Facebook's latest attempt at keeping users clued in on whats happening in the digital space seems to have backfired.
A story in ANI suggests the social media behemoth has been receiving a lot of flak for the trending stories feature that appears in the right-hand column of a user's news feed. The trends are generated based on discussions taking place on Facebook at the moment. Some of the criticism thrown Facebook's way include the fact that the feature actually focuses on celebrity gossip and is not really relevant to any usage patterns of users.
A Facebook discussion group called 'How do I get rid of trending topics' has seen a lot of activity over the past few days. Some of the complaints are below:
"Trending" showed up a few months ago and then went away. Silly me–I thought that it was gone for good. I hate this thing–it NEVER has any topics I'm interested in and takes up valuable space. Please make this a hideable option, like Chat."
First, it should be called "Trended'" not "Trending." Trending implies that this is new news and not 12 or more hours old. Second, if I were interested in any of the things in that feed, I would have already followed pages about them. I have yet to see *anything* that interests me.
For people who really really hate it however, there is help out there. You can use this app called 'FB purity' that allows you to clean up your timeline and as a built in option for hiding / removing Facebook's Trending Topics box. It also helps you hide other Facebook features like autoplay videos.
The trending topics feature is available in the US, UK and even India, where the service was rolled out earlier this month. "Facebook wants to be your news source," said S. Shyam Sundar, founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University to PC World. The trending tool, he said, acts as a news digest for those who believe that news worth knowing will find them rather than them going after it.
Though similar in idea to Twitter, Facebook's feature is different in that apart from the trending story it also includes a short description of why the item is popular.
via Technology - Google News http://ift.tt/1iEPSYC
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