Big publishers are fleeing from Facebook's Instant Articles
theverge.com
theverge.com
Instead they let themselves caught up in the 'fake news' fiasco (a factor absent from the article), re-prioritized personal posts, and deprecated their previous actually-kinda-nice attempts to give a proper home to professionally-written journalistic content, such that it's not jarringly intermingled with memes, baby photos, and humblebrags.
Part of their problem, perhaps, is the insistence on using the Facebook brand for their homegrown stuff, which is ironic considering they run parallel services under different names. No doubt a lot of it comes from having to harness the idle time of massive numbers of Facebook users sitting in their flagship website or app, but if they started a news portal with micropayments, cross-pollinated with their network of apps and backed with their identities, they would still do more volume within a month than any of their competitors managed to do so in years.
I can't imagine Facebook going up against those household names.
That's because there is no FB-level money to be made in "microtransactions in exchange for content", especially news content, and nobody cares for those firms, including Medium which has posted its second "We've failed to make any revenue, but pivoting to some vague BS" post by now.
They don't even need it to be a significant amount of their income. But they could show that some people are in fact willing to pay, which may be enough to entice big publishers to supply content to Facebook again, closing the loop on the original idea of "outsourcing [news] distribution".
But maybe, I say, it never took off for a reason? Some things are just not what people want.
(Though of course all the content providers crave them like crazy)
No one (practically speaking) accepts micropayments because there's no unified system with good UX, and no one can build a unified system with a good UX because no one is accepting micropayments. Facebook could change all that in the same way that MS can push a feature to Windows and instantly make a new market. Barrier to entry looks different when you're a de facto monopoly.
With so much "free stuff" on the internet, it's almost impossible to convince that your content is worth more than an infinite increase in value (1¢/free =infinite ). The "big guys" like the WSJ or IEEE can, simply by being close to canonical.
This was nice while it lasted, but it was facing a lot of flak for it. Several news outlets were talking about how facebook was censoring news and only allowing 'democrat/liberal' news and blocking news from more conservative news outlets (which tend to be terrible, but oh well)
So they had to shut it down, and set up algorithmic news aggregator, which lead to the fake news problem.
I don't think it is as simple as that. It is a fiasco at face value. Only if we think those smart people running Facebook and Google really thought Lizard People and Chemtrails believers have turned around the election and now they are on a noble mission to rescue us from such horrors, because you know, they are pure and noble, and not evil. At least that is how they framed it.
But I think it was a about something else. It was a signal to powerful advertisement buyers that traditional media (TV news channels, newspapers etc) have failed at manufacturing consent, and they shouldn't waste their money on them anymore. That market vacuum can now be filled Google and Facebook - "Don't let fake news ruin your next campaign. Come to us. We'll make sure only true news gets out".
Newspapers -> broadcast TV -> site based web -> network based web
I'd argue that network based web looks a lot more like the wild west days of hyper newspaper competition than broadcast TV. Fake news is essentially peer sourced yellow journalism. And I'm amazed publishers didn't see that coming -- there's historical precedent!
It's too early to know if this particular website will be successful but this is the idea of how to get curated quality content with self sustained micro transactions. This might be a better incentive than fake internet points.
This will resurface the sensationalist headline-grabbing click-optimized shenanigans of ViralNova and UpWorthy of the past, and you won't believe what happened next.
Only thing with any value to me is Twitter, and that's only reactively when i'm looking if there's an outage.
Twitter, on the other hand, is somewhat entertaining, given I have a decent amount of followers who may or may not be listening to my random rants. A minor ego boost, at best, but still probably a very large illusion on my part. It's fun to pretend though! ;)
Honestly, I have to say this place, HN, feels the closest to home. Or playing Rust, depending.
I have an account I opened a while ago and I just enter from time to time, or when someone asks to add me as a contact. Every single post is just mindless corporate self-help.
Content from friends and family is rare to nonexistent these days.
For finding clickbait, memes, etc., reddit is pretty much strictly superior to FB.
If I want to follow the news, my FB feed is one of the most biased sources on the internet.
In short, FB has almost no purpose for me anymore.
Why don0t they simply move away to some alternatives that's designed with the user first.
A couple years ago I made a concerted effort to make better use of Twitter. I aggressively added any account that seemed to be producing interesting and informative tweets, and then pruned the ones that turned out to be bad.
Today my #1 source of news is Twitter. My feed is full of reporters, producers, experts, and commentators who are providing up to date info and analysis--and other points of view. I log into FB far more rarely than I used to.
Hah, thanks to my cousin I get the conservative clickbait pages. It's just weird how people just share that sort of junk. I prefer sharing the Babylon 5 memes and jokes (that mostly no one gets) which I have to wonder if I'm confusing her and the rest of the family yet (No one remembers Zathras...).
This will auto-filter those who actually care and really are part of your circle from those who don't.
If everybody just schlep along then nothing will ever change and you will continue to go to Abilene.
Seriously if your social circle expands to more than 40 miles in every direction, Facebook is useful as hell. Even with the clickbait bullshit and invasive ads.
Of course I don't keep up on a daily basis, which is in line with the AFK way of interacting with people in my local circle. We catch up once in a while through interpersonal conversation intended for the other person.
Why would someone want a constant reminder of what happens in the daily life of every people they know in 40 miles radius is beyond comprehension to me. Do you even have anything to talk about when you actually see each other ? Do you even meet or talk to each other ?
Facebook seems to be only useful because it is a walled prison, where prisoners are forbidden from interacting with the outside, so prisoners find it useful that they can at least communicate with each other in filtered, censored and filled with advertisement way. To me the usefulness of facebook is that it keeps much of the eternal september crap contained inside itself, though it has a tendency to leak and spill in the rest of the web when the prisoners get the occasional interaction with the outside world and not understand that what is acceptable in a prison environment is not in the normal world.
If they don't contact you then they don't care enough and you're probably not losing anything of value.
I know quite a few teenagers; they say FB is for "old people" like me.
It's been true since the days of suck.com: if you don't pay for the product you are the product. I'm sick of being product.
But facebook has already been replaced by other websites for a variety of thing, the most known examples are those built around neighborhood community with extra privacy.
Repeated about ten times, I no longer have any clickbait, and only about 5% memes.
I built it in response to the same frustrations you describe. The only catch is that it's paid :-) I want to explore if a noise-free social network can be built, and the only way I think it's sustainable is with a small subscription fee.
Please check it out, if the idea interests you.
The feed normally reflect the way you use it. So if you click and like that "pure shit" then you will get more of it.
However if you share and like the few nuggets there are you will start getting more of that.
I mean you get a third party that want to be a MitM for all your exchange with friends and family while making the biggest profit possible out of investor story time.
Then you get the worst possible internet users massively flocking to the site through antipatterns and use of all tricks in the black book.
I wonder what else you were expecting. Situation was way better when blogs + rss were the craze and could be federated.
Whoops! Almost accidentally destroyed the business model of a free press! Good thing we encouraged all those bullshit clickbait meme Facebook pages to grow on our platform. They'll do the hard, non-profitable accountability journalism.
Well, Buzzfeed (which grew to its size mainly due to FB) for example doesn't just produce clickbait crxp, but also high quality journalism these days.
https://www.poynter.org/2016/how-buzzfeed-built-an-investiga...
Of course, that includes some irresponsible journalism too.
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/314042-buzzfeeds...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-tru...
In fact, Buzzfeed seems like one of the few news operations with a business plan: clickbait and "sponsored content" successfully subsidising actual news output. The problem comes either when a news story conflicts with an advertiser's promoted content, or when shareholders start insisting on better returns and look at the news operation as a liability.
But this is buzzfeed so I won't go there ever for any reason, and certainly not for the handful of stories that may interest me.
It's clear that actual users don't put enough into the FB ecosystem to make FB interesting for people each day, despite FB's best efforts. Content owners therefore have quite a bit of power. Because if FB suddenly stopped surfacing one or two great The Atlantic pieces per day, FB gets noticeably worse for me as a single user.
The old economics of journalism are: publications get 100% of ad revenue. The Google economics (2001 - 2012) are that publishers get ~65% of revenue and Google gets ~35%. That is self-evidently failing. [1] And Facebook built instant articles on those now-failing economics. The price system is working. Which is why IAs are getting less popular.
Maybe a decentralized web isn't such a bad thing.
[1] I'm self-interested: I cofounded a software company in this space, premised on empowering content producers.
Twitter is where I follow people and organizations for which I don't have a personal connection.
This separation works pretty well for me.
Maybe this didn't occur to you, but I also want to share photos and video. I mean, I can describe my daughter's piano recital, but they seem to enjoy seeing and hearing it as well.
> Direct interaction works way better that going through a middle man.
Who has time to lay all that copper and build their own telephone exchange? I'm happy to pay for middle men to help me out.
Images, gifs and short videos seems like a logical step forward for mass consumption. Can't really blame facebook for heading in that direction.
Yup, their first order of business is to optimize for the widest swath of users. That being said, as feeds become more customized, I'm sure you'll start seeing more rich articles if that's what you desire.
Twitter delivers desirable information because the user curates it strongly (it's normal to follow/unfollow users over time), but Facebook will likely replace that effort with algorithms.
You're pretty optimistic. I wish I could share the optimism. They've had over a decade to get there, and as far as I can tell, they're moving the opposite direction they'd need to do what you claim they will.
They're doing their best to become irrelevant and die. But their users keep clawing them back to life. Eventually either FB or the users will figure their shit out, and part ways.
How many in your circle have actually quit FB (including Messenger)?
The impression I'm forming is that these younger people see FB as something like my generation viewed the phone company.
I like your idea about the phone company.
https://backchannel.com/a-teenagers-view-on-social-media-1df...
http://mashable.com/2013/08/11/teens-facebook/
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/10/24/faceb...
The resulting feed has no post and displays "no more posts to show".
It is still possible to use messenger and to browse profiles. But this empty feed has been a massive time saver!