Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more level playing field, and the users will follow.
I'm far better for it.
0.5% is being generous, i had almost no interaction with people i cared about while i was on there and i'm glad i've switched to other platforms where they aren't as interested in feeding me their stuff and just letting people talk
Weird as it probably sounds, FB sucks for humans because its users are people not corporations.
That's not a problem.
Friends will share important stuff outside of Facebook because that's how friendship works.
And there are many other platforms where things can be shared too. People can post the same or similar things to multiple platforms quite easily these days.
There are relationship negatives to censored personal news. My wife was tangentially involved in a family feud where facebook randomly promoted or hid various attacks and defenses and apologies of the two major factions. Its just not a platform useful for social interaction anymore. The censorship of the family feud and the resulting weird interpersonal drama reminds me of some incidents in the meme-war on facebook leading up to the election of Trump which is interesting.
Superficially it sounds awful to have family drama increased by hiding half the posts, much like playing a board game where half the moves are deleted sounds terrible. However, for a short period of time, until the users are completely alienated, FB made money by increasing the depth and length of that family feud by increasing readership during the height of the feud. In the long run people won't use FB at all, of course.
It is annoying, but I'm not a power user. I only check it once every few days to keep up with the relatives, maybe post once a week or so. It's pretty low maintenance.
Now I see from my friends "I'm going out to devil's den in 20 minutes if anyone wants to join me - 23 hours ago"
yeah, thanks for that facebook. i really needed cat videos and political rants triaged ahead of that for a whoel day.
Hundreds of millions of people stare the news feed on weekly basis and interact with it. This creates a spectacular opportunity for employing machine learning to optimize things. Facebook has huge amount of data and it is easy to run various tests automatically to see what works in practice.
If this is the case, then it may be difficult for the others to compete. Facebook might be doing exactly what customers want - even if they don't know it themselves.
My thoughts were influenced by this article posted on HN some weeks ago: http://www.truthhawk.com/is-facebook-a-structural-threat-to-...
Facebook is doing what maximizes revenue, but there's no evidence that is the same thing that will encourage users to keep using it in the long term.
You can't beat Facebook by getting good content into some user-less alternative.
Users don't follow content. Content follows users.
"Follow the users" is a good way to decide where to do some content marketing next week, but it's incomplete if you're looking at how the overall information ecosystem evolves. You have to account for how new services attract users, in order to understand what established services are doing to try to keep users.
The threat of communist takeover permeated most of the 20th century as the ultimate threat for private enterprise, but the military-industrial-complex had a wonderful time.