
Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes - dismal2
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-31/facebook-falls-after-user-growth-fails-to-meet-expectation
======
ComputerGuru
I didn’t see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook’s
own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos
and pictures by “viral marketing” firms onto it. They replaced groups
(inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back
years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were
given permission to crap all over it by default interspersed with ads and
machine-generated content (“a picture of you from three years ago”).

In their zeal to gain IM users, they replaced messages with chat, removing the
inhibition that kept people from using messages for one liners. Then they made
you always online, supplanting Facebook itself entirely with something that
could be replaced by any other real-time communication app. Once phones became
nicer to use and there were alternatives to the lag and limitations of SMS,
people had no reason to log into Facebook to chat with their friends because
Facebook has trained non-IMers to IM and they no longer needed Facebook to do
it.

Users would have killed for high-resolution photos (Facebook would make
pictures so tiny and so low resolution that they’d become unrecognizable and
all talent that went into composing them or editing them would be lost, and
they couldn’t contain text or captions because that would be compressed away)
or the ability to create albums. A dozen apps existed to shoehorn that
functionality in via the Flickr api. Then they had to go buy Instagram to win
those users back.

Now people just post major life events to share with people they didn’t bother
communicating them to via another, more personal means of communication once a
year or so.

~~~
btilly
Worse yet, do you know how frustrating it is to be told that there are no more
updates available while you know that you a missing life events from friends
that actually posted them.

After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because
they will similarly not show up for friends.

Cutting back on FB has become ever easier over time.

~~~
danudey
My wife and were 'in a relationship' on Facebook within a few months of
meeting each other. Then we were 'married'. Even still, for the first four or
so years that we had each other on FB, it wouldn't show me her posts. They
just weren't in my feed, I'd scroll down so far I was seeing content from
months ago, but I'd never see anything she'd posted that week.

Eventually it took me telling FB I didn't want to see posts from 90% of my
'friends', and then going to her feed and 'engaging' with her posts, for it to
start showing them to me.

I've never actually _used_ Facebook in any serious way; I'll log in and scroll
through my feed once every few months, but I've always hated it. The other day
I put my finger on why: it's the mobile equivalent of turning on the TV and
flipping through channels looking for something to watch, something you do as
an alternative to doing something with your time.

~~~
TipVFL
They've probably done testing and found that for some significant percentage
of married couples, seeing their spouse's posts caused them to reduce their
Facebook usage. So unhappy marriages are ruining it for everyone.

I feel like the general trend of UI simplification and a/b testing everything
has companies chasing after anything that will push their general metrics up
in the short term, at the expense of slowly disenfranchising a large portion
of their users.

I interviewed at Netflix recently for a position on their UI team, and I
questioned the interviewer about a lot of annoying aspects of the Netflix
interface. He was aware of every complaint, and his explanation for every one
of them was he wishes he could change it but the a/b testing shows they get
higher engagement with it the way it is. So, for example, they show you movies
you have already said you don't like, because enough people give a thumbs down
and then later watch the movie. In the short term very few people are going to
cancel Netflix because of this, but enough of these decisions in succession is
erosive to customer goodwill.

Personally, these kind of decisions wouldn't bother me that much if apps and
websites made it easy to customize your experience. Facebook makes it
difficult by opaquely shaping your newsfeed and giving you what seems like
hundreds of options across a half dozen settings pages. Netflix makes it
difficult by just giving you practically no options, but there's enough demand
that's there a tiny industry in just making websites and plugins to make
Netflix usable.

~~~
nojvek
I guess A/B testing will tell you if the horse will become faster if you
change from iron shoes to carbon fiber ones.

A/B testing won’t ever get you a Tesla from a horse.

~~~
mygo
If you do enough binary switching, you eventually _will_ get a Tesla. Assuming
a Tesla is optimal. Let’s test to find out.

How do you think the eyeball arose from unicellular eukaryotes?

~~~
nora4
I don't think so. A/B testing is like gradient descent which is a greedy
algorithm. You move in the direction that locally looks best. Evolution on the
other hand allows for suboptimal species to persist for enough time to let
them develop their advantage. (In the language of optimization evolution
allows you to go past the local optimal and reach global optima by allowing
you to move in non-optimal direction -- as long as the move is not
catastrophic.)

~~~
mygo
Nope. A/B testing depends on what you choose to mutate. The problem is that we
humans intentionally change the things. Nature randomly changes the things.

You’re not going to get to a global optimum driven by human choice of what to
test (only local optima at best) unless the human setting up the tests is some
sort of sage.

~~~
btilly
Do you Nature will eventually hit on a global optimum? If so, that belief is
opposed by what biologists know about developmental and evolutionary pathways.

For a trivial and well-known example, there is now no developmental or
evolutionary pathway that will lead to a vertebrate eye where the nerves run
behind the retina. As a result every last vertebrate has a blind spot where
all of the nerves dive through the retina. This makes our eyes less efficient
because the nerves block out light.

We're therefore stuck with the first design of the vertebrate eye and can't
change it. There is no pathway to the more sensible design of the mollusk eye.

This is but one of many examples. For another one, relative developmental
timing of growth is fixed across vertebrates. For example the "hand" grows
before the "arm". The result is that pterodactyls, whose wings are entirely
hands, could fly from birth. But birds (whose wings are arms) and bats (a mix
of the two) can't fly from birth. No matter how desirable an evolutionary
trait that may be.

~~~
mygo
> Do you think Nature will eventually hit on a global optimum?

No. At least not in the way described. Optimal as considered by whom? Us? We
look at something and say this would function better than that, but is
something that is optimal perfect? Basic microeconomics shows that perfection
is sub-optimal due to the law of diminishing marginal return. Perfection is
wasteful and unsustainable. What do we know to be optimal? From what I know,
“adequate enough to reproduce” may not be perfect, but it might be brushing up
against optimal in its “good enough and no more” / lagom nature. Mollusks have
mollusk eyes. Can we know that humans would be better off with mollusk eyes
without rewriting our evolutionary lineage for us to be more like mollusks in
other imperfect ways?

------
firasd
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.

~~~
rm999
>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.

~~~
JauntyHatAngle
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.

~~~
comex
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.

------
redmaverick
Posting on Facebook, right now, is like updating your resume (like LinkedIn)
for personal life. It just feels too "public". Sure, you can tweak your social
network into different privacy levels. But, that just doesn't feel intuitive
or effortless. The exclusivity factor which initially propelled the network is
simply not there. At the peak of the facebook madness, you had a need to post
whenever anything happened. Now, its just the big ticket items.

I think people login more due to habit than to post personal updates. I doubt
the current college going kids even login at all. Today, you update facebook
only on special occasions like marriage, birth of a child, graduation or when
people go out to visit places etc. Previously, like 7 to 8 years back, people
used to post very personal things, knowing that only their friends are on the
network. It definitely, felt safe. It Again, maybe my gen aged a bit during
the last 8 years, I don't know. If anyone posts anything too personal right
now, it feels like a violation of social norms. Like crying in public with
everyone watching.

No matter how many tweaks Facebook makes to their Newsfeed, I doubt quality
engagement from what I saw 7 to 8 years back will return.

People just shifted to mobile apps like Whatsapp and have different social
groups there. This feels very natural and organic. You have a few small groups
of maybe 10 to 15 people max per group who all know you intimately and maybe a
couple of larger groups with 50 plus members. This usually an alumni group of
some kind. Even the larger groups get tiring if there are too updates and many
frequently opt out after a tiff.

I just feel the era of publicly sharing personal information on web based
social networks is over. If there is somekind of a decentralized privacy
oriented mobile app that has the same functionality as whatsapp and it gets
widely adopted, then it might be game over for the big companies in the social
networking space. Even though Whatsapp is owned by facebook. It feels very
safe and personal to share updates.

~~~
rogy
Personal opinion that this is all again unintentionally there own doing.

They drove people to stop posting personal content by making personal content
so rare to come by (with ads, news,pages,sponsored posts..) that it was
percieved that people don’t post those kind of things anymore.

Going to be very tough to get people back into that mindset.

~~~
matte_black
There is no need to go back to that mindset. The goal is to transition
everyone to a new, different mindset. This is how a business evolves.

~~~
brain5ide
You mean imitates progress?

------
chollida1
Some notes from the results they just released:

Revenues: \- 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.

~~~
bigheadpercoli
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.

~~~
pfarnsworth
But in the 90s we were all watching 4-6 hrs of TV a day.

~~~
AznHisoka
It was good family TV though! Like Family Matters and Full House!

~~~
jsemrau
...and no need to be stressed if your comment will receive "likes"

------
Puer
For people using uBlock Origin who want to hide all of the noise on their
Facebook and truly see what their friends are posting, here are some useful
filters:

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ commented on this./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ replied to a /)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ liked this post from /)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ liked this./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ commented on a post from /)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ reacted to this./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/'s cover photo./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ likes /)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ are now friends./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ is interested in an event./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/Sponsored/)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/Suggested Post/)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/A video you may like/)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ shared /)

!facebook.com##u_fetchstream

!facebook.com##._4-u2[id*="u_fetchstream"]

I got tired of seeing seemingly hundreds of, "Your friends reacted to this ad
page 5 months ago" or "Here's another advertisement disguised as a page you
might be interested in." I realized after I implemented these that I see maybe
2 or 3 new posts a day from my 500 friends, and of these posts the majority of
them are political in nature and don't interest me. The only reason I still
continue to use FB is for the messenger app as I still think it's the most
convenient compared to other platforms.

Here's what my feed looks like with the rules implemented (they aren't FULLY
currently up to date either because FB continually updates the phrases, but
good enough for me). I also hid a lot of the junk on the sidebar with the
element picker. I have no interest in using FB as a platform for buying and
selling and the "News Ticker" (if you can call it "News") is just tabloid
garbage. I have 4 posts in the past day before I get the "There are no more
posts to show right now" message.

[https://i.imgur.com/AbBnPo3.png](https://i.imgur.com/AbBnPo3.png)

~~~
toomanybeersies
Thanks, I might use some of those to tweak my newsfeed.

------
jokermatt999
Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent? They don't make it easy,
and I don't think you can default to it, but I just point all my bookmarks to
[https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr](https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr)

Still though, Facebook could be so much better. The problem is that a profit-
driven social media site is always going to have different goals than its
users. Free ones seem to never gain traction. Currently, most of my friend
groups are switching to Discord, but that's basically just going back to IRC
without having to understand NickServ and such.

As many others have pointed out though, Facebook got bland when everyone's
parents joined. Private groups somewhat help, but it really does need to be
more directly baked in to the design. It's far too late for that now, but I
dream one day someone will finally make the Facebook killer. Until then, I use
Facebook, because it benefits me more than not using it. Shallow interaction,
peoples kids, etc? That can easily be fixed. For me, the boost in mood I get
from reconnecting to old friends makes it worth all the pain. I was a hold out
too, and didn't join until ~5 years ago?

I think the problem is it's almost a utility at this point. Most everyone I
know (non-techy crowd) is on it. If you aren't, you truly do miss out, which
sucks. But do you know anyone who doesn't work, or want to work at Facebook
who would say "I love Facebook!" Tweak all you want, but it's too much a
behemoth to love.

~~~
gaius
_Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent?_

Do you think most recent really is everything in reverse chronological order,
or just a slightly different algorithm?

~~~
jokermatt999
Naively, yes, yes I did. Dammit Facebook. There's a reason why I changed the
settings. I figured it was like browsing the new queue here.

------
Firebrand
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter usage are all down.

People are just spending less time on social media apps for some reasons these
days.

[https://www.similarweb.com/blog/social-media-
usage](https://www.similarweb.com/blog/social-media-usage)

~~~
tanilama
That is interesting. Too much noise , too much distraction?

~~~
adventured
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.

~~~
jimmies
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.

------
JoshTko
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.

~~~
analogic
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.

~~~
Terr_
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."

~~~
jimmies
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.

------
flunhat
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).

~~~
jsemrau
I have a company page/account where I daily automatically post updates. I
guess that counts into this number.

~~~
underwater
Pages are not counted as a user in their DAU counts.

~~~
jsemrau
Sure, but there is a user who is the admin for the page. This "admin" is
entirely a bot.

~~~
underwater
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.

------
qwerty456127
Who and why uses Facebook today anyway? All my friends use messenger apps like
WhatsApp or Telegram to communicate to people they know in real life, sites
like Reddit and HN to communicate to random crowd sharing their interests and
Instagram to share pictures they take. I personally feel like Facebook is a
concept fading into the past.

UPDATE: The only thing I used to use Facebook for a couple of years ago when I
had more spare time was finding events to attend for fun. Does anybody know a
good alternative? There probably is a special app just for this. Another
useful feature of Facebook seems to be the groups directory: there are groups
in WhatsApp and Telegram but they are harder to find - isn't there a project
building a directory of them already?

~~~
nora4
I wonder what will happen to the Facebook the company as this progresses. It
would be quite funny if the main product of Facebook becomes Instagram -- and
the original product fades.

One thing we might be discounting though is other nations. (I assume you live
in N.A.) I don't know how widespread Facebook is elsewhere. It could be that
Facebook gives up on N.A. market and let Insta handles their interest there
and focus itself on emerging markets.

~~~
qwerty456127
A probable role Facebook may take in future is providing digital "passport"
kind of identity. The Chinese Facebook clone is doing it already and the
Russian Facebook clone does too though in much smaller degree.

I live in Europe, not N.A. We use messengers a lot here and many people still
use Facebook. I've heard that people use SMS and MMS much more actively in the
USA (I have never used MMS and have stopped using SMS years ago).

~~~
asclepi
That's what we call "texting", but very often texting isn't done using SMS.
With the iOS market share hovering slightly below 50% in the US, it's iMessage
that is the main messenger, at least where I live. The iOS Messages app
seamlessly switches over to SMS when the receiver doesn't have iMessage - and
shows a visual distinction - but in my case, that's a minority of the people I
text with.

I don't use Whatsapp nor was I ever invited by someone to use it, but I heard
it's basically the iMessage equivalent in the EU and in other places where the
iOS market share is lower.

------
alkonaut
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.

~~~
ClassyJacket
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".

~~~
acchow
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.

~~~
salvar
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".

------
nickysielicki
I am effectively banned from facebook.

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.

~~~
mythrwy
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.

------
tn_
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.

~~~
volkk
> 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

~~~
cheschire
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.

~~~
volkk
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

------
Spooky23
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.

~~~
bnolsen
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.

------
aresant
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.

~~~
MarkMc
Well the average price per Facebook ad rose 43% in Q4 2017 (and only 3% in Q4
2016): [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-earnings-stock-
to...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-earnings-stock-touches-
record-after-massive-ad-price-increase-2018-01-31)

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.

------
istorical
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.

~~~
coolso
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.

~~~
sebleon
> public trust in the media at an all time low

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.

~~~
coolso
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.

[0] [http://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-
medi...](http://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-
new-low.aspx)

[1] [https://www.poynter.org/news/poynter-releases-new-study-
exam...](https://www.poynter.org/news/poynter-releases-new-study-examining-
trust-media)

[2] [https://www.fastcompany.com/40503393/americans-are-more-
trus...](https://www.fastcompany.com/40503393/americans-are-more-trusting-of-
the-media-in-2017-but-theres-a-catch)

------
JohnJamesRambo
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.

~~~
burlesona
That pretty much sums it up for me too.

------
ridgeguy
It seems like nobody at Facebook is allowed to play the long game.

In the long game, quality wins. In the long game, an organization that puts
quality of information at top priority persists and becomes a long-lived
resource for civilization.

Like Google has become a persistent Web search resource, setting aside its
short-lived ancillary forays into more clickable, trivial services.

So long as Facebook prioritizes viral clickbait, so long will it be in danger
of collapse, irrelevance, and extinction. That's ok with me.

~~~
bonniemuffin
Identifying "quality" content algorithmically seems like a hard problem to me.
If Facebook wanted to play the long game by promoting high quality content in
the feed, how would you propose they identify it in order to promote it?

~~~
ridgeguy
Your question is excellent and gets to the heart of the matter.

How could Facebook, in a neutral way, cull crap and promote quality?

I wish I had robust answers. All I have at the moment is opinions.

• Algorithmic methods can't deliver near term solutions. Algorithms embody the
biases of their human coders. I doubt we currently know how to algorithmically
evaluate inputs for quality in the Facebook or "fake news" context. We need
more time and effort to learn how to do this.

• Promoting quality currently requires humans, who are expensive. If Facebook
really prioritizes feed quality, we'll see serious hiring. If we don't, then
evidence of commitment is lacking.

• I believe (no proof to offer, mainly intuition) quality can eventually be
algorithmically determined, but it's a hard problem. It will take years, lots
of smart people and $ to figure out how to make it work at scale.

• I don't think Facebook's announced path, which is to solicit those who are
arguably more susceptible to "fake news" to be arbitrators of quality, will
succeed.

Facebook, like others, is caught between maximizing 90 day quarterly profits
and becoming a persistent human resource. I don't envy Zuckerberg at all. I
hope he can do the right thing.

We'll see.

------
dc_gregory
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.

~~~
empath75
I deleted the Facebook app on my phone a few months ago and only use it for
messenger. My life has been improved so much.

------
narrator
I think with all the high profile hyperpoliticization of who and what gets
into the Facebook feed of the average person, the idea that Facebook is a
private space where friends create their own private worlds together has been
destroyed. Now it's just another public space like Twitter and that
essentially makes people not want to post personal stuff on it. This has also
led to the opening in the market that Snapchat filled and a bit of a revival
of twitter.

~~~
burlesona
Yes, like Twitter, but the late night infomercials version of Twitter where
some guy is trying to sell you miracle tanning cream.

------
NicoJuicy
I wonder if the cause really is the news feed. What if it was the first
decline ever and then they made some quick algorithm changes.

Then they went public with it, before releasing the numbers

~~~
cycrutchfield
This is the most likely explanation.

~~~
thomyorkie
Based on what?

~~~
cycrutchfield
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?

------
perseusprime11
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.

~~~
spyspy
If that was the case, FB has been lying on every single earnings release since
they went public, which seems unlikely.

~~~
saas_co_de
> seems unlikely

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.

------
pfarnsworth
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.

------
indubitable
As an aside here, I would be cautious of attributing declining growth on
Facebook to pretty much anything. They are the first company in the history of
our species to take market saturation to such extremes. They have more than 2
billion active monthly users, and growing.

The issue they have is that there are only 3-4 billion internet users in the
entire world. Their growth is predictably going to hit an asymptote at some
point in the near future - they are simply running out of people.

That also poses an interesting issue from a company perspective. We still live
in a world where endless growth is expected. But with a ad-driven service the
only way to make more money is to get users to view/click and otherwise
interact with even more ads, or to otherwise increase the efficiency of ads.
And that in general achieves little other creating a worse user experience, no
matter how clever the packaging and delivery.

------
matwood
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.

~~~
henrikschroder
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.

Love it, love it, love it.

------
jacksmith21006
Hope Google shares latest YouTube hours tomorrow and we can compare. Last
quarter Google shared

"As I mentioned in the last earnings call, YouTube now has over 1.5 billion
users. On average, these users spend 60 minutes a day on mobile. "

Which I guess means 1.5 billion hours a day of YT use daily. Be interesting to
compare to FB.

------
olivermarks
I would shorten this to 'Facebook User Growth Slows'

------
amasad
Instead of Facebook flailing about trying to come up with the best news feed
algorithm to please everyone they should just give the consumer a choice.
Imagine an "algorithm store" that lets developers build and publish ranking
algorithms that users can buy and use.

~~~
DashRattlesnake
That's won't happen. The mistake you're making is assuming that Facebook wants
to "please everyone." It doesn't. It only cares about pleasing itself, and it
does that through manipulating the algorithm to attempt to get its users to do
what it wants.

Giving up control of the algorithm means giving up control of its user-
products, and it's not going to do that.

------
itissid
I wonder if we as humans at some future point would evolve to understand and
consume only sane and specialized content based on lessons of Facebook?
History and behavioral psychology tells us people don't learn from the past
just because they simply can't recall it.

BUT perhaps what might work, and only hope, is a spectacular fall of this kind
of interaction model(and the business) so that no one touches it with a 10 ft
pole for some time. Like the terrible Nazi stuff of WWII.

Hopes of healthy competition in the industry and the democratization of
quality content in a way that precludes brand loyalty, will probably never
happen as long as Facebook lives. It will just acquire and buy its way to
monopolize everything.

------
MarkMc
From the article: "Yes, the time spent on Facebook in the quarter declined by
5 percent, but it was by Facebook’s design, executives said, in order to
promote a higher quality experience. Yes, there was a dip in North American
user numbers for the first time ever, but only because Facebook is already so
dominant in the region.”

Can someone explain why a 'higher quality experience' didn't lead to more
active monthly users in North America? I would have thought there were people
who hadn't checked out Facebook for a few months, but now start using it more
regularly.

------
beedogs
Good.

The less people use Facebook, the better and healthier society becomes.

------
ehnto
I think both time on site and engagement are narrow metrics to judge a site's
usefulness and effectiveness.

Reduced engagement on Facebook is probably a good thing for society, but it
could arguably mean it's also achieving it's goals as a social platform more
succinctly.

As an advert stream of course, that's bad. But I suspect an amount of truth in
Zuckerberg's somewhat altruistic new vision.

------
freyir
> " _We made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people 's time is
> well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by
> roughly 50 million hours every day._"

Weren't the changes to the news feed just announced? This sounds like spin.
They planned all along for people to stop using our service. Right.

------
tomkinson
1- charge advertisers more, for less. Pay to get back what you had.

2- sink the fb fangs deeper into users by promoting 'engagement' content i.e.
stuff with better hooks.

3- market the increase in time spend on site, Q418 to the very advertisers.

Brand cryptonite. He holds the poison and the medicine. Depending on public
sentiment they dish out the doses of each accordingly.

------
nytesky
It feels like Facebook started out as Geocities and has ended up as your
cranky aunts forwarded chain e-mail.

------
Robotbeat
Okay, that ship is sinking. Time to burn it; Facebook has long outlived the
usual online social network lifetime. What's the next one we jump to this
time?

[http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3240](http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3240)

------
jwalton
> 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.

------
misterbowfinger
It feels like they want to move towards being more "useful", a la WeChat:

[http://blog.ycombinator.com/lessons-from-
wechat/](http://blog.ycombinator.com/lessons-from-wechat/)

------
dwighttk
There are like 3 of my friends who I like and want to hear things from, but
they post about 10x per day. Facebook has decided that because of this volume
ALL I WANT TO SEE IS THESE 3 FRIENDS' POSTS. It's irritating. I wish I could
fall back on Twitter to show me everything, but now between "tweets you may
have missed" and randomly showing me posts (4 or 5 times) that other people
have liked, it's feeling more and more like Facebook, just with different
people.

------
ccachor
Encourage more personal photos. And ban links from Newsfeed. It's really that
simple.

------
product50
The stock has already recovered and is above $190 now (up 3.6% vs. close).

~~~
matte_black
Will probably hit $200 tomorrow

------
tanilama
Why is this article so certain this related to fake news correction?

------
j4ship
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.

------
SheinhardtWigCo
What could they possibly be doing with 25,000 staff? That is insane.

~~~
CGamesPlay
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.

