
A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24 - brunooo
http://blog.eat24hours.com/breakup-letter-to-facebook-from-eat24
======
antr
Every day that goes by I am more convinced that the Twitter stream is the best
way to communicate, as a brand and as a consumer. On Twitter, as in Facebook,
I follow/like whatever brands I find interesting, engaging and resonate with
my believes/interests. If I see that a brand does/say something I don't like,
I simply unfollow/unlike.

What Facebook is doing is (over)engineering how my relationship with
brands/people are, and I don't like that. If I like Robert Scoble on Facebook
it is because I want to see what he has to say, and my like should not just be
another stat on on Scoble's total number of followers. Hence, my use of
Twitter is significantly higher than that on FB. Facebook is digging itself
into a big hole.

~~~
maxerickson
Why do you want to engage with brands?

I don't mean that to be antagonistic, I just don't have much understanding of
that particular thing.

~~~
JohnTHaller
You follow a band you like because you want to know about their upcoming
performances and new music. You follow an artist you like to see new stuff
they're working on and when they post it online. You follow your favorite
family owned restaurant to see what specials they have and when they're doing
a wine tasting. You follow your favorite local bar to find out when trivia
night is.

There are a ton of reasons to follow things that aren't friends. And Facebook
was a great way to track all that stuff. Now, it isn't, because Facebook
changed the algorithm. You can still find it if you manually click on the
Pages Feed, which is handy for folks who know it's there. But most people
don't, so most of what you take the time to post on Facebook as a business is
barely seen by anyone.

~~~
notahacker
To be fair, half the time people sign up for purely symbolic reasons, or to
participate in a "like us on Facebook to win.." competition and not
necessarily because they want daily ads for $brand served to them in between
their friends' baby pics and obscure links posted by some guy they once met at
an airport.

If you _really_ want regular updates from a vendor you sign up to their
mailing list...

~~~
lotharbot
> _" If you really want regular updates from a vendor you sign up to their
> mailing list..."_

Or you follow them on social media because you use it more regularly than you
use e-mail, or you find it more convenient.

~~~
notahacker
But the Facebook news feed has _never_ been a reliable delivery mechanism for
updates you actually want to receive, because there's always been a huge
volume of content with imperfect filters in place; if you really want to check
on a brand you either go direct to their Facebook page which is entirely
unaffected by filter algorithms or follow them on Twitter or by email. Users
who only ever saw a fraction of the brand communications in their main feed
anyway aren't particularly upset by changes in the filter that mean they see
an even smaller percentage (if they get more friend updates instead they might
even see it as a net win). Brands whose free advertising reaches 1-2% of
eyeballs rather than 10-20% of the ones upset here, as with the Gmail
"promotions" tab.

Eat24's marketing team aren't stupid: they know this which is why you don't
get coupon offers on Facebook, you get meme graphics, jokes about food and
pictures of pizza. You get coupon offers by email without the jokes or on
Twitter with them.

Edit: disagreement by downvoting is particularly lame when it comes without an
explanation of why I'm supposedly wrong. You don't see everything that every
person or brand has posted in your newsfeed, haven't done for a long time, and
in practice wouldn't do without a lot of scrolling even if they didn't filter
at all. Whether Facebook's intent in filtering Pages posts to your feed more
aggressively than Friend posts to your feed is purely commercial, purely
driven by user engagement metrics or something in between, it's hardly a new
development or something that only applies to brands.

~~~
lotharbot
> _" the Facebook news feed has never been a reliable delivery mechanism for
> updates you actually want to receive"_

Yes it was. It was great for me for several years. I blocked games and kept my
friends list to actual friends, and I was easily able to keep up with peoples'
lives AND with products/companies I followed.

Eventually they changed the algorithm enough times, and hid/removed enough
options, that I couldn't keep up. I posted a mini-rant in the comments here
about it -- how FB's algorithm decided it was more important that I see a
random not-very-close high school friend post an offensive political meme than
that I see my brother's wedding pictures.

------
logn
Well that's funny brands are complaining Facebook is selling out. That's like
Coca-Cola complaining that the Super Bowl is too commercial. When I joined The
Facebook it was for me and my college classmates. There was no such thing as
liking a brand (and maybe not even liking at all). I remember most of my
friends being surprised when after liking a brand you were inundated with
spam. I guess after people obsessively liked things for years, and added every
possible friend, the only thing left is to pay for news feed placement.

------
protomyth
I have a question on this. Let's say small college puts a post on Facebook
like an event, financial aid warning, or a school close announcement. If I
read this right, then that post will not be distributed to everyone following
the college? In contrast, on Twitter, a post will go to all followers. Is this
right?

~~~
techaddict009
Yes it 100 Percent right. It will reach to approx 10% of people who have liked
the fan page.

~~~
sergiotapia
Wow, I just learned about this today. What's the point of having a Facebook
page then? Sounds like a gigantic waste of time.

~~~
frostmatthew
Well you can pay to promote a post so it will have a higher reach. Businesses
should be more appreciative of the fact that 5-10% reach for _free_ is far
more free reach than you will get with TV, radio, Google ads, or anything else
short of putting flyers on telephone poles.

~~~
sergiotapia
Well, no. I disagree with what you're saying. If I create a page for my
business and share coupons and stuff, people are free to come like my page.
That means they want to see more of my stuff voluntarily.

Why is Facebook extorting money from the business to allow users to see what
they want to see?

~~~
evgen
No, it does my mean they want to see a constant stream of every promotion and
sale you offer. It means that they liked _one thing_ and your page is no
different than the thousand other things I have liked last month. You don't
have some entitlement to space on my feed. If I am interested then a constant
stream of likes to your content will keep you in view. If you convinced me and
ten thousand others to like a single cat picture that does not mean I want to
see anything else you post. I may like your television advertisement, but that
is not why I turn on the tv or select a particular channel.

~~~
sergiotapia
You're confused. A like _for_ a page is not the same as a like on a _single
post_.

~~~
evgen
No, you are the one who is confused here. A like for a page, similar to a like
on a single post, is not permission to spam my news feed. If I wanted to
subscribe to your updates I would actually, you know, subscribe. A like is a
coarse-granularity indication that I have some interest in your page, but just
like everything else I opted to "like" it is one indicator among many that
should be used to build my feed.

------
joelrunyon
I don't use Eat24 - but between this and their post on NSFW advertising - I
feel like I should. Their content strategy people know what's up.

~~~
joelrunyon
Here's the other article I was referencing:

[http://blog.eat24hours.com/how-to-advertise-on-a-porn-
websit...](http://blog.eat24hours.com/how-to-advertise-on-a-porn-website/)

------
froo
I don't know what the original author is talking about to be honest. When I
use Facebook, my feed is filled with friends & family posts and the very
occasional ad.

To really put it into perspective, I just opened my Facebook now, first ad is
in position 5 in my feed. The next ad popped in at the 52nd item in my feed. I
went looking for a third ad.. I decided to stop after the 200th item in my
feed and I generally don't scroll down that far in a single sitting.

Sure, there are ads on the side, but I'm more or less blind to those ads
because they're always there.

That's not to say it was always like this. Candy Crush ads and whatnot used to
pop up all the time from certain people. That's why you can hide those. They
quickly disappear.

I guess it must just be cool to dump on Facebook now.

~~~
Irishsteve
We must be in different buckets. I signing and I see 1 message from a friend
followed by 1 ad, 2 sponsored posts and to the right 4 or 5 ad's in the
sidebar.

------
morgante
Honestly I still don't get the hubbub over this algorithm change by Facebook.
It's a scaling issue Facebook is attempting to solve, in a dramatically
different (and IMHO superior) way than Twitter.

On both networks, every time you look at your feed you'll only look at the top
X items. On Twitter, that'll just be the X most recent items. On Facebook,
those X items are picked algorithmically based on the degree of engagement.
The latter seems 1000x better and more intelligent than Twitter, even though
it technically means not every post I'm subscribed to will make it into my
feed.

As people spend more and more years on Facebook, we naturally accumulate more
friends and pages (personally around 1200 friends and 200 pages). Thus, we're
subscribed to more content. Far too much to reasonably make it into our feed.
Given that X is fixed, the percentage of any particular source's posts which
will make it into X _should_ decline. It seems totally reasonable that which
posts make it in are dictated by how much engagement those posts had.

~~~
sparkzilla
No. Just no. Like many other small businesses, I paid thousands of dollars to
Facebook for ads to create fan pages. People who were interested in what I was
doing became fans (I had about 4000 in all). There was _never_ any indication
from Facebook that they would make it increasingly difficult to reach those
people, and those fans were never told that they would not see my posts. Due
to changes in their algorithm I watched the views for my posts drop from 1200
to less than 10. Then I was told I had to pay to reach my own fans. Businesses
like ours helped grow Facebook by building fan pages but Facebook betrayed us
and, more importantly, betrayed our fans. It's sick.

~~~
morgante
Instead of resorting to emotion, can you explain a compelling alternative for
how Facebook could actually solve this?

Yes, you have 4000 fans. But I'm 99% sure you're not the only page they like.
They probably like many other pages, and also have many other friends (2
numbers that increase over time). Do you not see how it's literally impossible
for every post I'm subscribed to reach me?

This is purely a problem of scale. Most of my friends don't see my updates,
because they also have many other friends. But my mom sees every single update
I have because I'm her only Facebook friend.

Perhaps it's annoying/confusing that Facebook gave you the option to
monetarily combat the effects of a growing network. But organic growth also
still works.

~~~
sparkzilla
Facebook started to throttle response just over a year ago, well _after_ most
people already had all of their friends in their feed, and well after most
people had joined most of the pages they like.

It's no coincidence that Facebook told me I could get more views by spending
money to reach the same people I had been reaching organically just a few
weeks before.

The solution is to stop trying to extort money from the businesses that helped
them build their business and let the users decide what they want to see.

~~~
morgante
You're acting as though Facebook has somehow blocked fans from visiting your
page. They're of course free to do so.

Given that you accept it's a statistical impossibility for all content I'm
subscribed to to reach my feed, what we're debating is priorities. Before this
algorithm change, I fully believe it was tilted too far in terms of brands—I
received way too many updates from brands and few from my friends.

What you call extortion is what every sane person in the world calls
advertising. If a magazine writes a story about my business (free
advertising), that obviously doesn't entitle me to free advertising in all
future issues. Neither does Facebook once giving you free reach.

~~~
sparkzilla
If your feed before was "tilted too fat in terms of brands" then you could
easily have hidden them from the feed or unsubscribed.

Your analogy is wrong. Facebook did not write a free story about my business.
I _paid_ them to help me gather a group of people who were interested in my
business. They never at any point said that I would have to pay to access
those users. Then, after I spent a lot of money, time and effort maintaining
that group, they told me that I couldn't access them without paying them again
and again. That's extortion, not advertising.

As someone who has ran a business that has sold many millions of dollars of
advertising you don't screw over your readers and advertisers to make an extra
buck. It might work in the short term, but it's a failing business strategy.

~~~
waterlesscloud
The users are hiding you by their inaction on your posts.

If you "like" more posts from a page, you'll see more of their content. If you
don't like their posts, you'll see less of it.

------
tjshipe
They are deleting their Facebook on 11:59 PM on Monday. That is a minute
before April 1st. I suspect a clever April Fools self-promotion tactic...

------
Jedd
Here's my hit prediction - in 1-2 years HN will be full of blog posts of
people bemoaning how they are forced to abandon Twitter, not because they have
just noticed that 140char is too short to convey a meaningful message, but
because they feel that they've been betrayed and/or misled.

(It will take longer because they charge substantially less, but it will
happen _because_ they charge substantially less.)

------
nickgrosvenor
This is why Facebook is buying other companies because people are migrating
away from Facebook.

One flaw Facebook has, when everyone's been on it for years they collect
hundreds of friends from random old parts of their life. This waters down the
experience because random people you barely know posting all the time turns
your feed into something less interesting.

Toss in more ads combined with old acquaintances, and distant family members
and you have a spammy feed.

Plus advertisers are mad because they invested in broadening their reach only
to have it taken away from them unless they pay to promote.

A new social network is a fresh social network, void of your parent's family
friends and clothing companies you no longer care about.

Facebook is myspace all over again.

The most telling decline stat, my older sister who is a soccer mom and was
obsessed with Facebook for years recently told me, "we don't really go on
Facebook anymore, we use instagram." uh-oh, it's the non-technical family
member indicator. She was the last one of us to get a smartphone too.

That's why Facebook is buying other internet properties. Because their's is on
the decline with actual engaged users, their stats might show new users
joining quickly, those are probably bots, spammers, and foreigners. Facebook's
future is a universal login tool and a place to see you're great aunt's
inspiration quote spam.

~~~
evgen
You realize that at the same time as the occulus rift purchase they announced
one billion mobile users, right? No one is moving away from facebook. Everyone
has anecdotes but the financial filings have real numbers. They may not be
growing at the rates they were in the past, but that was inevitable.

------
jsonne
I actually kind of feel for facebook. Not even a year ago people were
complaining about Facebook not having enough relevant content etc. So they
were migrating away. Old facebook was filled with commercial spam and made it
a crappy experience. EdgeRank helped with that aspect a lot.

Switching hats, this also bothers me though. I'm a marketer for a lot of local
businesses through my agency, and obviously this sucks. It's still a really
valuable platform from a paid perspective. In fact using the some images and
copy on facebook versus Reddit I get almost 5x the CTR and conversions. I
guess what I'm trying to say is that if you're savvy and you're willing to
treat Facebook like any other ad network there's still a lot of value to be
had. The days of free engagement from pages seems to be coming to an end. That
really sucks for people who paid to build their's up. Going back on features
like that and screwing people etc. seems to be an endemic of the tech industry
as a whole though and not just Facebook. Google Reader anyone?

I know this is more of a rant and points out more problems than solutions, but
I just wanted to point out the situation is more complex than Facebook is bad
let's hate them.

~~~
robot_head
Nobody paid Google any money to create a following on Google Reader, and then
made that following worthless... Not really a fair comparison.

~~~
jsonne
Okay then not google reader. What about the myriad of startups that "pivot"
leaving paying customers hanging etc. Frankly too, that was a very small part
of my overall point.

------
star0zero
My sincere apologies for the sarcasm, but you mean to tell me that your
previously free source of massive one click fan reach is no longer free?!
There is no possible way that this was intentional ...

------
_superposition_
And I can't even post a comment on their blog to show support because I closed
my fb account. Oh the irony... Anyway, more power to ya.

------
j2kun
The algorithm they describe is apparently called "EdgeRank." All I can find
via Google are really bad infographics and worse layman explanations (ones
that make it clear the writer doesn't understand basic graph theory, or is
adulterating their understanding for whatever reason).

Can anyone post a link to a research-level paper explaining the algorithm? The
name EdgeRank makes me think it's a ripoff of PageRank, so are they solving
some sort of eigensystem for, what, an incidence matrix instead of an
adjacency matrix?

~~~
j2kun
Ah. It appears to be nothing more complicated than computing this linear
formula given, and Facebook has a thousand tiny little knobs for adjusting the
parameters.

Maybe the problem is that their algorithm is not really an algorithm. PageRank
was good because it had an interpretation as a random walk that made sense
(before SEO). EdgeRank can only be interpreted as an arbitrary formula.

------
MicroBerto
Sounds like they're cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Why not just go with the 100% free route and accept less engagement on their
posts? They will still profit. People will still come to Facebook and search
for them.

I'm no fan of Facebook either, but this just seems childish. In the end, it's
not Facebook who's hurt. It's them and their FB-only fans.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Because engagement with the people who like your page is purposely being
dropped to 1-2%. So, those 10,000 likes you have won't really matter because
only 100 or 200 people will see it. Unless you pay $20 to get all 10,000 to
see it and get you another couple dozen likes.

~~~
300bps
You're right, but you didn't point out the other obvious thing that some
people aren't getting: it takes effort to properly post things on Facebook.
Add that to only 1-2% of your hard-won subscribers are actually seeing it and
it makes it really not worth it.

~~~
MicroBerto
Has anyone _really_ looked at their Facebook page? Their engagement is low for
a good reason - they simply aren't good at posting on Facebook.

Go look at their page and tell me: if you were in charge of Facebook's
algorithm, would you put that stuff on every person's feed without charging a
bunch of money???

I'm by no means an expert, but I know that their posts aren't exactly making
me interested in ordering food or talking to them.

They do, however, have some posts that went viral, but they're really not
suited towards their customer base.

It's just not a good feed. IMHO, and obviously also in Facebook's, they don't
"deserve" any more attention when there are tons of more successful
alternatives for Facebook to show.

~~~
JohnTHaller
It doesn't matter the page. Facebook itself is purposely turning the algorithm
down to weight page posts much less strongly than they weight individual
posts. It's Facebook that's pushing it down to 1-2% and has been dialing it
back consistently for the last 4 months or so. That 1-2% metric isn't based on
people upset about their unpopular pages, it's from inside Facebook itself.

------
happywolf
FB has huge financial pressure to monetize everything. The consequence is to-
your-face ads that we are seeing day-in-day-out.

------
drawkbox
While I agree with the problem with paid ads and bots, it is funny that the
blog uses like buttons and has facebook comments though they are leaving
facebook.

~~~
joelrunyon
Yeah - interesting to see what they'll do about fb comments.

------
leephillips
I just don't understand why a company would want a Facebook page; consequently
all this angst and drama leaves me befuddled. They have a website. They can
show people who care pictures of food and whatever else they want. Why would
they seek to dilute their web presence and message by helping another company
profit from their content?

~~~
krisoft
I have asked the same question from a marketing professional. His answers was:
We go fishing where the fish is.

The sad truth is, it's hard to get eyeballs on your site. Once that changes
the game will change.

------
SnakeDoc
I 100% support eat24 in their decision. Facebook is ridiculous now. I
requested my "facebook archive" 2 days ago and still have not received my
email confirmation with the download link. As soon as I do, I'm deleting my
facebook profile as well. Goodbye Facebook. I hoped you would learn from
mistakes, but I see you haven't.

------
estebanrules
_yawn_

Another "breakup letter"...fascinating...

------
randomflavor
Silly post. Facebook is a business. Just like in Costco, you don't get free
samples forever. At some point you need to buy the bagel bites to get full at
home.

~~~
voyou
Exactly. Eat24 is mad that Facebook won't carry their ads for free, and I
can't say that that's a position I have much sympathy for.

~~~
belorn
Or Eat24 is mad that Facebook are demanding money to carry Eat24 contents for
free.

If spotify started to demand money for artists rather than pay them, artists
would start to get angry.

~~~
ryandrake
I'm not sure I understand the difference between "<company> ads" and
"<company>'s content". Facebook is a promotional platform. Content posted
there by companies are advertisements, nearly by definition.

~~~
nknighthb
People like/follow accounts of companies on social networks in order to
consume the content those accounts post. Certainly this includes marketing
material, but a key distinction between this and ordinary ads is that people
have made a deliberate decision, "I wish to see content from this company".

That content becomes part of the reason people spend time on the platform,
adding more opportunities for Facebook to sell actual ads (including to
competitors, I might add). The network effect applies to companies, too!

Facebook is now denying that content to users who have said they want it, and
destroying most of the value to the companies of creating that content. This
is a reversal of their prior policies (thus a bait-and-switch), dishonest (if
they don't want companies participating in their social network, they should
just ban them and make them run ordinary ads), and just plain ol' stupid
(because they're deliberately damaging their network and their image).

~~~
ryandrake
I think, what you are saying is, "It's not an ad if somebody signed up to see
it". It takes a lot of imagination to distinguish between "company content"
and "ads" on a platform whose purpose is PR and promotion.

~~~
nknighthb
It takes no imagination to distinguish between "things users go to Facebook to
see" and "things users do not go to Facebook to see".

~~~
ryandrake
I agree that people will want to see some ads and they will not want to see
other ads. They're all still ads.

~~~
nknighthb
In your opinion, not in mine. If Facebook agrees with you, then Facebook
should be honest and ban commercial entities from having accounts, instead
requiring them to use only the ordinary advertising mechanisms.

