
How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose - longarm
http://betabeat.com/2013/03/how-facebook-gets-away-with-being-broken-on-purpose/
======
snprbob86
Personally, I think Facebook would be broken if every message every person or
group I'm connected to made it directly into my feed. The feed has been
algorithmic for a very long time and paid placement is neither a surprising
nor nefarious input to that algorithm. Paid posts are clearly labeled and,
even if paid, don't guarantee distribution volume, but do provide analytics.
If you don't like the results you're getting, then don't pay for them.

If you think that you can complain "But they are my fans! They belong to me! I
deserve the right to be in their feeds" then be happy that Facebook is smarter
than you: All those lovely fans would be gone in a heartbeat if Facebook
didn't protect the advertisers from themselves. If you and all your
advertising friends had it your way, you'd spam users until there were no
users left to spam.

~~~
anonymoushn
Is there a button available to users that will cause stories posted by pages
and friends to actually show up in the news feed? It seems like there is no
solution available on the receiving end.

~~~
snprbob86
"Sort By: Most Recent" ?

~~~
dpatrick86
Nope. This worked for a while, however.

------
manaskarekar
OT:

One observation I have made is how facebook launches big changes in staggered
roll-outs.

Among all the other obvious benefits, I feel a big one is that all people
never get to complain at once. So even the most drastic of changes will be met
with pockets of protests/backlash, giving enough time between different
pockets for the uproar to cool off.

------
dasil003
Facebook is betting this will all blow over and everyone will accept it as the
new status quo just like 80% of the previous evil changes they implemented.
They are continually pushing the envelope to see what they can get away with,
and I think in this case they will probably pull it off like they usually do.

The article describes it as "as plain and malignant a case of conflict of
interest can get", but I don't see it; Facebook's interest is to make money,
not to guarantee equality of Facebook's posting. Even if you grant that their
primary interest is to assure the highest quality feed, this doesn't go
directly against that either since a paid post is not inherently worse than
free one even if it skews that way.

What people are really objecting to here is the blurring of the lines between
ads and organic content. Certainly it smells bad, but it's not the same as an
investment bank shorting the very securities they're selling to clients, after
all, you can still get something for free. All they've done is just is turned
a formerly free service into a freemium service without removing any
functionality. Sure they can ratchet up the cost arbitrarily, but you have no
excuse to be screwed by that because you can dip your toe in any time to
figure out if the ROI makes sense. If they didn't offer you the opportunity to
pay for placement you would have been drowned out by the noise anyway. I think
the business justification is precisely that: the stream is so noisy for most
people that paid placement can be done without significantly degrading its
quality. They may be wrong about this, but I don't see why they aren't
justified to try.

~~~
greggman
You seem to have missed the entire point of the article. That point is there
is a conflict of interest between Facebook and its advertisers. Something
that's not true of most Internet advertising systems according to the author.
That is the specific problem. Not that it used to be free and now is pay.

~~~
Evbn
Google, the largest ad business on the planet, derives much of its revenue
from a product that is directly antagonistic to advertisers: organic search.

------
spinchange
Regrettably, I think a lot of journalists are also spoon-fed PR and don't dig
deeper or ask more questions.

Just last week I saw two stories, one on MIT Technology Review [0] and another
on Fast Company [1] about Facebook's up-and-coming "Entity Graph." Ostensibly
aimed at bolstering their search and informational relevance, neither article
reported that many of these pages are scraped/imported content from Wikipedia
and have been there since 2010, then called "Community Pages." Fast Company
goes as far as to compare Facebook's efforts in this area to Wikipedia's, but
doesn't mention that millions of pages are taken directly from Wikipedia. I
did some digging on my own and found that at the time this was started,
Wikipedia's director of business development was quoted as saying this was a
positive development and viewed favorably by the foundation [2], but neither
piece of reporting mentions anything about it. Both position Facebook's effort
as being grassroots and not something seeded/bootstrapped off of Commons and a
not-for-profit site.

[0] [http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511591/facebook-
nudges-...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511591/facebook-nudges-users-
to-catalog-the-real-world/)

[1] [http://www.fastcompany.com/3006389/where-are-they-
now/entity...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3006389/where-are-they-now/entity-
graph-facebook-calls-users-improve-its-search)

[2] <http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21721>

------
dm8
I don't understand the hoopla behind edgerank. Personally, I really like it.
My feed is much cleaner. I get all status updates from the most important
people in my life. And from other friends I get the most important updates.

As far as sponsored stories go, I prefer to those ugly banner ads. Much better
UX and lot of times sponsored stories are relevant to me.

~~~
Semaphor
Fully agree, I really like edgerank. I sometimes need to optimize it by
removing a specific person from the feed, but besides that its great. Can't
agree on the sponsored stories though, so far I haven't seen a single one
relevant to me or my interests.

And as someone with a lot of people in my friendlist that often post in
languages I can't understand, I wish they allowed me to filter non-image posts
by language (so I'd only see German and English posts).

------
tomasien
If users wanted Twitter-like, see 100% of posts as the default, Facebook would
have done it. They maximize for engagement 1st and then they monetize that
engagement.

For example, if people were most engaged seeing every post (which they
wouldn't be, because of the nature of Facebook where you're mostly friends
with people you don't care about), they could have far more Timeline
"Suggested" of "Featured" posts than they have now.

Facebook with Edgerank is a far better experience than pre-edgerank. And if
you don't like edgerank, you can make your default to see all posts from most
recent to least recent.

~~~
RougeFemme
I think most users _do_ want Twitter-like 100% visibility. And, at least when
they first signed up (for those who signed up more than a year ago), they
thought they were getting that. I think that the typical user has just given
up on trying to keep up with and compensate the every-changing features and
have settled for what they get and/or moved on to something else.

~~~
brazzy
> I think most users do want Twitter-like 100% visibility.

Well, you're wrong.

------
danso
So this variation on advertising is just a consequence of Facebook using an
algorithm to fill your "top stories" feed as opposed to a chronological feed.
The NYT article that the OP refers to:

[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/disruptions-when-
sh...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/disruptions-when-sharing-on-
facebook-comes-at-a-cost/)

\-- implies that Twitter has a better model because you still see the same
tweets in the same order even with a sponsored tweet up top, because tweets
always come in a chronological order.

Maybe that works for Twitter, but I know I don't check my own tweetstream as
often as I do my Facebook newsfeed. If FB showed me everything my friends and
acquaintances did by default, including everytime they did something in
Farmville2, I'd be less inclined to check FB.

And it's not a fair comparison because the FB newsfeed shows a variety of
actions, from wall posts, to a posted picture, to entirely new photo
albums...Twitter shows, for the most part, one kind of content: tweets.

I'm not saying that the OP isn't right here, that FB's model at its core could
be problematic. I'm just pointing out that it's an advertising system that is
a consequence of "weighting" the importance of each feed item.

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EGreg
This is what Overture was doing for advertisers back in the day - relevance
based on payment

then Google came along and made pagerank -- so relevance was actually based on
relevance and not just ads

but then it acquired overture's patents and made the adwords, which is back to
paying if you want to be on top

So I see the same game playing out all over again. Facebook can be the
overture and we will be the google :)

------
gojomo
I think this is a hint to the real opportunity for App.net.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter have pioneered the 'feed'... but they're also
abusing it. To mix some metaphors, they're polluting the feed with inserts and
glitz, or strip-mining their audience's attention. Some necessary innovation
in how feeds could be sorted/filtered, strictly for the user's benefit, has
been foreclosed by their business models.

Perhaps it's a little like the first generation of search engines and portals:
a haste to monetize has caused them to overlook how deep and universal a user-
centric feed-service could be. They are locking up their proprietary 'sources'
of events well, and thus slowing the emergence of alternatives. But at some
point a 10X-plus-better uncorrupted competitor could emerge, first among geeky
early adopters, making people look back at Facebook and Twitter like they were
Yahoo/Hotbot/Altavista.

~~~
mehrzad
I hope App.net does well, but I (and I think others) would prefer a more open
solution. Tent is doing OK so far, but we need something like IRC (which is
still doing great).

------
liotier
This is what sharecroppers get for promoting the use of Facebook in lieu of
proper feed aggregators. Serves them well !

------
namenotrequired
It's not broken, it's working exactly how it's told to work. It's just not how
you'd personally prefer it.

I'm personally happy to put up with advertisements and whatever they think
they need to do to optimise their earnings on this so long as they don't screw
up so badly that there's no longer any value for me in using the site. That
said I'd happily get a paid membership for a couple of bucks a month, to
browse it free of ads (and sponsored stories etc) and perhaps get to beta test
changes. I don't believe any such thing exists but I think that would be cool
:)

------
adjwilli
Facebook has every right to promote paid posts, and Google has every right to
promote paid links despite not exercising it. And we as users have every right
to decide whether we find the Facebook feed and Google search results relevant
and useful based on that. When Facebook's policy starts effecting the quality
of their services for users and companies, people will stop using it, just as
if Google's search results lowered in quality people would switch to something
else.

~~~
ElissaShevinsky
This is a very useful insight.

If brands can't rely on Facebook to reliably deliver messaging to a
significant number of their fans, then these brands will spend less resources
(both effort and money) on cultivating fan bases on Facebook. Instead they'll
focus on Twitter, Instagram or just reduce the scope of their social media
campaigns in favor of something with more optimized results.

------
pagekicker
The reason that tech journalists are often repeating stories that were broken
earlier is that they are able to sell the stories to editors. As far as many
editors are concerned "if it didn't appear in my publication, it hasn't
happened yet." This phenomenon is not just limited to news media -- I'm often
boggled by consultancies like McKinsey who are _still_ coming out with timely
reports on "how CEOS can use social media."

------
andkon
Y'know, Google has been doing this for a long time with AdWords: if your site
doesn't have a high PageRank for the keywords you're targeting, you have to
pay more.

I think the real problem here is the PR problem of charging for something that
once was free. It wasn't a great idea, and the Tumblr example serves to
illustrate how it could've been done differently.

~~~
tomkarlo
I'm not sure that's comparable; that's rewarding ads for being more relevant
to the original search (or penalizing ads for being less relevant.) CPC
services get paid for clicks but have views for inventory, so it makes sense
they'd favor showing an add where the chance of a click is higher, raising the
CPM.

On FB, you're getting charged just to show the post, so it's more of a CPM
model.

------
greghinch
This just in: Facebook is a business and wants to make a profit.

Seriously, how is this surprising? You want to use Facebook to increase your
own business, you pay them. If anything, being able to reach a fraction of
your followers for free is an evolution of freemium.

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andrewflnr
All Facebook gets from me in all this is that I spend less and less time on
Facebook, because all I do is look at the news feed, and if there's only five
new items from yesterday, then I leave. I wish I could say I was sticking it
to them for being jerks, but I know they don't really care about me or need
me. And it's not like all my friends are going to go to Google+, or heaven
forbid Diaspora. Excuse me while I go post this story on my wall.

~~~
brazzy
I suspect that the opposite is actually the case; If every time you looked at
the newsfeed you saw 50 new items of which 45 are uninteresting, you'd leave
and _not_ come back the next day.

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csense
I ditched Facebook years ago, and I've never been happier.

~~~
b1daly
Correlation does not equal causation:) But good for you! (on the happiness
part)

------
whiddershins
hmm, I think some different, unrelated issues are getting conflated here.

\- Your feed is determined by edgeRank, just like your google results are
(let's say for the sake of simplicity) determined by pageRank

\- You can switch your feed to 'most recent' which ignores edgeRank, and
simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, like FB used to, like
tumblr does, twitter did (not sure about twitter right now), etc.

\- Yes, facebook defaults to the former setting, but that probably makes
sense, right?

\- That "reach 15% of fans" number, I believe, is a result of edgeRank
functioning correctly. Obviously even if everyone got reverse chronological
feeds, your update would STILL only be seen by a small percentage of users
because it would be pushed down by more recent posts, right? So whether the
user saw it would be based on whether you posted it right before the user
checks their feed, and would just incent everyone to spam facebook updates
like crazy,(which is how tumblr is right now) ... am I missing something here
about that stat?

\- Yeah, I guess maybe in both Google's and Facebook's case there are
conflicting goals but I am not sure it is a conflict of interest. It is their
business to make that newsfeeed (or Google's search results) as relevant as
possible so you use their service.

\- The dubious thing about Facebook's method is the promoted posts are not as
clearly delineated from the feed as Google's adword results are. That, in my
opinion, is the controversial thing here. Not making a clear distinction
between advertising content and "normal" content.

\- Ryan Holiday is a marketing genius whose primary tactic to to try to
generate controversy, so, I think this article should be evaluated within that
context.

~~~
Semaphor
> \- You can switch your feed to 'most recent' which ignores edgeRank, and
> simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, like FB used to, like
> tumblr does, twitter did (not sure about twitter right now), etc.

That's not true. I use most recent and while it's probably filtering less, it
still filters.

~~~
ryanmolden
It also resets itself to Top Stories say, every day or so. I would say I am
surprised that with all the engineering talent Facebook has they can't manage
to remember this one setting I have made about 20 times, but I am not that
naive.

~~~
Semaphor
Might be a bug on your end, I've been using recent stories for a very long
time now (always seeing the same stuff on top posts got annoying) and never
had to change it back to it.

------
porterhaney
It's interesting to me that Facebook is getting called out on this when
Twitter does the exact same thing. I know a few folks with +1M Twitter
followers that have stopped using the service because they were upset that
Twitter was not delivering their Tweets to every one of their followers.

~~~
garretruh
Source? I haven't heard anything about this.

------
RandallBrown
I remember when this first was news. I also remember that facebook made it
possible for a user to subscribe to ALL posts from a page that they "like."

A facebook like is not the same as a follower on twitter and I'm not sure why
people expect it to be.

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stcredzero
I think this is an important but sad milestone: The day when "saying no"
actually becomes a smokescreen for being broken on purpose. (Question: Has
Apple already passed it?)

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prostoalex
So if I have no friends who paid to promote their posts and no pages who
bought promoted ads for my demographic profile, my news feed will be blank,
the story implies.

~~~
adjwilli
The algorithm probably works by showing paid posts to the people most likely
to click on them, so people who don't click much don't get many promote posts
or the non-promoted ones.

------
bcoates
I thought this was going to be about the bug(?) where they spam you with
notifications from yourself, and how they don't fix it because it hurts MAU.

------
zipop
This is what happens when you build a business on top of free users then
attempt to make money later - not that there is anything wrong with that.

~~~
ElissaShevinsky
It's a good business model ;) The issues with it are exacerbated by the
promise they made to always be free (which makes it problematic to offer a
tier of paid services even if users would be interested.)

They're getting around this by offering paid services that are outside their
basic offering (services for business, messaging users outside your friend
group, etc.)

See their post about always being free:
<https://www.facebook.com/facebook/posts/10150420085741729>

------
ChrisCinelli
What is really broken with my feeds is that I click for more feed and it shows
me the same feed I read in the same identical order.

------
OGinparadise
_Facebook posts are seen by only a woeful fraction of a company’s total fans
or subscribers (often less than 15 percent). And conveniently, that percentage
is controlled by Facebook, while the site simultaneously offers an expensive
“service” that allows companies to pay to reach its own fans. This throttling
quickly became a source of millions of dollars of revenue for the social
network.

It’s about as plain and malignant a case of conflict of interest can get. One
that only Facebook would dare to try._

It's less malignant than Google, Google also claims that they are impartial.

Google updates the algorithm or adds another 5-6 ads a page, you lose traffic;
you have to advertise; they make money. They have a conflict of interests in
wanting to have sites advertise and judging by Google's earnings it's working,
_for them_

~~~
spinchange
There is a world of difference between Google changing their search algorithm
and Facebook holding friends & followers an entity has already reached,
connected with, and/or "acquired," hostage for money.

~~~
OGinparadise
_changing their search algorithm_

Changing it but what's the real reason of the algorithmic changes, not the
stated one? Google controls both search and advertising.

Facebook cannot afford to let every business spam every person that has a
"like," it would replace email spam in a short time. Of course Facebook would
go out of business soon

