
Facebook's News Feed - jeo1234
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/facebooks-news-feed-often-changed-never-great
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ryanmarsh
Before I deleted my Facebook account the first time I had ~> 2,000 friends.
These were all people who knew me or of me, mainly from my community. My wife
has topped out well above that. She still uses it.

You might think going from 2000 friends to zero Facebook would be a big social
change. It wasn't really. Beyond about 10 friends (well below whatshisnames
number) Facebook didn't increase its social value to me. At 2,000 it was just
a time waste.

I don't really need to know what is happening in the lives of so many people.
My real tribe isn't that big. Facebook didn't deepen my relationships either.
It didn't enrich my life.

I got back on about two years ago and added plenty of people. By then Facebook
had become this kind of Twitter for idiots/drudge report/unmoderated
Reddit/MySpace so I deleted it.

I recently created an account (my third) and I think I have about 5 friends on
there. I added them mainly because a real friend died. It's not a great
experience. My feed is full of stuff friends liked and stuff I don't
understand why Facebook thinks is relevant to me.

Facebook's land grab worked. They're huge but their product makes me feel like
I walked into a dirty gas station bathroom.

Maybe I'm naive but couldn't a product that deepens relationships (quality not
quantity) be a more stable long term business?

~~~
bryanlarsen
IMO the best way to deal with Facebook is to have lots of friends, mark them
all as casual friends and check infrequently. That way you mostly get just
important stuff like birth announcements.

By marking friends as casual you tell Facebook that you only care about
important stuff. Having lots of friends and checking infrequently ensures that
the algorithm always has important stuff to show you.

~~~
ryanmarsh
And that's where they lose me. It's my job to curate this thing? Meh.

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compactmani
I see the optimization problem they face. Promote non-personal content to
generate short term revenue versus promote personal content to minimize long-
term churn. It looks like their data scientists and business analysts have
identified significant risk to pursuing the former and advocate the latter,
for now.

In other words this has nothing to do with a return to claimed core values,
but a shift in strategy to remain afloat for as long as possible.

~~~
aleem
The real problem is a post IPO Facebook and its obligation to make money.
Intimacy isn't profitable and there is no money in sharing personal photos.
Publisher content has money but FB risks becoming a feed of useless updates
and viral fluff. Within this space, text is a poor revenue generator but video
has the highest CPM so we are seeing a major shift to video. FB's $50mn
payouts to BuzzFeed and the like shows their commitment to viral junk. The
watermelon live video gimmick isn't long term sustainable. FB is losing the
plot it seems. There was a time when people used to post pics of things they
ate and do FB checkins everywhere they went. It got people on board but other
than on-boarding it proved to be just a fad.

I imagine the long term strategy will be to selectively optimize feeds based
on user prefs. Not everyone values intimacy and some people prefer BuzzFeed
cruft on a daily basis.

Unfortunately intimacy is hard to measure while sharing and content generation
makes for easy KPIs for exec to focus on. Focusing on these will treat the
symptoms but not the cause. In fact if sharing and recirculation is a KPI then
FB will increasingly gravitate toward Twitter.

However this is all backwards. Monetizing the users is a piss poor business
model. It fucks up the UX and alienates the users. FB should move to other
avenues. Personalized search or ecommerce or premium SMB accounts should be
the bigger focus.

Aside, their move into messaging reminds me of Microsoft's play when they
leveraged Hotmail users into MSN and virtually overnight, uprooted ICQ/AOL.

~~~
onewaystreet
> Intimacy isn't profitable and there is no money in sharing personal photos.

Facebook makes money as long as users continue using its services. It doesn't
matter much what they are doing as long as they keep coming back.

~~~
dmix
Exactly, sharing personal photos is insanely profitable if it keeps people on
your website. You need to have a core value prop and just like TV it needs to
be the primary user experience. Facebook is just readjusting for that after
initially ramping up the money firehose.

It shows Facebook has a long term focus which you would expect from a public
company.

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eknkc
This might be just me but,

On facebook 'friend' mostly means someone you met once, your colleagues or
those people you went to high school with and lost connection etc. Also, even
at the age of 35, I feel I have some "uncool" family connections there. I
can't image what it's like for teenagers. Facebook friendships don't mean
anything for most of the people.

Therefore, I don't want to see their babies taking their first steps. I just
don't care. Those who I care, I follow on other platforms actually.

Not sure how this will play out.

~~~
yeukhon
I hate to say, so why don't you remove them from your friend list if you don't
care? Why have a stranger on your list? The "met once and I add you to FB" is
kind of weird.

I keep my FB to people I have good relationship now and in the past but may be
not actively talking to each other. That's okay, because occasionally we would
comment on each other's latest update. Have a positive attitude toward using
FB.

~~~
eknkc
Because mostly, I don't care that much at this point. Facebook is "that thing"
now.

I'm not sure but I guess this was what they encouraged? I remember going to
places and meeting people, they'd pull up their phone and add you as facebook
friends. And you'd accept. Not anymore though.

Also, on the UX front; "unfriend" is a pretty strong word. Just leaves a bad
taste when you want to click on it :). And unfollow stuff came out so late
that the train had already passed.

~~~
agumonkey
This era of massive commoditization of everything is detrimental. Nature put
pressure on things, expressing value you cared about. I can't say Fb is
useless, some people were able to reconnect, maintain long distance relations
..

~~~
grayclhn
Let's not glorify "nature's pressure." I kind of prefer having 3 kids that I
expect to live to adulthood instead of having 8 as nature intended and playing
the odds.

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hackathonguy
The way I see it, Facebook's newsfeed has already penalized organic reach so
severely it doesn't really doesn't provide a strong growth channel for small
businesses any more. Nowadays, Pages are better used to communicate with
existing customers by distributing content to a highly engaged, much smaller
audience (which would still see your posts in their newsfeed).

[0] [https://blog.yalabot.com/facebooks-changing-the-newsfeed-
alg...](https://blog.yalabot.com/facebooks-changing-the-newsfeed-algorithm-
and-it-really-doesn-t-matter-2c2461df8a30#.7ybp6dgnq)

~~~
type0
> Pages are better used to communicate with existing customers by distributing
> content ...

I don't like this trend, more and more service oriented companies moving their
support to facebook platform. As a customer who is not on facebok I get less
attention from their support staff, this makes me reevaluate such companies
and for the most part abandon their services. I'm talking about smaller telcos
and such, but I'm noticing that even bigger companies starting to do this
thing: "contact us on facebook to get help". Don't they realize that they
alienate a proportion of their customers? It seems that they don't care and
that's really is the issue here.

~~~
rdiddly
"If your company's web presence is MySpace, your company doesn't have a web
presence," said someone smart 10 years ago.

------
avree
One thing I've noticed (and I don't have any hard data for this, just
anecdotal evidence) is that the rate of my friends sharing memories on
Facebook has dropped a lot. It seems like more and more people are going to
other networks/sites to share, and Facebook not so much. Messaging and
communication is still going strong, but posting photos and stuff not so much.

These changes, plus the features I've noticed lately that push up "your past
memories" or "friendship anniversaries" certainly seem to be an attempt to get
people posting more again, and remind them that what Facebook wants them to do
is make this their 'social database'.

~~~
5555624
Maybe it's a cultural thing. While I don't have a Facebook account, but a
close friend has an account where a bunch of her friends are from the
Philippines. Her friends in the U.S. don't seem to share much, other than an
occasional funny picture; while those from the Philippines share what they are
doing all the time. (She's from the U.S. and has never been to the
Philippines.)

~~~
hurricaneSlider
Maybe it is because of workplace and hiring culture. Perhaps the states
weights social media higher in their hiring decisions and hence people are
more reluctant to express themselves in fear that this might cost them a
future job

~~~
drusepth
I've always held the mindset, "If a company doesn't want to hire me for me
being me, I don't want to work at that company," which obviously only works
well when you have ample opportunities to select from during job searches.

If there is a correlation between people posting less and fear of being
rejected from future jobs, I wonder if Facebook will see more posting as the
job market continues to improve (and vice versa). Would be interesting to plot
out.

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CoolGuySteve
I'm always annoyed at Facebook's definition of "news" being about babies,
marriages, etc. Just like listening to someone talk about their kids in real
life, I just don't really care.

On the other hand, I do like the articles and commentary people post for the
most part. It's more interesting to know my friends opinions than some Reddit
stranger's. Those article discussions are more like what I talk about when I'm
out with friends than the babies and vacations the Facebook news feed wants to
focus on.

In psychology, memory is divided into autobiographical and semantic. I think
Facebook "news" needs to be split into the same categories as well.

As in having a 'news feed' that updates you on everyone's life, and an 'issues
feed' where you can talk with your friends about what's going on in the world.

~~~
APock
Facebook really wants to display that kind of content because it triggers
positivity on most people,getting you to comment and like said post,thus
making your comment get likes and so on.. feeding you positive engagement in
the process, so you don't stop using Facebook.

~~~
tdkl
Funny, because I saw the exact opposite happening when the majority of people
came to FB in my country around 2009. It's like almost like YouTube and those
people don't even mind they're writing those rants under their name.

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danso
I wonder if the author (Om Malik) has revised his thinking on a related
matter:

[http://om.co/2016/04/25/should-you-publish-on-facebook-
first...](http://om.co/2016/04/25/should-you-publish-on-facebook-first/)

> _My parting comment (which he included in the final piece) was that if I
> were to start a publication, it would be on Facebook (perhaps as a Facebook
> page). Today I learned that Vox Media is going to launch Circuit Breaker, a
> gadget blog, as a Facebook-only publication. (It will also have it as a
> section of The Verge on the web. I call this a web-based backup /archive.)_

> _Despite hand-wringing by traditonalists, I believe Vox’s decision is bold
> and the right one: In the post-browser-only world, it makes perfect sense to
> go where the audience lives. I am not clear how well it will monetize this
> effort. After all, Facebook is a selfish partner when it comes to
> monetization._

At least The Verge/Vox is savvy enough to manage a workflow that pushes to
both Facebook and the Web...but I imagine prioritizing FB means doing much
less A/B testing and other optimizations that are needed to create a refined
Web product.

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msoad
A lot of us are thinking Facebook made this decision without any research and
AB testing. I belive a change this big had to prove it's usefulness I pilot
runs before going public. Maybe we will share more I'm Facebook after this
change is in effect. By we I mean Facebook uses. Hacker news crowd of course
is a very small and unusual niche of Facebook users.

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socialleaf
Facebook weighs'share' more than anything else which I don't think is cool. I
personally might not want to share a post or anything but it shouldn't mean I
don't like it. Yes, interaction is crucial but narrowing it down to just
sharing isn't a good measure. The official explanation by facebook seems to
hint at providing monetary benefit to the company by playing on business'
money. It seems facebook is running out of funds and is coining out ways to
weed out more money from businesses. Thoughts?

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paulpauper
I imagine the best solution is to stop using the Facebook news feed. There are
better way to get information . I had no idea people still regularly check
their Facebook

~~~
bogomipz
I keep hearing this sentiment and it reminds me of the Yogi Bera quote "Nobody
goes there any more. It's too crowded."

People keep talking about how "over" FB is yet every time I'm in line
somewhere and I glance at people's phones in front of me I see they are
scrolling through FB.

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harel
I started seeing an unreasonable amount of friend's page likes as little page
ads. A lot of those, in close succession. Not sure that is what they had in
mind.

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walterbell
_> ... in deciding to prioritize one kind of post over another for reasons
that seem to have little to do with what individuals are asking for, Facebook
is once again confusing its users._

Has Facebook (or media or academia) publicly asked users how they want posts
to be prioritized? This data would inform investors, management and
algorithms.

~~~
gkoberger
Do you remember the backlash when they added the newsfeed in the first place?
The public has a very bad track record when it comes to knowing what they want
from Facebook.

~~~
walterbell
_> ... the public has a bad track record of knowing what they want .._

For products that don't yet exist, this is often true.

For products that are used daily, this is less clear.

Facebook is now backtracking because user behavior has changed, possibly
because user needs/wants have changed.

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hliyan
There's only so much you can innovate with a reverse chronological list of
content. After a while one starts revisiting old territory. Perhaps Facebook
needs to start thinking about alternative presentation formats?

~~~
sparkzilla
There are ways to do it, but I can't say more...

~~~
welanes
C'mon, tell us the secret. We won't tell anybody.

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quadrangle
I go on Facebook for the sole purpose of posting anti-Facebook news articles
and related items. I do sometimes engage with other crap when I'm there, but
the majority of the occasions it's a waste of time.

