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Comment by george3383 | Hacker News Reader

If it's bad for journalists and advertisers then it's good for users.

There's a meaningful difference between journalists and advertisers. I know it's fashionable to bash "the media" but I wouldn't want to live in a world without journalism. Advertising I could take or leave.

We’ve lived in a world without “journalism” for, I would guess, decades? The internet is slowly giving us the option of journalism back, but it’s going to take time to reanimate that corpse.

> There's a meaningful difference between journalists and advertisers.

In the dictionary, sure. In reality, for as long as advertisers are how journalists get paid, that difference is whittling towards nil.

That's pretty obviously not true. I didn't see advertisers covering the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Harvey Weinstein or tax reform, to pick just three things from the last year.

Um. Not really. The media covers that which gets clicks / eyeballs. That gets turned into revenue via advertisers.

When you gather news from enough sources you start to see patterns in what gets a lot of attention, and what doesn't.

Long to short, you're naive if you don't think there's a straight line been the mainstrean news media and advertisers.

Note: The mainstream news media should also not be confused with journalism. The reasons are obvious.

I am not saying "journalists only cover what advertisers will cover".

I am saying "journalist's standards are increasingly coming second to the generation of advertising revenue".

Once-reptutable media empires embed Outbrain widgets and generate fad-focused, celebrity-focused clickbait garbage because it makes them money. They are not doing this for Journalism's sake. They are doing it for revenue from advertisers. I understand that this is an ancient phenomenon (PG's "suits back in style" essay comes to mind), but I have observed the scale and shallowness of the phenomenon worsening as the coffers get lighter at the news orgs.

For that reason, I am arguing that the "meaningfulness" of the difference between advertisers and journalists appears to be waning.

It depends. Some people use Facebook "likes" as a crappy replacement for RSS, so it's probably not great for them.

I was one of those people.

It's... shocking, how much of that noise that you can get by without.

To be fair, I'm missing out on a ton of news with regards to the community and culture that I used Facebook to participate in - but my life is measurably better in every other metric for having left the platform. Getting BMX racing news second-hand is a small price to pay for having my mind back.

(Disclaimer: I spent 20+ hours per week on Facebook. It's mostly nice to have those 20+ hours back, and not having to be constantly bombarded by all the evil of this world is a huge plus, too.)

As someone who runs a business partly driven by people who use Facebook as a crappy replacement for RSS, I can confirm. Facebook made a change a while back where people who explicitly followed my page to keep up to date on local events and businesses suddenly were not seeing anything I posted. I had to start paying Facebook to keep them showing things to people, but even that is far slower than it had been. Out of about 2000 people following my page, I used to have around 1500 seeing my posts per week, now it's down to under 500.

My readers are pretty upset, complaining to me that I don't post enough anymore and they're missing events they wanted to know about, but I can't make Facebook show them what Facebook doesn't want to show them. I tell the people to go directly to my website, but for a lot of them Facebook is the only website that exists.

It's a small town without a newspaper or any other media outlets, so I'm still trying to figure out how to keep on going because I think it's a worthwhile service. Facebook doesn't make it easy anymore though.

This, essentially, is Facebook's business model.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing... I pay to get access to my audience. I wish I only paid to get access to a new expanded audience, but I understand the reality of business.

My main complaint is, people explicitly chose to follow my content and got used to seeing it... and now it's all gone. They still follow, but they don't see. Even if I pay, it's not guaranteed to hit the same audience I had before.

> My main complaint is, people explicitly chose to follow my content and got used to seeing it... and now it's all gone. They still follow, but they don't see.

They're the product, so it doesn't matter if they get what they want or not, so long as they come back.

> Even if I pay, it's not guaranteed to hit the same audience I had before.

If it was guaranteed, what incentive would you have to pay Facebook more?

>If it was guaranteed, what incentive would you have to pay Facebook more?

Well the way products usually work is the company says "pay me this amount and here is what you'll get". The way Facebook works is "Pay me... no, a bit more. Maybe a bit more. No, there's no guarantee of what you'll get in return. Don't like it? Pay a bit more then." The relationship between content creators and Facebook is a partnership. Facebook wouldn't be worth anything without users, and users would have a smaller audience without Facebook. The last thing you want is for that to tip too far in one direction.

Have you ever used Facebook ads? They're not exactly straightforward, and there's no "pay this amount to reach everyone who says they want to read your content". You can excuse their exploitative business model all you want, but it only works until there's a viable alternative.

> You can excuse their exploitative business model all you want, but it only works until there's a viable alternative.

I'm not excusing it, I just want to put it in stark relief because I dislike it.

I'm curious, what kind of ad rates are you seeing from Facebook to appeal to people locally in that small town? Do you consider it expensive? Does it seem artificially high (ie way out of line with what other local ad platforms might have been in the past such as a small town newspaper or radio station), or does Facebook seem to properly proportion the rates down based on the value of a small local economy etc etc?

I guess what I'm asking, is, does Facebook consider the value of you trying to reach those users, on a globally competitive basis (so you're competing with Nike for their attention), or is it cost effective on a more localized basis (you're competing with Sam's Plumbing on third street in the small town)? I haven't tried to reach users on Facebook in the style you're describing, so I'm not familiar with how costly it is comparatively.

Facebook gives you the option of how much to pay and says how many people you may reach with that money. I currently pay $1 per day, which lets me reach about 800 out of my 2000 followers every week. Each post ends up being seen by 50-100 people unless someone interacts with it (such as a like, share, etc), then it can get up around 200-500 depending on the interaction.

I have no idea what a newspaper would charge for similar exposure, but I can tell you that at $1 per day, I'm often paying more money than I'm making from my site.

For comparison, six months ago I was reaching nearly 100% of my followers each week and each post would easily be seen by 500 people no matter what. It's been an absolutely catastrophic drop-off.

>My main complaint is, people explicitly chose to follow my content and got used to seeing it... and now it's all gone.

That was exactly my point : Facebook's business model is to encourage businesses to accumulate followers and to then charge them for communicating with those followers.

SMS marketing is an option if your userbase isn't in to using the internet enough for email notifications to be an alternative to facebook updates.

I really do need to set up more mailing lists. I had it set up but I always got far greater reactions and click-through from Facebook so I haven't fully explored all my email options. Seems like it's time to jump back on that.

I understand that your audience is unlikely to setup an rss reader, but what about an old fashioned newsletter? Build a simple website (if you don't have one already) and let people subscribe to your events/announcements via email. Services like Mailchimp would come in handy to manage subscriptions, create newsletters and, of course, send them.

Also, explain the problem to your facebook users and encourage them to use the email subscription to not miss any future events.

Here's your experience summed up in comic form:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people

Seems to be a common thing.

Damn that's so true.

I can't be smug though. HN has become my replacement for RSS. Surely even Facebook is a better approximation.

It's only bad for media companies who use pretty awful tactics to get eyeballs.

The trick is really to stop worrying about clicks to your site and focus on good content that people will engage with (share, comment, like, whatever). If it's good content people respond well to it and will seek out your brand.

You see the same thing with the savvy companies on Instagram/Snapchat/etc

It's only bad if you're essentially a click-bait factory.

Facebook has a metric they use to determine if they're going to show people your post, and it has to do with the first few people who see it. If they see it and don't interact with it, it disappears and no one else will see it.

That really reinforces clickbait, but it also makes sure that you absolutely need those first few impressions to really count. Good content doesn't matter if the algorithm keeps it hidden.

That's... an incredible over-simplification of their algorithms. To the point of ridiculousness.

THIS ^ If you are good generating good quality content that engages in a meaningful way, then you have nothing to worry about.

These days I’m extremely skeptical of recently created accounts whose only comments are political and two of which bash journalists.

“Journalists” being those making their money by being shared on Facebook are the least journalistic.

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