Afternoon Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: Facebook Product Director Furious at Facebook’s Effect on News

Matthew Yglesias: Facebook product director furious at Facebook’s effect on news: “Mike Hudak — who, importantly, is Director of Product at Facebook…

…has a little rant about the state of the media and his view that we at http://vox.com have failed to cure what ails it:

And we come to Ezra Klein. The great Ezra Klein of Wapo and msnbc. The man who, while a partisan, does not try to keep his own set of facts…. They write stupid stories about how you should wash your jeans instead of freezing them. To be fair their top headline right now is “How a bill made it through the worst Congress ever.” Which is better than “you can’t clean your jeans by freezing them.”… It’s hard to tell who’s to blame. But someone should fix this shit.

Here’s where I disagree–it is not hard to tell who is to blame for the fact that the jeans story (which is a great, interesting, informative story) got more readers than Andrew Prokop’s excellent feature on the DATA Act. Facebook is to blame…. The jeans story has been shared 1,062 times on Facebook while the DATA Act story has been shared just 242 times. That’s why the jeans story has been read by more people. We featured the DATA Act story much more prominently on our home page, but these days the bulk of web traffic is driven by social media and the bulk of social traffic is driven by Facebook…. Traffic on the internet right now is all about Facebook sharing behavior…. On Twitter if you share something, your followers see it. On Facebook, what is seen is driven by algorithm that Facebook controls–if they wanted to promote more hard news they could do it….

The Facebook Gods smiled upon my sharing of ‘Buzzfeed’s founder used to write Marxist theory and it explains Buzzfeed perfectly’ and I hope the Gods will be as friendly to my share of Max Fisher’s brilliant 4,000 word explanation of the endless political crisis in Thailand. But, frankly, my experience as a veteran professional in this field is that the Facebook Gods will not smile on Max’s Thailand piece…. If Facebook executives don’t like a world in which those are the kind of stories people read, they should do something about it…