Admit it — you get a little bit excited when something you post on Facebook gets a lot of likes and comments. But do you really care how many people actually view your posts? According to Facebook newsfeed engineer Lars Backstrom, the answer is no. Backstrom on Sunday fired back at a recent Buzzfeed story that said Facebook intentionally hides view tallies from its users. The story cited a Stanford University study, which found that Facebook users greatly overestimate the size of their audience, and actually reach an average of just 35 percent of their friends with each post. "It's in the company's best interest to keep that information to itself," the story's author, Charlie Warzel, wrote. "[Facebook] knows full well that the only thing worse than speaking to an empty room is speaking to a room full of friends and family and having them ignore you." But Backstrom disagreed that users want to see this information, and denied that Facebook has any ulterior motives for keeping it off users' news feeds. He said the assertion that everyone wants to know how many friends see each of their posts "is just plain wrong." "A few of us did build and test a feature like this internally," Backstrom wrote in a Facebook post. "Our conclusion after testing it: people are way more interested in seeing *who* liked their posts, rather than just the number of people who saw it." Read more http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2421795,00.asp
