- 4Q mobile ad revenue as percentage of ad revenue 89%
- 4Q advertising rev. $12.78 billion
General:
- increased headcount: it was 25,105 as of December 31, 2017, an increase of 47% year-over-year.
- This is the first-ever decline Facebook has had in North American users. Daily active users growth in US & Canada fell to 184 million, compared to 185 million in Q3.
Related to new US Tax Plan
- There's a one-time mandatory transition tax on accumulated foreign earnings and a reduction of the corporate income tax rate to 21 percent, effective Jan. 1, 2018. Facebook's provision for income taxes increased by $2.27 billion and its diluted EPS decreased by $0.77 for both the fourth quarter and full year 2017.
In another thread here we are learning how much of this "daily active users" is actually bots run by corporations.
I for myself have shown myself out of Facebook and enjoy real live interactions with human beings like it's the '90s.
Counterpoint: I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in. So by that metric, Facebook is far better than generic Ads I see on TV.
> I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in.
You're not going to see more ads about the things you're interested in, you're going to see ads that have a higher potential to manipulate you into commercially profitable behavior. There's a big but subtle difference between those things. You are definitely not going to see ads for your interests that bring you more joy but aren't easily monetizeable.
The coarseness of TV targeting meant people had more opportunity to assert their own priorities against the less effective manipulation.
Is your argument that if an ad works I am being manipulated, and if it doesn't work then I am not being manipulated?
I'm telling you right now that I don't mind seeing Ads on Instagram. They're great and I've found out about niche products that I otherwise would not have. If this means that small brands are able to rise up against the mega corps (Dollar Shave Club vs Gillette, as a classic example), then all the better for the market.
The other reason I don't mind is that they're visually appealing and seem to fit the Instagram ethos. Compare that to shitty banner Ads that disrupt the flow of content by being so different and so jarring in comparison.
Now, my opinion isn't meant to be generalized. Others may have a far different experience on Instagram (just because of how the product is designed to work). I'm sure there is someone who will chime in and say they hate Instagram Ads because they are completely ineffective. We could both be right in opposite directions since our feeds are probably very different.
If your opinion isn’t generalizable, it’s probably not useful in a discussion about civilization-wide issues, right? Moreover you’re only sharing your perception of how ads affect you, while others are pointing to known effects on whole populations. In essence you’re arguing against a system worth many billions with your own personal anecdote.
My opinion isn't generalizable because no two people have the same experience on Facebook and no two people use the product in the same way. For example, I only use Messenger. Some people only use the photo sharing features. Some people only use Marketplace to buy/sell things. Some people use newsfeed as their primary news source. Some people use all of these things in tandem.
So when people come into this discussion with strong opinions and try to impose their experience on everyone else, that's not useful nor reflective of reality.
What you're arguing is something very primal and not isolated to Facebook. You can make that argument about literally anything in this world and that's why I'm saying it's not useful. Cars have known effects on whole populations. Tax regulation has known effects on the behaviors of whole populations. I mean potato chips and similar snacks are engineered from the ground up to be addictive and have known effects on mass populations. Where do you draw the line for your argument? I chose to draw it at the bounds of my own personal experience with the product we're discussing.
It's OK to not like Facebook. It's also OK to like Facebook. But for me to impose my opinion on you would be misinformed because I don't know how you use it. It's an incredibly complex product with incredibly complex effects.
Sometimes I don't know what I'm interested in, which is where TV ads are much better than targeted ads. For example, once I stopped watching TV, I found that I never knew when new movies were coming out, because I never saw ads for them.
Surely this has something to do with the sheer number of users they have, right? There's only like 8 billion people on Earth and Facebook has 2 billion monthly active users. If you take away 1.5 billion people in China who can't/don't use Facebook, this means that it has 2 billion out of like ~6.5 billion possible users. And many of those people are either children (<13 years old), don't have reliable access to internet, and/or have no use for social media. So it really doesn't seem that bad to me (unless I'm missing something important).
You have a bot that logs in as a regular user? I’d be surprised if that is common, there are APIs for automation that wouldn’t count against DAU. And you would run the risk of getting your admin account blocked.
I think this is spot on.. but you've actually understated FB's market penetration, because only 1/2 of the world population is on the internet.. as of 2016: 3.4B. 750m of those are in China.. so 2.7B. (of course it'll be a bit higher than this, because it has certainly grown somewhat since 2016.)
And from that, now you can exclude children, reliable access, and people who dont want to use it, etc.
Maybe it's slowing because they hit over 1.4B people? I doubt people are concerned about societal impact, regardless of what the media would love you to believe.
Building the thing called Facebook, to be sure, but also building Oculus VR, Onavo (data collection company), WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, as well as their open source stuff like React, Flux, Relay, and myriad other JS/Haskell/OCaml/C++ projects, and don't forget the people building out Internet.org and content for Facebook Watch.
when you already have a large percentage of the online user base you are going to have to
1) wait for that underlying user base to grow
2) offer something new to capture people you dont have with your current product
They have reached the point where its a lot easier to lose someone then gain someone. I dont think its societal impact ... its people getting older and dropping off while at the same time its really hard to replenish that use base when already have so many of the young people already on your site.
So maybe they need to understand user rentention vs aging , I think that would be a place to look, societal impact ... no one uses or drops a product becuase of societal impact.
How many diamonds and how many electronics or clothes do we use that have a dubious labor practices. Its the product quality that speaks loudest.
This is a chance before the U.S mid-terms for them to prove to the public they've learned from their mistakes..
1). prevent the spread of fake news.. they need a better solution than the user-tagging bs if an article is valid or not. there was a scientologist that had an account that wasn't active for 5+ years, that started posting how puerto rico wasn't that bad when the storm first hit. why is this account not being banned or suspended when people are reporting it and they're reposting pictures from texas claiming it to be all good.
2). prevent outside interference with elections. the first baby step is if they're accepting rubles for political ads targetted at americans, ban it. simple as that. then it'll get more complex and interesting handling proxies doing the dirty deed. the hearing w/ congress was pathetic and makes fb even more untrustworthy.
3). ban fake accounts / tie in a real human behind the account. 100000 fake users means a lot less to me if i'm an advertiser than 10 real people.
even though pretty much everyone i know is on facebook, i'm itching for another platform with better integrity to jump ship to.
> 3). ban fake accounts / tie in a real human behind the account. 100000 fake users means a lot less to me if i'm an advertiser than 10 real people.
so i posted this in another thread in response to twitter, and it got kind of drowned out but with regards to authoritative/oppressive governments subpoenaing facebook to get a user's identity for voicing an opinion that isn't in line with the regime's. how do you solve this while giving every account an identity? anonymity on facebook/twitter seems to be one way to practice freedom of speech in countries where there isn't really any
In German there's a term called Eierlegende wollmilchsau. A wool pig that gives milk and lays eggs.
A reason that term exists is because there's a tendency for Germans to wait to commit to, or outright dismiss choices because they do not meet ALL of a list of requirements.
I bring it up because I do not believe that it is possible to have an identity and anonymity concurrently while the service achieves all of its goals.
Either the service caters to anonymity, or it caters to identity. Trying to sit on the fence too long results in more specialized services dividing the customer base.
i don't disagree. but what's more important? personally i'd vote on people being able to be heard. however, those messages are diluted or hidden if massive amounts of bots are spamming something else
Anonymity and bots are an interesting problem. As users become more anonymous, by creating interest-specific accounts, changing their posting behavior, and use proxies, they converge on the behavior of bots trying to masquerade as humans.
Total anonymity means total freedom of speech and total lack of trust in speech.
Facebook needs to find it's balance between anonymity that increases activity while eliminating trust, and strong trusted identities that limit activity based on social pressures.
I think "fake accounts" is definitely a problem ... however, don't think it's the true issue. They should take a note from the financial industry, and self-impose more stringent KYC and content regulations for those posting political ads.
I feel like your post is very US-centric and that is a big part of the misunderstanding.
Facebook should not be so focused on one country. And they are not: some of the problems were visible for the Brexit and the subsequent parliamentary vote in the UK; they have already addressed some issues with recent the French and the German elections. There certainly are many more elections before November, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_electoral_calendar_20...
and there was a handful of Special ones the US.
Facebook leadership used to be too US-Centric and I was very happy to see during the US Congressional hearing that it had changed (their counsel was trying to explain but failed). The reason it matters is that this means that they cannot a custom-build solution that assumes that the issue is:
- Fake News: the issue is, depending on who you ask, raise in inequality, more international migrations, the rise of populism, a systemic challenge to the Nation-State; the problems go from raising tension between political groups and non-constructive political speech; normalisation of racism; the expansion of satire beyond recognition; the two-step of outrageous statements, partial correction and dog-whistling; acceleration of political news cycle; leverage of non-factual or non-representative statements for political inflammation; etc. The over-simplification or confusing all that into that lumpy bag of a concept that is “Fake News” is highly problematic, even if you focus on one country.
- preventing outside interference: that’s actually a lot easier without so much corporate money: massive ad campaigns, or ads-only approach is mainly a US problem; creating puppet accounts and using them to discredit a group, or pouring more oil on the fire is more the type of vector we have seen overall. That is generally done training local volunteers as was seen in France, or apparently almost entirely internal influence, as was seen in Germany.
- ban fake accounts: Facebook has been fighting fake account forever, so yeah, this is clearly a problem; but the issue is that there is no clear definition of fake. To simplify greatly, you have:
1. people who use a modified version of their name (no one cares);
2. people who have two accounts (justifiable but made harder by 1.);
3. people who do 2.) to have a raging account where they exposer views on race, gender and religion that their friends and relatives would not accept (certainly some cases where that can be justified, like closeted gays);
4. people who do 3.) whose other account is deeply hateful, threatening or just plain dickish (we are getting close to banning territory);
5. people like 4. whose other account was blocked or banned so they set up a new one to keep on talking about how smart Hitler was (see where this is getting?) and how they are going to act on his ideas;
6. people like 5. but who know how to code and preventively create more accounts because they expect the first dozen they created to be blocked soon;
7. people who are better developers than 6. and offer to help them creating many realistic-sounding people who like to comment about the upsides of Slavery, below advertising for the NYTimes;
8. people who learned how to do 7. but figured out you could make money off it — of more simply, who went straight to that step.
And for 9. people who figured out you get more, less scrupulous friends faster if you use picture set scraped from porn sites.
The direct advertising loss from fake accounts is presumably massive; the loss of targeting relevance probably much bigger; the loss of trust and long-term profit orders of magnitude bigger -- so you are right to think this matters to Facebook, but for the right reasons. It’s just not simple, not exclusively politics and certainly not a problem that should be though as US-vs.-Russia. It’s much more complex.
I would actually be surprised: Putin has the redeeming quality of autocrats, he doesn’t complain about trivial things. He certainly instruments threats, made-up or otherwise, and he might occasionally get people excited over confusing displays of nationalism, like that foreign food strike last year, but the whole message around it was grave.
Saying that a freckled teenager in California can challenge his popularity by writing nonsense on the internet… it’s unbecoming.
Respect for journalism is as much about avoiding headlines like this that sneakily imply some sort of baseless causation via - in this case - the word "After" as it is about bad science in Fox News coverage of global warming.
When we let poor journalism like this headline go uncontested we erode public trust.
Headlines are why I rarely read online news articles anymore, and typically just view the comment sections, either here on HN, or Slashdot, etc. It never used to be this bad. One would think that with public trust in the media at an all time low, they would make an effort to be less sneaky and clickbaity, at the very least with their headlines, but....... nope.
Is that a fact or opinion? Likely they're seeing ad-revenue increasing with the clickbait titles, giving them a data-driven reason to pursue this (short-sighted) strategy. Long-term, they may lose their readership once they catch on.
Looks like it hit the absolute bottom in 2016 [0], with a slight uptick in 2017 according to some [1][2], but still, overall, according to various studies it's been at an all-time low during these last couple of years.
The title makes it seem like the growth slowed after the questions on societal impact were raised. I think the growth stalled years ago and has been declining even before the questions were raised.
I can't imagine why anyone would lie when they stand to make billions of dollars from it. What an odd idea.
That aside, there is a gray area between lies and not really digging into truths that you don't want to know the answer to, like how many of your accounts are actually fake.
The only people I know that still use Facebook are people over 50 years old, and to them it is crack cocaine that consumes their whole life. I think not growing up with things like this their whole life, they have been ill prepared for it when it breaches their world.
I feel they have crossed several lines in their constant push for engagement, to the point where, previously, a notification from Facebook was generally worth my time (and directly related to an action a friend has taken), whereas now, most of the notifications are irrelevant, effectively short term boosting engagement at the cost of mid/long term engagement drop. I have flat out disabled notifications from Facebook at this point.
I don’t think anyone really cares about societal impact. IMO, Facebook is a faddish activity that many people have turned into a defacto obligation.
People are getting Facebook fatigue. In my social circle, Facebook use seems to have switched to Instagram.
Personally, I check on it once a week now to keep up with a few friends who I don’t see anymore. It’s an effort, because Facebook refuses to show me what I want to see, and I need to specifically search for people.
I'm seeing some of that Instagram move as well. Having a service that's more about what's happening in people's lives is better than the mess that's facebook.
> Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that those changes have already reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day.
Or, to put this another way, people have saved 50 million hours that they formerly spent scrolling past stupid videos and memes they'd already seen on Reddit.
It's a cesspool, imo. My Facebook is overwhelmed by extremely ugly political obnoxiousness these days, which makes it almost worthless (I'd have to hide 3/4 of the conversations/posts by friends). Between that and the junk content and general corporate spam, maybe 3-5% of what I've seen on FB in the last year has been legitimately valuable social content. The majority of people I know hate Facebook as a product now. They don't just not want to use it, they hate it. Facebook knows what their product has become, it's so bad now they stopped trying to pretend otherwise. They're basically facing their Microsoft Internet tsunami moment, they either quickly adapt or fade from here. If they fade, what will happen is a dozen new social competitors will spring up and begin stripping fringe corners off the core FB network, amounting to tens of millions of users in eg North America. It'll simply break up at the edges, and retain a large foundational user base that will be a lot less engaged.
All the political stuff just ends up making me mad and probably ends up pissing off certain acquaintances if I jump into a thread. Why would I want to continuously look at that stuff?
I've been thinking about how much I hate Facebook as a product. I think the idea might not be wrong and centralization of trust might not be a horrible idea. Implementation is important. There just needs a GNU or Wikipedia of Facebook to exist. A place that has a great code of conduct and not-for-profit agenda.
I'm curious if it's related to the concept of push notifications.
If I have my online network of friends configured in such a way so that I get a notification on my phone, I don't need to stay on Facebook all day wading through cruft. If a close friend posts something, I'll get a notification and check it out. I read/watch and I'm out.
I doubt it, push notifications have been around for years now...Could just be fatigue from it all. Millennials are also getting to their 30s/mid-30s on the old side and are having families, so probably less time/need for a bunch of social networks.
The trend is moving towards private chatrooms (whatsapp, telegram, slack, messenger groups). People are tired of public social media.
Even as a pretty public twitter/fb/etc person, I'm finding that my social activity increasingly happens in private and semi private chats. For most of my friends, they use chat groups exclusively. The only times they post on Facebook/Instagram publicly is when they need to brag about some semi-big event.
Instagram Stories are popular tho. They seem to have mostly replaced the old casual personal posting.
Honestly, how many of those can someone juggle a day? I'd struggle with two yet still more show up every year. It's not big in the US, I heard, but for me it's 90% WhatsApp. MySpace used to be huge, then facebook came along. I feel like Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter are slowly replacing facebook. And what makes any of them so perfect to suggest they're the last in line?
- News: the same articles everyone is posting everywhere. Plus nutter conspiracy theorists educating us all about why the earth is flat / we never went to the moon / we should embrace communism/capitalism on completely unrelated threads.
- Friends: same people going on about the same things. One guy has a special hatred for Trump that he vents every day. Another guy talks about local affairs for his little island community. Both people I know IRL, but online they become cartoons.
- Groups: same messages over and over, with news mixed in. Sports team group news is a filter for your team. So I see all the transfers for my team, and all the game updates and comments from the fans. Pretty low quality, as in "anyone know this guy we're buying? Yeah, he's a midfielder". And permanently "We should fire the coach / He's the best coach ever".
- Baby pics / anecdotes. These are great, but take about 5 seconds to consume and like.
Engagement numbers are averaged across Q4 2017, I assume. Zuck announced the news feed algorithm changes in mid-January 2018. Now, they were likely A/B testing it for part of the past quarter, but it seems quite likely that these changes were not 100% live for all of North America for the entirety of the past quarter.
Therefore, speculatively, engagement in Q4 was likely flat or declining across NA already. What is more uncertain is the order of operations here. Did they publicly announce these changes in advance of the earnings report to get ahead of bad numbers?
From my readings, something Facebook has been struggling with for a couple years is getting people to post more personal updates.
Thus their Newsfeed changes de-prioritizing articles, and thus (I figure) their experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes, and enabling MySpace-like gradient backgrounds on text posts...
This dynamic makes me recall something: Anyone remember how back in the day (like 2006) Facebook had a feature called 'Wall-to-Wall' conversations? You would go to a friend's profile and just write a message, they would go to your 'wall' and reply, and mutual friends could see the conversation.
These days between the Newsfeed, comments on posts, and Messenger, the only reason I would post on another friend's profile is to wish them a happy birthday. That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone.
Yeah but what I'm suggesting is that the semi-public nature of wall-to-wall conversations gave Facebook a more personal vibe. I could see my friends talking and my friends could see me talking with other friends, sharing jokes, saying "I had fun at the party", stuff like that...
I think Facebook wants people to log on and post things like "It's a tough day at work but I'm looking forward to watching Black Panther" instead of just posting another link about "check out how the primaries were rigged!11". And I think the way the Newsfeed works with highly-specific posts and comments is part of the problem. There's less opportunity for laid back semi-public chatter.
Most of the people who used facebook in 2004–2006 had (and used) other ways to chat via their computers or cellphones. Most people’s profiles listed their phone numbers, email addresses and various chat service handles.
Facebook wall conversations were not used as a poor imitation of private chat, but a separate form of quasi-public communication.
Yeah, thinking back, Facebook was largely a convenient way to find and keep track of my friends' IM handles. And their phone numbers, back in the day when losing a phone meant losing all contacts because they're stored on the device.
I couldn’t possibly comment on recent Facebook struggles.
But, on the wall-to-wall thing: it still happens, but it’s generally associated with elderly or candid people who might not grasp the visibility of their post.
One thing that I feel you should be able to do is pick an audience when you write on someone’s wall. De facto, people often do that for birthdays and those rarely appear much.
I see a lot of the same casual conversations in Groups -- assuming you have groups of friends there. Those are cool and generally where the banter happens for me.
Thirded. It feels like a poorly kept secret. Last in the row of pushes is my Facebook has started showing how I can now post to groups of people more easily. Just in case posting for all friends to see is holding me back, you know. (yes friend lists exist since eons but this seems more ad-hoc... Unsure if I'm in an A/B test)
>That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone.
The wall was never a good way to do this. It's neither as powerful nor as flexible as pretty much any competing way for a small group of people to communicate, including chat programs, email, txt, snapchat, etc.
Facebook's deprioritization of the wall and buy-in on messenger/whatsapp, instagram, and the newsfeed was very smart. I suspect they are ok with people moving off posting on facebook to posting on instagram and chatting privately.
The engaging part of the wall to wall wasn't how good it was for communication, it was the semi-permissioned town hall style chat for semi-related groups of friends you'd see as it whizzed by on your feed. People did all sorts of humblebragging, cries for attention, or on the nicer side of the spectrum, open discussion that chat like whatsapp and messenger do not have.
The similarity between snooping around facebook and seeing all the open chats going on with people you'd never usually talk to and watching reality TV were striking to me.
Thought admittedly, I do not know if it was one of the driving factors to FB success or not, so it may well have been past its use by date rather than the news feeds killing it.
Personally I enjoyed those days more as my feed was more of a chronological account of people chatting rather than reshares articles, videos and memes.
On the other hand, your description bears a strong resemblance to Twitter. If you have a conversation with someone through replies, anyone who follows both of you will see it in their timeline, and by default, anyone can read it by going to either of your profiles. So it’s not uncommon to have someone you’ve never heard of jump into a conversation. And it’s easy enough to “snoop around” yourself; sometimes that can be a source of genuine new acquaintances, and with time, friendships. (There’s an etiquette to it, though. If you don’t know someone, you should only butt in to their conversations if you have something to add - not because, say, you disagree with a political statement they’re making, or at the very least, certainly not if you’re planning to hurl insults!)
Unfortunately, some people and some topics tend to attract a lot of those sorts of uninvited rebuttals - in other words, harassment - driving some to make their accounts private. In that case, only approved followers can see your tweets, ever. There’s no “friends of friends”-like middle ground, or any other more flexible filtering options.
On the other hand, for most people, Twitter’s system seems to work pretty well. It works for me, and I really enjoy the spontaneity of it.
And yet people used it--even after the news feed and well into the reign of IM and email. I'm not sure how it's smart to remove a feature that was creating engagement just because FB didn't understand why.
Facebook never clicked for me. I've had an account for a long time, but log in maybe once or twice a year.
But Instagram I love. I check it a couple of times a week. I love seeing images from my friends and having comments barely visible is exactly what I like. My only problem with it is the increasing frequency of ads. It's sucking a lot of the joy out of the platform for me.
There was an article that I can't find for the life of me about how someone suffering with depression had killed himself, and it was only a long time afterwards that any friends friends knew because Facebook hadn't been showing his posts.
IIRC they looked through his feed and there had been basically cries for help, but no one had seem them because Facebook was prioritizing engagement and not personal content.
How many other people are trying to reach out on Facebook, thinking that no one cares, when the reality is that no one even sees?
Fortunately for me, it didn't go that far. But I know that feeling, because I've been there. I cut off facebook after a pretty low point in my life, and to this day, it has been the best decision I ever made.
> someone suffering with depression had killed himself, and it was only a long time afterwards that any friends friends knew because Facebook hadn't been showing his posts.
> IIRC they looked through his feed and there had been basically cries for help, but no one had seem them because Facebook was prioritizing engagement and not personal content.
Don't worry! Facebook is working on an AI to detect such posts and refer the suicidal users to help! No need to bring his friends down with his negativity and decrease their engagement! /s
I’ve hidden friends before who I have close relationships with, simply because the content they post is trash:
- reshares of “inspirational” and “motivational” memes
- post frequency too high
- constantly posting pictures of their kids
- unfortunately a close aunt is into MLM and I can’t just unfriend her without causing drama
- generally only posting things I don’t care for enough to see like guns, cars, etc
Like, just because we are friends, doesn’t mean we have to share the same interests nor does it mean I want to hear everything you have to say on every topic.
The wall to wall stuff loses its practicality when my mother joined Facebook. Informal group chat among friends happens on chat programs like hangouts and whatsapp were you can have a large group of friends in one chat for a very long period of time. Where nothing is said for a while until someone posts "is anyone down for pizza?" or "did you see that ludicrous display last night?"
I think that was because at the time we all probably had far fewer friends on FB. As my friend count has grown over time (and really it isn't even that much compared to most) I have felt less and less inclined to broadcast my life to a bunch of people that I know only tangentially. In a way it encourages me to actually hang out with my real friends, since their updates are so buried and I rarely post anything besides politics and links.
> experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes
While we're complaining, the Javascript associated with this is particularly slow. On clicking into the text entry box, I find that if I start typing immediately it can result in the letters coming out in the wrong order when it resets the caret.
Since the newsfeed changes I noticed that I spent a bit more time on my FB feed. Normally I would see one of those idiotic posts, and wonder WTF was I doing on the site. Now I actually see stuff from friends (pics and stories), and I linger a bit more to see what's going on. Clearly I'm not the real FB demographic though.
I'm with you. I love the changes they did to the newsfeed, because now I'm seeing way less viral shit, and way more actual interesting posts and updates by my friends. And since everyone gets the same interesting content promoted to them, there's also more comments on that content, making it better.
From the analyst covering "They’ve warned about a decline in one of the basic fundamental financial drivers." which was "changes in the fourth quarter that cut the number of viral videos in people’s news feeds. Those tweaks, and others, have already reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day, he noted."
I am going to assume that FB is smart enough to have figured out how to trim the 50m hour engagement # from an ad cohort that is likely not that profitable or important.
Because guess what - the brand advertisers that elevate overall CPM already don't want to be in your shitty viral cat video, or your stupid publishers-gaming-FB with autogenerated content.
I would go a step further and predict that within this quarter we see an internal FB study for advertisers suggesting that their algorithm that trimmed that 50m in hours has actually IMPROVED the value of the advertising by a commiserate level.
I was on the platform a few years ago, but deleted my account and didn't miss it at all. Then, a couple months ago, I became interested in a new Chinese amateur radio transceiver, and the best source of English information was through a Facebook group of a couple hundred owners. So naturally, I joined facebook, joined the group, and had several weeks of a really enjoyable experience. I didn't add any friends or pictures or anything like that; I had no interest in really using Facebook with people I knew in real life, and as a result my newsfeed was an endless list of really great discussions about amateur satellites, straight key century club, Xiegu transceivers, etc. I think what set it apart from something like Reddit is the civility that comes when you make hams post with their real name.
Then, all of a sudden, "You Can't Log In Right Now". I was actually forced to upload an image of my face to get back into the site. This was a sort of funny thing to ask, because I didn't have any images of myself on the site up to that point-- so how are they supposed to know what I look like, anyway? (I'm being sarcastic here, I'm sure that Facebook has my face profiled in their databases somewhere.) So I uploaded my photo, a handful of days went by, and then I was allowed back in, and again started using Facebook as an awesome discussion platform full of meaningful interactions with people that shared a common interest with me.
A couple weeks go by, and yet again, "You Can't Log In Right Now". I upload my face again, but this time I've never been unbanned. I think it's been this way for over a month now. I still get email notifications with subject lines like, "See what people are talking about in your group AMSAT North America", but when I click "Read Post", I'm not able to view the content. (I also can't unsubscribe from the emails, as editing email settings is hidden behind a login prompt, which I am obviously not able to get through. I also can't file a bug report about the lack of ability to unsubscribe... because that, too, is hidden behind a login prompt.)
It's just so incredibly ironic that as soon as I started using facebook for content I was interested in, instead of seeing political posts from people I went to middle school with, I get permabanned on suspicion of being a fake account.
Geeze. For some reason I never bothered to make a Facebook account, and as time went by I bothered even less so this might be less shocking to the seasoned, but to me that sounds absolutely horrendous.
What legitimate reason (in my interest) would Facebook have in me uploading a picture? It's not a transaction where I need to prove identity. They aren't a government issuing ID's (yet). So no fucking way! And why would anyone? I don't get it.
Main problem is that Facebook is too public in that most friends are actually acquaintances. People are less likely to share intimate updates with acquaintances and instead will only post generic neutral, non-controversial things which dont’t drive deep engagement.
basically. guess thats what the whole g+ circles thing was, and im sure fb can do too now, but if i have to spend basically any effort thinking about who's going to see it I'm just not gonna post. (or worry about who won't see it because of the black-box algorithm)
I'm prob not the target market anyway, as im paranoid and social media and human interaction in general is strange and frightening to me, but that's a major part of the reason i never post anything.
IMO Google+ circles were a step in the right direction, but Google shot themselves in the foot with their "one real-name account to rule them all" bullshit.
People don't just want to separate their "lists of other people", people also act a different role in different contexts.
In other words, humans want to maintain different identities too. That doesn't always mean pseudonyms, but the single human behind "Bob from the Accounting Department" probably wants to use a completely different set of contact-information and profile-pictures when he's in the role of "Bob, Death Metal Biker" or "Bob, Single Parent Looking For Love."
When Google forced the real name bullshit on Youtube and Places reviews, I knew I had it enough. I just wanted to leave a stupid, lighthearted comment on a video talking about a socially taboo topic, and I can't. I just wanted to leave an honest negative review on a business that fucked me over, and I can't.
biker139 is different than John M Businessman. I don't want people reading that review to know I'm John.
My preference would be to never see anything, ever, that was shared more than say 50 times. As soon as something is “viral” It’s usually just a timekill. It’s not relevant to me.
So a simple tweak to the news feed would be to just stop showing me what my friends “like” or “re-share”. Just show me what they say, or post or show directly. That’s it.
For a really dramatic change: remove the ability to pass on content alltogether.
This is what I want from a service like facebook - posts my friends, groups, and pages explicitly post, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, and nothing else. No "John commented on this" or "Melanie liked that". No algorithms. No out-of-order, unless I ask for it.
(If 10 friends all reshare the same post, sure, collapse it into one.)
But, of course, if they do that, they make it too easy for people to see posts they want without pages they follow paying for ads. So they put in an "algorithm" and say they're "making the news feed more personal".
If your content stream includes every post your friends make, every comment they add, every post they like, every event they're interested in or join in on and it was sorted chronologically then you would never be able to scroll past the immediate present. It would just constantly generate new content as quickly as you can scroll.
I'm glad they sort by relevance and time is just one small factor in relevance.
True, but what are the other relevance factors? It's a black box, and basically ends up being "whatever Facebook deems to be the most profitable content to show you".
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadRevenues: - 4Q revenue $12.97 billion, estimate $12.55 billion (range $12.15 billion to $12.91 billion) (Bloomberg data)
- 4Q EPS $1.44
- 4Q daily active users 1.40 billion, estimate 1.41 billion (Bloomberg News) (3 estimates)
- 4Q monthly active users 2.13 billion, estimate 2.13 billion (BN) (3 estimates)
- 4Q mobile ad revenue as percentage of ad revenue 89%
- 4Q advertising rev. $12.78 billion
General:
- increased headcount: it was 25,105 as of December 31, 2017, an increase of 47% year-over-year.
- This is the first-ever decline Facebook has had in North American users. Daily active users growth in US & Canada fell to 184 million, compared to 185 million in Q3.
Related to new US Tax Plan
- There's a one-time mandatory transition tax on accumulated foreign earnings and a reduction of the corporate income tax rate to 21 percent, effective Jan. 1, 2018. Facebook's provision for income taxes increased by $2.27 billion and its diluted EPS decreased by $0.77 for both the fourth quarter and full year 2017.
It is a poor comparison.
You're not going to see more ads about the things you're interested in, you're going to see ads that have a higher potential to manipulate you into commercially profitable behavior. There's a big but subtle difference between those things. You are definitely not going to see ads for your interests that bring you more joy but aren't easily monetizeable.
The coarseness of TV targeting meant people had more opportunity to assert their own priorities against the less effective manipulation.
I'm telling you right now that I don't mind seeing Ads on Instagram. They're great and I've found out about niche products that I otherwise would not have. If this means that small brands are able to rise up against the mega corps (Dollar Shave Club vs Gillette, as a classic example), then all the better for the market.
The other reason I don't mind is that they're visually appealing and seem to fit the Instagram ethos. Compare that to shitty banner Ads that disrupt the flow of content by being so different and so jarring in comparison.
Now, my opinion isn't meant to be generalized. Others may have a far different experience on Instagram (just because of how the product is designed to work). I'm sure there is someone who will chime in and say they hate Instagram Ads because they are completely ineffective. We could both be right in opposite directions since our feeds are probably very different.
So when people come into this discussion with strong opinions and try to impose their experience on everyone else, that's not useful nor reflective of reality.
What you're arguing is something very primal and not isolated to Facebook. You can make that argument about literally anything in this world and that's why I'm saying it's not useful. Cars have known effects on whole populations. Tax regulation has known effects on the behaviors of whole populations. I mean potato chips and similar snacks are engineered from the ground up to be addictive and have known effects on mass populations. Where do you draw the line for your argument? I chose to draw it at the bounds of my own personal experience with the product we're discussing.
It's OK to not like Facebook. It's also OK to like Facebook. But for me to impose my opinion on you would be misinformed because I don't know how you use it. It's an incredibly complex product with incredibly complex effects.
And from that, now you can exclude children, reliable access, and people who dont want to use it, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
They have reached the point where its a lot easier to lose someone then gain someone. I dont think its societal impact ... its people getting older and dropping off while at the same time its really hard to replenish that use base when already have so many of the young people already on your site.
So maybe they need to understand user rentention vs aging , I think that would be a place to look, societal impact ... no one uses or drops a product becuase of societal impact.
How many diamonds and how many electronics or clothes do we use that have a dubious labor practices. Its the product quality that speaks loudest.
1). prevent the spread of fake news.. they need a better solution than the user-tagging bs if an article is valid or not. there was a scientologist that had an account that wasn't active for 5+ years, that started posting how puerto rico wasn't that bad when the storm first hit. why is this account not being banned or suspended when people are reporting it and they're reposting pictures from texas claiming it to be all good.
2). prevent outside interference with elections. the first baby step is if they're accepting rubles for political ads targetted at americans, ban it. simple as that. then it'll get more complex and interesting handling proxies doing the dirty deed. the hearing w/ congress was pathetic and makes fb even more untrustworthy.
3). ban fake accounts / tie in a real human behind the account. 100000 fake users means a lot less to me if i'm an advertiser than 10 real people.
even though pretty much everyone i know is on facebook, i'm itching for another platform with better integrity to jump ship to.
so i posted this in another thread in response to twitter, and it got kind of drowned out but with regards to authoritative/oppressive governments subpoenaing facebook to get a user's identity for voicing an opinion that isn't in line with the regime's. how do you solve this while giving every account an identity? anonymity on facebook/twitter seems to be one way to practice freedom of speech in countries where there isn't really any
A reason that term exists is because there's a tendency for Germans to wait to commit to, or outright dismiss choices because they do not meet ALL of a list of requirements.
I bring it up because I do not believe that it is possible to have an identity and anonymity concurrently while the service achieves all of its goals.
Either the service caters to anonymity, or it caters to identity. Trying to sit on the fence too long results in more specialized services dividing the customer base.
Total anonymity means total freedom of speech and total lack of trust in speech.
Facebook needs to find it's balance between anonymity that increases activity while eliminating trust, and strong trusted identities that limit activity based on social pressures.
Facebook should not be so focused on one country. And they are not: some of the problems were visible for the Brexit and the subsequent parliamentary vote in the UK; they have already addressed some issues with recent the French and the German elections. There certainly are many more elections before November, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_electoral_calendar_20... and there was a handful of Special ones the US.
Facebook leadership used to be too US-Centric and I was very happy to see during the US Congressional hearing that it had changed (their counsel was trying to explain but failed). The reason it matters is that this means that they cannot a custom-build solution that assumes that the issue is:
- Fake News: the issue is, depending on who you ask, raise in inequality, more international migrations, the rise of populism, a systemic challenge to the Nation-State; the problems go from raising tension between political groups and non-constructive political speech; normalisation of racism; the expansion of satire beyond recognition; the two-step of outrageous statements, partial correction and dog-whistling; acceleration of political news cycle; leverage of non-factual or non-representative statements for political inflammation; etc. The over-simplification or confusing all that into that lumpy bag of a concept that is “Fake News” is highly problematic, even if you focus on one country.
- preventing outside interference: that’s actually a lot easier without so much corporate money: massive ad campaigns, or ads-only approach is mainly a US problem; creating puppet accounts and using them to discredit a group, or pouring more oil on the fire is more the type of vector we have seen overall. That is generally done training local volunteers as was seen in France, or apparently almost entirely internal influence, as was seen in Germany.
- ban fake accounts: Facebook has been fighting fake account forever, so yeah, this is clearly a problem; but the issue is that there is no clear definition of fake. To simplify greatly, you have:
1. people who use a modified version of their name (no one cares);
2. people who have two accounts (justifiable but made harder by 1.);
3. people who do 2.) to have a raging account where they exposer views on race, gender and religion that their friends and relatives would not accept (certainly some cases where that can be justified, like closeted gays);
4. people who do 3.) whose other account is deeply hateful, threatening or just plain dickish (we are getting close to banning territory);
5. people like 4. whose other account was blocked or banned so they set up a new one to keep on talking about how smart Hitler was (see where this is getting?) and how they are going to act on his ideas;
6. people like 5. but who know how to code and preventively create more accounts because they expect the first dozen they created to be blocked soon;
7. people who are better developers than 6. and offer to help them creating many realistic-sounding people who like to comment about the upsides of Slavery, below advertising for the NYTimes;
8. people who learned how to do 7. but figured out you could make money off it — of more simply, who went straight to that step.
And for 9. people who figured out you get more, less scrupulous friends faster if you use picture set scraped from porn sites.
The direct advertising loss from fake accounts is presumably massive; the loss of targeting relevance probably much bigger; the loss of trust and long-term profit orders of magnitude bigger -- so you are right to think this matters to Facebook, but for the right reasons. It’s just not simple, not exclusively politics and certainly not a problem that should be though as US-vs.-Russia. It’s much more complex.
I mean, Facebook even has to consider ...
The day will come during the election, when Putin accuses Facebook of anti-Putin fake news
Still might complain about it mind you (has a userbase, but its half as big as VK..)
Saying that a freckled teenager in California can challenge his popularity by writing nonsense on the internet… it’s unbecoming.
When we let poor journalism like this headline go uncontested we erode public trust.
Is that a fact or opinion? Likely they're seeing ad-revenue increasing with the clickbait titles, giving them a data-driven reason to pursue this (short-sighted) strategy. Long-term, they may lose their readership once they catch on.
[0] http://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-medi...
[1] https://www.poynter.org/news/poynter-releases-new-study-exam...
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/40503393/americans-are-more-trus...
I can't imagine why anyone would lie when they stand to make billions of dollars from it. What an odd idea.
That aside, there is a gray area between lies and not really digging into truths that you don't want to know the answer to, like how many of your accounts are actually fake.
People are getting Facebook fatigue. In my social circle, Facebook use seems to have switched to Instagram.
Personally, I check on it once a week now to keep up with a few friends who I don’t see anymore. It’s an effort, because Facebook refuses to show me what I want to see, and I need to specifically search for people.
Or, to put this another way, people have saved 50 million hours that they formerly spent scrolling past stupid videos and memes they'd already seen on Reddit.
People are just spending less time on social media apps for some reasons these days.
https://www.similarweb.com/blog/social-media-usage
I can only hope things are not going to be so self centered anymore.
If I have my online network of friends configured in such a way so that I get a notification on my phone, I don't need to stay on Facebook all day wading through cruft. If a close friend posts something, I'll get a notification and check it out. I read/watch and I'm out.
Even as a pretty public twitter/fb/etc person, I'm finding that my social activity increasingly happens in private and semi private chats. For most of my friends, they use chat groups exclusively. The only times they post on Facebook/Instagram publicly is when they need to brag about some semi-big event.
Instagram Stories are popular tho. They seem to have mostly replaced the old casual personal posting.
this data is 2-3 years old now.
- News: the same articles everyone is posting everywhere. Plus nutter conspiracy theorists educating us all about why the earth is flat / we never went to the moon / we should embrace communism/capitalism on completely unrelated threads.
- Friends: same people going on about the same things. One guy has a special hatred for Trump that he vents every day. Another guy talks about local affairs for his little island community. Both people I know IRL, but online they become cartoons.
- Groups: same messages over and over, with news mixed in. Sports team group news is a filter for your team. So I see all the transfers for my team, and all the game updates and comments from the fans. Pretty low quality, as in "anyone know this guy we're buying? Yeah, he's a midfielder". And permanently "We should fire the coach / He's the best coach ever".
- Baby pics / anecdotes. These are great, but take about 5 seconds to consume and like.
Then they went public with it, before releasing the numbers
Therefore, speculatively, engagement in Q4 was likely flat or declining across NA already. What is more uncertain is the order of operations here. Did they publicly announce these changes in advance of the earnings report to get ahead of bad numbers?
Thus their Newsfeed changes de-prioritizing articles, and thus (I figure) their experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes, and enabling MySpace-like gradient backgrounds on text posts...
This dynamic makes me recall something: Anyone remember how back in the day (like 2006) Facebook had a feature called 'Wall-to-Wall' conversations? You would go to a friend's profile and just write a message, they would go to your 'wall' and reply, and mutual friends could see the conversation.
These days between the Newsfeed, comments on posts, and Messenger, the only reason I would post on another friend's profile is to wish them a happy birthday. That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone.
When chat and then messenger came along there was no need to do that anymore.
I think Facebook wants people to log on and post things like "It's a tough day at work but I'm looking forward to watching Black Panther" instead of just posting another link about "check out how the primaries were rigged!11". And I think the way the Newsfeed works with highly-specific posts and comments is part of the problem. There's less opportunity for laid back semi-public chatter.
Facebook wall conversations were not used as a poor imitation of private chat, but a separate form of quasi-public communication.
But, on the wall-to-wall thing: it still happens, but it’s generally associated with elderly or candid people who might not grasp the visibility of their post.
One thing that I feel you should be able to do is pick an audience when you write on someone’s wall. De facto, people often do that for birthdays and those rarely appear much.
I see a lot of the same casual conversations in Groups -- assuming you have groups of friends there. Those are cool and generally where the banter happens for me.
This is what I perceive as well.
The wall was never a good way to do this. It's neither as powerful nor as flexible as pretty much any competing way for a small group of people to communicate, including chat programs, email, txt, snapchat, etc.
Facebook's deprioritization of the wall and buy-in on messenger/whatsapp, instagram, and the newsfeed was very smart. I suspect they are ok with people moving off posting on facebook to posting on instagram and chatting privately.
The similarity between snooping around facebook and seeing all the open chats going on with people you'd never usually talk to and watching reality TV were striking to me.
Thought admittedly, I do not know if it was one of the driving factors to FB success or not, so it may well have been past its use by date rather than the news feeds killing it.
Personally I enjoyed those days more as my feed was more of a chronological account of people chatting rather than reshares articles, videos and memes.
Unfortunately, some people and some topics tend to attract a lot of those sorts of uninvited rebuttals - in other words, harassment - driving some to make their accounts private. In that case, only approved followers can see your tweets, ever. There’s no “friends of friends”-like middle ground, or any other more flexible filtering options.
On the other hand, for most people, Twitter’s system seems to work pretty well. It works for me, and I really enjoy the spontaneity of it.
And yet people used it--even after the news feed and well into the reign of IM and email. I'm not sure how it's smart to remove a feature that was creating engagement just because FB didn't understand why.
But Instagram I love. I check it a couple of times a week. I love seeing images from my friends and having comments barely visible is exactly what I like. My only problem with it is the increasing frequency of ads. It's sucking a lot of the joy out of the platform for me.
If they want people to make better content, they need to start figuring out why people feel like their better content gets no audience.
IIRC they looked through his feed and there had been basically cries for help, but no one had seem them because Facebook was prioritizing engagement and not personal content.
How many other people are trying to reach out on Facebook, thinking that no one cares, when the reality is that no one even sees?
> IIRC they looked through his feed and there had been basically cries for help, but no one had seem them because Facebook was prioritizing engagement and not personal content.
Don't worry! Facebook is working on an AI to detect such posts and refer the suicidal users to help! No need to bring his friends down with his negativity and decrease their engagement! /s
I wish I was joking: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/28/16709224/facebook-suicid.... Social networks like Facebook have contributed to a big rise in depression, but instead of course correcting, we get buzzword tech band-aids.
I’ve hidden friends before who I have close relationships with, simply because the content they post is trash:
- reshares of “inspirational” and “motivational” memes - post frequency too high - constantly posting pictures of their kids - unfortunately a close aunt is into MLM and I can’t just unfriend her without causing drama - generally only posting things I don’t care for enough to see like guns, cars, etc
Like, just because we are friends, doesn’t mean we have to share the same interests nor does it mean I want to hear everything you have to say on every topic.
While we're complaining, the Javascript associated with this is particularly slow. On clicking into the text entry box, I find that if I start typing immediately it can result in the letters coming out in the wrong order when it resets the caret.
Love it, love it, love it.
I am going to assume that FB is smart enough to have figured out how to trim the 50m hour engagement # from an ad cohort that is likely not that profitable or important.
Because guess what - the brand advertisers that elevate overall CPM already don't want to be in your shitty viral cat video, or your stupid publishers-gaming-FB with autogenerated content.
I would go a step further and predict that within this quarter we see an internal FB study for advertisers suggesting that their algorithm that trimmed that 50m in hours has actually IMPROVED the value of the advertising by a commiserate level.
That increase more than offsets the decline in the amount of time users spent on Facebook. So it looks like the value of advertising has improved.
I was on the platform a few years ago, but deleted my account and didn't miss it at all. Then, a couple months ago, I became interested in a new Chinese amateur radio transceiver, and the best source of English information was through a Facebook group of a couple hundred owners. So naturally, I joined facebook, joined the group, and had several weeks of a really enjoyable experience. I didn't add any friends or pictures or anything like that; I had no interest in really using Facebook with people I knew in real life, and as a result my newsfeed was an endless list of really great discussions about amateur satellites, straight key century club, Xiegu transceivers, etc. I think what set it apart from something like Reddit is the civility that comes when you make hams post with their real name.
Then, all of a sudden, "You Can't Log In Right Now". I was actually forced to upload an image of my face to get back into the site. This was a sort of funny thing to ask, because I didn't have any images of myself on the site up to that point-- so how are they supposed to know what I look like, anyway? (I'm being sarcastic here, I'm sure that Facebook has my face profiled in their databases somewhere.) So I uploaded my photo, a handful of days went by, and then I was allowed back in, and again started using Facebook as an awesome discussion platform full of meaningful interactions with people that shared a common interest with me.
A couple weeks go by, and yet again, "You Can't Log In Right Now". I upload my face again, but this time I've never been unbanned. I think it's been this way for over a month now. I still get email notifications with subject lines like, "See what people are talking about in your group AMSAT North America", but when I click "Read Post", I'm not able to view the content. (I also can't unsubscribe from the emails, as editing email settings is hidden behind a login prompt, which I am obviously not able to get through. I also can't file a bug report about the lack of ability to unsubscribe... because that, too, is hidden behind a login prompt.)
It's just so incredibly ironic that as soon as I started using facebook for content I was interested in, instead of seeing political posts from people I went to middle school with, I get permabanned on suspicion of being a fake account.
What legitimate reason (in my interest) would Facebook have in me uploading a picture? It's not a transaction where I need to prove identity. They aren't a government issuing ID's (yet). So no fucking way! And why would anyone? I don't get it.
I'm prob not the target market anyway, as im paranoid and social media and human interaction in general is strange and frightening to me, but that's a major part of the reason i never post anything.
People don't just want to separate their "lists of other people", people also act a different role in different contexts.
In other words, humans want to maintain different identities too. That doesn't always mean pseudonyms, but the single human behind "Bob from the Accounting Department" probably wants to use a completely different set of contact-information and profile-pictures when he's in the role of "Bob, Death Metal Biker" or "Bob, Single Parent Looking For Love."
biker139 is different than John M Businessman. I don't want people reading that review to know I'm John.
So a simple tweak to the news feed would be to just stop showing me what my friends “like” or “re-share”. Just show me what they say, or post or show directly. That’s it.
For a really dramatic change: remove the ability to pass on content alltogether.
(If 10 friends all reshare the same post, sure, collapse it into one.)
But, of course, if they do that, they make it too easy for people to see posts they want without pages they follow paying for ads. So they put in an "algorithm" and say they're "making the news feed more personal".
I'm glad they sort by relevance and time is just one small factor in relevance.