Facebook's Adam Mosseri on Why You'll See Less Video, More from Friends
wired.com
wired.com
Like we could choose chronological, controversial, event based, whatever, I'm sure they could be creative, some could be algorithms. They could keep the default they have now which most people wouldn't change. Then they could inject ads by whatever means they want and we could check them out or click on them or ignore them as we see fit and they could make a little money.
This isn't one of those "Why don't they just..." type posts where it's obvious why not. It's a serious question, like why can't they do this? I mean presumably there's some answer where they say that they have tested it and the current scheme increases engagement, or something like that.
That seems unconvincing though, clearly there's a problem here they are trying to address. It's a piece of software, can't they add some controls to how people use it?
My news feed got a lot better after tweaking that, but they soon did away with it.
I imagine the majority of people spend much more time when these algorithms are working, even if they're just idling scrolling. What they're trying to address is flukes in that algo -- they want to keep their pie and eat it too. They want the high engagement numbers and are trying to combat the negatives that are making headlines.
I'd definitely like to see a social media site that's more about intentional interactions versus a raw numbers game of trying to keep me on.
It has to be the same for everybody; they have to maintain a consistent UX because it's harder to sell random reach to advertisers. Remember that you're not Facebook's customer, so this is a move to keep eyeballs from leaving.
Take away the tools that can be used for political manipulation and Facebook starts looking a lot more like Snap/IG/TWTR/some new thing.
Exactly.
The UX is the same, just the content is different (just as it is today, I don't get the same feed as you).
Everybody uses FB differently. Some people use it to share and read news. Others as an "aggregator" for different services (Insta, Twitter...). Others for groups. Or chats. Or to connect with businesses. I use it exclusively to share posts and pics with friends.
However, after years and years of using the "hide all content from (domain)" feature, the algorithm hasn't yet learned that I want to read zero news in Facebook. If I could block domains inside FB I'll be the happiest -- actually, let me whitelist a few pic sharing sites and block the rest of the web. For me, FB is not RSS. But, for some people, it is.
I love Facebook. I will not "quit". People who do that, I understand. But it lets me connect with people that I have no other way of communicating with.
Wrapping up, I'm sure that Facebook has identified 5-6 clear use cases of its platform. Why isn't the news feed tailored for them? I simply do not understand it. Give more of what I want, or my engagement will drop. Give me my friends posts, and a few ads in between, and I'll be a happy Facebook user, surely it can't be that hard?
This is such an unfortunate and all-too-common mindset in our world. Of course there are other ways to connect with people. They may not be as simple to use. It blows my mind how much people talk about how tech can do amazing, world-changing things while simultaneously telling themselves that alternative methods of online communication simply aren't possible.
> Give more of what I want, or my engagement will drop.
Think about what you're asking from Facebook's perspective. You're threatening to reduce engagement if you don't receive a feature that almost guarantees a reduction in engagement across the entire platform because everyone will have more control to filter what they see. How does that make business sense to them?
Call that lazy, or whatever, but I think it's an extremely reasonable admission. Not everyone has the inclination to pour tons and tons of effort into maintaining a large social network purely through offline means.
That being said it takes a lot more effort. Chances are it'll limit the number of people we keep in touch with. But that's probably not so bad, as it'll force us to focus on the people we care about most.
> Wrapping up, I'm sure that Facebook has identified 5-6 clear use cases of its platform. Why isn't the news feed tailored for them? I simply do not understand it. Give more of what I want, or my engagement will drop. Give me my friends posts, and a few ads in between, and I'll be a happy Facebook user, surely it can't be that hard?
You're approaching this wrong. You're not Facebook's customer, you're it's product. They don't care how you want to use it, they only care about what will keep you on it and seeing what they want you to see. They're not going to optimize their website to fit your preferences. They want to maximize their value metrics, not yours.
- The majority of people will never seek out settings like this, so the engineering effort you spend on these sorts of classifiers is only going to benefit a minority. Facebook has a lot of engineers to throw at these problems, so that's not the end of the world, but all else equal they'll prefer improvements that have a better chance of helping the whole userbase.
- Trying to coax people to look at settings is tricky. Users have very limited patience for interruptions, and a lot of it is already taken up with important flows like "hey did you know your password is terrible?"
- Exposing settings like this kind of ties down some of the details of your system. Say you start with 6 different categories, and I choose 3 of them. Fast forward a couple of years, and now there are 30 categories. If I haven't changed anything, do I still have only 3, or do I now have 15? That's gonna depend on the details, of course, but one problem is that not everyone will interpret the old-categories-new-categories relationship in the same way, and some users are going to end up confused or disappointed.
- Users don't necessarily know what they want, especially looking farther into the future. Maybe it's an election year, and I get tired of politics, and I say "no political news for me please." A year later, maybe I'd be interested in some of the political news that's happening, but there's nothing prompting me to go back and change that setting. Trying to put a time-limit on these filters, or prompting users to change them, adds more and more to the clutter.
I think Facebook is a company that is based on insidious manipulations and deceptions.* It's about making the users think that they are freeing themselves and becoming more connected, when the company is actually restricting them and locking them in. It seems unlikely that they would give users control in a way that might make the site less sticky.
* I could provide specific examples, but it would be a long comment. I took screenshots of examples before I quit.
My answer is: The same reason Chrome took away the ability to stop video autoplay. The same reason the Roku apps are crippled so, for example you can't filter search results in the YouTube app or skip Reuters ads in its app or stop Netflix from showing trailers simply by scrolling.
Because the world of media has transitioned from a come-and-find me to one of I'm-coming-at-your-attention. Kind of like TV used to be. Except now we have personalized coming-at-you.
That's why Facebook can't give you settings to fine tune your feed. It would ruin the coming-at-you.
And ad tech can't have that.
I think the real answer is: adding such a switch would be very very hard UX-wise. Also imagine what would happen to users that flipped the switch and then never knew how to turn it back off, or whatever. You get the idea.
I do know one thing: Facebook news has become a source of derision due to its quantifiable impact on divisiveness in the US politically. And a scandal erupted on the topic of Russia funding of political ads.
There's a fantastic article on the general topic of Facebook news here: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511...
With all this mess, it's inconceivable that only .01% of people would toggle these settings.
I won't argue against the idea of the UI being too complicated, that sounds absurd to me although I'm no UI designer.
You have a flag for that: chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy
It's not our feed. It's Facebook's. It's designed to show you content based on your input, but not exclusively based on that input.
I use reddit because I’m in control: I only see what I subscribe to, and I can switch between popular and chronological.
I’m assuming it’s different for you because you check Twitter often? In either case the feed is most definitely not in chronological order, but determined by an opaque, secret algorithm.
I like Tweetbot.
Profiles are now being transitioned to a social media profile, where it's more like a MySpace page. You can get around it for now (add "/overview" to the end of the URL), but it's default for a lot of users' profiles.
Why will I see less video, and more from friends? Because I won't be on facebook.
Edit: From FTA:
> But the other is a lot of the research that we've done and the research that's out there in the field and in academia that we've read suggests that online interacting with people is positively correlated with a lot of measures of well-being, whereas passively consuming media content online is less so.
They do their own research on users, by modifying their news feed and measuring their emotions with sentiment analysis. You are not just a product they sell, you are also a product they experiment on. It's not worth it.
Edit 2: On the secret psychological experiments that Facebook executes to torture your mind: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
The real kicker, is that by using Facebook they argue that you give consent to them to conduct unlimited psychological experiments on you in secret.
> It argued that its 1.28 billion monthly users gave blanket consent to the company’s research as a condition of using the service.
I quit FB and my mental health improved.
I don't mind using Goodreads because Amazon and I have the same goal: they want me to buy and read books, and guess what? So do I.
Eventually the newsfeed will become polluted again, and Facebook will announce sweeping changes to address this and the cycle will continue.
And how is this different than the passive experience of scrolling endlessly through people's vacation pictures, food pictures and baby pictures? Is clicking on a blue thumb icon really an "active" experience. Is writing a one lime comment about the picture of someones hamburger or their vacation shots really engaging with friends? This is no more of an active social interaction than a bag of potato chips is a meal.
I feel like the genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back in, regardless of these PR contrivances to convince us otherwise.
However, I'm sure in the next 6 month'z Zuckerberg will be on a press junket telling us all that "the problem is fixed" and that their data shows that people are having meaningful experiences on FB and that FB is bringing people together.
Facebook became dominant because it had an aura of exclusivity and successfully captured some trend-setting demographics. If it loses those, no amount of users accessing it through Free Basics is going to make up for it.