Biggest drop in Facebook organic reach we have seen | Hacker News Reader

Biggest drop in Facebook organic reach we have seen

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231 pointsstdclass132 comments

As a former active user on Facebook, this sort of change may succeed in bringing people like me back to the site. The minimal effort required in hitting that "share" button means that every page that organically reached my friends would end up polluting my news feed as well with crap that I wasn't interested in and got in the way of what I had originally joined FB for. If my friends aren't seeing these posts, they won't be clicking "share" on them either.

I've had my account on Facebook since 2004 when it first became available at my university. Since the very beginning it's first usefulness was as a Rolodex, basically. I recently stopped using the site (without deactivating my account, because it still serves that digital Rolodex function) because >75% of the posts on my newsfeed were either "organic" ads or propaganda. Most of the offending posts were things that had been "shared" by my friends and not necessarily even posted by pages I had "liked" or "followed"

A principle I've been using recently to help me understand the world around me is that I am not special or unique, and when I do something, a lot of other people who are broadly similar to me are doing the same thing. So, I assume that there are others like me who have recently been deleting the FB app and avoiding the website, if not deleting their accounts entirely. Facebook is almost certainly aware of it, and while publishers are always going to see stuff like this as a money grab, it may be necessary for the health of the platform for FB to clamp down on publisher patterns that are driving users away.

Agreed here. I feel like I am constantly fighting to filter out all this "content" from external sites. I feel like I can't even see the stuff I joined FB for- to see pictures/updates to see what my friends are up to. Instagram is much better for this these days, the signal/noise ratio is getting so low on FB that I find myself going on just out of habit, not because of the information I get from there. It has shades of slashdot, which for awhile was just in my daily list of sites to visit because it always had been, eventually though it dropped off.

Note that you can eliminate a lot of this crap by changing your news feed from "top stories" to "most recent." This change will not persist, can not be changed on the app, and you will have to manually change this every time you log on- you can't even save the url as a bookmark. Still, its waaay closer to the FB I used to really like.

You can view "Most Recent" in the app, just have to grab it from your feeds tab.

Is this new-ish? I remember looking for this awhile back and not being able to find it.

Thank you though!

Unless they’ve recently changed how it works the URL does actually affect the Top Stories vs Most Recent.^1

I’ve had the same bookmark for a couple years now which always defaults to Most Recent.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

> my friends would end up polluting my news feed as well with crap that I wasn't interested in and got in the way of what I had originally joined FB for

A few weeks ago I went back on Facebook and took the time to try cleaning it up. I went through every shared article and clicked "hide post" and "hide all posts from site". Some bullshit shares still make it into my feed, but mostly it's pictures and actual updates from friends and family again.

This was after I got sick of the crap people were sharing and stopped using Facebook last year. Unfortunately it also meant I missed a few big family events that were announced on Facebook. My brother moved and didn't mention it when I called him because he had posted so much on Facebook that he figured I already knew.

>I went through every shared article and clicked "hide post" and "hide all posts from site".

I did try this at one point, but it ended up like whac-a-mole.

My wife is still really active on Facebook, so I still hear about important stuff that family and friends post through her. If she wasn't on there, I'd probably seek to make it so that I got some kind of daily summary of text posts and events from a specific, very small group of people.

Anecdata: I'm also an old user (joined around 2006). I deactivated my account because I also found the noise level to get too high.

Facebook still won, though, because I've switched to Instagram.

Ads are still in the feed, only smb's that don't pay ads won't

Exactly. Your friends will still see share just as many ads, except they'll be even more obnoxiously click-baity because the ads will be that much more desperate to make ROI.

Its funny that to advertisers this is like the start of nuclear war, but to me it might mean I actually start using facebook more. I hardly ever login any more, when I do I usually have 80+ notifications. I never bother looking at my facebook feed since its just a dumpsterfire of garbage I'm not interested in. Mostly I use Messenger to talk to 2 or 3 people who are on messenger.

Yeah, it's because advertisers are parasites; they exploit a medium, making it worse for consumers. Any trouble for them is a victory for us.

> So, I assume that there are others like me who have recently been deleting the FB app and avoiding the website, if not deleting their accounts entirely.

It is funny how programmers assume everyone thinks like them. I have not seen similar anti-FB stance from any other group, no matter the social status / education.

Except maybe older people, who never used any social network / messaging outside the cellular network. And even among them there are exceptions ...

Facebook pulling a bait and switch for newspapers that forces them to pay to reach an audience they used to reach for free (organic reach)? This has only happened repeatedly in the history of facebook.

Facebook is like a game where the difficulty rises after you've had a taste of success. And by difficulty I mean you have to pay to reach your previous levels of success.

Facebook did this for those first games (e.g. Farmville), then for pages (remember the idea of advertizing for likes to raise the visibility of your page in the news feed? https://www.matthewbarby.com/facebook-likes-dont-matter/), now for newspapers. All in the service of "keeping the news feed clean/relevant for users", but really it is just effective monetization of the attention of Facebook's users.

Never become dependent on Facebook's feebies in any way, because you will soon be paying for them. But I figure everyone already knew this strategy of Zuck's Facebook -- it is nothing new, it is "The Strategy" over there.

I don’t know - how many posts is an individual meant to consume in a day?

X friends + Y followed pages x Z average posts per day.

What’s the baseline X for an average user, 100? 300? What about Y pages liked / followed, another hundred?

Plus if like half the feed is “A friend liked this post: “ you have even more content to consume that you didn’t even sign up for directly.

yeah wow, it's almost like if FB let you store and categorize things in a chronologically ordered list, and filter posts based on customizable preferences, people might be able to manage their feed GASP...

themselves!

But then how would they know about all the highest-ranked paid/sponsored/promoted posts from Facebook's closest friends?

>> X friends + Y followed pages x Z average posts per day.

Not sure how it works for you, but facebook feed dropped in quality about 9mo ago for me -- Without any change from my side, I usually only see "Close Friends" posts plus significant posts (high likes, live events) from all friends. I also see lots of repeats of posts I already saw earlier in the day or previous days.

At first I thought, perhaps my friends have blocked me, but no -- I can see their posts if I search for them. Then I thought, perhaps you have to be mutual "Close" but even that was a no -- because I actually verified with others.

All I can guess is i'm on the wrong side of some A/B test where you see the same old stuff and keep coming back hoping to see more. Except in my case, i've just stopped using it...not enough to look at on the "infinite" scroll.

So for me it is more like X friends (* 0.05) + Y followed pages x Z average posts per day. I wish i could reset it somehow back to 2015 functionality.

I'm the same, I almost never see anything new in timeline except 2 or 3 people, some who I don't even care about.

I think I noticed the same change in my feed as well, but it's part of a lot of small changes over the past few years that have in general reduced the enjoyment I got from FB to the point where I deleted the apps from my phones and quit using it entirely. I've kept my account active because it's useful for getting in contact with people when I need to, but I never look at FB anymore without a very specific reason for doing so, and I leave as soon as I'm done.

>"Facebook is like a game where the difficulty rises after you've had a taste of success. And by difficulty I mean you have to pay to reach your previously levels of success"

Your analogy would sound better, and imo, reflect reality more if you swapped out 'game' for 'drug'.

That is to say, Facebook is like a drug (like heroin), the more you use it the more you have to pay to get the same level of high. Don't become dependent on the freebies because that's how the dealers get you hooked.

Except that doesn't work as an analogy because the end-users are not the ones paying.

They are paying with their data and attention to advertisements

Drugs are not always paid with money. Services like facebook neither.

But maybe drugs is a bit overkill.

Like sugar maybe ?

It does work as an analogy, because the difference between heroin, and a useful product is that heroin doesn't make your life better. Becoming addicted to heroin means that not using it makes your life worse then using it, even if the net value add is negative.

I often feel the same way about Facebook. I stay on because the cost of disconnecting is too high, not because its particular implementation of 'A social network' for what I pay for it (Time and ad spam) is a net gain.

Sure, but thats not the only reason why the analogy doesn't work. The heroin analogy is B2C. The Facebook discussion is B2B.

Utilising that reasoning the game analogy fails also

I wasn't alluding to cost as in money, though I do agree with others here that you're paying one way or another.

In relation to Facebook user I was alluding to addiction and the way you pay for that addiction.

Yes, but the discussion is about service providers using Facebook's platform, not Facebook's end users.

That's true but you are, hence so was I when replying to you.

I was not, actually. That's why I said it was a bad analogy.

Oh I must have been confused when you said "end-users". But either way I think my analogy stands.

It's standard go to strategy once you control the supply chain.

Maybe it should be called Walmart strategy because it was perfected by them. First they propose a deal. You get access to the massive Walmart supply channel for this good deal. Sales volumes and profits soar. Half year later Walmart buyers negotiate price little lower, then lower still. You must lower the quality of the brand little to make it. And it goes on and on. Finally it becomes almost impossible to separate from Walmart because finding another supply channel for the bulk you end up making is next to impossible. Walmart never stops squeezing once it has you.

For more info on this strategy, see this study of Walmart's squeeze of Vlasic (pickles).

https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know

How is this a Walmart problem though? This is a totally natural result of free-market competition. When two competing pizza restaurants can no longer squeeze a lower price by reducing quality or working staff harder, they move the production offshore to countries with lower costs (usually looks like slavery). If we want to stop this natural phenomenon we would need new trade agreements to provide a financial incentive to keep the production within USA. I'm not a fan of Walmart but this is not at all a fair criticism of their business practices.

Human society's categorization of Capitalism as "natural" is probably the reason most responsible for keeping us back from a better world. When you do that, greed is no longer considered a vice but a virtue.

Are you implying that communism is the way forward? I think a lot of murdered people would like to have a word with you, but that wasn't real communism right?

If not, please explain your "way forward" that solves the problems that capitalism doesn't while still retaining the same incentives that appeal to basic human psychology. I'm sincerely interested.

This is an unnecessary strawman. Additionally, any political/economic system is going to have its fair share of blood on its hands. Capitalism included.

I think the person you replied to was opting for evaluating these and other systems in a different light. Judging by your extreme overreaction, I think you missed this important point.

Edit to add: Also, as feedback, the degree of sincerity you claim to have of your interest is undermined by the rest of your response. It would not surprise me if no one took the risk to have a more productive conversation, so please do not take silence as validation.

Capitalism isn't a package deal. There's plenty you can do to rein it in, without awakening the spirit of Comrade Stalin.

It's a monopoly or concentration of power problem, not a problem with capitalism per se.

It's not a monopoly though, this is simply the inevitable conclusion to any price competition: suppliers will be pressed to cut costs in ways that lose American jobs. Having a minimum wage means other countries can undercut our labor and pass some of the savings on to the retailers, who then compete more efficiently vs those who do not put pressure on suppliers. There are many legitimate reasons to criticize Walmart, this one is not one of those.

It's not Walmart's problem, it's market failure and problem for others.

Natural result of free-market competition is sometimes market failure.

The natural result of free-market competition is the ultimately the sale of the market.

Usually piece by piece, as we are seeing here, and in congress.

> But I figure everyone knew this about 5 years ago if not earlier.

This is something that keep surprising me. This year we had stories after stories against facebook. But nothing unexpected. Only about things we said again and again would happen, for years. We wrote about it. We discussed about it with friends.

But apparently, being loud and clear about something very obvious is not enough. When things are too good to be true, people will want to keep believing it is. All you have to do to keep the frogs in is to raise the temperature slowly enough so that there is no outrage.

I hate that frog analogy. People always use it as shorthand for "small changes over time go unnoticed" but in the actual experiment, the frogs were basically lobotomized.

So how are we lobotomized? One sort of answer would be how people are convinced that their data is not important. They are convinced of this while Google and Facebook mine it to no end and the NSA stores pretty much everything you do in Utah. So maybe you don't think it's important, but Some very big players who have a lot more money and knowledge sure do.

> One sort of answer would be how people are convinced that their data is not important.

When I'm wandering through my yard watering plants, I like to imagine a world where our personal data, or more precisely access to it, is treated more like mineral rights today.

Companies would be required to pay a small micro-payment royalty anytime your data was used to make them money, and you would be able to transfer/split the rights just as you could mineral rights today. This micro-payment world would supplant the current "your data is the price of admission" world we live in.

We do not live in a "your data is the price of admission" world. We live in a "your data is extra gravy we monetize for free because in small quantities it is useless to you but in aggregate it has value so we will extract that value even if you've already paid for the product and legally own it"

With people, I'd say it works like this: you tolerate ever increasing temperature, because escaping it would require you to jump out of the pot and traverse the sea of flames surrounding it, to reach a safe spot. You look around, see the hellscape of roaring fire, and decide that maybe the pot is relatively better place for you.

It's the usual way incentives work. You may or may not have realized this will keep happening, but it doesn't matter either way. At every stage of the process you're presented with a choice - do business with Facebook, or not. And every time, the deal is beneficial to you short-term. In a competitive environment, you usually cannot afford not to take that deal.

At least with games like Farmville, they did it because there was a huge backlash from users who were sick and tired of their friends spamming them with game invites and cluttering up their news feeds with game updates.

Facebook did the right thing.

The best part about Twitter is the simple timeline. Twitter doesn’t care about what the account represents, so all accounts have the same priority.

Yes, Twitter has started to mess with its timeline, but that’s besides the point.

Facebook’s noise problem is one that they themselves created. Countless of times I found myself subscribed to some page only because I liked one of their posts. Which is bullshit, because in my vocabulary Follow != Like.

Then they tried fixing this by prioritizing posts based on a bullshit ranking system only they understand. That didn’t work either.

Oh well, maybe we’ll go back full circle after all.

Also, why is the second item in my newsfeed always a "Sponsored Link"

Because of ad money to pay for the service?

I'm not using facebook (not since they had this anti-adblock stuff), but if it is always the second item for everyone, it should be quite easy to hide with a small greasemonkey script (that you don't even have to code yourself, someone probably already did).

Here's a chrome extension that works for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsored-posts-bl...

A chrome extension that uploads all my FB data to its servers? Neat!

That extension contains no code for uploading to any server and has no host permissions in its manifest to do so, its a cosmetic filter.

If you're looking for a Facebook customization extension, check out http://www.fbpurity.com/

While I still vastly prefer Twitter over Facebook, I have to disagree with you; I think Twitter is beginning to go down the same road that Facebook did a few years ago.

Twitter (like Facebook) was set up with a core set of rules for the user to follow. You have 140 characters, your feed is a chronological list of the tweets of those you follow, likes are support for a tweet, but non-visible to your followers, while retweets are visible to your followers. There may be others, but to me these are the 'core' of the user experience.

At this point, Twitter has removed the functionality of almost all of these points. They're experimenting with longer tweets, the timeline is no longer chronological, and (in my opinion the worst change) they've changed the behavior of the like function. It no longer simply notifies the original user, but now has some random chance of also appearing in other timelines. They've muddled their basic system for reasons I can't quite understand. If anything, I'm choosing to like things less. In the past, I would've retweeted one tweet, but liked several similar posts to avoid oversaturation in my timeline. Now, I feel that I must use likes in the same way as retweets.

Twitter is all about pushing "top tweets" these days.

Another fun "like" side effect is when Facebook rebroadcasts likes. This can be kinda funny / morbid when someone who has passed away (but has not had their Facebook profile memorialized) "likes" some random brand...

The annoying thing here, as a Facebook user, is that if I've liked the "Cute Puppies" page it's because I want to see their cute puppies.

To then strip them entirely out of my Facebook feed unless they hand Facebook some cash feels like a step back in my usage of Facebook.

The annoying bit is that (with the current model), if my friend likes cute puppies, then I'm forever cursed with them too, at the expense of all the things I actually want to see.

That is absolutely annoying as well.

It's as if Facebook should show me the things I've asked it to, and show you the things you've asked it to, and not try and take mine away or give them to you.

Inferring that people that are “friends” may share the same interests doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me.

Fine inference, but the implementation degenerates to spam. My news feed has almost nothing other than things-others-liked now, mostly because Facebook seems to be trying to push video heavily into your feed because (I assume) it increases their engagement statistics drastically on the average

It is very unreasonable for users who hundreds of friends to expect interests to he similiar. This could be excused for a smaller site but facebook has detailed metrics on what I liked where I visited outside of facebook and what purchases I made.

Using that targeting is much more effective compared to friend's interest.

Doesn't it? I have plenty of fiends that don't have the same interests that I do. And if I think one of my friends would like something, can't I just share it with them?

I read it as you could go to a separate feed (Explore Feed) and see all of the pages you follow. As a user I may actually like this better.

That's what happens when we abandon protocols (RSS feeds) in favor of walled gardens.

RSS feed ads used to be quite a thing.

quite a thing that you have the ability to filter if you wanted to..

>That's what happens when we abandon protocols (RSS feeds)

Yes, in general terms, there's always an abstract discussion about RSS vs Facebook,Twitter,Google AMP, etc.

However, your particular comment is not relevant to this particular blog post. The RSS protocol is "free" but that doesn't matter if it does not address the targets that Facebook does.

(Besides that, the journalist writes for DennikN and they didn't "abandon" the RSS feed. It's at: https://dennikn.sk/rss-odber/)

We can't just reflexively reply with "RSS" every time the trigger word "Facebook" comes up. It needs to be relevant. RSS is not applicable to what the journalist is talking about. RSS is not relevant to the perspective of the publisher for metrics of "audience reach". RSS feed is a convenience tool for the reader and the blog post isn't about that perspective.

RSS feeds aren't social.

Social functionality might not be important to you, but it is very important to many, many people.

(Services that graft social functionality onto RSS feeds could satisfy the same need, but then we're not talking about RSS feeds anymore...)

Arguably, using social feed for ads isn't social either. It's advertisement.

So the argument still stands. RSS was a much better mechanism to distribute updates and could have been made "social" if companies like Twitter and Facebook weren't intent on dominating that space.

It is kind of understandable that RSS feeds would fade in prominence as content creators, even of more casual blogs, increasingly sought to monetize. RSS feeds tended to present successively posted content without the ads that site owners were keen to confront users with. A person subscribing to feeds would often never need to visit the actual site and see those ads, not would they get tagged by lucrative tracking cookies. Rather they could read everything "for free" through an RSS reader. Yes, you could introduce ads into the RSS feed, but when the RSS channel is increasingly seen as something for only a tiny niche of anoraks (especially since the demise of Google Reader), no surprise that it was no longer seen as worth the trouble.

Or you could simply take the route that most monetized sites with RSS did, and only include the first few paragraphs of your content in the feed.

Ars Technica still does this, and it strikes a good balance between letting the user see what content is available in the tool of their choice (and whether they'd be interested in reading more), and the site/publisher having control over how the complete articles are presented.

Of course, this requires the site to actually have more than a paragraph worth of actual content for any given article.

My RSS feeds quickly became noisy dumps of data

I think this is a great turning point for Facebook and might even bring Facebook back on the map SOCIAL media wise. Since almost all people I know barely use Facebook anymore for communication, because you just don’t see any posts by your friends no more.

Yet they over time created this crucial need of local/small business to have a Facebook page if they want to engage with potential customers and such, but now they change this “contract”.

The truly evil thing here is that page admins are prompted relentlessly by Facebook to purchase "likes", which Facebook makes more and more worthless.

Not to even mention how totally fucking useless Facebook ads are. You'll only be seeing fake likes and followers from developing countries that only serve to dilute your reach and make you pay even more. Facebook is not and never will be in a hurry to change how many fake accounts are doing this kind of "like farming".

Yep its all about memes and 'news' (fake news, dailymail stuff).

I found something interesting on my FB feed. I haven't liked any meme or news pages etc. So I'd get mostly what my friends liked from their liked pages.

Recently I liked an online newspaper. For the past 2 months 4 out of 7 posts are from this newspaper.

It feels like FB knows its a newspaper and its just serving me news, to get me more addicted to it...

Actually, they're just forcing businesses that have pages to pay for ads. Like if you have a well known page that has grown through shares and likes, you'll be needing to pay money to reach the people that have liked your page.

I don't have a problem with Facebook asking people to pay for the value provided, especially if it actually increases my utility of it as a user. (Which, admittedly, I'm not anymore - partially due to this problem.)

Actually, I've found the opposite. My feed is almost entirely social now, and it's very difficult to find news.

I use fbpurity, which removes all the cruft. So basically I only see friends. Not much is happening on fb, except by a hand full of people

> In main newsfeed are now just friend and sponsored posts.

Haven't seen many posts by my friends this year, only people commenting or liking stuff on various pages. Not sure if it is because my friends (including me) have stopped posting, or if it just drowns in everything else.

I've found this too, seems the whole platform is just becoming a cavalcade of adverts, click bait and reaction videos. I don't post updates anymore and I only really use FB to follow local events in town i'm interested in.

Can confirm. In my friends list only activity is tagging on memes and posting life events. All personal sharing has moved to Instagram and "stories" on Facebook/WhatsApp/Messenger.

I've only once seen someone use the stories feature of Messenger/facebook, and he is a Facebook employee. All my friends use snapchat to share our days.

This is wishful thinking, but maybe this move will push content creators back to providing RSS feeds so their audience can follow them without needing to use Facebook.

Makes me wonder if killing RSS was an FB condition.

More than wishful thinking, and no offence, but it's simply disconnected with reality.

RSS is not dead, it was never alive to begin with.

It's the other way round for me. I read feeds but no Facebook. Works fine. Which content producers are missing?

While this is a good move for Facebook's users, who will get a less cluttered feed, it's a disaster for publishers who use Facebook for content distribution. For example, over the past year my company has been supplying news to a network of two million MMA fans on Facebook. With this change it's very difficult to make enough revenue to continue: less reach = less clickthrough to our site = less revenue. The silver lining is that if publishers write off Facebook as a distribution method then perhaps they can work more on other distribution methods, generating some innovation.

Yes, dependency is bad, but you target platform where your customers are.

We operate small indoor playground for kids. Sure, I wanted to have website, but since almost all moms with small kids are on FB 24/7, Facebook Page was obvious choice. Yes, it makes us platform dependent, but I won't expect our target audience to play with RSS... Now this step bite us in the backside a bit. It really sucks to be in the bad part of A/B test :)

If you are a small business owner and want to do paid promotion.Please not spend on likes, and boosting posts also doesn't help much. Create ads with very specific targeting and take users to your landing page and try to catch them again with retargeting. This will help you reach better audience and let you calculate definitive ROIs.

Big difference between what the article says:

"The idea behind the Explore Feed is to help Facebook users discover more content across the social network, beyond posts from friends and Pages you already follow. Instead, this feed surfaces recommended content it thinks you might find interesting."

And what the author of the Medium post says: "All posts by pages are moved from News Feed to Explore Feed. In main News Feed are now just friend and sponsored posts."

If the first is true, then eh. Another useless tab I won't ever use. If the latter is true, then this is a gamechanger. Facebook has turned into the literal feed of news for many people for many years at this point.

If it's reduced back down into what it was in 2010, it's going to outrage a lot of older people who use it for more than a friend feed.

> If it's reduced back down into what it was in 2010, it's going to outrage a lot of older people who use it for more than a friend feed.

And some people (like me) would be really happy.

For me at least, the facebook feed at this point is just pure SPAM and garbage.

They could have let it to the users to decide if they want news or family posts. Then there is no conflict between them any more.

Likewise. But I know plenty of people who would be livid if suddenly they couldn't see the crap clickbait on their feed.

The "News Feed" => "Explore Feed" thing reminds me of this image, someone on Twitter created it when Twitter starting muddling around with their feed:

http://zdnet2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2017/03/31/05706b1f-125b-...

That image is by Jon Bois who went on to create 17776 https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football which is amazing.

Holy crap, I just spent I don't know how much time reading this and, you're right... that truly is amazing. Thank you!

Ha it's funny I couldn't remember the original author (I had to google something like "timeline product") only that he had a Hobbes avatar :-D

Frankly the only stuff that is not completely brain-melting on Facebook can be found in groups, which mostly doesn't do a lot of moving posts around based on what the system thinks you'll engage with. I only use Facebook to advertise to people, having long grown disgusted and bored by the main timeline as a user.

What are even facebook "pages you follow"? Is it anything that isn't a personal fb account in the friend list?

Do groups count in this category, or are groups a third category?

I don't think I follow any "pages" such as those created by companies or artists (apart from personal accounts).

If "pages" were basically fb's equivalent of corporate accounts, why would you want to follow them? Isn't that like signing up for commercials in your feed?

Exactly as you mentioned - Facebook Pages are for anything that is not a person, pretty much. We run FB Page as info page for kids playground, for example. If you are frequent visitor and you liked/followed our page, you'd get notification when playground is closed due to birthday party etc. Well, until now :).

To give you a counter example, I follow nothing except pages most of the time. My real account sticks around in case I want to contact friends, and because some people insist on communicating via FB messages. But all my browsers are logged into a second account, which has no friends,and follows a non-profit, a news site from my hometown, and a few think tanks. It only exists because one or two of those don't put out their feeds anywhere else.

I follow several pages because they are businesses or organizations that I am actually interested in hearing from.

Local businesses that make announcements that I'm interested in, Musicians who post updates on when they are going on tour/release new albums, the companies that I work for because I like to keep up on what we are announcing publicly.

There are plenty of reasons that I want some organizations to advertise to me.

any newspaper.

https://www.facebook.com/bloombergbusiness/

https://www.facebook.com/APNews/

https://www.facebook.com/RollingStone/

https://www.facebook.com/roadsandkingdoms/

https://www.facebook.com/IEEE.org/

the best is to make a list. i have 200 pages in a list, and use it as my facebook bookmark instead of my newsfeed.

Some of the pages I follow... not comprehensive at all.

Local stuff:

- WFAA-TV

- Texas Tribune

- Mayor Mike Rawlings

- Texas Humor

- Flashback: Dallas

- various pages for local restaurants and other businesses I enjoy

LGBT pages

- Lizzy the Lezzy

- Equality Texas

- I bet this turkey can get more fans than NOM (run by the guy who runs the Holy Bullies & Headless Monsters blog)

- The New Civil Rights Movement

- Gender Dysphoria Memes

- Trans Pride Initiative (doubles as local)

Pro-GMO, pro-vaccine pages:

- We Love GMOs and Vaccines

- Reasonable Dad

- Chow Babe

- SciBabe

- Kavin Senapathy

- Liberal without Woo

- ScienceKitten (which is turning into the next category...)

Pages that post random content that I like:

- Nerds with Vaginas

- So Bad So Good

- TV Tropes

- 90s Kids Only

Pages that post cute cat pictures:

- TONS of KITTY CATS

- Lovable Cats

- Cats in Snow

- Just Cat Things

Geek humor pages:

- Programming Jokes

- Only Linux User Can Understand It

Some pages for TV shows and games I like. Much of which I'm considering unfollowing because I'm really far behind on everything.

Tokusatsu fandom pages, including a bunch of Kamen Rider shitposting pages. Not going to enumerate them here because it's such a small niche (and I've unfollowed a couple of the shitposting pages for posting memes with slurs in them).

A number of anti-Trump and/or pro-Democrat pages. I've started unfollowing and/or unliking a lot of them though, for mental health reasons. Trump has me so upset that being constantly reminded of his actions is... not good for me, so I'm pulling back hard. The pages aren't as bad as the groups, though. The groups not only post the most upsetting content but also flooded my feed with fake news and are filled with Bill Palmer supporters who innundate you in personal attacks if you call out the fake news. Some of the ones I still follow:

- Media Matters for America

- The Recovering Conservative

- Republican Women for Progress

- Kamala Harris

Webcomics:

- Sarah's Scribbles

- C. Cassandra

- Trans Girl Next Door

I also follow my own employer and some former employers.

If I see how many companies don't create a homepage but rely on Facebook entirely. Or have a very stale homepage while they keep posting news on Facebook and Instagram. And I don't get it, if you use a free Wordpress setup with a few simple plug-ins you can already post all of your content immediately to all social media channels together with an update on your homepage.

IG engagement is so much higher for many categories, people just don't interact with websites like they do with social media

I see bars and restaurants always post stuff happy Friday pictures with food photos all of the time yet information about what beer or food they actually serve remains a mystery on their social media channels. If they didn't bother with a website I'm basically just guessing based on what they took pictures of.

In that case they're probably just looking to grow their following by having a high enough engagement to appear in the featured page of IG, and remind their existing followers that they exist. Here it's less about promoting the food and more about promoting the image of the food, so it gets shared more widely.

Very paradoxical as social media should give companies the opportunity to engage more directly with their customers. It's like meeting a very interesting Hacker News poster IRL and the only thing that person can talk about is some kind of sports team you don't give a shit about.

>free Wordpress setup with a few simple plug-ins

That is already beyond the tech skills of many folks. And since FB is already there, there isn't any urgency for them to waste time learning, or $$$ to pay someone.

To an outside observer (I do not have a FB account), this looks like a good plan from the FB side. Kind of like GMail inbox categories/tabs. All about reducing the signal (friends) to noise (something you may have liked 3 years ago) ratio. You will still see as many ads, but the content between those will be more relevant.

Too bad FB does not offer ad-free account as an option.

How is it more relevant to remove content that I've deliberately chosen to see from my feed?

That's exactly what annoys me about it.

I liked those pages, so I choose to see the content.

Their solution to put it into the "Explore"-Tab, mixed with content of Pages I didn't even like makes it worthless.

Is it removed or moved?

Social networks so far are between humans. Removal is bad, categorization to 2..3 subgroups may be good. I guess this is what they are testing.

I didn't like it when Gmail did it either, and removed tabs almost immediately.

Let me control what I see and how I see it. Provide me the tools to move things into other 'feeds' if I want to, but don't force me into using these tools. Otherwise, give me what I've asked for (posts, emails, etc) in the order I've received them.

And I loved it immediately when Gmail did it.

It is their platform, right? I’d assume they are within their rights to determine how Information flows within it. Obviously they’d want it to be in a way that positively impacts their bottom line. If the ability to reach people on their platform through pages is valuable, then i should not be surprised if they want those who use it to pay for it.

That's going to become increasingly the debate, as with Google.

You're starting to see more and more arguments in the media, in Washington DC, among anti-trust and anti-corporate power groups, that these platforms should be treated more like utilities. Given the culture at the moment, I'd expect those arguments to get a lot louder yet.

The platforms are responding predictably:

"Tech Pours Millions Into Lobbying While Pressure Mounts in Washington"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-20/tech-pour...

Is there a proposal of what "like a utility" would look like for social media platforms?

Looked at this "Explore feed" today. Only "viral videos", "funny animals" videos, listicles about casual topics. Recently I started to see the same content in Instagram Explore tab too. This is how their super-targeted AI trained on terabytes of behavioral data works? The same quality of targeting as on TV. Why they gather data on users at all?

"Captain, it looks like we have reached a MySpace singularity!"

Won't someone please think of those poor, helpless brands?

Rats in a cage.

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