
Facebook’s retreat from the news business - blatherard
https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/facebooks-retreat-from-the-news-has-painful-for-publishers-including-slate.html
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robertAngst
What if facebook isnt trying to get rid of the media? What if that is actually
users being sick of it?

Mind you facebook has driven me to the point I stopped using it entirely.

~~~
rock_hard
You mean the media or Facebook?

If Facebook, then why do they keep growing their user base quarter over
quarter?

Don’t underestimate the bubble you are in and extrapolating that to global
scale!

Facebook is here to stay for the time being, whether you personally choose to
use it or not!

~~~
apatters
You're cherrypicking one metric with a nonchalance that Facebook's investors
surely do not share. FB is experiencing its slowest global user growth ever,
and US users are declining.

Popular/media criticism and boycotting actually appear to be making an impact
in the west, along with an inevitable generation shift (young'uns just aren't
thrilled about sharing a social platform with Mom and Gramps).

Having failed at doing news in a way that users liked, it makes sense for FB
to pull out. Most of their new users are in countries with poor education
systems or regimes that censor the news. News is an awkward business to be in
under those conditions anyway.

None of this is surprising at all once you've seen multiple product cycles,
markets do in fact matter, no company rules forever, if your product is total
crap people will drift away from it, this time is almost never different.
Friendster died, Myspace died, etc. FB can go the same way if they mis-execute
badly enough (though it could certainly take decades especially in their
strongest markets).

~~~
Haydos585x2
I've really slowed using Facebook because of the amount of misinformation or
straight up lies by some acquaintance. Comments on any kind of news source are
pretty bad as well. So many lies just made the platform unusable for me.

~~~
apatters
It's quite remarkable really how tone deaf the product planning at Facebook
has been. For centuries thousands of families have deemed it a wise decision
to forbid politics as a discussion topic at the dinner table. Zuck jumps right
in the middle of the table and "connects the world" by shoving Trump articles
with unmoderated comment threads in all their faces. Because an A/B test
showed that it "promoted engagement." Such idiocy lol.

~~~
Haydos585x2
I'd love to see a Facebook where either I or the page itself could hide/forbid
comments. I'm sure that no news company would ever turn off comments on their
pages but they might. A lot of companies have disabled comments on their
websites.

I really don't care that some bloke thinks everything is a Zionist conspiracy
to eradicate the white race. The smaller lies and falsehoods are what gets me
even more.

It's basically the Gell-Mann amnesia affect on steroids:

"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray
[Gell-Mann]'s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and
see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the
issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story
backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the 'wet streets cause rain'
stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or
amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national
or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow
more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the
page, and forget what you know."

------
Endama
I don't know if this is necessarily the right thing to do, I understand that
Facebook (and others) were really effectively weaponized by malicious foreign
actors, but conceding by not participating in journalism feels wrong to me.

This is indicative of a larger question that I think we, as the tech industry,
need to really ask ourselves: to what degree are the platforms responsible for
fixing the ills of the connections between users. Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Snapchat, etc. are all Western businesses operating at
international scales. Is it "right" for them to impose western approaches to
journalism, "truth", civic engagement, digital literacy, etc. to the rest of
the world?

If the answer is yes, we must come to the realization that these platforms
cannot be impartial, if the answer is no, we must accept that we, as an
industry, are going to complicit in the systematic harm of societies and must
accept that as table stakes.

Now I don't think this is necessarily a zero-sum situation, Salesforce
probably doesn't have the same kind of civic obligations that FB, Twitter,
Google have; but the clear lines of engagement in the spectrum of SAAS
companies needs to be discussed.

~~~
threeseed
> Is it "right" for them to impose western approaches to journalism

It's largely a moot point.

Because no company is going to want to alienate themselves from three very
large markets (EU, US, UK) all of whom have legal and political structures
which govern journalistic behaviours.

~~~
saagarjha
What about the large market that is China?

~~~
rozenmd
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall)

------
rossdavidh
I wonder, given the grilling that Zuckerberg got the last year, if Google
would rather avoid replacing them in the near-monopoly position of news
gatekeeper. On the other hand, Twitter seems to be fine with it, since the
Facebook pivot away from news might be what it is using to reverse its
decline.

~~~
0xfaded
Would someone with knowledge care to comment what % of traffic disappears at
each update. The last update pushed me over the edge to bing news of all
things. Worse aggregation with a UI only as bad as gnews minus two major
updates.

~~~
robertAngst
Curious too.

Are there any stats on this?

Btw, quit fb and havent needed to look back. replaced it with... HN, reddit,
crappy twitter, instagram, and snapchat.

~~~
Haydos585x2
Instead of crappy twitter you could use Mastodon. It feels like Twitter in the
early days. Of course, if you used "crappy twitter" as a nickname for Mastodon
I'm not going to disagree with you.

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ThJ
I can't read that article because I have booked all cookies from slate.com,
and it's using a cookie to store that I have consented to being tracked with
cookies...

I do not consent to being tracked, but I do want to read the article.

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JumpCrisscross
Good. Everything wrong with non-subscription clickbait-driven news is
amplified on Facebook. Very little is gained for that cost.

------
sudosushi
Google Cached version for all the EU members whom get the GDPR warning, with
no option to opt out of anything.

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qvSt11...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qvSt11OAA0QJ:https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/facebooks-
retreat-from-the-news-has-painful-for-publishers-including-slate.html)

~~~
pmontra
Thanks! All I was seeing is:

> Slate’s Use of Your Data

> By clicking “Agree,” you consent to Slate’s Terms of Service and Privacy
> Policy and the use of technologies such as cookies by Slate and our partners
> to deliver relevant advertising on our site, in emails and across the
> Internet, to personalize content and perform site analytics. Please see our
> Privacy Policy for more information about our use of data, your rights, and
> how to withdraw consent.

> Agree

Obviously I didn't agree even if I have all the extensions to block and delete
ads, cookies and the like.

Kind of Slate's retreat from the news business.

------
coderdude
Interesting. Maybe Facebook didn't like being dragged through the mud by news
organizations. Maybe Facebook is hurting them back by asphyxiating them. I
can't say I'd feel very bad about that if that were the case.

~~~
oscarthegrouch
If you read the article, this trend began before the recent "Facebook is the
devil" trend in the news. Perhaps instead it's the other way around? Perhaps
the news organizations are trying to hurt FB for a drop in their readership?

Either way, the news and social media spaces do not have a healthy
relationship.

