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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's bold but good for the long term.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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?
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...)
> 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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, yes.
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.
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
>ALL THEY DO IS HOST YOUR FRIENDS' PHOTOS.
These two obviously false statements completely undermine your otherwise valid point about personal responsibility.
You're probably right. I'm just one person and my views are not universal but also not unique to me. IMHO shared content of all kinds has killed the value of facebook to me. I go there to see what's up with people I know, not to see bunch of shared stuff from 3rd parties. A few years ago you could go through and click "don't show any more from cool_cat_videos" and do that agressively for a day or two and the feed would clean up and show more friends posts. That doesn't work any more, there is a constant barrage of suggested content that isn't coming from anyone I know - just FB paid suggestions. It's awful. My typical Facebook experience is to log in, scroll down - ignoring almost all content - looking for an actual post from someone I know. Then I log out.
To me the problem is the "share" button. It encourages impersonal content sharing, which I can get all day long over at reddit or youtube or whatever. I go to FB to see what's up with people I know, but it just doesn't work like that any more.
They seem to get it, but the fix they're talking about is to focus on 3rd party content that get a response from people you know. That's still not personal posts, and I don't think it's going to change my use much.
The problem for them is that the stuff that used to bring me there doesn't pay, and the stuff that does drives me away.
Facebook has become a kind of shit version of Reddit where everything in the news feed is basically stuff from Reddit that has been shared by friends. It used to be original messages from friends.
This!
Intermixed with ads, game invites, racist/populist images, and those silly heart glitter greeting cards stuff...
Nobody is posting or reading stuff in public... Except older mostly female people (i.e. the "my aunt" stereotype).
Ad companies have long specialized in the mechanistic side of things so Facebook really brings nothing new to table for them, and merely being "a giant audience" isn't especially worthwhile either since a "run of network" ad buy for Adsense or the like is cheap. Facebook's differentiator was "we have all this insight into users!" and while that was true at the time they began courting advertisers what I suspect advertisers and Facebook discovered was that those insights became less and less accurate as users responded to the changes Facebook began to make in order to try and increase ad effectiveness, thus beginning the distortion spiral.
I wonder if Facebook is making an attempt to return to the insight side of the business, allowing advertisers to use the info Facebook has regarding people as targeting for ads that occur away from Facebook. They return to a demographic/insight source rather than an advertising platform.
Seriously, I won’t shed a single tear for these “”””publishers””””.
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.
Recent example: while I was logged out, they put my picture on their “quick login” page with a little red number “2” on my photo. Well gee, turns out there wasn’t “2” of anything in my profile to see: no unread messages, etc.; no, it was just made-up crap to make me want to go check Facebook again.
Not sure why Facebook is so desperate for attention that they need to LIE to get it but advertisers should be concerned: anything Facebook claims about “active users”, etc. is probably greatly exaggerated.
I've seen this too: I created an empty profile once for some reason. The email account that I setup for it very quickly started getting messages like "you have 1 new notification - log in." When I did that, there wasn't a damn thing there.
OK 1) There are people out there who live their whole lives according to good values pretty much the whole time, and don't need the shock of parenthood to finally make them care about acting like a decent human being. And most are not 2) billionaires. However, quite a few apparently do need that little kick in the pants, which explains 3) how trite this sentiment is.
But owing precisely to how common it is, we may never know if this is something Zuckerberg actually feels, or if it's 4) just something he picked up that he thought sounded like something an earthling might say. A nice platitude to conceal the true market-driven motivation for this move, and 5) you just know there is one.
Also even assuming it's sincere, there's a prominent tone of 6) narcissism in it, when people suddenly start caring about their legacy. (Like "my legacy" and "how I will be viewed" as opposed to anything about the kids themselves or you or me or anyone that person might've hurt.)
I feel like as outlandish as it is, South Park's animated version of him, voiced like a badly dubbed Hong Kong martial arts actor, saying "Ha ha ha, you cannot block my shtoyle" and such, is more convincing & realistic than the reality!
Can I literally write down a statement that would have changed my perspective on this statement/issue/perspective?
Most things that I'm against, I cannot imagine myself not being against. One possible explanation is Zuckerberg is evil incarnate, but I believe the world is much more nuanced than that. If I cannot bring to life (and even metaphorically "try on" the other perspective), there is a high probability that I am too biased to offer a fair judgement.
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.
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.
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.
Be real, social media is intended to magnify narcissistic ego through engagement, not disengagement.
Facebook 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:
I wonder if the phrasing is deliberate.
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.
and also easy to explain: the quest for ad revenue
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.
Most instance admins have a Patreon and/or Liberapay if you want to send $10/month their way.
Honestly, maybe invites/sponsorships? One person who care's enough to pay $10 can bring his "social graph" (or a subset) with him.
Publishing a static set of lightly styled HTML pages to massive audiences is shockingly cheap.
This is not necessarily a bad thing for users
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
More on this: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/23/facebook-page-feed/
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.
next? AR/VR = weapon of mass delusion?
The news feed offers nothing.
Or maybe it will just go back to the point it was when I left, in 2013, which was already very unbearable.
next? VR/AR = weapon of mass delusion ?
So on and so forth. If your feed is irrelevant, it's your fault...
[1] https://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/facebook-sharing-crisis.h...
