Facebook's News Feed
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It shows Facebook has a long term focus which you would expect from a public company.
Advertising has been a huge business for the last 100 years (or more) and it is all going to move online.
The more people deploy adblockers, the more FB makes: (statistically) everyone on mobile access it (and other FB-owned brands) via the app, so they get the revenue of the money that would go to the open web.
The amount of people who have rooted Android devices are probably far lower than the likely-also-low number of people using in-browser ad blockers on Android. For iOS devices, the number of people with jailbroken devices I would guess to be lower in relative percentage than on Android. I don't know if even just in-browser adblocking is possible on iOS at all without jailbreaking.
Anyway, point is, while ad blocking might be relatively wide-spread on the desktop among all people (why else would media bother to spend valuable developer time implementing ad blocker blockers?), in-app ad blocking probably is much less common and that's what fb benefits from.
In general AdBlocking works very well on the open internet with the browser of your choice. However, they're basically non-functional for things happening in-app over HTTPS connections. So, with the majority of FB mobile traffic happening over the dedicated FB app - they are largely immune to blocking AND have a much better set of demographic targeting features.
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.
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.
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.
I realise that in an ideal world us humans wouldn't click a button and we'd get the prefect endorphin-releasing content 24/7 but at the moment we have to make a bit of a conscious effort and use the tools we are afforded to make the experience better.
If you enjoy Facebook and want to keep in contact with "aquaintances" just spend 20 mins unfollowing and you'll find Facebook is a much nicer place!
That for me works much better. Non the less does FB loose more and more appeal to me. Trivial BS being shoved down my throat is just not valuable to me.
It's nice because I don't have to embark on some great friend list culling as a major event, but I do get to trim the list with some frequency.
It's entirely possible to post racey photos for your close friends while still appearing like a golden child to your family FB friends.
Facebook has had these option forever and they are used.
What next, a Fox news expose on how snapchat can be used for sexting?
If it's tagged "baby" or "religion", for instance, I could have that filtered out. Would make it 1000x more enjoyable to use.
There's a couple of issues with it though, namely allowing an extension to view / modify your account as a security risk, and it breaks periodically as Facebook changes layout / css names
[0] https://blog.yalabot.com/facebooks-changing-the-newsfeed-alg...
Where I once got updates from interesting projects, I started getting Buzzfeed listicles, car ads and other garbage I didn't care about. I'm sure they made a ton of money, but it destroyed the product for me.
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.
What's different? Is Facebook now saying that it won't show the posts of publishers, even if people are liking/sharing/commenting?
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'.
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.
As in, many people in the West have been using social media for a long time and now don't care for it it as much, or are more particular in their use, while in the Philippines it's a relatively new phenomenon across age-groups?
That's assuming that social media use is newer in the Philippines, of course. I have no clue if that's actually the case.
I remember a time that everyone was on this whole 'chat thing' via IRC (some), ICQ, and whatnot. You chatted with strangers and friends alike; chat was the goal itself. In later years of high school this died down and we mostly used chat apps (in particular MSN Messenger) to actually get stuff done. Chat was just the tool.
Now at this same time, internet had just become a big thing in Albania, and I remember people from all ages doing what I'd been doing in my early teens: random chats with people from around the world, just for the sake of it. The only difference was that they did it in internet cafés while I always had a home computer. Conversations with a number of people from Eastern Europe give me the same impression: regardless of age, they went through a 'chat phase' significantly later than those in Holland.
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.
While many of us may be annoyed by this content, the vast majority of people are not and in fact seek it out.
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.
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.
Has Facebook (or media or academia) publicly asked users how they want posts to be prioritized? This data would inform investors, management and algorithms.
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.