Business 2 CommunityFacebook Apologizes For ‘Year In Review’ App After Resurrecting Users’ Grief
Many Facebook users have utilized the ‘Year in Review’ app this year, and many others have complained about the app. It shows up in your feed uninvited, asking if you’d like to click to see your year. When your friends use the app, their results appear in your feed. It can feel, for some users, spammy and overdone. For some users, though, the problem was deeper than annoyance, and to at least one user, Facebook has extended an apology.
Eric Meyer called it ‘inadvertent algorithmic cruelty’ on his blog. He lost his daughter to cancer this year. He says he was already avoiding the Year in Review app as it showed up on the walls of friends and loved ones — after all, many of them had lost his daughter too, and from a place of grief, he couldn’t understand anyone looking back on the year with joy.
Then, he got the invite to the app himself. The invite includes an automatically-chosen cover photo, one from your own Facebook photos that has seen a lot of activity this year. For Eric, it was a photo of his daughter. For his year to be defined by her sweet smiling face was both apt and painful, he says.
Others piled on: a Facebook user who posted a photo of himself with his mother, now deceased, saw that photo as his cover. Another saw his father pop up, with the app’s festive party background. One woman felt she had the opposite problem — the app started collecting photos in March, and wouldn’t let her include a photo of her mother, who had died in February. She says she felt the social network was erasing her mother from her year.
Users are calling for Facebook to change the algorithm in one of many possible ways — a photo with many comments like ‘condolences’ or ‘prayers’ might be automatically skipped, and only added manually, or the app could leave the user to do all the photo selecting, instead of suggesting photos itself.
After Eric’s negative experience with the Year in Review app became known, the Washington Post says that product manager Jonathan Gheller reached out to Meyer personally to apologize, and that he would take all of these suggestions into account for further iterations of the app.
It’s not the only algorithm Facebook users say could use some tweaking — just ask the many users who’ve been told they might like to friend an ex’s new love, or offered ads for a given product or service after posting about problems with it, because the algorithm only read the mention and not the context.
However, if Facebook is listening and taking steps to improve Year in Review to prevent giving users a negative experience, it’s a step in the right direction.
[photo credit: Neon Tommy]
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Facebook Apologizes For ‘Year In Review’ App After Resurrecting Users’ Grief
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