Silently removed happiness from my web application that you visit on a voluntary basis. If you think my web app is too gloomy, feel free to stop coming.
You expect GMail to show you every non-spam message sent to you in your inbox. On Facebook, on the other hand, you expect a curated list of recent posts - otherwise you wouldn't be able to keep up with what your 500+ friends and 1500+ liked pages post every day. So comparing GMail to Facebook makes no sense at all.
Gmail users have an expectation that Google won't start silently diverting their legitimate email as an experiment on them. That's the comparison if you didn't quite grasp that.
You're claiming that users would "expect" Facebook to do something like filter out all the happy posts from their friends and family without telling them? I don't think many would agree with you.
I think he's merely claiming that you expect Facebook to curate the news feed. How they do so (and for what purpose) is ever-changing and has never been fully transparent, thus your expectations for those particular factors is irrelevant.
I don't see any abuse here, and I believe that their lack of transparency wrt. filtering algorithms is justified.
First off all, the shortest description of what they do wouldn't probably be far from publishing the algorithm iteslf. An algorithm that's ever changing and probably different depending on where you live or to what group you were randomly assigned. 99% of people wouldn't care anyway, and being transparent about the algorithm would likely make them less happy - right now they accept Facebook as is and don't think twice about it; give them the description of how things work and suddenly everyone will start saying that Facebook filtering sucks because random-reason-511.
Moreover, the only people that stand to benefit from knowing Facebook's algorithm are advertisers, who will game the hell out of the system for their own short-term benefit, just like they do with Google. It's something neither Facebook users, nor Facebook itself want.
