Dunbar’s number (a rule of thumb that implies that you probably do know several hundred people well enough to friend them on Facebook) and ‘Zuckerberg’s law’ (the supposed tendency to share more and more on social media over time). Combine these two and you get overload.

the asymmetric feed makes posting at that kind of frequency normal instead of rude. Since you’re posting it to ‘your’ feed instead of sending it explicitly to someone, it’s OK to post lots and to post less important things.

That, in turn, takes us to the tragedy of the commons - we’re ‘supposed’ to post stuff, but by posting stuff, we overload each other’s feeds.

People’s desires change, and they get bored of things, so Facebook has to keep changing the mix to try to reflect that

Google shows me exactly what I told it I wanted, it’s succeeded, even if I ‘shouldn’t’ have searched for that. Facebook has no such direct signal. There are things it ‘shouldn’t’ show me, even if my uncle did share them. But what are those things, and who should decide, and what does the weighting look like?

if the feed is focused on ‘what do I want to see?’, then it cannot be focused on ‘what do my friends want (or need) me to see?’

we swing from one kind of expression to another and back again, and we might be swinging away from the feed.