>we will also prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people.
Ugh... Lately I've had posts from weeks ago sticking to the top of my news feed. It gets really old logging in and seeing exactly the same content day after day, especially knowing things are happening and people are posting but I'm not seeing it.
What we need is more fine-grained filters, Mark. Not your prediction algorithms.
> The FB feed has been terrible since it changed from a chronological list
Isn’t there still an option to rank chronologically? It just isn’t the default. In any case, the news feed has been a quantitative success in terms of engagement metrics.
I don't think it's stictly honest about showing all posts chronologically--it still hides many that it decides aren't worth your time, time that can be better spent viewing ads. Even then, the choice to view it chronologically expires every 2 days or so, and you're back to the default.
Unless you have a small number of FB contacts (AKA “friends”) chrono is probably rapidly overwhelmed. I wanted chrono too, but it’s just too much.
OTOH it’s absurd that if you want to see again that post you saw last week — or this morning! — you probably can’t find it. That can be true in the HN firehouse too though sometimes you can dredge it out of your browser history. Good luck trying that w/FB
My gf works on this at FB (don’t know if she works on this particular change) and she says her group talks every day about the difficulty of finding stuff. I don’t know if those discussions are part of her work or it’s just they have the same problems. I just know that when I gripe about any UX issues or the shittiness of their app she just sighs and says, “yeah, we know”
> OTOH it’s absurd that if you want to see again that post you saw last week — or this morning! — you probably can’t find it.
Try 2 seconds ago. Open facebook, browse, start to close facebook, see something interesting, but it's too late the tab is closing, oh well, re-open facebook, too bad it's gone forever you'll never see it again.
Worse yet, if you use the Facebook app to follow a link someone posted and leave it open for awhile, when you then hit the back button to close the browser and return to your feed, the post containing the link will no longer be on your screen, or even easy to find. Makes it near impossible to comment on it, re-share it, etc.
OTOH it’s absurd that if you want to see again that post you saw last week — or this morning! — you probably can’t find it
Forgive my ignorance, don’t have a FB account, but there’s no “search the feed” functionality? That crazy, WTH is the point if something blips by and I have no way to find it again? Something something monetization, but it seems like that would be a major oversight.
But silly me, I’m probably making the mistake of looking at it from the user’s perspective.
It worked fine for me when it was chronological previously - albeit, I was using it differently.
In fact, I would say its harder to find stuff nowadays because if you close the page and then come back and the algorithm has weighted something off the page, you can't find it again.
Back in the day, I used to use it like a messageboard essentially, communicating at peak times with my group of friends.
If there was a post I was communicating on earlier, notifications let me know it was still happening, or I could go onto the page of the person who wrote the status.
Nowadays, its more like a blog of the popular stuff and I see the same people dominating my feed and the same posts appear for long periods - which is one of the reasons I go onto it very rarely nowadays.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's not what I enjoyed about it back when I actually used it regularly.
If you have Pages which you really like, you can emphasize them with See First as the press release notes:
> Can people still see posts from the Pages they follow at the top of News Feed?
> Yes. People who want to see more posts from Pages they follow can choose See First in News Feed Preferences to make sure they always see posts from their favorite Pages
First it was an option to still use the chronological list. Then the option was only temporary. Then they buried the option under Feeds > Most Recent. Sometimes it's even hidden and you have to hit "See More..." and scroll down. Even then it's only temporary until you re-open the app. A dark pattern for sure.
To have access to messenger to keep in touch for the people that are hooked on FB. Killing the feed has helped me stop wasting time mindlessly scrolling FB. Sorry, the memories comment wasn't meant to show narcissism but it's honestly the only thing that appears.
I'm very similar to you, though I think I still have about 50/1000 friends followed. I get maybe 2-3 new posts on my timeline on a "good day". Anyone who posts anything political or vitriolic gets unfollowed. Generally I only see happy things like travel photos, humorous posts, etc.
FB constantly nags me to "add more friends" to see more posts. I love my happy feed. :)
I've recently started putting my photos on Apple's iCloud photo library (both on my iPhone and Mac) and every now and again I'll get a notification from the Photos app saying it's create a new Memory (a collection of photos in a "smart album" put together by their AI).
Has a very similar nostalgic feeling to what you're describing, and a welcome surprise - especially after a long day at work.
It's... shocking, how much of that noise that you can get by without.
To be fair, I'm missing out on a ton of news with regards to the community and culture that I used Facebook to participate in - but my life is measurably better in every other metric for having left the platform. Getting BMX racing news second-hand is a small price to pay for having my mind back.
(Disclaimer: I spent 20+ hours per week on Facebook. It's mostly nice to have those 20+ hours back, and not having to be constantly bombarded by all the evil of this world is a huge plus, too.)
As someone who runs a business partly driven by people who use Facebook as a crappy replacement for RSS, I can confirm. Facebook made a change a while back where people who explicitly followed my page to keep up to date on local events and businesses suddenly were not seeing anything I posted. I had to start paying Facebook to keep them showing things to people, but even that is far slower than it had been. Out of about 2000 people following my page, I used to have around 1500 seeing my posts per week, now it's down to under 500.
My readers are pretty upset, complaining to me that I don't post enough anymore and they're missing events they wanted to know about, but I can't make Facebook show them what Facebook doesn't want to show them. I tell the people to go directly to my website, but for a lot of them Facebook is the only website that exists.
It's a small town without a newspaper or any other media outlets, so I'm still trying to figure out how to keep on going because I think it's a worthwhile service. Facebook doesn't make it easy anymore though.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing... I pay to get access to my audience. I wish I only paid to get access to a new expanded audience, but I understand the reality of business.
My main complaint is, people explicitly chose to follow my content and got used to seeing it... and now it's all gone. They still follow, but they don't see. Even if I pay, it's not guaranteed to hit the same audience I had before.
> My main complaint is, people explicitly chose to follow my content and got used to seeing it... and now it's all gone. They still follow, but they don't see.
They're the product, so it doesn't matter if they get what they want or not, so long as they come back.
> Even if I pay, it's not guaranteed to hit the same audience I had before.
If it was guaranteed, what incentive would you have to pay Facebook more?
>If it was guaranteed, what incentive would you have to pay Facebook more?
Well the way products usually work is the company says "pay me this amount and here is what you'll get". The way Facebook works is "Pay me... no, a bit more. Maybe a bit more. No, there's no guarantee of what you'll get in return. Don't like it? Pay a bit more then." The relationship between content creators and Facebook is a partnership. Facebook wouldn't be worth anything without users, and users would have a smaller audience without Facebook. The last thing you want is for that to tip too far in one direction.
Have you ever used Facebook ads? They're not exactly straightforward, and there's no "pay this amount to reach everyone who says they want to read your content". You can excuse their exploitative business model all you want, but it only works until there's a viable alternative.
I'm curious, what kind of ad rates are you seeing from Facebook to appeal to people locally in that small town? Do you consider it expensive? Does it seem artificially high (ie way out of line with what other local ad platforms might have been in the past such as a small town newspaper or radio station), or does Facebook seem to properly proportion the rates down based on the value of a small local economy etc etc?
I guess what I'm asking, is, does Facebook consider the value of you trying to reach those users, on a globally competitive basis (so you're competing with Nike for their attention), or is it cost effective on a more localized basis (you're competing with Sam's Plumbing on third street in the small town)? I haven't tried to reach users on Facebook in the style you're describing, so I'm not familiar with how costly it is comparatively.
Facebook gives you the option of how much to pay and says how many people you may reach with that money. I currently pay $1 per day, which lets me reach about 800 out of my 2000 followers every week. Each post ends up being seen by 50-100 people unless someone interacts with it (such as a like, share, etc), then it can get up around 200-500 depending on the interaction.
I have no idea what a newspaper would charge for similar exposure, but I can tell you that at $1 per day, I'm often paying more money than I'm making from my site.
For comparison, six months ago I was reaching nearly 100% of my followers each week and each post would easily be seen by 500 people no matter what. It's been an absolutely catastrophic drop-off.
>My main complaint is, people explicitly chose to follow my content and got used to seeing it... and now it's all gone.
That was exactly my point : Facebook's business model is to encourage businesses to accumulate followers and to then charge them for communicating with those followers.
I really do need to set up more mailing lists. I had it set up but I always got far greater reactions and click-through from Facebook so I haven't fully explored all my email options. Seems like it's time to jump back on that.
I understand that your audience is unlikely to setup an rss reader, but what about an old fashioned newsletter? Build a simple website (if you don't have one already) and let people subscribe to your events/announcements via email. Services like Mailchimp would come in handy to manage subscriptions, create newsletters and, of course, send them.
Also, explain the problem to your facebook users and encourage them to use the email subscription to not miss any future events.
There's a meaningful difference between journalists and advertisers. I know it's fashionable to bash "the media" but I wouldn't want to live in a world without journalism. Advertising I could take or leave.
We’ve lived in a world without “journalism” for, I would guess, decades? The internet is slowly giving us the option of journalism back, but it’s going to take time to reanimate that corpse.
That's pretty obviously not true. I didn't see advertisers covering the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Harvey Weinstein or tax reform, to pick just three things from the last year.
I am not saying "journalists only cover what advertisers will cover".
I am saying "journalist's standards are increasingly coming second to the generation of advertising revenue".
Once-reptutable media empires embed Outbrain widgets and generate fad-focused, celebrity-focused clickbait garbage because it makes them money. They are not doing this for Journalism's sake. They are doing it for revenue from advertisers. I understand that this is an ancient phenomenon (PG's "suits back in style" essay comes to mind), but I have observed the scale and shallowness of the phenomenon worsening as the coffers get lighter at the news orgs.
For that reason, I am arguing that the "meaningfulness" of the difference between advertisers and journalists appears to be waning.
It's only bad for media companies who use pretty awful tactics to get eyeballs.
The trick is really to stop worrying about clicks to your site and focus on good content that people will engage with (share, comment, like, whatever). If it's good content people respond well to it and will seek out your brand.
You see the same thing with the savvy companies on Instagram/Snapchat/etc
It's only bad if you're essentially a click-bait factory.
Facebook has a metric they use to determine if they're going to show people your post, and it has to do with the first few people who see it. If they see it and don't interact with it, it disappears and no one else will see it.
That really reinforces clickbait, but it also makes sure that you absolutely need those first few impressions to really count. Good content doesn't matter if the algorithm keeps it hidden.
Golly! Who would have thought it was a bad idea to shape your business model exclusively around facebook’s news feed algorithm without any contractual relationship with them?!
Seriously, I won’t shed a single tear for these “”””publishers””””.
Wait, Facebook cares about engagement between people instead of between people and ad-supported lowest common demoninator content? Could have fooled me over the past several years. I’m really cynical about FB but it really has earned it.
I hope it becomes more useful, because for me their original value proposition to users was great but has totally lost its way as they’ve monetized.
Yea, at this point I'd be willing to pay $10/month for a social network that respected my privacy, didn't bombard me with ads, and just generally treated me as a customer, rather than product.
The trick of course is convincing anyone who isn't me to pay :)
I use umatrix chrome extension to block FB and twitter to the max and almost every ad server. That keeps FB and twitter and a bunch of other nonsense out.
If they won't text you, they're not your real friends. (This isn't always true, but I'd say that it's 95% accurate.)
I'm not being condescending or pretentious. I have done this, over the last few months, and it's helped me to realize who's really worth having in my life on a daily basis, and who's not.
I don't want my friends texting me everything. That's far more disruptive than a passive feed I can glance at. And I don't want to text my friends everything either.
One of the great things about Facebook is the unexpected social interactions. I post a picture and someone I haven't talked to in a while comments something really great on it and sparks a conversation and rekindles the friendship. That's not going to happen over text.
People in my life on a daily basis are in my life on a daily basis. People in my life occasionally are on Facebook.
> I don't want my friends texting me everything. That's far more disruptive than a passive feed I can glance at. And I don't want to text my friends everything either.
I am personally going through a period where I need to tighten my circle and cut down on the number of people that I communicate with on a given day, so that’s what’s driving my approach.
We have a Telegram group with all the important people.
Just mute it so you can passively read it. And if it's something specifically for you they can @handle you.
Also we have more specific groups for gaming, memes, serious, homework,...
Oh and a "huge" group were we can add new people at first, that somebody randomly met somewhere. So they can maybe get friends with some of the others too.
I looked through my newsfeed this week for the first time in several months.
I thought the amount of trash posts and videos (which caused me to leave Facebook) had greatly declined, but wasn’t sure why. If it’s related to this change, it’s a good start.
While I’m skeptical of Facebook, I appreciate their attempt to improve if it’s genuine.
from the article:
“We want to make sure that our products are not just fun, but are good for people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “We need to refocus the system.”
genuine for me, is making changes that are good for people, even if they are bad for advertisers.
I very much hope this isn't just words. The core problem, IMO, is that content that makes us angry, anxious or jealous is a much better driver of clicks than content that makes us happy. I'm sure Facebook knows this. If they really mean it, they'll accept that they will make less money as a result of this change. It would be the right decision in the long term, but the short term will hurt.
> they'll accept that they will make less money as a result of this change
If they're providing less engagement to content discovery from businesses in the feed, it increases the value of the traditional advertising on the platform. Perhaps their plan is expected to simultaneously push up the ad rates they can charge to access users, as an offset.
It's also likely to increase the value of the content Facebook is going to curate/push on its own platform via Watch. They're going to build out a substantial streaming business in the coming years, rivaling YouTube. The user obviously has finite time, this will probably ultimately shift more engagement time to Watch, less time to stray business or media content.
Overall it strikes me as a classic later stage of platform evolution. First you have an ecosystem with large numbers of external parties that are deriving immense value from the platform (whether businesses or developers or other). Then you eat the ecosystem, replacing it with your own systems and on-platform content. For example, instead of promoting a Craigslist (eBay, Poshmark, whatever) post, if you're Facebook you promote on-platform "marketplace" listings. Instead of an external YouTube post getting attention, that goes to Watch. By doing that, they technically fulfill their claimed plan (if only in their own opinion). Twitter, Microsoft Windows, eBay, Google, Netflix, nearly all platforms do this aggressively eventually.
> content that makes us angry, anxious or jealous is a much better driver of clicks than content that makes us happy
This might be true. Or it might be a belief we formed to explain Facebook's behaviour, and we now need to start updating our beliefs.
Anyway, assuming it is true, Facebook still must balance two things: (a) get clicks from your existing users (b) get and retain users. In their halcyon days they could take (b) for granted. Perhaps now the market demands some humility from them?
Are clicks the majority of revenue for FB? An ad unit that fills a users screen for a few second as they scroll throughout the day every day is super super valuable to brand advertising. I think that’s ~$450 billion of the total ~$500 billion total annual global ad spend.
To me browsing the fb feed is a lot like like flipping through tv channels used to be. Brand advertising loved that too.
I’d think the More people browse their feeds the more valuable their ad unit becomes to brand advertisers.
Right I mean, driving a click through to a website due to rage has to be less profitable than driving a click through to say DeWalt power tools due to delight. Right? I mean some fraction of a fraction of of an ad for DeWalt must be worth less than keeping your friends pro DeWalt status update on top.
(This is not a paid ad for DeWalt but seriously, fucking DeWalt. Them and Stihl: just gorgeous power tools)
Haha. Yeah. My wife doesn't get it yet that when I pay a little extra for DeWalt it means I will not have to buy the same tool again for a very long time.
No question. The value of sales engines - driving sales referrals - as ecommerce in the US doubles over the next ~10 years (and in many developed economies), is extraordinary. If you want to make a billion dollars, build the next generation of sale referral monsters (RetailMeNot or Coupons.com being a primitive, unsophisticated first generation version; Groupon & Co were/are also primitive early sales referral engines).
A catalog is a concept, rather than a pile of printed paper as perhaps most people would think of it (ie thinking that catalogs died out with the rise of the Web). Historically catalogs pushed sales in all sorts of ways for all sorts of things, for eg the last 150 years in the US (and much longer elsewhere). As a concept, it's a sales referral system; it can either be internally owned (Sears Catalog) to drive content within eg a retailer's selection, or it can drive sales for external stray objects (whether tchotchkes or otherwise). The catalog business in the US was massive for a century. It's being rebuilt online right now. Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. are in part sales referral engines, there will be dozens of major platforms that perform that role, as it spreads to fill in every possible ecommerce niche.
All of these shops/brands/products coming online or being started from day one online, need a way to drive sales online (the more cost effectively the better). Taking a cut of that sales referral action will be dramatically more valuable than rage clicks for content on a random buzzfeed article or a paid click over to low value content on boredpanda and similar.
Are your thoughts that Facebook et al would - instead of charging for an ad 'impression' - charge ecommerce sites a sales commission for the referral? (Disclaimer; I think/imagine they do this already to some extent, but it's not the main revenue driver.)
If this were the case, then it would absolutely be in Facebook's interest to present ads based on a persons likelihood of purchase (perhaps using a deep neural recommendations network (akin to YouTube's) to power it all).
How many people are aware that the list of interests directing Facebook ads are easily visible and editable?
Settings | Ads | Your Interests
It's really interesting to see the full scope of the interests FB has gathered over time. Some of them are pretty hilarious.
They have a seemingly huge ontology of every subject you could think of. If you methodically go through an remove every interest, the ads suddenly become very generic - stuff targeted to, say, age group and/or location. Since removing everything, and periodically clearing it all out, I generally only see stuff for things like real estate and car dealerships, which don't really mean much for me.
Generally people only consider ads that “don’t mean much to me” as ads. If they do mean something to someone they suddenly cease being ads to that person. It’s a weird thing.
It’s unclear where they got those from, or why those are even allowed to be considered hobbies.
I don’t use Facebook much these days, but I’ve had an account for nearly 13 years, I use Instagram regularly and they surely have lots of tracking pixel data on me...so I was suprised at how poorly they’d inferred my interests (the other categories were less farcical but not especially accurate).
I did the same and filled it with things that are relevant to me, and now my ads are generally enjoyable — things I might not have otherwise known about.
There was a lot of cruft in there from the early days when it was easy to like everything. But after the cleanout my ads are definitely better.
Of course they will make more money from this change:
It turns out that using ML to optimize for immediate engagement has two unintended side-effects: 1) it produces junkier content, 2) it decreases long-term retention. For obvious reasons, building a model to optimize for the long-term engagement is way harder and takes way more time.
While in the long run new model is more profitable (due to increased retention life-long engagement goes up), it decreases immediate engagement metrics. When this happens, major accounts start to call in and ask why now they are getting less for their dollar, thus this preemptive explanation by Mr Zuckerberg.
Then, when the dust settles and prices adjust, increased retention will compound and profits will go up.
I just routinely block any political page (of any kind) that someone shares, and have unfollowed anyone who feels the need to go on political rants more than once or twice a week (including, sadly, some family members and long-time friends).
I mean, by this point I get it that they like (or don't like) Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Message received.
While I won't unfriend someone over politics (unless they start insulting me), I will unfollow them. If they want to waste their own time ranting on Facebook, it's their business, but I've stopped letting them waste mine.
Twitter is, of course, much worse. I don't understand how anyone can believe that Twitter's format is suitable for serious political discussion, but many people apparently do. I quit Twitter a long time ago.
They mention this quite explicitly: "As we make these updates, Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease. The impact will vary from Page to Page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and how people interact with it."
> If they really mean it, they'll accept that they will make less money as a result of this change.
First, it's not sure whether they will actually lose money. The problem with clickbait is that you learn relatively little about the user. Suppose someone clicked on hundreds of articles about why everyone hates Donald Trump... what does this teach about the user? How does it allow you to show them better targeted advertisement? If instead they will click on stuff written by their friends, you will learn what hobbies they share, and then you can sell them things related to the hobbies.
Second, just because Facebook changed a value of some variable quickly overnight, doesn't mean they can't slowly change it back later, if it indeed turns out to be a loss of profit.
>It would be the right decision in the long term, but the short term will hurt.
It seems there's quite a bit of incentive to target short term gains for many of the relatively new tech companies. When tons of early employees hold incredibly valuable stock options, which tend to be more valuable than their salary's, this creates an organization wide incentive to drive those stock prices as high as possible during their tenure. Those early employees gain position and influence, then use it to influence company culture and direction.
Is assume this contributes to the reason why it's so hard for behemoth companies to be nimble and quickly change direction.
Anecdotally, the only change I've noticed is that Facebook seems to be showing more ads (almost always for something I'm not interested in) in my news feed.
> The core problem, IMO, is that content that makes us angry, anxious or jealous is a much better driver of clicks than content that makes us happy.
Right ... and if they're not careful here, they'll just go back to how FB was before the brands all moved in: people posting content that made each other angry or anxious.
A FB feed full of people trolling one other and squabbling about politics in long comment threads might look like it's "sparking conversations" and worth promoting in News Feed, but it's fundamentally going to be the same sort of turn-off as any badly-run forum is.
The core core problem is the content incentives: whether for brands or individuals, FB incentivises content that gets interactions, and without moderation of some kind that leads inexorably to trolling/clickbait.
Well, studies have said social media increases anxiety, I suppose because people usually post highlights of their lives, on average people's reaction to those posts is jealousy and feeling like "Why is my life shit?"...
I have a perfectly lovely set of friends, who often post lovely things.
But when I think back to all the “long comments” and “spark conversation” type posts, they’re not lovely. They are politics or other things that spark FB’s equivalent of a flame war.
So my fear is that using those things to indicate these posts should be more prominent is going to be a tricky thing for them to get right.
Getting a computer to decide between “has lots of comments because it’s a fight” and “has lots of comments because it’s useful and interesting” is an interesting challenge.
That is a good statement of the problem. It seems like I've read about some pretty effective tone analysis for English, at least, that might be helpful.
A "Was that worth it?" button might help distinguish clickbait or angerbait from genuinely worthwhile and fulfilling information. Say you participated in a conversation on FB. When the conversation ends, you might get a notification from FB the next time to log in asking you whether it was good.
Or a news site could have a Was it worth it? button at the end of each story, to help identify clickbait or otherwise low-quality articles. Rather than measuring how many page views each journalist drives, they might measure how many satisfied readers that article had, and reward journalists who write high-quality articles.
yes please! The reason I don't use facebook anymore is because it doesn't present me anything I care about. Just memes, news and updates in some sale groups I am part of. I'm not complaining that it doesn't hog me as much as it used to, but the reason why I still have a account is to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances and see what's going in in their life
I have long critiqued Facebook for chasing after ad revenue at the expense of the experience they offer users. In light of this news, the following quote comes to mind: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I generally feel that Facebook has traveled so far in the wrong direction, coming back to any sense of morality will be an extremely hard job. That being said, I wonder if they truly understood the extent of their "shady" tactics. It's all too easy to focus on shareholders and forget about the real people using your service. All told, this does at least feel like a step in the right direction.
The context there is important there. He didn’t call them dumbfucks for using Facebook, but made the observation that a small subset that work at the school newspaper are dumbfucks.
Not saying it’s right, but that quote is taken wildly out of context all the time.
Here's the quote. I don't see how it is has anything to do with newspaper people. He says "anyone at Harvard."
> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
> Zuck: Just ask
> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
> Zuck: People just submitted it.
> Zuck: I don't know why.
> Zuck: They "trust me"
> Zuck: Dumb fucks
I see. FB is adopting a similar model to Tecent's WeChat Moments in which users primarily see content shared by friends and family. It worked for WeChat but let's how it goes for Facebook.
I'm guessing that this change won't affect the dopamine-release strategy they were engaging with before. There are far more issues with Facebook rather than the need to tweak the network to ad post ratio in the news feed.
I believe this is step 1 in entering/dominating another industry: influencer marketing. Hear me out. I have 3 friends who have started “influencer marketing” companies that fly out 20 or so influencers, and brands pay for posts during their trip. I’m not too well attuned to the economics of it, but from what I can see, it’s profitable.
Facebooks move of doing this is probably to ultimately purposefully change the incentives for advertisers. Now, advertisers, who have went all in to social networks will have to retain that channel, since it happens to work so well. And they’ll be paying more per ad, as a result of the economics of this new marketing paradigm. Influencers (when FB takes over this market, I’m sure they/we won’t be called that) and Facebook is, please excuse my use of a buzzword, a true synergy. I mean, who wouldn’t want free stuff* (with the catch that you have to post about the product x times in a given time frame)? By using the whole network as a conduit for advertising, I think this is going to be huge.
I think you're right, influencers are going to get bigger. They're kind of like a contracted-out or part-time sales team. Or another way of looking at it, they're living commercials.
Eventually FB will see influences as a challenge to their own ad network (the only ads on FB must go thru FB!), so I agree with you, FB will try to take it over. PS I wonder why you got a downvote.
Good intentions or not, we must remember that history has proven time and time again, when any entity has far too much unchecked power, it is inevitably exploited by bad actors.
A user base of two billion users without any real accountability is a scary thing. The only people policing Facebook are Facebook. We would never agree to a having a single dictator who answers to no one, why should Facebook be treated any differently?
Because unlike a dictator Facebook has zero real power over your life? It's a site of puppies and horoscopes, you think we should be dealing with them like we do Kim Jong Un?
How have we moved so far on the personal responsibility scale. Why aren't people partly responsible for not making better use of their time? Facebook is an "evil echo chamber", "wasting people's lives", "catering to business", etc - ALL THEY DO IS HOST YOUR FRIENDS' PHOTOS. Can't we take partial responsibility at least for how often we _choose_ to log on? Are we that simple that our entire personalities can be fully pwned with some basic machine learning?
Facebook is regulated (everything is regulated to some degree either directly or indirectly). Is there a specific regulation you mean? Perhaps traditional media should be less regulated? I personally really like the way the internet is.
Who forced you to use a single site on the web? Monopolies of oil, phone lines, food ... Those are troubling.
What is Facebook a monopoly of? Attention? Digital family scrapbooks?
If they're such a monopoly why is it ridiculously easy to quit it with absolutely no consequences?
Why are you giving these companies powers they don't actually possess? Their only value to anyone is their Network effects. There are plenty of alternatives to Facebook and Twitter and Google and (thanks, Internet!) they're really easy to find and use.
I'd like more regulations on securing / deleting consumer data, accountability for data leaks, public disclosure of political advertising, clear labeling of friend's content vs ads and organic trending content, and anti-monopoly regulations to promote innovative competition.
The public has benefitted from placing those regulations on traditional media, it should serve as an example for regulating massive tech corporations. If anything, I'm in favor of more advertising regulations on traditional media (eg banning deceptive advertising, especially in medicine).
FB does far more than host photos. In addition to being a platform to disseminate any sort of media, from cat videos to news to political commentary (so much so that they developed Instant Articles), it serves as a platform for text/video chat, event coordination among friends and organizations, web pages for small businesses, forums (which is basically what a Group is), games, and countless other stuff I haven’t listed here.
Facebook really does want to be your homepage and their products currently released all point to an all encompassing strategy to get you to stay on Facebook in order to look at more ads. In light of their ambitious strategy that extends far beyond the scope of traditional media, it really is not something to laugh off.
Power is very different from influence. Facebook does a great job of encouraging people to choose to visit, but they have no power to force anyone to do so. The second comment is hyperbolic for sure, I used that device to try and swing the conversation closer to the other side where I think it needs to be.
Influence is a function of power, it's in the very definition of the word:
1. the ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a faculty or quality.
2. the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events.
Does FB not have the ability to influence behavior?
Even if you choose not to visit FB (I don't), that doesn't mean FB has no influence over your life, especially when many/most of your friends and billions of others are plugged into it. Unless you live on Mars.
This is like saying a Tesla car is just a machine that generates heat.
Facebook has built an algorithmically optimized list of content that they believe will drive you back to the site to consume more.
They also have insane amounts of usage data which they are testing for sentiment analysis [0] They've also run tests on content to provoke emotion as far back as 2014.[1]
It's clear that they have the power to influence emotions and impact people in real ways. Because you are strong willed does not mean that others cannot be easily swayed by dopamine release.
> This is like saying a Tesla car is just a machine that generates heat.
Not to that degree but I admit that I used a hyperbolic devise to try and pull back the implied necessity of Facebook.
> does not mean that others cannot be easily swayed by dopamine release
Facebook should be regulated as a narcotic :-P
Jokes aside, FB does have lots of ability to influence, and they shouldn't be able to operate with impunity, but that's a far cry from where we are now:
- Facebook is too fun (because AI!!) and my work is suffering!
- Facebook keeps giving me what I'm interested and engaged in!! (echo chamber)
Seriously. I get the argument that the brain has flaws that can be manipulated to some degree, and I think it is seriously worth considering, but HN has really jumped the shark when it comes to these conversations. To hear this forum tell it, everybody is powerlessly cowering beneath the lash of their electronic devices, completely unable to make any decisions about their usage.
The ugly truth is that while you may be very conscious of how you spend your time online and what you interact with, the majority of people simply is not, and many people are ill-equipped to even understand how they are being manipulated to scroll a bit more, play another game or vote for the wrong candidate.
I'm not going to explain to you why it matters in which direction societies evolve.
And yes, the 'wrong' candidate obviously can exist, for example the one that deceives the voter.
Sure, that's probably fair. But to be precise, what I'm complaining about is my perception that the tenor of some of these HN conversation is so hysterical that they don't even recognize the _possibility_ of having control over your usage. The idea that Facebook et al are _nothing_ more than a 21st century poison, and that they're impossible to use responsibly, is something I've seen far too often for far too long on this board.
I use drugs (caffeine, alcohol, weed, and a couple others), and do so responsibly, and think that they add some measure of richness to my life. I enjoy well-made desserts, and do so responsibly, mostly avoiding sugar and processed carbs in the rest of my diet, and I'm in great physical health. Both of these have a huge potential for abuse, but the idea that they're 100% terrible and the only possible way to handle them is complete abstinence is absurd.
I use Facebook, but I do so in moderation, I generally don't spend much/any time in the feed, and it adds a dimension of convenience of communication to my life which has helped _enrich_ many friendships instead of damaged them[1]. And yet out of the three examples I've given here, Facebook is the only one for which I frequently see top comments and entire threads with people claiming they can't believe that everyone hasn't figured out that any FB usage is toxic and the only solution is complete abstinence. I just don't get it.
[1] A friend of mine had a traumatic brain injury last year and has been recovering with family in a different city. Since he's not able to have the big bday party up here that he usually has, a couple of weekends from now, 10 of us are flying from three separate parts of the country to celebrate his birthday for a weekend. _All_ of the planning, from convincing his family, to figuring out lodgings, to figuring out the guest list, to figuring out transportation and scheduling for everyone, was done over Facebook Events and Messenger (and Google Sheets).
I agree and feel similarly about the fake news discussion that's been going on since the election: Instead of looking for ways to hide it we should try to educate people, encourage critical thinking and work towards media consumption literacy and competence. If publications like Breitbart, /r/the_donald and others find a substantial following, maybe the receivers and not the messenger itself needs fixing.
Of course this isn't an overnight process, but one that has to start early, particularly during childhood, which is why the education system is central to those efforts.
Facebook can affect your life by being a rumor mill and bullying platform. Yes, it is easy to stop using Facebook, but the consequences of rumors can greatly affect a person offline.
If that's all they do, why do they just show me my friend's political rants and never the photos? I have to click on a specific person to see their entire timeline these days ("Most recent" only shows me a couple things, and then tells me to add more friends), and it's almost always their political rants and links, and rarely their photos.
I've started using Instagram, ironically also owned by facebook, because it's photos and not weird political rants.
If you want to hear the opposite side of the story, you should listen to an episode of the Dan Harris podcast with Tristan Harris [1]. Tristan is the founder of timewellspent.io which is an organization advocating for changes to the way we measure the success of applications.
The core point is that properties like FB are built to persuade you into doing certain things and we have surprisingly effective techniques for getting the results we want. A major aspect is that even when people notice and reject certain techniques this requires mental effort – over time you are worn down and less likely to make good decisions. At the moment we are fighting an up-hill battle against all the big players on the net – for what? Should it be like this? How do you want live to be? isn’t it worthwhile to strive for creating an environment where as many people as possible are able to thrive and succeed – after all, we all profit from other people making good decisions!
This change was tested for months in several smaller countries including mine. I am not on facebook, but I know that media here hate the change. They lost tens of percents of traffic overnight.
This plus the Adblock wars makes me wonder if there's anything that would make both consumers and media happy at the same time, or whether the relationship is pseudo adversarial by nature now.
I welcome the changes, and am open to giving Zuckerberg's pledge to investigate decentralization this year[1] a fair shake.
He has a lot of work and convincing to do to fulfill these lofty goals and inspire us to take him seriously. Nothing against Zuckerberg specifically, even -- just that corporate incentives and business momentum are mighty forces to be contended with, even assuming Mark is acting in good faith and full capacity.
I agree. I've unfollowed so many friends because they are basically little machines designed to share everything they see on Facebook. I'm missing tons of moments from their lives and it gets awkward when my brother asks me if I saw his Facebook post the other day, but man I wish I could choose to see written posts but not shared posts.
The News Feed algorithm is a plague for everyone who is not Facebook or its shareholders. Who knows if I will see something written by a "friend"? Who knows if "friends" will see something I write? What if they "share" or "like" it; does that make a difference? I guess this is how all those poor pigeons felt inside Skinner's boxes.
I've noticed that very few actually write or post content to Facebook at this point. Of cause it may just be within my circle of friends, but it's mostly just stuff people liked or shared. At this point, if Facebook would allow me to just view friends posted content, chronologically, then I could browse a weeks worth of posts in five minutes.
The trend of people posting updates on their lives on Facebook is dead I think. Either people have moved to snapchat, or they don't want to play that game anymore. Facebook has been reduce to a platform for party invites and messaging.
I am very surprised by the general vibe in here that FB are doing this for the users or to promote responsible social networking. IMHO They poisoned the well by disrespecting their users [1] and are now trying to undo the damage. Just like Apple were very sorry after they got caught slowing iPhones.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 72.1 ms ] threadFacebook press release: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/news-feed-fyi-bringing-...
> One of our big focus areas for 2018 is to make sure that the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent.
"Time well spent" is also the name of an organization that is one of Facebook's strongest critics:
http://timewellspent.io
I wonder if the phrasing is deliberate.
and also easy to explain: the quest for ad revenue
Ugh... Lately I've had posts from weeks ago sticking to the top of my news feed. It gets really old logging in and seeing exactly the same content day after day, especially knowing things are happening and people are posting but I'm not seeing it.
What we need is more fine-grained filters, Mark. Not your prediction algorithms.
Isn’t there still an option to rank chronologically? It just isn’t the default. In any case, the news feed has been a quantitative success in terms of engagement metrics.
Edit: to hook people on FB to increase eye ball time (which translates to more ad exposure as well as improving individual profiling and ad targeting)
OTOH it’s absurd that if you want to see again that post you saw last week — or this morning! — you probably can’t find it. That can be true in the HN firehouse too though sometimes you can dredge it out of your browser history. Good luck trying that w/FB
My gf works on this at FB (don’t know if she works on this particular change) and she says her group talks every day about the difficulty of finding stuff. I don’t know if those discussions are part of her work or it’s just they have the same problems. I just know that when I gripe about any UX issues or the shittiness of their app she just sighs and says, “yeah, we know”
Try 2 seconds ago. Open facebook, browse, start to close facebook, see something interesting, but it's too late the tab is closing, oh well, re-open facebook, too bad it's gone forever you'll never see it again.
Forgive my ignorance, don’t have a FB account, but there’s no “search the feed” functionality? That crazy, WTH is the point if something blips by and I have no way to find it again? Something something monetization, but it seems like that would be a major oversight.
But silly me, I’m probably making the mistake of looking at it from the user’s perspective.
In fact, I would say its harder to find stuff nowadays because if you close the page and then come back and the algorithm has weighted something off the page, you can't find it again.
Back in the day, I used to use it like a messageboard essentially, communicating at peak times with my group of friends.
If there was a post I was communicating on earlier, notifications let me know it was still happening, or I could go onto the page of the person who wrote the status.
Nowadays, its more like a blog of the popular stuff and I see the same people dominating my feed and the same posts appear for long periods - which is one of the reasons I go onto it very rarely nowadays.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's not what I enjoyed about it back when I actually used it regularly.
> Can people still see posts from the Pages they follow at the top of News Feed?
> Yes. People who want to see more posts from Pages they follow can choose See First in News Feed Preferences to make sure they always see posts from their favorite Pages
Be real, social media is intended to magnify narcissistic ego through engagement, not disengagement.
See their response to a sibling of yours. They still use fb to keep in touch with people, just not have them on the newsfeed.
I understand this is an hyperbole, but it sounds really too far fetched. Facebook is not the internet.
Edit: OP says they “unfollowed” everyone, as opposed to unfriending, which is what I’m basing this off of.
FB constantly nags me to "add more friends" to see more posts. I love my happy feed. :)
Has a very similar nostalgic feeling to what you're describing, and a welcome surprise - especially after a long day at work.
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/951615904760172545
It's... shocking, how much of that noise that you can get by without.
To be fair, I'm missing out on a ton of news with regards to the community and culture that I used Facebook to participate in - but my life is measurably better in every other metric for having left the platform. Getting BMX racing news second-hand is a small price to pay for having my mind back.
(Disclaimer: I spent 20+ hours per week on Facebook. It's mostly nice to have those 20+ hours back, and not having to be constantly bombarded by all the evil of this world is a huge plus, too.)
My readers are pretty upset, complaining to me that I don't post enough anymore and they're missing events they wanted to know about, but I can't make Facebook show them what Facebook doesn't want to show them. I tell the people to go directly to my website, but for a lot of them Facebook is the only website that exists.
It's a small town without a newspaper or any other media outlets, so I'm still trying to figure out how to keep on going because I think it's a worthwhile service. Facebook doesn't make it easy anymore though.
My main complaint is, people explicitly chose to follow my content and got used to seeing it... and now it's all gone. They still follow, but they don't see. Even if I pay, it's not guaranteed to hit the same audience I had before.
They're the product, so it doesn't matter if they get what they want or not, so long as they come back.
> Even if I pay, it's not guaranteed to hit the same audience I had before.
If it was guaranteed, what incentive would you have to pay Facebook more?
Well the way products usually work is the company says "pay me this amount and here is what you'll get". The way Facebook works is "Pay me... no, a bit more. Maybe a bit more. No, there's no guarantee of what you'll get in return. Don't like it? Pay a bit more then." The relationship between content creators and Facebook is a partnership. Facebook wouldn't be worth anything without users, and users would have a smaller audience without Facebook. The last thing you want is for that to tip too far in one direction.
Have you ever used Facebook ads? They're not exactly straightforward, and there's no "pay this amount to reach everyone who says they want to read your content". You can excuse their exploitative business model all you want, but it only works until there's a viable alternative.
I'm not excusing it, I just want to put it in stark relief because I dislike it.
I guess what I'm asking, is, does Facebook consider the value of you trying to reach those users, on a globally competitive basis (so you're competing with Nike for their attention), or is it cost effective on a more localized basis (you're competing with Sam's Plumbing on third street in the small town)? I haven't tried to reach users on Facebook in the style you're describing, so I'm not familiar with how costly it is comparatively.
I have no idea what a newspaper would charge for similar exposure, but I can tell you that at $1 per day, I'm often paying more money than I'm making from my site.
For comparison, six months ago I was reaching nearly 100% of my followers each week and each post would easily be seen by 500 people no matter what. It's been an absolutely catastrophic drop-off.
That was exactly my point : Facebook's business model is to encourage businesses to accumulate followers and to then charge them for communicating with those followers.
Also, explain the problem to your facebook users and encourage them to use the email subscription to not miss any future events.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
Seems to be a common thing.
In the dictionary, sure. In reality, for as long as advertisers are how journalists get paid, that difference is whittling towards nil.
When you gather news from enough sources you start to see patterns in what gets a lot of attention, and what doesn't.
Long to short, you're naive if you don't think there's a straight line been the mainstrean news media and advertisers.
Note: The mainstream news media should also not be confused with journalism. The reasons are obvious.
I am saying "journalist's standards are increasingly coming second to the generation of advertising revenue".
Once-reptutable media empires embed Outbrain widgets and generate fad-focused, celebrity-focused clickbait garbage because it makes them money. They are not doing this for Journalism's sake. They are doing it for revenue from advertisers. I understand that this is an ancient phenomenon (PG's "suits back in style" essay comes to mind), but I have observed the scale and shallowness of the phenomenon worsening as the coffers get lighter at the news orgs.
For that reason, I am arguing that the "meaningfulness" of the difference between advertisers and journalists appears to be waning.
The trick is really to stop worrying about clicks to your site and focus on good content that people will engage with (share, comment, like, whatever). If it's good content people respond well to it and will seek out your brand.
You see the same thing with the savvy companies on Instagram/Snapchat/etc
It's only bad if you're essentially a click-bait factory.
That really reinforces clickbait, but it also makes sure that you absolutely need those first few impressions to really count. Good content doesn't matter if the algorithm keeps it hidden.
Seriously, I won’t shed a single tear for these “”””publishers””””.
I hope it becomes more useful, because for me their original value proposition to users was great but has totally lost its way as they’ve monetized.
The trick of course is convincing anyone who isn't me to pay :)
Heck, maybe it should be a non-profit.
If they won't text you, they're not your real friends. (This isn't always true, but I'd say that it's 95% accurate.)
I'm not being condescending or pretentious. I have done this, over the last few months, and it's helped me to realize who's really worth having in my life on a daily basis, and who's not.
One of the great things about Facebook is the unexpected social interactions. I post a picture and someone I haven't talked to in a while comments something really great on it and sparks a conversation and rekindles the friendship. That's not going to happen over text.
People in my life on a daily basis are in my life on a daily basis. People in my life occasionally are on Facebook.
Real friendships aren't passive.
I am personally going through a period where I need to tighten my circle and cut down on the number of people that I communicate with on a given day, so that’s what’s driving my approach.
Thank you for sharing your perspective.
Just mute it so you can passively read it. And if it's something specifically for you they can @handle you.
Also we have more specific groups for gaming, memes, serious, homework,...
Oh and a "huge" group were we can add new people at first, that somebody randomly met somewhere. So they can maybe get friends with some of the others too.
Honestly, maybe invites/sponsorships? One person who care's enough to pay $10 can bring his "social graph" (or a subset) with him.
Most instance admins have a Patreon and/or Liberapay if you want to send $10/month their way.
I thought the amount of trash posts and videos (which caused me to leave Facebook) had greatly declined, but wasn’t sure why. If it’s related to this change, it’s a good start.
While I’m skeptical of Facebook, I appreciate their attempt to improve if it’s genuine.
genuine for me, is making changes that are good for people, even if they are bad for advertisers.
If they're providing less engagement to content discovery from businesses in the feed, it increases the value of the traditional advertising on the platform. Perhaps their plan is expected to simultaneously push up the ad rates they can charge to access users, as an offset.
It's also likely to increase the value of the content Facebook is going to curate/push on its own platform via Watch. They're going to build out a substantial streaming business in the coming years, rivaling YouTube. The user obviously has finite time, this will probably ultimately shift more engagement time to Watch, less time to stray business or media content.
Overall it strikes me as a classic later stage of platform evolution. First you have an ecosystem with large numbers of external parties that are deriving immense value from the platform (whether businesses or developers or other). Then you eat the ecosystem, replacing it with your own systems and on-platform content. For example, instead of promoting a Craigslist (eBay, Poshmark, whatever) post, if you're Facebook you promote on-platform "marketplace" listings. Instead of an external YouTube post getting attention, that goes to Watch. By doing that, they technically fulfill their claimed plan (if only in their own opinion). Twitter, Microsoft Windows, eBay, Google, Netflix, nearly all platforms do this aggressively eventually.
This might be true. Or it might be a belief we formed to explain Facebook's behaviour, and we now need to start updating our beliefs.
Anyway, assuming it is true, Facebook still must balance two things: (a) get clicks from your existing users (b) get and retain users. In their halcyon days they could take (b) for granted. Perhaps now the market demands some humility from them?
To me browsing the fb feed is a lot like like flipping through tv channels used to be. Brand advertising loved that too.
I’d think the More people browse their feeds the more valuable their ad unit becomes to brand advertisers.
(This is not a paid ad for DeWalt but seriously, fucking DeWalt. Them and Stihl: just gorgeous power tools)
A catalog is a concept, rather than a pile of printed paper as perhaps most people would think of it (ie thinking that catalogs died out with the rise of the Web). Historically catalogs pushed sales in all sorts of ways for all sorts of things, for eg the last 150 years in the US (and much longer elsewhere). As a concept, it's a sales referral system; it can either be internally owned (Sears Catalog) to drive content within eg a retailer's selection, or it can drive sales for external stray objects (whether tchotchkes or otherwise). The catalog business in the US was massive for a century. It's being rebuilt online right now. Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. are in part sales referral engines, there will be dozens of major platforms that perform that role, as it spreads to fill in every possible ecommerce niche.
All of these shops/brands/products coming online or being started from day one online, need a way to drive sales online (the more cost effectively the better). Taking a cut of that sales referral action will be dramatically more valuable than rage clicks for content on a random buzzfeed article or a paid click over to low value content on boredpanda and similar.
If this were the case, then it would absolutely be in Facebook's interest to present ads based on a persons likelihood of purchase (perhaps using a deep neural recommendations network (akin to YouTube's) to power it all).
Settings | Ads | Your Interests
It's really interesting to see the full scope of the interests FB has gathered over time. Some of them are pretty hilarious.
They have a seemingly huge ontology of every subject you could think of. If you methodically go through an remove every interest, the ads suddenly become very generic - stuff targeted to, say, age group and/or location. Since removing everything, and periodically clearing it all out, I generally only see stuff for things like real estate and car dealerships, which don't really mean much for me.
It’s unclear where they got those from, or why those are even allowed to be considered hobbies.
I don’t use Facebook much these days, but I’ve had an account for nearly 13 years, I use Instagram regularly and they surely have lots of tracking pixel data on me...so I was suprised at how poorly they’d inferred my interests (the other categories were less farcical but not especially accurate).
There was a lot of cruft in there from the early days when it was easy to like everything. But after the cleanout my ads are definitely better.
It turns out that using ML to optimize for immediate engagement has two unintended side-effects: 1) it produces junkier content, 2) it decreases long-term retention. For obvious reasons, building a model to optimize for the long-term engagement is way harder and takes way more time.
While in the long run new model is more profitable (due to increased retention life-long engagement goes up), it decreases immediate engagement metrics. When this happens, major accounts start to call in and ask why now they are getting less for their dollar, thus this preemptive explanation by Mr Zuckerberg.
Then, when the dust settles and prices adjust, increased retention will compound and profits will go up.
Not for me. I've all but abandoned Facebook because I was tired of being angry all the time. It's a wasteland of political hysterics.
I mean, by this point I get it that they like (or don't like) Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Message received.
While I won't unfriend someone over politics (unless they start insulting me), I will unfollow them. If they want to waste their own time ranting on Facebook, it's their business, but I've stopped letting them waste mine.
Twitter is, of course, much worse. I don't understand how anyone can believe that Twitter's format is suitable for serious political discussion, but many people apparently do. I quit Twitter a long time ago.
I think it's bold but good for the long term.
First, it's not sure whether they will actually lose money. The problem with clickbait is that you learn relatively little about the user. Suppose someone clicked on hundreds of articles about why everyone hates Donald Trump... what does this teach about the user? How does it allow you to show them better targeted advertisement? If instead they will click on stuff written by their friends, you will learn what hobbies they share, and then you can sell them things related to the hobbies.
Second, just because Facebook changed a value of some variable quickly overnight, doesn't mean they can't slowly change it back later, if it indeed turns out to be a loss of profit.
What they really need to be worried about is how many advertisers they will/won't lose.
It seems there's quite a bit of incentive to target short term gains for many of the relatively new tech companies. When tons of early employees hold incredibly valuable stock options, which tend to be more valuable than their salary's, this creates an organization wide incentive to drive those stock prices as high as possible during their tenure. Those early employees gain position and influence, then use it to influence company culture and direction.
Is assume this contributes to the reason why it's so hard for behemoth companies to be nimble and quickly change direction.
If anything, stock options incentivize longer term thinking. Instead of quarter to quarter goals, stock options reward goals years in the future.
If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change, and all that.
Especially considering there's only a "like" button and not a "dislike" button. It's frustrating!
Right ... and if they're not careful here, they'll just go back to how FB was before the brands all moved in: people posting content that made each other angry or anxious.
A FB feed full of people trolling one other and squabbling about politics in long comment threads might look like it's "sparking conversations" and worth promoting in News Feed, but it's fundamentally going to be the same sort of turn-off as any badly-run forum is.
The core core problem is the content incentives: whether for brands or individuals, FB incentivises content that gets interactions, and without moderation of some kind that leads inexorably to trolling/clickbait.
But when I think back to all the “long comments” and “spark conversation” type posts, they’re not lovely. They are politics or other things that spark FB’s equivalent of a flame war.
So my fear is that using those things to indicate these posts should be more prominent is going to be a tricky thing for them to get right.
Getting a computer to decide between “has lots of comments because it’s a fight” and “has lots of comments because it’s useful and interesting” is an interesting challenge.
Or a news site could have a Was it worth it? button at the end of each story, to help identify clickbait or otherwise low-quality articles. Rather than measuring how many page views each journalist drives, they might measure how many satisfied readers that article had, and reward journalists who write high-quality articles.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16142137
I generally feel that Facebook has traveled so far in the wrong direction, coming back to any sense of morality will be an extremely hard job. That being said, I wonder if they truly understood the extent of their "shady" tactics. It's all too easy to focus on shareholders and forget about the real people using your service. All told, this does at least feel like a step in the right direction.
Not saying it’s right, but that quote is taken wildly out of context all the time.
Facebooks move of doing this is probably to ultimately purposefully change the incentives for advertisers. Now, advertisers, who have went all in to social networks will have to retain that channel, since it happens to work so well. And they’ll be paying more per ad, as a result of the economics of this new marketing paradigm. Influencers (when FB takes over this market, I’m sure they/we won’t be called that) and Facebook is, please excuse my use of a buzzword, a true synergy. I mean, who wouldn’t want free stuff* (with the catch that you have to post about the product x times in a given time frame)? By using the whole network as a conduit for advertising, I think this is going to be huge.
Eventually FB will see influences as a challenge to their own ad network (the only ads on FB must go thru FB!), so I agree with you, FB will try to take it over. PS I wonder why you got a downvote.
How have we moved so far on the personal responsibility scale. Why aren't people partly responsible for not making better use of their time? Facebook is an "evil echo chamber", "wasting people's lives", "catering to business", etc - ALL THEY DO IS HOST YOUR FRIENDS' PHOTOS. Can't we take partial responsibility at least for how often we _choose_ to log on? Are we that simple that our entire personalities can be fully pwned with some basic machine learning?
Giant monopolies that control most of it for most users?
What is Facebook a monopoly of? Attention? Digital family scrapbooks?
If they're such a monopoly why is it ridiculously easy to quit it with absolutely no consequences?
Why are you giving these companies powers they don't actually possess? Their only value to anyone is their Network effects. There are plenty of alternatives to Facebook and Twitter and Google and (thanks, Internet!) they're really easy to find and use.
The public has benefitted from placing those regulations on traditional media, it should serve as an example for regulating massive tech corporations. If anything, I'm in favor of more advertising regulations on traditional media (eg banning deceptive advertising, especially in medicine).
Facebook really does want to be your homepage and their products currently released all point to an all encompassing strategy to get you to stay on Facebook in order to look at more ads. In light of their ambitious strategy that extends far beyond the scope of traditional media, it really is not something to laugh off.
>ALL THEY DO IS HOST YOUR FRIENDS' PHOTOS.
These two obviously false statements completely undermine your otherwise valid point about personal responsibility.
Influence is a function of power, it's in the very definition of the word:
1. the ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a faculty or quality.
2. the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events.
Does FB not have the ability to influence behavior?
Even if you choose not to visit FB (I don't), that doesn't mean FB has no influence over your life, especially when many/most of your friends and billions of others are plugged into it. Unless you live on Mars.
This is like saying a Tesla car is just a machine that generates heat.
Facebook has built an algorithmically optimized list of content that they believe will drive you back to the site to consume more.
They also have insane amounts of usage data which they are testing for sentiment analysis [0] They've also run tests on content to provoke emotion as far back as 2014.[1]
It's clear that they have the power to influence emotions and impact people in real ways. Because you are strong willed does not mean that others cannot be easily swayed by dopamine release.
[0](http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/27/technology/facebook-ai-suici...) [1](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...)
Not to that degree but I admit that I used a hyperbolic devise to try and pull back the implied necessity of Facebook.
> does not mean that others cannot be easily swayed by dopamine release
Facebook should be regulated as a narcotic :-P
Jokes aside, FB does have lots of ability to influence, and they shouldn't be able to operate with impunity, but that's a far cry from where we are now:
- Facebook is too fun (because AI!!) and my work is suffering!
- Facebook keeps giving me what I'm interested and engaged in!! (echo chamber)
Unfortunately, yes.
> ALL THEY DO IS HOST YOUR FRIENDS' PHOTOS
You might not have noticed that Facebook also hosts a lot of Javascript that non-facebook sites load for some aspect of their implementation.
I use drugs (caffeine, alcohol, weed, and a couple others), and do so responsibly, and think that they add some measure of richness to my life. I enjoy well-made desserts, and do so responsibly, mostly avoiding sugar and processed carbs in the rest of my diet, and I'm in great physical health. Both of these have a huge potential for abuse, but the idea that they're 100% terrible and the only possible way to handle them is complete abstinence is absurd.
I use Facebook, but I do so in moderation, I generally don't spend much/any time in the feed, and it adds a dimension of convenience of communication to my life which has helped _enrich_ many friendships instead of damaged them[1]. And yet out of the three examples I've given here, Facebook is the only one for which I frequently see top comments and entire threads with people claiming they can't believe that everyone hasn't figured out that any FB usage is toxic and the only solution is complete abstinence. I just don't get it.
[1] A friend of mine had a traumatic brain injury last year and has been recovering with family in a different city. Since he's not able to have the big bday party up here that he usually has, a couple of weekends from now, 10 of us are flying from three separate parts of the country to celebrate his birthday for a weekend. _All_ of the planning, from convincing his family, to figuring out lodgings, to figuring out the guest list, to figuring out transportation and scheduling for everyone, was done over Facebook Events and Messenger (and Google Sheets).
Of course this isn't an overnight process, but one that has to start early, particularly during childhood, which is why the education system is central to those efforts.
If that's all they do, why do they just show me my friend's political rants and never the photos? I have to click on a specific person to see their entire timeline these days ("Most recent" only shows me a couple things, and then tells me to add more friends), and it's almost always their political rants and links, and rarely their photos.
I've started using Instagram, ironically also owned by facebook, because it's photos and not weird political rants.
The core point is that properties like FB are built to persuade you into doing certain things and we have surprisingly effective techniques for getting the results we want. A major aspect is that even when people notice and reject certain techniques this requires mental effort – over time you are worn down and less likely to make good decisions. At the moment we are fighting an up-hill battle against all the big players on the net – for what? Should it be like this? How do you want live to be? isn’t it worthwhile to strive for creating an environment where as many people as possible are able to thrive and succeed – after all, we all profit from other people making good decisions!
[1] https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/what-is-technology-do... I
Publishing a static set of lightly styled HTML pages to massive audiences is shockingly cheap.
This is not necessarily a bad thing for users
He has a lot of work and convincing to do to fulfill these lofty goals and inspire us to take him seriously. Nothing against Zuckerberg specifically, even -- just that corporate incentives and business momentum are mighty forces to be contended with, even assuming Mark is acting in good faith and full capacity.
[1]https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104380170714571
next? VR/AR = weapon of mass delusion ?
Or maybe it will just go back to the point it was when I left, in 2013, which was already very unbearable.
I'm interested in what my friends write. I have little interest in what they share, especially if it's commercial content.
Exactly. And Facebook won't give you that.
The trend of people posting updates on their lives on Facebook is dead I think. Either people have moved to snapchat, or they don't want to play that game anymore. Facebook has been reduce to a platform for party invites and messaging.
next? AR/VR = weapon of mass delusion?
[1] https://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/facebook-sharing-crisis.h...