
Facebook Wants You to Post More About Yourself - sushirain
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-07/facebook-said-to-face-decline-in-people-posting-personal-content
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otterley
When Facebook was relatively new, that's exactly what its users (including me)
did. In many ways, it was a better short-blogging platform than LiveJournal,
and many us of left to enjoy the future of personal sharing.

Then, over time, Facebook added new kinds of content to the News Feed, and
added one-click re-sharing. People eventually found it easier to just click
mouse buttons than make their own statements.

Next, they started curating people's News Feeds, selecting the content
Facebook thought was important, instead of showing a raw stream of their
friends' updates. Personal updates were squelched; linkbait and social gaming
(Zynga, anyone?) were promoted.

To make matters worse, they stopped allowing subscribers to control their own
News Feeds' content. Sure, you could hide updates from certain posters, or
express a vague preference to "hide content like this" (whatever that means),
but you could only do that one item at a time. There was never a way to
control the News Feed to filter out everything but personal content. As a
consequence of these maneuvers, Facebook expressed a clear business preference
to keep people engaged through low-quality, quick-dopamine-hit content.

And those who continued to try to use Facebook as they'd done before noticed
these changes. Their "Like" counts went down. People stopped commenting. In
fact it became clear that perhaps what they were posting -- even party
invitations -- were never being seen by their friends at all.

So, it's natural that people stopped posting personal updates. For many, if
Facebook isn't going to guarantee that your friends see them, taking the time
to write starts to seem like wasted effort. And that's exactly what it felt
like for me.

So, now Facebook wants us to post more about ourselves. But they created this
problem. If they want to solve it, they already know how, because the site
made it a great place to do so 10 years ago. But I doubt that they will,
because it conflicts too strongly with their profit motive.

~~~
wodenokoto
> There was never a way to control the News Feed to filter out everything but
> personal content.

What do you mean? You can ban links on a domain level.

~~~
wodenokoto
If someone shares a link from buzzfeed you can hide the post from your feed
and then choose "Never see links from buzzfeed again"

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zo1
I stopped posting because people stopped reacting/commenting/etc. It was a
black hole that nothing ever emerged from. What was even the point? It even
stopped being a form of diarising/expressing yourself.

Looking back, I sort of understand why. I've clicked on "hide all from person
X" for a lot of the obnoxious/repeated offenders on my friends list. The ones
left are probably the ones that don't post very often anyways. My facebook
feed these days is almost exclusively filled with posts from groups/pages I
follow due to their theme/topic.

Initially, when facebook was still young, they let you pick
movies/hobbies/quotes/people you liked. It was then added to your page as if
to "describe" you. At some point, those items became "pages" that were run by
individuals that posted things. That was the end of Facebook, I think. So, I
picked "Einstein" as a favourite celebrity/author at some point, therefore
Facebook had someone create an Einstein group and spam me with semi-related
articles? No thanks. That was when I promptly went ahead and removed _all_ of
those likes/groups/pages.

That brings me to another gripe with Facebook. A lot of Facebook pages/groups,
and the admins running them, seem to view their group of "likes/followers" as
a resource. They then go ahead and use Facebook as their own personal platform
to espouse whatever thing they believe, regardless if it is related to the
topic of the page at all. So, people stopped using their own
personalities/profiles as platforms to spread their personal ideas and instead
went behind "pages".

~~~
Jordrok
That shift to linked "interest" pages was what killed it for me as well. My
music section used to be a nicely formatted list categorized by genre
sometimes with individual songs or composers. Then the change hit and they
totally ruined it. Most of my stuff was improperly matched. Sometimes it split
up song titles into multiple pages. All formatting and categorization was
obliterated. The ones which were properly matched started popping up in my
feed, totally unasked for. I never forgave Facebook for that.

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makecheck
The feed algorithm is now an utter mystery: they somehow manage to show me
things twice, and there is lots of interspersed garbage. The endless scroll
makes it very obvious very quickly that this is now a “chore” so I just stop.
I also log in far less than before; certainly not every day as I once
did…perhaps weekly (and even then, I somehow see updates from 2 or 3 friends
tops).

The mobile interface is also ridiculous. My friend’s phone was _hot_ and he
complained about his battery not lasting…he wanted to upgrade his iPhone 6
because of it! What was the real problem? The Facebook app, ALONE, consuming
upwards of 30% of his battery!!!

Then there is the _automatic_ distrust I feel these days whenever I see “log
in with Facebook” or similar things. I just _assume_ that this can’t be a good
idea, kind of like receiving a scam E-mail. That kind of pattern is going to
tarnish Facebook’s prospects long-term.

And why is Facebook chat supposed to be so great? What is new about this? I am
so tired of technology falling into “pits”, where just because a company has
your data you are supposed to suffer through whatever software stack they
create. Microsoft did this with documents, now I am supposed to use a Facebook
app just to reach anybody? No.

We used to know how to create standalone clients and open protocols...let’s
get back there again and let Facebook die.

~~~
educar
Now are doing this with slack. Everyone wants to put some integration or other
in slack. When it started, I just had a chat with friends. Now it's a mix of
random bots and non-stop alerts about things I really don't want to know
(immediately) at that point.

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Malician
1\. Facebook's algorithms determine who sees what you post.

2\. I've noticed that personal pictures get a flood of likes, no matter how
trite. Widespread distribution by the algorithm + people like them.

3\. Making my own post with multiple links as sources = basically invisible,
compared to "sharing" similar content which is already going around Facebook.

Sometimes, of course, it's hard to discriminate between "what the algorithm
doesn't like," and "what people just aren't interested in."

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pcurve
I can't speak for others, but I used to post a lot of personal stuff when I
was hiding behind anonymity, but still had community of people who read my
posts; that was Xanga.com.

Aside from the anonymity, there are many aspects of current facebook design
that makes it near impossible for ordinary folks to posts more personal stuff.

They're trying to have their cake and eat it.

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0x0
I recently discovered that you can get a feed much more like the 2008-era
facebook, on the fb ios app at least, by seaching for the string "posts by my
friends". Getting rid of all those page posts and comments feels like trying
on noise cancelling headphones for the first time.

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jug
So, Facebook is noticing how people link more to sites and news, and post less
about themselves. I definitely fall into that category of users. Why? It's
simple. Facebook doesn't really encourage socializing. They encourage
information sharing and information consumption. They further seem to give
information from advertisers and actual users roughly the same priority. If a
tech news site I follow posts a story that seems to be bought by some brand (a
trend I have definitely noticed lately), the chance of it appearing seems to
be roughly the same as a status update from a friend. If I follow a company's
"page", a large bulk of what they post will be advertisments. So... There's a
lot of attention grabbing ads or covert ads, these of course with clickbait
titles, to penetrate for any normal guy who wants to enter the fray.

I think Facebook has realized this problem a long time ago, and that is why
they provide these algorithm curated timelines to their users, just so people
won't be overwhelmed? And I guess then, in the end, it is about what the
algorithm does, and ultimately what Facebook wants it to do, in extension what
they want to be. Right now they have chosen to be a 50/50 mix of ads/status
updates, so in order to penetrate the ads that are attention grabbing by
design, it is easiest to do so with memes and easily digestible jokes, things
like that, things also attention grabbing by design.

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mkay581
"Post more content organically, please. But just try not to do it just because
we said so."

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donretag
They could start off by help cleaning up a person's feed. Users should not be
able to see if a friend likes or comments on a post. It creates noise. Many
are turned off by Facebook because of all the noise that is generated.

~~~
makecheck
Especially when they say “<Someone You Know> commented on X” and the only link
is to a page with _thousands_ of comments that doesn’t highlight your friend’s
actual comment.

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wodenokoto
Facebook has had an irrational fear of Twitter. Twitter gets their trending
topics on CNN and Zuckerberg watches in jealousy, while forgetting he has the
vast majority of posting and advertisement.

A lot of things have changed meaning (liking a band, now mean following them)
and I think this has helped changed the Facebook experience for many of us,
but mostly it has been pushes to show users posts from outside their social
circles and show posts from public figures.

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mmsmatt
I use the Facebook app/site to follow food trucks and bars. Going to the news
feed to find out anything about my friends' lives? No, I'll write them on
Messenger and ask what's up.

If I'm no longer reading my news feed, why would I start typing into it,
hoping they are reading theirs?

