Everyone has prolly seen a couple of “Year in Review” posts by now while scrolling through their Facebook news feed. What it is, is a photo slide of highlight from your Facebook timeline over the past year. It gathers your most-engaged-with posts from 2014 and compiles them into a chronological photo album complete with cheesy clip art. Initially, The Washington Post reported that the feature’s default tagline was, “It’s been a great year! Thanks for being a part of it.”
Unfortunately, Facebook’s algorithm for choosing the images wasn’t very thoughtful, dishing out good memories along with the bad. Because the algorithm chooses the default photos and moments that had the most interaction, it also includes sad memories. However, users are given the option to customise their “Year in Review” prior to sharing.
So far, Facebook has directly apologised to at least one person for whom the “Year in Review” post brought back painful memories from 2014.
Web design consultant and writer Eric Meyer’s “Year in Review” highlighted the death of his 6-year-old daughter – she passed away of brain cancer in 2014. He then wrote a post to say that his year hadn’t been “great” as the uniform Facebook post declared, and wrote about the negative experience in a post on his website titled “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty”:
Eric also went on to suggest a handful of “obvious” design fixes, like not pre-filling the app with photos unless a user actually wants to see pictures from their year and asking before showing a user a preview of the app.
Quickly, Facebook’s product manager for “Year in Review”, Jonathan Gheller, reached out to Eric and personally apologised. He said, “[The app] was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy. We can do better – I’m very grateful he took the time in his grief to write the blog post.”
And that’s not all, of course. Users (perhaps you too) have also been criticising the”Year in Review” for its overwhelming presence on Facebook. Many are annoyed at how pushy the feature is, constantly reminding users of its existence. But what if we don’t want to post up our “Year in Review”, right? Exactly.
Sources: Mashable, The Washington Post, TIME.
