At brunch today a friend and I talked about how Facebook is writing algorithms to control the problem of Inspirational Quote memes (usually containing a sunset or some other cliched image). I can immediately imagine the dismay these images must cause for Facebook product people due to the images' banality. Because although we have come to associate Facebook with the banal, the whole point of Facebook is to try and know you deeply, to be the superfriend that stands between you and the world, feeding you everything you want to know and linking you to friends and affection. Facebook wants to be important to you, and it knows that spitting cookie-cutter cliches at you isn't the way to do that.
But what Facebook doesn't know is that an overreliance on algorithms to manage human relationships is what leads to the overwhelming amount of cliched content in the first place: if you treat users not unlike source material for a bot (where the original bot is the News Feed algorithm, which decides for you what and who is interesting to you) it is no surprise that users will eventually shorten the circuit and end up acting like bots, posting easily-spread meme content in place of more personal material. News Feed could never tell the difference between a personally-crafted communication and a meme anyway (in fact, the personal communication may have done more poorly in the rankings because by being more personal it would also be less applicable to the mass of viewers, thus being liked and shared less often). To be clear, being a clearinghouse for meme pictures isn't really bad for business in the short run, but it is bad for "cool", and leads to the inevitable assocation of the network with uncompelling content.
What Facebook would have to do to make users communicate authentically with one another would be to deploy less algorithms, rather than more. But to do that, given that Facebook is essentially a network of algorithms, they'd have to build a separate network founded on letting users communicate directly with one another without algorithmic manipulation, rather than always trying to manipulate or otherwise "improve" on people's communication behind the scenes. According to recent news, it appears that Facebook understands the need to create separate networks; whether it will see how to promote high-quality communication rather than create new engines for viral content is another question.
