

The beginning of the end of Facebook’s traffic engine? - luu
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-facebook-as-a-traffic-engine

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glitch13
I'm guessing that their move in 2015 to put the kibosh on organizations using
their Facebook account to self-promote will have a larger impact on this sort
of thing.

[http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/11/news-feed-fyi-
reducing-o...](http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/11/news-feed-fyi-reducing-
overly-promotional-page-posts-in-news-feed/)

They say it's in the name of reducing spam on your news feed, but something
tells me that it's just a ruse to route that type of behavior to paid
advertisements and to end the free ride for small businesses.

~~~
graeme
>They say it's in the name of reducing spam on your news feed, but something
tells me that it's just a ruse to route that type of behavior to paid
advertisements and to end the free ride for small businesses.

I hear this a lot from small businesses....but really, I'm not interested in
most things posted by pages I "like".

Facebook does a pretty good job of gauging my interest. I'm _very_ interested
in 2-3 pages I liked, and Facebook shows me all of their stuff, usually at the
top of my feed.

Other stuff is sporadic, usually just the most popular of that pages posts.
The rest is stuff from my friends.

Why should it be different? It's not like I have the attention to see every
post from pages I've liked.

~~~
mercer
I think part of the problem is the meaning of 'like'. It conflates liking the
'thing' (band, store, café, etc.) with 'following' this thing. In some cases
I'd love to follow a person or entity because I care about the updates, but in
some cases I just want to 'like' something to show other people how unique I
am (where 'I' is an younger version of myself).

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eknkc
So, nothing to back that claim. No data or announcement from Facebook. Just a
remark about external web links being shit on mobile and that's it. Not even a
decent argument there. It's like saying elephants will grow tall necks in 2005
because of some random reason.

Am I missing something here?

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mtmail
The author is a finance blogger at Reuters ([http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-
salmon/](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/)) and they asked for a 2015
prediction. You're right, I don't see anything to back up the prediction.

~~~
dennisnedry
Maybe the author is hoping this article will go viral on Facebook? It
certainly has a bit of a link-baity headline.

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sparkzilla
While I agree with the author's point that anyone who is not Facebook will be
screwed, I disagree with this part: "Facebook has two natural constituencies:
its advertisers and its users."

Facebook does have two constituencies: its advertisers and its shareholders.
There has been very little improvement for users in the past few years. While
the site has become filled with more and more advertising, users have less and
less control over their newsfeed. After years of changing the setting, I don't
even have the option to show posts by Most Recent any more.

Meanwhile, small businesses, who helped build up the Facebook brand are being
forced to pay to reach their own fans. I hope this misalignment of incentives
really bites them hard.

~~~
dennisnedry
If you're referring to the mobile app (iOS), there is a way to change the
setting to Most Recent posts; however, it is buried and difficult. You're
right here, Facebook wants full control so they CAN put more ads on the users'
news feed.

~~~
dodders
And this is one of the reasons why I uninstalled the android app and use the
mobile website instead - it still offers the option to sort by most recent.

~~~
zo1
And doesn't try to trick you into installing Facebook Messenger. Recently got
a mobile notification of a message from a Facebook contact, clicked on it
naturally thinking it would take me either to the website, or the messages
section in the Facebook app. Nope, it decided to start me on a wizard for
setting up and installing Facebook Messenger, and proceeding to ask me to
invite my other contacts to join as well.

No thank you.

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graeme
>and which is probably suboptimal on mobile.

Why is content so often bad on mobile? I tried reading a page by Forbes today
on my moto E, and it didn't even scroll right.

I'm guessing complex analytics has something to do with slow page load speed,
but why is so much effort put into making an interface that degrades user
experience compared to simply displaying the text with formatting? Web sites
used to look fine, AND work.

I suspect I'm missing something and that this behavior helps sites somehow.
But I'm at a loss to say how that is.

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erispoe
Well, true, there is no data to back it, so it's pure speculation. However, if
your all business is based on an external service that you have no control on
has that has no legal nor contractual obligation to you, then you should be
ready to pivot quickly if and when they take that away from you. And you
should plan to have the cushion to do so.

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qhoc
Am I the only one thinking this is not new? There are many articles about such
trend with Facebook strategy. Companies either starting to pay up for ads or
post more meaning posts to make it viral naturally. Anything bait-like or low
quality like-me, like-this,... will be dead.

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Animats
Next, a push for bigger mobile screens to make room for more ads.

(That's the biggest issue on mobile - where to put the ads. There's almost no
way to have a non-annoying ad on mobile. This is a vulnerability of all ad-
based mobile services.)

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Igglyboo
I can't wait until phone screens are as big as laptops and then some genius
comes up with the idea to add a hardware keyboard. Then the circle will start
again.

~~~
kenrikm
iPad Air 5 "even thinner with an attached keyboard that gets out of your way ~
we've boiled it down to the essence of what a tablet should be"

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markveronda
There is no question mark on the title of the page itself, so why is there one
here? And even if it was a question, it violates Betteridge's law of headlines
[0] in that if it was a question, then the answer would have been no, but in
this article Felix is arguing that will be the case.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Even Betteridge himself admits that his Law is not universally true.

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bduerst
I wonder how this will affect the web standards that are pushed by Facebook
traffic, like Open Graph.

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Aloha
This seems to be the thing ones does annually, predict the death of facebook.

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greglindahl
Did you read it? It predicts that Facebook will stop sending a firehose of
traffic to outside websites. It says nothing about the death or popularity of
Facebook itself.

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taternuts
I'm sorry... but was the incredibly visible avatar necessary for a
"journalistic" piece?
[http://i.imgur.com/920RtbF.png](http://i.imgur.com/920RtbF.png)

