’em, right? Today’s letter is to Facebook and regards their settings for post viewing. Or, rather, the lack of settings for post viewing.

I’m talking about “Top Stories” being the non-changable default, causing me to have to continuously switch it to “Most Recent” so that I can view them according to my preference. Sometimes I have to manually switch a dozen times a day, sometimes none at all. I have no need to have a continuing long discussion about three women’s personal foot care processes thrown in my face every time I log in just because it’s ‘popular’ or active.  No, I prefer to scroll back through the day as it happened, and let’s be real, even with all your tracking and algorithms, you do not know what I like like I know what I like.

Rumor has it that you are aware of this issue, and steadfastly refuse to address it. What makes this even more perplexing is that you seem to enjoy making all kinds of things optional to our preferences, so why not this?

C’mon, Facebook, get on the stick.