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Whoa, just noticed that on Facebook's Signal the Trending Now column used to regularly show between 150-210 stories. Today it only has 60.
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When bluechoochoo and I examined Trending Now in May there were significantly more stories: medium.com/@aramzs/some-brief-notes-on-what-journalists-see-in-trending-on-facebooks-signal-6b8b8ed8e7ea#.yci424yli
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Also notable in Trending Now column: whereas before there were rarely any stories older than 2 days, the mix of 'current' is very different.
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Of the now 66 stories overall in Trending Now, 59 are labeled as having occurred "a few seconds ago". The remaining 7 are >= 3 days old
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The Business & War/Terrorism sections of Trending aren't visible atm. Is no one talking about those topics right now or are they gone?
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So it looks like this may have somewhat been a correction. Trending Now in Signal is today up to 111 stories.
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Overall count is still low, not sure if there's a cache that needs to be filled or if it is intentional under the new process.
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Today Signal is at 129 stories trending, so it seems likely that after the Kelly incident Facebook dumped its database and started clean.
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So Signal's Trending Now has stayed between 100-150 topics. This means regularly 50-100 less than under the previous system for Trending.
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Also notable, a big spike in
a day
and2 days
ago in Trending. Further supports that theory. -
Interesting, I wonder if this implies a Time component to Facebook trending not present in Trend algos like Twitter's?
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Which is to say: with the fill coming back so slowly, is it possible that 'popularity' + 'time sustained' is required for some trends?
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Or, alternatively, perhaps only a certain number of trends are allowed to be added each day?