Facebook Will Introduce Ads as Videos Start, a Move Long Resisted
wsj.com
wsj.com
I have never in 10 years clicked on a single ad and I've removed the apps so I don't get autoplaying videos so I'm not bothered by the future ads on there. Messenger is important to me and the Birthday list is too. Without those I wouldn't deCtivate since you need it as social proof for Tinder, but I'd never go back on.
Honestly, I was busy for just 3 days and didn't log on and the "addiction" completely vanished. We need to have a no shave novemebr for Facebook, maybe a no Facebook February and I guarantee millions would get off the addiction and vastly limit daily social media use.
I’m amazed at how easily people obey the challenge memes. I’m guessing a lot of them are instigated by Facebook to increase engagement.
Browsing the site always made me a bit angry (at the politics) and a bit sad (because someone else always seems to be on some impressive vacation). Then I'd close the browser be angry at myself for wasting time I could have invested in learning something or creating something.
My #1 fear was that I'd feel out of the loop, but I honestly don't. I've yet to have anyone mention something with a "didn't you see that on Facebook?" A friend of mine tried the same experiment and says he's also happier. If you catch yourself left with a bit of pensive sadness after using the site, try taking a hiatus and see how it feels.
Any chance this is because you don't know what you've missed, and hence you don't talk to people about them?
I do like and use events on Facebook, but I wish it was any other service at this point. It's all about the network effect though, it doesn't matter how many better options there are if no one has an account there.
And if it wasn't important enough to mention, why care about it?
1. Events. For discovering events, there really is no good substitute to seeing where other people are going. I often get good event suggestions from Facebook through distant friends who would never invite me in real life.
2. Groups. For discussing stuff related to hobbies, people often use Facebook groups. E.g. a painting class, where people post their work, and post things like "let's visit this gallery tomorrow morning" or "there's a masterclass this weekend, who joins?".
Snapchat is low-stakes and more playful for throw-away stuff in people's day-to-day life.
I don’t even have some fairly close friends on FB!
With Snapchat I don't see such trend. It has no website, only a confusing mobile app with horrid UX that most people can't figure out and is mostly used for adding pig noses and cat ears to pictures by teenagers.
The whole point of Facebook is to "record personal history".
The whole point of Snapchat is to maintain "privacy". It fills a void that Facebook was never meant to do nor intends.
Before someone says "you can still screenshot" on Snapchat. While that is true, the platform strongly discourages it and millions of users do not screenshot for every single photo. Whereas FB, is default "save"
The way a platform facilitates interaction is very important.
Sending pictures that disappear and are not recorded is a valid use case but it's a very narrow one in my opinion. It might be useful for dating or "flirting" conversations so maybe 10% of human interaction.
Therefor I think the way Snapchat works it will never become mainstream like Facebook did because it doesn't work well for normal interaction between friends & family which is 90% of most peoples' social interaction.
Snapchat is already mainstream, it has 178 million daily active users. Tons of celebrities use it too. It's not some unknown app. Facebook is still more popular by a large margin. However, that doesn't deny Snapchat being labeled "mainstream".
>I think people want to keep personal history in most cases. Like all normal conversations with friends or family, you would want to keep history of it so you can go look up things in the future.
Again, Facebook and Snapchat are two different apps. Snapchat was never meant to become a Facebook copy-cat. They both fulfill two different purposes.
Your comment is similar to watching a horror film and complaining that it wasn't a comedy film and explaining how horror films do poorly compared to comedies. They are not mutually exclusive.
- I didn't miss anything. Turns out there wasn't any real quality content on there anyway.
- My battery lasts 2x longer.
- I seem to be happier. No joke. With all the rage articles and click bait headlines gone, I am far more happier.
- I am way more informed now. I visit allsides.com and get the news there. I quickly get up to speed and find well written articles that inform me about what is really going on.
- I am more productive. Without all the garbage Facebook puts out, I have more time to get actual work done.
- I feel accomplished. I go home feeling more accomplished. I am happier, more productive, and more informed. It is a win-win-win all around.
Jokes aside, I did the same. Its a healthy move, I also forgot my FB password on my main computer and have not gone through the trouble of using chrome to look it up.
I am now using Messenger Lite, as I am in some personal friend groups (muted) that I sometimes catch up on, and I will say that it hardly uses any resources at all. Would highly recommend it for anyone who still wants Messenger but without the bloat and battery loss.
I think life is a bit better not having facebook -- considered everything is already alright.
I think, however, if someone is depressed, being on Facebook is a huge problem. Which is ironically what I resorted to when I was depressed. It was like living in hell.
It was costing me >0 resources (i.e. my time) and was having a net negative effect on me. I was just so irritated by the mind numbingly dumb things that I'd consume while browsing the news feed. Which unfortunately over time became close to 100% of the content on my feed.
The only reason I still have facebook is for group chat messenger during the day, and to keep track of underground parties. One of those chats is moving to discord, and other kind of moved to iMessage. Messenger now has intrusive ads on it as well, I would leave it if I could.
This might be just specific to very international people like me who travel and work in many different countries so our phone numbers change often and keeping track of that is almost impossible.
I guess this also varies tremendously by region. WhatsApp completely dominates non-work communication in Argentina; we don't use SMS, nor phone calls, and FB is pretty much is second place.
AFAIK, in the US people actually use SMS a lot, and I'm sure it's a bit different everywhere else.
More on topic though; you can use Messenger without an FB account and still find people by username.
It seems that you have phone number that is in some way associated with you.
I'd say www.residentadvisor.com does a better job!
Wow, I've been looking for something like this. Wish they did more than just the USA.
They're mostly either partisan drivel, or bland statements of fact that don't explain why this news is good/bad/important.
The ability to do the latter in a neutral manner is what's valuable – to me, at least, – and I don't see it here.
Why in the hell is this so hard?
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...
install it from the Github repo and you can use it load a custom host file (the playstore version doesn't allow this) it functions as a VPN. Free service that also lets you block trackers and individual app analytics
Every once in a while i like to see what events my friends have invited me to, so I log on to facebook on my browser, check my notifications, and leave. How do I prevent myself from getting sucked in by the news feed? I block it, with News Feed Eradicator, a Chrome extension. If someone posted a picture of you or tagged you in some way, you know, the things that in your news feed that are actually useful/concern you, you get a notification without any clutter to block it up.
It's lowered my stress level and I still get to stay in touch with the things I care about.
To come with another data-point, I have the app on my phone, but don't open it every week. I have turned off most notifications, so if I get a notification on the phone I know it is worth it to use 30 sec to check what it is. Instead I check FB a couple of times a day on a PC where I can set the feed to show most recent post first and in a minute or two go through the list of new post from peoples I keep in the feed. Some times it is something interesting there, some times not. For me it is strange how others manage to use hours at a time on FB (except messenger which I use to keep in touch with friends and family).
My point is that you cannot only blame FB for getting addicted, you is the only one that is responsible for how you spend your time. It is getting so "normal" to blame external forces for own behavior
You don't see all the stuff you don't want to see if you don't keep opening the app all the time. So back to it is how you use the application that is the problem, not the application.
That frees you up to use Facebook for its actual useful function: Handling events and possibly the most genuinely important updates from your friends, without the bloat.
The pared-down user experience in the mbasic version is the entire point. I already filter out everything I don't consider important, and using the mbasic version is another step in the direction of reducing distractions. It also doesn't do the weird re-arranging of discussions and broken infinite scroll that the app does.
It's simply a much easier and less annoying experience.
I have also stopped using the main FB website. I only use messenger.com to talk to my friends but no need to go to the main website anymore.
The only reason why I haven't deleted my FB account completely yet is because I got a lot of pictures on FB and haven't found a convenient way to export them yet. So I might keep my FB account just as free cloud storage for my pictures, that's all.
Click the triangle on the right in the menu bar, and go to Settings. Under "General - General Account Settings" there's a light-grey link that takes you to "Download a copy of your Facebook data". From there you can request an archive of your profile.
It doesn't include all the 'shadow profile' info they keep of you, but it gives you and easy way to download all of your photos at once, easy to import in your photo management app.
EDIT: I've just done a fresh export of my profile, and it seems that sadly the photos don't get exported at full resolution, so this might not be the best option if FB is your primary photo storage at the moment.
Now just to block HN most hours of the day...
Before I deleted the app on my phone recently, I scrolled through my feed for about 5-10 minutes with a simple test: if I encountered something that genuinely improved my life, I'd keep it installed. I didn't. I can (and do) get my news and politics elsewhere, the comic strips I follow I'll figure out another solution for, and if I want to see photos I can log in through the website whenever the urge hits me.
* Do not install it on my phone. My long, complex password isn't even stored there, so I couldn't log in if I wanted.
* Open https://mbasic.facebook.com/ in a private tab on my computer when I want to post something or check in, then close it when I'm done. This greatly reduces tracking surface (no JS), and provides just enough friction to eliminate compulsive checking or interaction.
It's like not buying a giant bag of potato chips every time you go to the store.
Since when did Facebook become a news outlet? Oh wait...
Thinking about it more, all media should be in the running, from HN to Netflix, because it's really about time spent.
Useful for emergencies to non-daily users like me.
I recommend deleting your account. Facebook wants people to think that everything happens on Facebook, but really almost nothing happens on Facebook. It's basically a useless recreational drug that is wasting the lives of many people (and severely damaging human civilization with its reality distortion -- time will tell us the full effects).
If a "friend" posts something political or something that annoys me, I just Unfollow them. That means I've unfollowed most of my friends, but I have no interest in partaking in the outrage.
Best decision I’ve made. Just make sure not to logout or Facebook will hammer your email to entice you back in.
I’d really recommend trying it if you have the same feeling of wasting time as the OP - it’s a bit less drastic than removing your account, but it does the job. I thought I might refollow certain people after a while but six months later I haven’t bothered and I now only check the site once a day for messages usually.
You can either do the process of unfollowing manually, or using JavaScript - there is a settings page where you can list all your contacts (by pressing load more a lot) then automate clicking “unfollow”. I can try to find the script I used if you are interested. Sounds like another option is to use a browser extension.
Another piece of advice that others have mentioned is to delete the app - if you want access messages, you can use mbasic.facebook.com. It really sucks that they removed messaging from the mobile site to push users to their sucky apps.
I’ve got respect for people just deleting their account but for me messenger still has enough social use that this is a perfect compromise for now!
I've been seeing the same thing, almost everything is links, clickbait or "tests" that everyone just re-shares. Very few people are posting any original content any more.
Currently I think Messenger is what's keeping people from abandoning Facebook.
That's interesting, because I've never been able to find a second time a video that popped up in my feed. For my experience, videos on Facebook might as well be ephemeral. forever vanishing the moment my feed refreshes itself automatically.
Years ago I had the app installed. The fact that they wanted not one, but two hugely bloated apps on my phone is the reason they haven't been on my phone in many years.
A year or two ago they made the change to disallow access to messages from m.facebook.com, so I started using mbasic.facebook.com for messages. Recently they blocked the mbasic.facebook.com entirely for iPhones. It's clear that there reason is to force mobile users to install messenger, because messages are still available on m.facebook.com and mbasic if you visit in a desktop browser.
I already have a FB app on my phone, Instagram, which is more useful for messaging in my circle and less annoying. I refuse to be forced to install their app, so the only response to this is to stop using messenger. Already my messages are going unchecked and will stay that way until I get to a desktop.
The vagaries of finding content you saw minutes before, and the almost entirely random way posts and everything is organized, is frustrating too.
I've found it nearly impossible to search for anything on Facebook that isn't a person, and even that is difficult.
Edit: does anyone know of somewhere I can be informed of changes about this by Facebook?
Searching for previous discussions about this on a Hacker News, I see other people say that the mbasic Does or doesn’t work for them at various times.
Their entire UX is based around the algorithmic feed, which obfuscates the true quantity of actual content on the user's timeline, thereby allowing a higher density of ads and other sponsored content without the user necessarily being able to tell or prove [1]. But the sliding window of the feed still moves forward in time, so content that you don't interact with enough to be recorded in the activity log just falls off, never to be seen again.
In 2014, Facebook Paper was an effort to reimagine how Facebook surfaces content [2][3], but despite rave reviews it fizzled and was killed in 2016. It was part of a wider effort to pivot into being a publisher of original content and not merely a social aggregator, and although Paper was discontinued prematurely, the effort faced several hindrances, including news publishers' pushback against Facebook's content framing [4] and Facebook's role in the dissemination of fictitious clickbait.
Facebook is so multifaceted that its current way of presenting content is woefully inadequate, and doesn't fit their ambitions.
[1] Reusing an old line: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich+true+quantity+of+actua... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/30/5360358/facebook-paper-ip... [3] https://www.wired.com/2014/02/inside-look-at-the-creation-of... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14126073
I follow CGPGrey who does 3~7 min videos, and the main use case is a user looking at it when it pops up, and let it fade into the void after that.
Do that for 3M people in roughly 24h, and it’s done. The rest of the life of the video will have minimal financial returns from that point, and the creator can focus on the next viral topic.
Though maybe it's just me but I don't go to Facebook looking for video content because I can't actively seek anything I'm interested in or find that cool video my friend told me about. If someone says they saw a cool video in Facebook I go look for it on YouTube first.
You can see all the videos you watched as a list in your activity log.
This link works after inserting your username:
https://www.facebook.com/username/allactivity?privacy_source...
It's not working for videos you did not watch long enough.
To expand on the siblings' example of Uber, the public seems to mostly think Uber=unethical & Lyft=ethical, but really, they engage in many of the same business practices. Uber has a worse reputation because of their sexual harassment scandals and outspoken douchebag former CEO. Lyft tries to brand themselves as the hippie-dippy summer-of-love sharing company, and has done pretty well at maintaining that image. I don't doubt that Lyft is a much better place to work (for employees, not drivers), and I just had to look up their CEO's name because he isn't the raging asshole that Kalanick seems to be and isn't in the news all the time... but that doesn't maybe Lyft the innocent darling many people think they are, especially when it's so easy to compare them favorably against Uber.
So it's easy to demonize Facebook for being "the most unethical", because they're often front-and-center not just in the news, but also in people's daily lives. But consider other companies, like Uber (and Lyft!), Palantir (fuels the surveillance state), Theranos (fraudulent claims about the efficacy of "new" medical lab test procedures), Hampton Creek (had its employees buy their product from stores to pump up sales numbers), and Zenefits (built software that allowed employees to dodge state licensing requirements).
As much as I love Silicon Valley and couldn't imagine working anywhere else, there's also a lot of corruption and unethical behavior here.
This makes me really sad that this is the goal of Facebook, who will then serve only the goal of capitalizing on the latest and greatest type of platform format (by acquisition or copying) for social media while systematically and methodically milking the patience of their users with ads.
Facebook as a company will probably be fine as it has its tentacles in all sorts of places now.
Yea, and spy you out completely in the process, then sell your data to the highest bidder. Can't decide if I'm more creeped out by FB or big G.
Certainly that must describe Facebook, and I would think Google as well?
They are not dying.
I don't know the data, but my assumption is that facebook's user count isn't really continuing to grow among young people in developed countries. Like it or not, this demographic is usually what defines what it means to be cool. Would people in Indonesia and India join Facebook if it were mostly old people and people from their own countries? I doubt it - they would know what young people in other countries truly prefer, plus they would likely be better served by a local alternative. Would old people join Facebook if their children and younger relatives used something else? I doubt that too.
Facebook wanted to grab Snap, and did grab Instagram, so that it could maintain its monopoly on the social media that "cool" people use. All we need is more companies like Snap not willing to be bought out for Facebook to see a big hit in this market segment. I think that's the long term threat to Facebook
Shockingly, people join networks that are used by people they know and their circle of friends is in their own country, for most part. If you think young Indian people are desperately trying to copy what's cool in America you'd have to explain why Whatsapp has been (and continues to be) the dominant network in India, despite being a minor player in America.
you have to pay for each sms in India so people preferred watsapp which was free for unlimited sms.
The interface is simple even my mom understands how to use watsapp without me explaining how to use it.
Facebook hasn't been "cool" in almost 10 years. Their IPO was in 2012, and like pretty much any other teenager would've at the time, I thought it was about to die off because our moms were starting to use it.
Every SV think piece I read has Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon as the unassailable leaders of the industry.
HN comments would have one believe that everybody hates Facebook when the reality is that most regular people find it very useful.
And on top of that, there is a certain amount of hypocrisy here. How many HN commenters who hate Facebook, still work for startups that have (and profit off of) a Facebook presence?
I'd bet most.
And in reality maybe Facebook is useful, it is still designed and built for one purpose (as every company in world), to maximize profit. And they are doing it by turning their users into dopamine addicts. So it does not matter if it has useful functions when it turns you into an addict.
Now I did unleash an enormous amount of smugness towards everyone about how good it was to not have a TV. Being snobbish about the choice I made with a side of judgement to other people not having the same preference.
I think a lot of people here do something similar as soon facebook is discussed. And I feel we are missing out on having a conversation about how something as transformative as a personalised mediafeed impacts society because signalling not being part of it gives more cred.
We all know that software companies in a very short time has amassed power never seen before. It doesn't matter if you don't take part because at the end of the day it will affect you anyway.
In the real world we traditionally rely on other factors to keep out identities separate. A dirty joke told to some friends doesn't get archived and indexed and re-shared with metadata back to your boss. It gets forgotten or attributed to "a guy I know." So it's relatively safe to give your real name in both contexts, and maintain the separation between studious-worker in one context and bawdy-clown in another.
But online, maintaining that "freedom to be a different kind of person" isn't reliably safe when both things come from the same user-ID.
IMHO online social networks have a 5-7 year half life, after that they stagnate and die because the company tries to chase ad dollars (the easiest dollars to get) and step by step degrades their usefulness.
For some reason we don't model business on natural systems (birth -> growth -> reproduction -> death). Seems to me that'd be a good idea if we want to be around in a million years.
The issue is the cost of the service. You have to pay for those servers somehow and for updating the site to the latest versions of iOS or Windows or whatever.
There have been MANY attempts at implementing a 'paid FB' or just a straight attempt to tackle FB outright (Ello comes to mind). None have thus far worked. Not saying you can't try, but talk to the other creators out there first to learn from their mistakes.
Again, the issue is that servers cost money and you have to find the funding somehow. Ads are good at that. Subscription services aren't thus far, but Patreon may be changing things.
Still, with NN out the window now, I'd chill and wait to see how the dust settles.
Seriously though, I know monetisation is tricky, but there must be a better alternative to ads. I'm thinking something which can perhaps enrich the quality of a user's experience for a fee, rather than earning via ads while annoying the user.
But I think you really need to re-think the core concept of a social platform. Can't find the comment on HN, but someone a few days ago mentioned: social platform vs. social technology. A social platform is likely to be closed; Facebook only wants you to communicate via Facebook, same with Twitter, G+, etc. If you decide to email your friends instead of using FB, they lose out. A social technology, however, doesn't care about other providers as much. Think about a telephone company. They obviously want you to use their service, but they don't care if you call someone who has a different carrier. Likewise, they won't listen in to the content of your calls to tailor their service to you, because them providing you phone data and the contents of your calls are completely orthogonal.
Try thinking along the lines of a social technology, rather than a social platform. E.g. my friends want to put together a movie/pizza night so they go to Facebook to create a poll to decide on a movie and pizza toppings. Why can't that be part of an SMS standard?
It seems to me like SMS has a lot of potential for future iterations. Right now you can send texts and images to one or more people. Why not bake in other features like polls, appointments, etc. It truly has frustrated me that my friends will use Facebook to organize something that could easily be done over SMS if it just had a few extra features.
I have some other ideas that I was going to formally write up and thinking of submitting it to Mozilla. Feel free to email me (email in my profile) to discuss more if interested.
Thst would be pointless as people do not pay to be on Facebook. And people aren't paid to be on Facebook. People are the product being sold.
Proof: this last move tries to improve the product (people's time) for its actual customers (advertisers).
Harvesting value from people's lives seems to be working really well for them at the moment.
Ads before videos just means I won't be watching videos on Facebook.
https://vimeo.com/forums/help/topic:291071
https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/1963535797258090/?hc_lo...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
PS: The daily quote feature can be toggled off.
And don't forget to use Messenger Lite.
Edit: Not just Facebook but social media as a whole.
I have since stopped watching FB videos.
Facebook in a nutshell
Why would anyone be okay with watching a 3 minute video with an ad at the start and in the middle?
I get it that some people don't want to use Facebook, but you really can't understand why other people make a different decision?
I don't hate Facebook. I just don't have any reason to use it.
I do hate ads though and i will keep trying to stop them.
Deleting the Facebook app has been liberating. I spend more time learning new stuff, consuming entertainment I actually enjoy, and building stuff than I did before. Facebook was really unhealthy for me, and it could be that I'm approaching my 30s but it just gives me no lasting enjoyment anymore.
I also use it very successfully to sell things through free market groups when things like craigslist got me close to new results besides a few scammers.
And messenger I use for normal staying-in-contact.
I don't see the need to delete my account, or to do a 'facebook cleanse month'. It's a useful tool and I see it as that
Does company need to generate more revenue?
Company will give in to X.
Surprisingly, it also seems to be good for finding local events if you're looking for something to do.
http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-test-pre-roll-vide...
I think that's a nice middle ground to be on. I can still participate in groups that I'm a member of, can still chat with friends, while not have the awfulness that is the newsfeed shoved down my mind.
I remember when ublock stopped preventing spotify ads. It was when I stopped using the service for about 2 weeks, until the blocking functionality was reinstated.
It would be much appreciated!
I deleted it months ago and my life is better for it.
I was bothered by my mental illness this year and I live streamed my suicide attempt twice and it was not pretty to watch. Friends all freaked out and tried to get someone to help me. I guess I did that because “that’s where people get to see me”.
A few months ago I deactivated my facebook for about a month and I maintained my relationship strictly over WhatsApp. It worked great. There was no pressure. I eventually reactivated it so I can spend some more time with a really good friend.
Now, like my Instagram, most of the pages I follow now are about cats, some cultural stuff, and a number of youtubers.
I still get to see what my friends are doing and that’s great. I still share pictures and updates with my friends. But I am not so attached to it anymore (and the stupid iOS app has been crashing every 30 seconds for no freakin’ reason) - Facebook team please fix it.
You don’t have to deactivate the account, but please clean up your newsfeed first. Unfollow pages you don’t want and clean up friend list.
Use the good part of Facebook and you will be fine.