
Facebook bends the rules of audience engagement to its advantage - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/business/facebook-bends-the-rules-of-audience-engagement-to-its-advantage.html?src=busln&_r=0
======
arcticfox
> As a company spokeswoman, Jessie Baker, told me: “The time people spend on
> our site is a good measure of whether we’re delivering value to them.”

Eh, the same argument could be made by Philip Morris or a casino: "The time
people spend using our products is a good measure of whether we're delivering
value to them."

~~~
Aelinsaar
Exactly. Usage patterns and "deriving value" seem like very different beasts.

~~~
cb18
Well, value in sating a compulsive or addictive behavior, but not all values
are equal.

~~~
rhizome
That so many exceptions and alternative interpretations are possible makes
"value" a meaningless term. Perhaps some day reporters won't go MEGO[1] when
hearing it.

1\.
[https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/mego/](https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/mego/)

~~~
cb18
Value is just like a variable, it is a place holder for what matters. And the
value of the _value_ can vary depending on the person or the situation. It
could be a positive or a negative value, a value of high importance or minimal
importance. Assigning something a value just basically means you're not
entirely disinterested in it.

~~~
rhizome
Thanks. Well said.

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notliketherest
Kill your Facebook. Seriously. You'll feel so liberated. And showing people
pictures of your recent life when you meet them or email them is so fun and
you get so much more attention and conversation out of it. Best decision of my
life!

~~~
elliotec
I mean, it sounds okay to be liberated, but what if you just don't spend 50
minutes on it per day? Also, what about the argument of keeping in touch with
all your high school friends and distant relatives? What about all the things
I would've found out on facebook that I'm now missing out on?

~~~
darkclarity
Facebook doesn't just keep you in contact with old friends, it encourages you
to stalk their public facing persona. There's none of the mystery and personal
discovery that creates the bonds of friendship. It's not real friendship. It's
like being a super fan to an amateur musician - a one way street with
occasional responses.

The fear of missing out? That's just one of the many addictive strings that
Facebook tugs to manipulate you. The things that happen on Facebook don't
matter. If something is important then it is far better to discover it outside
of Facebook. In the end, nothing is _that_ important.

There are other ways of keeping up with old friends and relatives. Listen to
gossip from other friends and family. Keep in contact with them using email,
telephone and post. If you don't maintain some link then they should be
resigned to the past - until some event occurs to trigger a re-established
connection.

~~~
ctrl_freak
> The things that happen on Facebook don't matter.

In my own experience, that's just not true. Facebook has facilitated lots of
social interactions for me that simply would not have happened otherwise. Some
examples:

\- I was doing an internship in Australia for a few months. I posted a picture
of the beach on Facebook, an old friend from highschool whom I hadn't talked
to in years saw it, commented that I should come visit her in Melbourne. I
did, and we met and caught up on life.

\- A friend of mine invited me to go to a music festival with her friends. She
added me to a group message on Facebook that they were using to plan
logistics, etc. After the festival, we continued using the chat to plan other
social activities.

\- Casual acquaintances that I met once or twice invite me to parties, etc.

Can these things happen without Facebook? Technically, I suppose so.
Realistically, I think they would happen less frequently. IMO there's a big
difference between Messenger/Events/Groups (facilitates a lot of real
interactions) vs News Feed/Profiles (stalking other people).

------
kristopolous
Knowing it's within Facebook's financial interest to self-report this
unverifiable number as high as they can, I wonder what's included.

Are they only including when a user has the mobile app or browser window open
and is engaging with the content or are they measuring the total time the page
is open regardless of whether it's being interacted with or not? [1]

Are they only including engaging directly on facebook.com or would looking at
say, powered-by-facebook comments on a third party site add to this tally?

If that's game, what other things are open to this interpretation?

I'm not saying these metrics are fraudulent, just underspecified.

\---

1\. Under the more permissive metrics, I could be considered "on"
stackoverflow, github, or wikipedia perhaps 4 hours a day - because I, like
most, don't judiciously close every browser window immediately after I'm done.
Although I certainly visit these sites a lot, tallying the numbers like this
is probably disingenuous.

~~~
tmuir
Tons of services have "log in with Facebook" features. Last I checked, Tinder
required a Facebook account. I wonder if those logins are included?

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x0054
While people are spending more and more time on FB, I find it that there is
less and less original content uploaded. It's all likes and re-shares.

~~~
jsm386
Facebook is actively trying to deal with that truth:
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-07/facebook-s...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-07/facebook-
said-to-face-decline-in-people-posting-personal-content)

------
electic
This should be a wake up call. This site really doesn't deliver anything of
value. It doesn't really make you more social and it doesn't really connect
you to people in the real world. So basically you spend 16,800 minutes a year
on Facebook. That is 11 days of your life lost a year.

~~~
zappo2938
I spend 50 minutes a day on Hacker News.

~~~
intrasight
Hacker News is for me a news and discussion portal. Reddit is something that
might show up from a Google search. I block most of the distracting internet
during the day - except FB and HN - so of course those two get the majority of
my allocated distracted time. I should measure it, but I'd not be at all
surprised if they each got an hour a day.

------
jheriko
Why is this remotely bad?

> “They’re doing a tremendous job of finding ways to keep people on the site”

Could also be phrased

"Facebook provides such great value to its unpaying customers that they are
willing to spend 50 minutes per day interacting with their services"

... a spin/PR/sales person could word it better I'm sure

~~~
devishard
Please don't feed the turd-polishers.

------
wslh
I suggest you to read Momo by Michael Ende[1], it is basically about this
topic. Obviously, not only Facebook is guilty.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_\(novel\))

------
zerotimer
I don't think we should expect Facebook to change. We need better tools that
allow people to stay away from it (and other such distractions in future). We
need tools that help people understand how to manage their internet time
better. They need to understand what kind of emotional costs (which will vary
a lot) are associated with extended FB usage. And such tools will ideally be
browser addons.

Imagine a browser that I can configure based on my weekly goals. There are
domains I want to avoid. There are domains where I most want to be (for that
week). And some neutral domains like search engines. Maybe assign weights to
these. Then over the week, browser reminds or guides us towards most
productive behaviors. If our behavior is inconsistent with our initial goals,
it assigns heavier penalties (like block domain for a week) for those negative
domains.

There are many interesting implications once someone starts thinking about
some of these options. But at this point, I don't see exciting innovation on
this.

~~~
sthatipamala
RescueTime does exactly this.

~~~
zerotimer
First of all, separate app isn't the same. Secondly, it just gives reports.
That's a passive action. The "guide towards more productive behavior" part of
my comment meant that actively tries to stop you from negative domains or push
you towards better domains.

------
Ileca
I still don't see ANY value in using facebook besides giving to the market my
personal data. I just don't understand why this is so popular.

If I wanted to use a social network, I would use one where I can contact new
people of interest, not the one I can talk with when I open my window but I
won't because I use facebook.

~~~
Unklejoe
The value for many people is:

\- Being able to easily communicate with a large group of your friends at the
same time

\- Being able to contact old acquaintances who you otherwise wouldn't have
been able to find

\- Being able to finely control they way you present yourself to your peers

\- Being able to easily coordinate events

...to name a few.

There are other ways to accomplish the same tasks, but Facebook is coherent
and easy to use.

I personally don't use Facebook either, but I do see the value in it.

~~~
Ileca
Only your second point is valid to me and not worth the use of the system by
itself. This is not worth the encapsulation around your acquaintances you are
supposed to cultivate the relation face to face, not through a "wall" and
mediocre public interactions.

There is a lot of means to communicate and coordinate things efficiently (it
was already possible before facebook) and the "fine control" over your
"present yourself" is either an illusion or proof of your superficiality. I
think it is the point around what facebook was built: the superficiality of
people and their need to show off everywhere and think of themselves as some
public figure. I guess that's also why instagram and selfies are so popular.
It's all about network connection, not about the meaningful content the
network is supposed to carry.

------
ojbyrne
I wonder how much of an overlap there is with "waiting in line." because
that's a big use case for me.

------
davidwparker
Last year, I was spending roughly ~25 minutes / day on Facebook (according to
Rescuetime). I've never had the app, or messenger on my phone. So on Chrome, I
added News Feed Eradicator ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-
feed-eradicat...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-
eradicator-for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg)) and my usage dropped down to
about 5 minutes / day (still more than necessary).

Unlike a lot of people here (it seems), I get a lot of real usage out of
Facebook though. For example, it's the number one source of events for my
favorite hobby / workout. I wouldn't really be connected to the community and
know what events are going on if I didn't have it.

~~~
j_s
A slightly less drastic / more tweakable extension:
[http://www.fbpurity.com/](http://www.fbpurity.com/)

I use it to delete game + app stories from the newsfeed; I will sheepishly
admit I haven't disabled 'Deleted Friend Alerts' either.

------
dredmorbius
Criticisms of FB notwithstanding (and it's interesting how that dominates this
discussion), time-on-site is a _horrible_ measure of "value added" to me.

I've found highly-directed, highly-filtered, low-noise, low-distraction
envrionments are what give me return.

Interfaces and services like ... _Books._ A notebook. Index cards for noting
thoughts and ideas. Tangibles which I can hold, flip through, sort, take
outside, read in sunlight, and _don 't_ offer me the option of clicking over
to see my feed or who's responded to me.

(And no, I don't have a FB account either, never have.)

------
Mendenhall
All i think of when I see the word facebook is who would use that data mining,
censoring, manipulative product. To each their own but I think many dont see
whats going on with it.

~~~
amelius
> many dont see whats going on with it

I think we need some realistic examples of what could go wrong. To many,
online privacy issues are a bit too hypothetical and abstract.

~~~
gvurrdon
Indeed; a common response I encounter if I complain about Facebook is along
the lines of "I don't see why it matters that FB knows stuff about me, and I
think I get more value from them than they possibly could get from me for the
trivial information they learn about me."

------
AndrewKemendo
It seems like in general massively scaled technology companies don't get much
love on HN. Seems odd to me as so much of what is discussed on HN is how to
massively scale your own technology company.

Is it that they become othered once they pass a certain size, or go public?

What gives?

I mean, I get it that people don't like the influence of VC and finance, but
that's part of the game with scaled companies.

------
scoot
_" Facebook Has 50 Minutes of Your Time Each Day"_

FaceBook has none of my time ever. (Unless we're talking about their
contributions to OSS.)

~~~
ruffrey
Considering the widespread use of their open source projects like react, I'd
say we have 50 minutes of THEIR time each day

~~~
spicyj
Certainly 50 minutes of mine! More than half of my days go to open-source
React.

------
wfactor
Sadly this estimate seems on point. I think the jump in time spent is largely
because of Instagram though - there are many who check both daily

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xirdstl
That includes Messenger. Is Messenger just IM? If so, that estimate makes more
sense. Do they serve ads there too?

------
kinkdr
I was never an active FB user, and it has been years since I deleted my
account. On the other hand my wife is using it every now and then and I can
see the entertainment value in it.

I know everybody loves to hate it, but I don't see it as being inherently
worse than TV, or Reddit...

~~~
joelg
People who love to hate Facebook love to hate TV and Reddit equally.

------
brianstorms
Facebook gets about 10 minutes of my time each day, thanks to heavily muting
many friends' posts, FB Purity, and uBlock.

Meanwhile, Tesla has 120 minutes of my time each day. I'm fine with that.

~~~
Mendenhall
I am not someone who uses facebook, if you would not mind could you explain
briefly what you mean by "muting friends posts"?

~~~
koala_advert
You can "unfollow" people that you have added, so that their posts no longer
show up on your news feed. You still have them added as a friend, you just
don't see their posts without visiting their profile page.

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heifetz
People spend 5 hours on average watching tv, so Facebook has a long way to go!
Seriously, is this really something to be proud of?

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ihsw
If they _really_ want to dominate then it would be prudent for them to buy
reddit and imgur.

------
are_hem
is it really user engagement or the time you spend scrolling through your feed
to find something worth checking out, that dwarfs the time spent on twitter?

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are_hem
the time spent looking through your FB feed to find something worth checking
out largely contributes to it's dominance over time spent on twitter...

------
pmalynin
Yeah not gonna happen. Literally the only thing I use it for is chat.

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necessity
How is this news?

~~~
adrenalinelol
Apparently Facebook is so good at user engagement, they can get people to
spend time talking about how much time is spent on the platform ;)

