Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes | Hacker News Reader

Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

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262 pointsdismal2250 comments

I didn’t see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook’s own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos and pictures by “viral marketing” firms onto it. They replaced groups (inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were given permission to crap all over it by default interspersed with ads and machine-generated content (“a picture of you from three years ago”).

In their zeal to gain IM users, they replaced messages with chat, removing the inhibition that kept people from using messages for one liners. Then they made you always online, supplanting Facebook itself entirely with something that could be replaced by any other real-time communication app. Once phones became nicer to use and there were alternatives to the lag and limitations of SMS, people had no reason to log into Facebook to chat with their friends because Facebook has trained non-IMers to IM and they no longer needed Facebook to do it.

Users would have killed for high-resolution photos (Facebook would make pictures so tiny and so low resolution that they’d become unrecognizable and all talent that went into composing them or editing them would be lost, and they couldn’t contain text or captions because that would be compressed away) or the ability to create albums. A dozen apps existed to shoehorn that functionality in via the Flickr api. Then they had to go buy Instagram to win those users back.

Now people just post major life events to share with people they didn’t bother communicating them to via another, more personal means of communication once a year or so.

Agreed. I've always enjoyed and found great value in Facebook, which was helped by the fact that I was in college when it launched so everyone I knew back then was on it, and everyone I know today is on it (minus 2 or 3 holdouts).

I was getting frustrated with all the junk, but still used it regularly.

Now when I get that dopamine craving and am flipping through app screens on my phone looking for something novel, I often completely forget that Facebook is even there.

The changes they made are absolutely in the direction I want them to go, but perhaps it's too late?

Worse yet, do you know how frustrating it is to be told that there are no more updates available while you know that you a missing life events from friends that actually posted them.

After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because they will similarly not show up for friends.

Cutting back on FB has become ever easier over time.

Yep. People talk about the benefits of how they delete their facebook account, but really, you just start using it less and less as the news feed becomes less relevant to your interests.

My wife and were 'in a relationship' on Facebook within a few months of meeting each other. Then we were 'married'. Even still, for the first four or so years that we had each other on FB, it wouldn't show me her posts. They just weren't in my feed, I'd scroll down so far I was seeing content from months ago, but I'd never see anything she'd posted that week.

Eventually it took me telling FB I didn't want to see posts from 90% of my 'friends', and then going to her feed and 'engaging' with her posts, for it to start showing them to me.

I've never actually used Facebook in any serious way; I'll log in and scroll through my feed once every few months, but I've always hated it. The other day I put my finger on why: it's the mobile equivalent of turning on the TV and flipping through channels looking for something to watch, something you do as an alternative to doing something with your time.

You'd think Facebook's algorithms would prioritize your spouse, but you could use friend lists to make it do what you seem to want. You can add people to your "close friends" list and you'll get notified whenever they post. Also tends to put their posts in your feed more from what I can tell (based on the minimal amount that I use FB these days).

https://www.facebook.com/help/598069963644156

Geeze, I had the EXACT same issue. I almost NEVER see stuff from my wife (even after I marked her stuff as something I want to see). I always see friends that I never interact with and their events that they're going to or all of the meme pages my friends like. But my wife's stuff? Not very much.

I hate using Facebook. The only reason I haven't removed my account is because it's the only way to keep up with certain friends and family. I feel like I am forced to use it simply because there isn't anything better for them to broadcast on.

> The only reason I haven't removed my account is because it's the only way to keep up with certain friends and family.

I'd suggest considering whether this is really true.

That's what the follow feature is for. You can get notified on ALL activity of a friend of you are willing to click two.

All of my friends are set to follow. Seems like a default option.

Yes, but there's a "see first" option and you can turn on notifications on activities:

https://imgur.com/a/xZTQk

They've probably done testing and found that for some significant percentage of married couples, seeing their spouse's posts caused them to reduce their Facebook usage. So unhappy marriages are ruining it for everyone.

I feel like the general trend of UI simplification and a/b testing everything has companies chasing after anything that will push their general metrics up in the short term, at the expense of slowly disenfranchising a large portion of their users.

I interviewed at Netflix recently for a position on their UI team, and I questioned the interviewer about a lot of annoying aspects of the Netflix interface. He was aware of every complaint, and his explanation for every one of them was he wishes he could change it but the a/b testing shows they get higher engagement with it the way it is. So, for example, they show you movies you have already said you don't like, because enough people give a thumbs down and then later watch the movie. In the short term very few people are going to cancel Netflix because of this, but enough of these decisions in succession is erosive to customer goodwill.

Personally, these kind of decisions wouldn't bother me that much if apps and websites made it easy to customize your experience. Facebook makes it difficult by opaquely shaping your newsfeed and giving you what seems like hundreds of options across a half dozen settings pages. Netflix makes it difficult by just giving you practically no options, but there's enough demand that's there a tiny industry in just making websites and plugins to make Netflix usable.

yes, a/b testing optimizes for an average user that dosent exist, and everyone is unhappy with.

Reminds me of the old tale of the man who drowned in a lake with an average depth of 3 feet.

A/B doesn’t design for an average user; it can be all, a tiny niche, or something in between depending on what you’re measuring. For example, DAU and engagement will be affected by drastically different distributions of users.

I guess A/B testing will tell you if the horse will become faster if you change from iron shoes to carbon fiber ones.

A/B testing won’t ever get you a Tesla from a horse.

It will also tell you that pumping horses full of steroids will make them go faster. Tech's absurd obsession with metrics and statistics will be their undoing.

If you do enough binary switching, you eventually will get a Tesla. Assuming a Tesla is optimal. Let’s test to find out.

How do you think the eyeball arose from unicellular eukaryotes?

local maxima trap hill climbing style optimizing, many (most?) times improvements require jumping large sub optimal chasms that can never be crossed by gradual improvement.

You won't get out of local minima/maxima with hill climbing though.

Eyeballs are nowhere near optimal either.

I don't think so. A/B testing is like gradient descent which is a greedy algorithm. You move in the direction that locally looks best. Evolution on the other hand allows for suboptimal species to persist for enough time to let them develop their advantage. (In the language of optimization evolution allows you to go past the local optimal and reach global optima by allowing you to move in non-optimal direction -- as long as the move is not catastrophic.)

Nope. A/B testing depends on what you choose to mutate. The problem is that we humans intentionally change the things. Nature randomly changes the things.

You’re not going to get to a global optimum driven by human choice of what to test (only local optima at best) unless the human setting up the tests is some sort of sage.

Do you Nature will eventually hit on a global optimum? If so, that belief is opposed by what biologists know about developmental and evolutionary pathways.

For a trivial and well-known example, there is now no developmental or evolutionary pathway that will lead to a vertebrate eye where the nerves run behind the retina. As a result every last vertebrate has a blind spot where all of the nerves dive through the retina. This makes our eyes less efficient because the nerves block out light.

We're therefore stuck with the first design of the vertebrate eye and can't change it. There is no pathway to the more sensible design of the mollusk eye.

This is but one of many examples. For another one, relative developmental timing of growth is fixed across vertebrates. For example the "hand" grows before the "arm". The result is that pterodactyls, whose wings are entirely hands, could fly from birth. But birds (whose wings are arms) and bats (a mix of the two) can't fly from birth. No matter how desirable an evolutionary trait that may be.

Now I wonder, has someone ran A/B tests but instead of using hill climbing for optimizing used simulated annealing?

> Do you think Nature will eventually hit on a global optimum?

No. At least not in the way described. Optimal as considered by whom? Us? We look at something and say this would function better than that, but is something that is optimal perfect? Basic microeconomics shows that perfection is sub-optimal due to the law of diminishing marginal return. Perfection is wasteful and unsustainable. What do we know to be optimal? From what I know, “adequate enough to reproduce” may not be perfect, but it might be brushing up against optimal in its “good enough and no more” / lagom nature. Mollusks have mollusk eyes. Can we know that humans would be better off with mollusk eyes without rewriting our evolutionary lineage for us to be more like mollusks in other imperfect ways?

Says every product person I've ever worked with who didn't want to actually be data driven.

There are two kinds of product people: those who can't design and those who don't understand statistics.

I understand the fear, though - when you're data driven, you can actually numerically measure the contribution of every feature that's tested, and in a lot of cases figure out the exact impact on revenue. In a culture where everything is tested, it's a very small step from there to stack ranking your product designers based mostly on how the features they designed did.

I'm not necessarily against that as a valid way to measure job performance if it's done intelligently (for one, realizing that there's a lot of blind luck and variance, and it takes time to smooth out) - I mean, if you're in sales and you're not booking any sales, you don't get to hide from that. But it's also really easy to get ranking and evaluation schemes wrong, so I understand why people would be nervous about it and prefer soft-skill-based evaluations instead.

valid point. However I also often see "politics optimized sales" where the current pet project of whoever has the most swing goes up front even if it's a terrible product and death to revenue.

A/B testing won’t ever get you a Tesla from a horse.

Right. But if you were already selling Teslas, and along came a smooth-talking product designer with a dream to "improve" it by building a horse instead, A/B testing would make sure that change never saw the light of day.

A/B testing is not a way to get out of having to come up with good ideas yourself. It's a way to validate that your ideas are any good in the first place before betting the whole company on them.

A/B testing is most critical when evaluating big changes to a product, because those are the changes most likely to completely blow up the business. Otherwise it's left up to the opinion of the highest paid person in the room, and people are notoriously bad at guessing how customers will respond to change.

Indeed. When I was advocating for A/B testing at the last company I worked for, I tried hard to teach people that every test should have a sane hypothesis behind it based on some kind of usability theory. Not just “let’s try changing the header font color to red and see what happens!”

I worked for a company with an obsessed AB culture. Biggest hole I found. Clicks != satisfaction. Time spent on site also != satisfaction.

There’s something very powerful just talking to the user, feeling their pain and working with them to fix it until they say “this is awesome”.

Did you ask what their definition of engagement is, and why it's the primary measure?

> In the short term very few people are going to cancel Netflix because of this, but enough of these decisions in succession is erosive to customer goodwill.

The “auto preview” is so unpleasant that I’ve essentially stopped using Netflix entirely. I’ve no doubt that their testing shows it increases engagement, but I find it so jarring and abrasive that I rarely open the app any more. I’m sure they still have content I want to watch, but I can’t stand the experience of trying to find it.

I would love to have more insight into their A/B engagement metrics. I’m sure they capture if immediate engagement goes up when a feature is enabled, and probably the same over time periods of days or weeks. Do they also capture if total app usage declines 75% over 6 months after a feature is enabled?

That’s funny - I Like the auto preview, in fact I would like them to go further and advertise their content to me, as live TV does. When I watch Netflix at the end of a hard day I’m in lazy consumer mode, I want content to be suggested to me. I hate wading through static dull pictures which give me very few clues as to the content they represent. Netflix are unstoppable - they offer incredible value compared to extortionate SKY, i cancelled their £120 per month package 6 months ago and I have never regretted it.

I'm listening to music or half-watching twitch whilst scrolling through Netflix to decide what I'll watch with supper. It's incredibly frustrating to have them autoplay video content, to the extent that I've started going back to browsing torrent sites instead.

It doesn't help that their website is a laggy piece of shit with miserable discover-ability. But, you know. Ugh.

Surely the video is muted by default, why is that a problem?

It is not muted by default. Nor is there any way to mute short of muting your TV.

The website doesn't autoplay, but per Ntrails, it's "a laggy piece of shit with miserable discover-ability". I don't actually use the website so don't have an opinion there.

I also like auto preview. But I would never want them to start advertising their shows to me (like Amazon Prime does), that's going too far.

I agree. You can't even leave Netflix running on a device and leave the room because it will just start playing something without any actual user input! And it appears none of the apps let you turn this behavior off.

Netflix already seems to have no problem getting people to watch hours and hours of shows as a result of having high quality content. Why do they need to perform cheap tricks like auto-preview to bump up user stats, as others have pointed out, at the expense of user happiness/preference?

> The “auto preview” is so unpleasant that I’ve essentially stopped using Netflix entirely.

If you find a lower powered device such as the previous generation of Amazon Fire TV, it does not auto-preview or auto-run trailers at the top of the screen - instead you just get a static image of the show.

Now if only I could get it to do that on my PS4 :(

I'm definitely not planning to buy a dedicated crappy device for Netflix, though. :/ I want fewer devices. I've only still got an Xbox One for Blu-Ray/DVD and HBO Now, which inexplicably isn't available for my TV.

> he wishes he could change it but the a/b testing shows they get higher engagement with it the way it is

The upshot of this is that if Netflix or Facebook _do_ see a slow drift of users away from the platform, they are institutionally incapable of understanding why. Engagement is not the same thing as satisfaction, which is far harder to measure.

(I'm also now wondering how static the results of A/B testing really are - if an idea fails AB even once does the company abandon it forever?)

But engagement is what advertisers pay for, isn't it ? Clicks ! Clicks ! Clicks !

So I'm pretty sure that they are institutionally incapable of understanding why for a very good reason.

Can completely relate. The other annoying thing I have found is that FB will show posts that are outdated. For example, prior to replying here, I scrolled through my feed and over half the posts were from yesterday or two days ago. Even more frustrating is when those posts are from media outlets and contain outdated news or other articles of interest. I know the SOTU was last night, I don't need several posts from various media outlets trying to tell me where to watch. I know the problem is I don't engage often enough or with the content I want to see, but it would be nice if I could have more control over what content I see in my timeline without having to engage.

Facebook's weighting there makes sense to me. Why do you need to see your misso's posts? You see her all the time.

The posts I actually want to see on Facebook are from my friends that are far away. For me though, FB weights posts that are geographically closer to you higher. When I moved to Australia, I discovered through Facebook that I had 3 or 4 friends from high school here in Melbourne, purely because their posts started showing up on my newsfeed.

> Worse yet, do you know how frustrating it is to be told that there are no more updates available while you know that you a missing life events from friends that actually posted them.

Or trying to find something you saw in your feed, which then disappeared for no obvious reason. I can't decide whether I'm a pigeon in a Skinner box run by humans, or a human in one run by pigeons, but either way, the experience is unpleasant.

Or trying to find something you saw in your feed, which then disappeared for no obvious reason

The reason is the time you subsequently spend looking for it is “engagement” in their metrics.

> trying to find something you saw in your feed

Sometimes it's right here on my phone, third post in my feed. I want to leave a lengthy comment, but it's nowhere to be found on the desktop browser.

The moment you 'interact' with something it goes. So I might click a newspaper article to read it, then refresh the page to update the comments, but poof, it's gone. I'd have to seek it out on the newspaper's page. Utterly dumb.

I haven't logged into facebook a while, and it's not because of recent changes, it's because of existing frustrations, all of which are captured in these comments.

"After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because they will similarly not show up for friends."

Glad I'm not the only one. I once set up a list for viewing posts just from family etc. It would only show me 24 hours worth! There seemed to be nothing I could do to adjust it. Everything about facebook is a usability shitshow.

In my experience, life events are one of the few things that do show up.

I got "engaged" to a girl for a laugh a while back. Everyone saw it, it had almost 200 likes before I took it down. It was really awkward to explain to my grandma that no, I'm not actually getting married and it was all a joke.

Yea but you chose the topmost event that would trigger their algorithm to showcase you for. If a friend of yours got engaged and you weren't notified because of the algorithm people would complain so they probably give marriage/engagements the highest priority.

You are totally right. Noone of my friends post anything about their lives.

Its all about friends commenting someones name on some memes and then getting to see a meme or a viral video instead. Which is definitely not what I want to be spending my time with.

Cutting off fb is way easier.

That was an amazing summary, it encapsulates a lot.

> Once phones became nicer to use and there were alternatives to the lag and limitations of SMS, people had no reason to log into Facebook to chat with their friends because Facebook has trained non-IMers to IM and they no longer needed Facebook to do it.

It's funny, because of Facebook Messenger, I have completely moved off SMS and now use Facebook Messenger for all my communication. The only reason why I use SMS is that I Am not connected to that person on Facebook (and probably wouldn't).

I am also so disturbed by Facebook’s “keep the user always logged in” policy. If you click on a link inside a reminder mail sent when one of your friends post something, you are automatically logged in. I noticed it after forwarding such an email to one of my friends. At least they could explicitly indicate such behavior in the email.

A tangent on one of your points: Facebook not only lowers photo resolution, but it also visibly deteriorates color quality in some cases. I had a beautiful golden meadow turn into a pretty ugly dry yellow (edit: orange-ish, not yellow -- I misremembered) field after uploading a photo. It was quite astonishing switching tabs and seeing the difference.

Would love to see that - any chance for a screengrab?

Sure, here: https://imgur.com/a/udfB5

(And before anyone inevitably objects: yes, I get that you might actually like the downsized version better. Personally I didn't like a random reddish hue being added to the golden scene, but it's obviously a matter of taste, so let's not judge me here. The point isn't which one looks better, but that they shouldn't look so dramatically visibly different in the first place.)

They oversharpened it A LOT, that brought the whites front and center and ruined the color.

Confused, are you mixing the two up? The original is way sharper and less red than their version. Or is there something about it that indicates it was oversharpened despite that?

Also note that there is a resizing (downwards, not upwards) I had to do in Photoshop to make them the same dimensions, since Facebook both lowers the quality and the dimensions, so it was impossible to match up the pixels without that. If it did any sharpening along with that I have no idea, but I don't notice any changes on Photoshop's side.

Yep, for some reason I thought the images were in other order.

So you think "the problem" is all the things that Facebook started doing when there were 10 million registered users that grew it to 1.4 billion daily actives?

A problem that can be rectified by Facebook, literally 11 years after some of the things you talk about, tweaking news feed weights towards personal posts from friends and other changes to allow users to spend time on the site more efficiently is not a serious problem.

And the analysis of photos is spectacular nonsense. First, albums existed very very early in the time you were talking about. Second, the photo uploading features you mention (including hi-res photos) were added at most a billion daily actives ago. Third, building a platform that allowed "a dozen apps" to get created was pretty clearly higher leverage. And finally and most damningly, Instagram doesn't have high-resolution photos or albums and certainly didn't at the time of acquisition: how are those the features that FB had to buy to win users back?

Disclosure: I worked there for 8.5 years, including writing Facebook Chat.

I've been a Facebook user for, oh, almost 14 years now, and adding all those users didn't make the product better for me. But the newsfeed changes mentioned did make it worse. (And maybe those billion people would have liked it better the way it was in 2007.)

I'm skeptical that tweaking newsfeed weights will make the people I care about start posting regularly again. I doubt the evaporative cooling is reversable.

> Disclosure: I worked there for 8.5 years, including writing Facebook Chat.

In my book this is equivalent to saying you worked for Philip Morris for 8.5 years and worked on campaigns to bring in new smokers.

Your book is poorly written: even accepting your premise, I didn’t work on the growth team.

I think it's respectable that you gave a disclaimer that you worked there in a thread about Facebook's use value. It's a little unlikely that doing so wouldn't result in an accusation of bias, too. It certainly should not be the basis for an ad hominem against your response. So it brings me to, why mention it?

Not a disclaimer, but a disclosure :)

The reason I mentioned it was because it was rather relevant to my having the incentive to remember the timelines of FB launching various features almost a decade ago.

Facebook cheated the numbers, so to speak. In every poor SEA country is a Facebook plan, or plan with x data + free Facebook. Stop acting like it was organic growth, it really wasn't and we both know that.

Where can I read more about this?

I'm not from SE Asia, but from Romania. This kind of thing happens everywhere:

https://www.vodafone.ro/shop/abonamente-de-date#tab-1

-> "Detalii abonament"

-> Social Pass: [...] (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, Pinterest, Twitter, Viber)

It's widespread around the world, except for the US, until recently.

Ah I had never read an article about it, just saw the phone plans and talked to folks when I was there. Minimum googling brought me here - https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/333313/milliions-of-face...

Also available in SA. You have to share your facebook data with the mobile company though.

I think this highlights how out of touch you (and the Facebook developers) are.

I’ve had a Facebook account since the days of needing a edu email account to register. During my college years Facebook was a very important thing and all of my friends were very active and it was nice being able to see what people were up to and doing.

Over time Facebook started optimizing away to whatever it is now. I’ve deleted the Facebook app because it’s simply garbage. My friends don’t really post personal things anymore (most don’t even post anything anymore) and the influx of users and this “retweet” culture has made it so my Facebook feed is essentially spam. Why should I have to bother and waste time to curate what I see? Why should I have to hide so many individual pages?

Furthermore, the recent(?) addition of these marketplaces made it just way worse. My news feed activity is constantly telling me about new things for sale here and I just don’t care. I thought I’ve disabled these notifications but apparently I haven’t because they still show up. To be honest I don’t even know how to disable these messages because everything is hidden under 20 layers of options.

Not to mention the whole age/generation issue:

I’m 30, and my sister is 20. I’m at that age where I don’t really meet a lot of new people anymore, so my friends list has been very stagnant. I really just keep a Facebook profile just to let the occasional old friend/family contact me or find me. My sister and her friends look at Facebook and think it’s something old people use. For her everything is Snapchat.

I keep hearing that my age group don't use Facebook but this clashas with the multiple relentless group chats and the dozens of notifications from groups that I engage with every day. On the other hand, I post things about myself about once a year, which could make someone on my friends list think I never log on. I wonder if this shift from social network to content aggregation and chat is a significant reason for this perception.

I love how many people are acting like their own personal experiences and gripes are highly representative of some large segment of the userbase. Frankly, I don't think disgruntled HN users are their core demographic.

I'm also 30 and registered in 2005. Lots of my friends post frequently. Curating by hiding people I don't want to see takes a negligible amount of time and effort. I've barely even noticed the marketplace. The idea that 30 is "that age" where you don't meet many new people is bizzare to me. I regularly make new friends and the standard way of exchanging contact info is FB.

Do you have wife and kids? or maybe you are single? I think you are not representative for your demographic. I agree with OP here, it matches my experience and experience of most of my friends and their friends.

I am single, and very social. My point, though, is that you can't really determine what is representative from your own anecdotal experience, as real as it feels to you.

Even adding the experience of a dozen HN users (and discounting the ones that disagree) still represents a small and very biased sample. And have you honestly gathered that much information about the experience and usage of your friends' friends? Or is it possible you are applying a combination of projection and confirmation bias? Also, the news cycle is currently mostly negative about FB, so it's popular to be bashing it, but many of those people continue to use it daily anyway.

I just think there is a very common pattern here on HN of people acting like "this product/service doesn't really work for me, therefore it is shit/out of touch/etc," when there are likely many people who do actually get value out of using it.

While arguably anecdotal, I see pretty much what you do. Nobody is posting to Facebook regularly any more. I can pretty much browse my entire news feed in 10 minutes once every two weeks.

What I believe keeps people on Facebook is Messenger. Even people who never post on Facebook is available via Messenger and given that Facebook makes it pretty easy to find people, it's slowly devolving to a "better phonebook".

The most powerful feature for me at the moment is "On This Day" - highlighting to me how my engagement there has changed, and how it was (not to sound too old) better in the old days.

Luckily I'm quite "friend light" on there, but most of my social interaction has moved to WhatsApp (including groups for nights out/sharing photos, organising, and engaging with different people - all of the things I used FB for). Guessing one of the main reasons they bought them.

I like FB less and less - for all the same reasons that others here have posted. It is especially frustrating and vexing to me because I had build a "Facebook clone" about fifteen years ago that had all the features that I would like to have in a social/informational web service. Surely there are other places we can go online that have a better user experience. I am curious what other web sites people are using to do social blogging. Alternatively, are there any good "Facebook skins" (web clients built against the FB APIs) that provide a better user experience?

There are some clients for mobile devices, but I'm pretty sure if anyone were to make such a skin, and it were to gain any meaningful popularity, facebook would just kill its API access or threaten with legal repercussions because its explicitly forbidden to do this [0].

[0] https://developers.facebook.com/policy

Lots of stuff there. Which one says you can't use the API to build a read-only client? Makes no sense that they would have an API for something which is forbidden.

4.1 Add something unique to the community. Don’t replicate core functionality that Facebook already provides. 4.4 Respect the limits we've placed on Facebook functionality.

Read-only client violates 4.1, as it replicates news feed. Changing how news feed is formed is a violation of 4.4.

But it doesn't "replicate" the newsfeed because the newsfeed doesn't show me what I want to see.

The current version of the FB API doesn't allow posting. So any third party app would be read-only.

Earlier API versions used to allow posting, but of course they took it out.

All very good reasons, but I think the training of users to use Facebook messenger is what ultimately killed them, because people could then use any other messenger just as well. Messengers have made a comeback and now "social networks" are done. Stick a fork in them.

Indeed it is. Joel had a great analyis on what went wrong[0] at FB (and to some extend Twitter). They were optimising for the wrong metrics, forgetting user utility and happiness in the process. Fixing this will mean making less money. But also a much higher chance of long term relevance.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/01/12/birdcage-liners/

Thanks. Great read - and too bad that's not the OP.

Hah! Cool, he blogged again.

The key question here is: does self-regulation work for social media? I'm not sure it does. Their end goal is to create a Skinner box. That's all there is to it. And that goal definitely conflicts with what we actually want/need.

From my readings, something Facebook has been struggling with for a couple years is getting people to post more personal updates.

Thus their Newsfeed changes de-prioritizing articles, and thus (I figure) their experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes, and enabling MySpace-like gradient backgrounds on text posts...

This dynamic makes me recall something: Anyone remember how back in the day (like 2006) Facebook had a feature called 'Wall-to-Wall' conversations? You would go to a friend's profile and just write a message, they would go to your 'wall' and reply, and mutual friends could see the conversation.

These days between the Newsfeed, comments on posts, and Messenger, the only reason I would post on another friend's profile is to wish them a happy birthday. That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone.

That was prior to chat though, and more of a desperate attempt to chat in an interface that didn't do a good job supporting it.

When chat and then messenger came along there was no need to do that anymore.

Yeah but what I'm suggesting is that the semi-public nature of wall-to-wall conversations gave Facebook a more personal vibe. I could see my friends talking and my friends could see me talking with other friends, sharing jokes, saying "I had fun at the party", stuff like that...

I think Facebook wants people to log on and post things like "It's a tough day at work but I'm looking forward to watching Black Panther" instead of just posting another link about "check out how the primaries were rigged!11". And I think the way the Newsfeed works with highly-specific posts and comments is part of the problem. There's less opportunity for laid back semi-public chatter.

Most of the people who used facebook in 2004–2006 had (and used) other ways to chat via their computers or cellphones. Most people’s profiles listed their phone numbers, email addresses and various chat service handles.

Facebook wall conversations were not used as a poor imitation of private chat, but a separate form of quasi-public communication.

Yeah, thinking back, Facebook was largely a convenient way to find and keep track of my friends' IM handles. And their phone numbers, back in the day when losing a phone meant losing all contacts because they're stored on the device.

Thinking back, Facebook was really a face book...

I couldn’t possibly comment on recent Facebook struggles.

But, on the wall-to-wall thing: it still happens, but it’s generally associated with elderly or candid people who might not grasp the visibility of their post.

One thing that I feel you should be able to do is pick an audience when you write on someone’s wall. De facto, people often do that for birthdays and those rarely appear much.

I see a lot of the same casual conversations in Groups -- assuming you have groups of friends there. Those are cool and generally where the banter happens for me.

> something Facebook been struggling with for a couple years is getting people to post more personal updates.

This is what I perceive as well.

Thirded. It feels like a poorly kept secret. Last in the row of pushes is my Facebook has started showing how I can now post to groups of people more easily. Just in case posting for all friends to see is holding me back, you know. (yes friend lists exist since eons but this seems more ad-hoc... Unsure if I'm in an A/B test)

>That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone.

The wall was never a good way to do this. It's neither as powerful nor as flexible as pretty much any competing way for a small group of people to communicate, including chat programs, email, txt, snapchat, etc.

Facebook's deprioritization of the wall and buy-in on messenger/whatsapp, instagram, and the newsfeed was very smart. I suspect they are ok with people moving off posting on facebook to posting on instagram and chatting privately.

The engaging part of the wall to wall wasn't how good it was for communication, it was the semi-permissioned town hall style chat for semi-related groups of friends you'd see as it whizzed by on your feed. People did all sorts of humblebragging, cries for attention, or on the nicer side of the spectrum, open discussion that chat like whatsapp and messenger do not have.

The similarity between snooping around facebook and seeing all the open chats going on with people you'd never usually talk to and watching reality TV were striking to me.

Thought admittedly, I do not know if it was one of the driving factors to FB success or not, so it may well have been past its use by date rather than the news feeds killing it.

Personally I enjoyed those days more as my feed was more of a chronological account of people chatting rather than reshares articles, videos and memes.

On the other hand, your description bears a strong resemblance to Twitter. If you have a conversation with someone through replies, anyone who follows both of you will see it in their timeline, and by default, anyone can read it by going to either of your profiles. So it’s not uncommon to have someone you’ve never heard of jump into a conversation. And it’s easy enough to “snoop around” yourself; sometimes that can be a source of genuine new acquaintances, and with time, friendships. (There’s an etiquette to it, though. If you don’t know someone, you should only butt in to their conversations if you have something to add - not because, say, you disagree with a political statement they’re making, or at the very least, certainly not if you’re planning to hurl insults!)

Unfortunately, some people and some topics tend to attract a lot of those sorts of uninvited rebuttals - in other words, harassment - driving some to make their accounts private. In that case, only approved followers can see your tweets, ever. There’s no “friends of friends”-like middle ground, or any other more flexible filtering options.

On the other hand, for most people, Twitter’s system seems to work pretty well. It works for me, and I really enjoy the spontaneity of it.

> The wall was never a good way to do this.

And yet people used it--even after the news feed and well into the reign of IM and email. I'm not sure how it's smart to remove a feature that was creating engagement just because FB didn't understand why.

Facebook never clicked for me. I've had an account for a long time, but log in maybe once or twice a year.

But Instagram I love. I check it a couple of times a week. I love seeing images from my friends and having comments barely visible is exactly what I like. My only problem with it is the increasing frequency of ads. It's sucking a lot of the joy out of the platform for me.

Posting anything deeper than dank memes & news seems futile, when The Algorithm decides who can see your post.

If they want people to make better content, they need to start figuring out why people feel like their better content gets no audience.

There was an article that I can't find for the life of me about how someone suffering with depression had killed himself, and it was only a long time afterwards that any friends friends knew because Facebook hadn't been showing his posts.

IIRC they looked through his feed and there had been basically cries for help, but no one had seem them because Facebook was prioritizing engagement and not personal content.

How many other people are trying to reach out on Facebook, thinking that no one cares, when the reality is that no one even sees?

This looks like a dark and completely likely situation

Fortunately for me, it didn't go that far. But I know that feeling, because I've been there. I cut off facebook after a pretty low point in my life, and to this day, it has been the best decision I ever made.

> someone suffering with depression had killed himself, and it was only a long time afterwards that any friends friends knew because Facebook hadn't been showing his posts.

> IIRC they looked through his feed and there had been basically cries for help, but no one had seem them because Facebook was prioritizing engagement and not personal content.

Don't worry! Facebook is working on an AI to detect such posts and refer the suicidal users to help! No need to bring his friends down with his negativity and decrease their engagement! /s

I wish I was joking: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/28/16709224/facebook-suicid.... Social networks like Facebook have contributed to a big rise in depression, but instead of course correcting, we get buzzword tech band-aids.

If you want to sell glass, better go break some windows.

"A friend of mine died and I didn't know because of algorithms": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956811

this reads like a black mirror episode

Ideally everyone on your friends list would see your post. If they no longer care for them they can either unfriend or hide your posts.

That’s a silly take.

I’ve hidden friends before who I have close relationships with, simply because the content they post is trash:

- reshares of “inspirational” and “motivational” memes - post frequency too high - constantly posting pictures of their kids - unfortunately a close aunt is into MLM and I can’t just unfriend her without causing drama - generally only posting things I don’t care for enough to see like guns, cars, etc

Like, just because we are friends, doesn’t mean we have to share the same interests nor does it mean I want to hear everything you have to say on every topic.

The wall to wall stuff loses its practicality when my mother joined Facebook. Informal group chat among friends happens on chat programs like hangouts and whatsapp were you can have a large group of friends in one chat for a very long period of time. Where nothing is said for a while until someone posts "is anyone down for pizza?" or "did you see that ludicrous display last night?"

What were they thinking?!

I think that was because at the time we all probably had far fewer friends on FB. As my friend count has grown over time (and really it isn't even that much compared to most) I have felt less and less inclined to broadcast my life to a bunch of people that I know only tangentially. In a way it encourages me to actually hang out with my real friends, since their updates are so buried and I rarely post anything besides politics and links.

> experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes

While we're complaining, the Javascript associated with this is particularly slow. On clicking into the text entry box, I find that if I start typing immediately it can result in the letters coming out in the wrong order when it resets the caret.

Posting on Facebook, right now, is like updating your resume (like LinkedIn) for personal life. It just feels too "public". Sure, you can tweak your social network into different privacy levels. But, that just doesn't feel intuitive or effortless. The exclusivity factor which initially propelled the network is simply not there. At the peak of the facebook madness, you had a need to post whenever anything happened. Now, its just the big ticket items.

I think people login more due to habit than to post personal updates. I doubt the current college going kids even login at all. Today, you update facebook only on special occasions like marriage, birth of a child, graduation or when people go out to visit places etc. Previously, like 7 to 8 years back, people used to post very personal things, knowing that only their friends are on the network. It definitely, felt safe. It Again, maybe my gen aged a bit during the last 8 years, I don't know. If anyone posts anything too personal right now, it feels like a violation of social norms. Like crying in public with everyone watching.

No matter how many tweaks Facebook makes to their Newsfeed, I doubt quality engagement from what I saw 7 to 8 years back will return.

People just shifted to mobile apps like Whatsapp and have different social groups there. This feels very natural and organic. You have a few small groups of maybe 10 to 15 people max per group who all know you intimately and maybe a couple of larger groups with 50 plus members. This usually an alumni group of some kind. Even the larger groups get tiring if there are too updates and many frequently opt out after a tiff.

I just feel the era of publicly sharing personal information on web based social networks is over. If there is somekind of a decentralized privacy oriented mobile app that has the same functionality as whatsapp and it gets widely adopted, then it might be game over for the big companies in the social networking space. Even though Whatsapp is owned by facebook. It feels very safe and personal to share updates.

Personal opinion that this is all again unintentionally there own doing.

They drove people to stop posting personal content by making personal content so rare to come by (with ads, news,pages,sponsored posts..) that it was percieved that people don’t post those kind of things anymore.

Going to be very tough to get people back into that mindset.

There is no need to go back to that mindset. The goal is to transition everyone to a new, different mindset. This is how a business evolves.

You mean imitates progress?

I think in general this is why Snapchat is (was?) so popular - the ephemeral posts + "it's not my parent's facebook" was what a lot of young people want.

These days, my main interaction with Facebook (outside of messenger) is me and my friends tagging each other in memes. It's silly and infantile, but it's sort of funny.

Any day-to-day updates that used to go on Facebook, like "look what I had for dinner", go on my insta story or Snapchat. So in many ways, FB is still getting that engagement, it has just shifted to Instagram, rather than Facebook.

> It definitely, felt safe

I do wonder how much the "culture war" has affected this. I'm sure all the fighting over the election was good for "engagement" in the short term but in the long term has left people disillusioned.

Some notes from the results they just released:

Revenues: - 4Q revenue $12.97 billion, estimate $12.55 billion (range $12.15 billion to $12.91 billion) (Bloomberg data)

- 4Q EPS $1.44

- 4Q daily active users 1.40 billion, estimate 1.41 billion (Bloomberg News) (3 estimates)

- 4Q monthly active users 2.13 billion, estimate 2.13 billion (BN) (3 estimates)

- 4Q mobile ad revenue as percentage of ad revenue 89%

- 4Q advertising rev. $12.78 billion

General:

- increased headcount: it was 25,105 as of December 31, 2017, an increase of 47% year-over-year.

- This is the first-ever decline Facebook has had in North American users. Daily active users growth in US & Canada fell to 184 million, compared to 185 million in Q3.

Related to new US Tax Plan

- There's a one-time mandatory transition tax on accumulated foreign earnings and a reduction of the corporate income tax rate to 21 percent, effective Jan. 1, 2018. Facebook's provision for income taxes increased by $2.27 billion and its diluted EPS decreased by $0.77 for both the fourth quarter and full year 2017.

In another thread here we are learning how much of this "daily active users" is actually bots run by corporations. I for myself have shown myself out of Facebook and enjoy real live interactions with human beings like it's the '90s.

But in the 90s we were all watching 4-6 hrs of TV a day.

It was a generic 4-6, not targeted, neither was it profiling you while you watched it

Television programming has been profiled and targeted for decades. It just wasn't as granular and accurate as it is on the web.

While true, that kind of understatement seems calculated to miss the point. FB is targeting the individual, tv targeted entire demographics.

It is a poor comparison.

Counterpoint: I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in. So by that metric, Facebook is far better than generic Ads I see on TV.

That’s a non sequitor, not a counterpoint to the matter of how manipulative and effective from the POV of the advertiser ads are today vs on tv.

> I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in.

You're not going to see more ads about the things you're interested in, you're going to see ads that have a higher potential to manipulate you into commercially profitable behavior. There's a big but subtle difference between those things. You are definitely not going to see ads for your interests that bring you more joy but aren't easily monetizeable.

The coarseness of TV targeting meant people had more opportunity to assert their own priorities against the less effective manipulation.

Is your argument that if an ad works I am being manipulated, and if it doesn't work then I am not being manipulated?

I'm telling you right now that I don't mind seeing Ads on Instagram. They're great and I've found out about niche products that I otherwise would not have. If this means that small brands are able to rise up against the mega corps (Dollar Shave Club vs Gillette, as a classic example), then all the better for the market.

The other reason I don't mind is that they're visually appealing and seem to fit the Instagram ethos. Compare that to shitty banner Ads that disrupt the flow of content by being so different and so jarring in comparison.

Now, my opinion isn't meant to be generalized. Others may have a far different experience on Instagram (just because of how the product is designed to work). I'm sure there is someone who will chime in and say they hate Instagram Ads because they are completely ineffective. We could both be right in opposite directions since our feeds are probably very different.

If your opinion isn’t generalizable, it’s probably not useful in a discussion about civilization-wide issues, right? Moreover you’re only sharing your perception of how ads affect you, while others are pointing to known effects on whole populations. In essence you’re arguing against a system worth many billions with your own personal anecdote.

My opinion isn't generalizable because no two people have the same experience on Facebook and no two people use the product in the same way. For example, I only use Messenger. Some people only use the photo sharing features. Some people only use Marketplace to buy/sell things. Some people use newsfeed as their primary news source. Some people use all of these things in tandem.

So when people come into this discussion with strong opinions and try to impose their experience on everyone else, that's not useful nor reflective of reality.

What you're arguing is something very primal and not isolated to Facebook. You can make that argument about literally anything in this world and that's why I'm saying it's not useful. Cars have known effects on whole populations. Tax regulation has known effects on the behaviors of whole populations. I mean potato chips and similar snacks are engineered from the ground up to be addictive and have known effects on mass populations. Where do you draw the line for your argument? I chose to draw it at the bounds of my own personal experience with the product we're discussing.

It's OK to not like Facebook. It's also OK to like Facebook. But for me to impose my opinion on you would be misinformed because I don't know how you use it. It's an incredibly complex product with incredibly complex effects.

Sometimes I don't know what I'm interested in, which is where TV ads are much better than targeted ads. For example, once I stopped watching TV, I found that I never knew when new movies were coming out, because I never saw ads for them.

I surely wasn't. I fondly remember my Quake 2 LAN Parties.

D O U B L E KIILLLL

It was good family TV though! Like Family Matters and Full House!

...and no need to be stressed if your comment will receive "likes"

If you enjoyed Full House you'll love Fuller House on Netflix.

For people using uBlock Origin who want to hide all of the noise on their Facebook and truly see what their friends are posting, here are some useful filters:

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ commented on this./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ replied to a /)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ liked this post from /)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ liked this./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ commented on a post from /)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ reacted to this./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/'s cover photo./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ likes /)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ are now friends./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ is interested in an event./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/Sponsored/)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/Suggested Post/)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/A video you may like/)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ shared /)

!facebook.com##u_fetchstream

!facebook.com##._4-u2[id*="u_fetchstream"]

I got tired of seeing seemingly hundreds of, "Your friends reacted to this ad page 5 months ago" or "Here's another advertisement disguised as a page you might be interested in." I realized after I implemented these that I see maybe 2 or 3 new posts a day from my 500 friends, and of these posts the majority of them are political in nature and don't interest me. The only reason I still continue to use FB is for the messenger app as I still think it's the most convenient compared to other platforms.

Here's what my feed looks like with the rules implemented (they aren't FULLY currently up to date either because FB continually updates the phrases, but good enough for me). I also hid a lot of the junk on the sidebar with the element picker. I have no interest in using FB as a platform for buying and selling and the "News Ticker" (if you can call it "News") is just tabloid garbage. I have 4 posts in the past day before I get the "There are no more posts to show right now" message.

https://i.imgur.com/AbBnPo3.png

Thanks, I might use some of those to tweak my newsfeed.

Thank you for that filter, work amazingly well

Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent? They don't make it easy, and I don't think you can default to it, but I just point all my bookmarks to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

Still though, Facebook could be so much better. The problem is that a profit-driven social media site is always going to have different goals than its users. Free ones seem to never gain traction. Currently, most of my friend groups are switching to Discord, but that's basically just going back to IRC without having to understand NickServ and such.

As many others have pointed out though, Facebook got bland when everyone's parents joined. Private groups somewhat help, but it really does need to be more directly baked in to the design. It's far too late for that now, but I dream one day someone will finally make the Facebook killer. Until then, I use Facebook, because it benefits me more than not using it. Shallow interaction, peoples kids, etc? That can easily be fixed. For me, the boost in mood I get from reconnecting to old friends makes it worth all the pain. I was a hold out too, and didn't join until ~5 years ago?

I think the problem is it's almost a utility at this point. Most everyone I know (non-techy crowd) is on it. If you aren't, you truly do miss out, which sucks. But do you know anyone who doesn't work, or want to work at Facebook who would say "I love Facebook!" Tweak all you want, but it's too much a behemoth to love.

Wow thanks for that link, it totally transformed what I was shown on the feed.

Even that link only shows a pruned, algorithmically decided subset of the most recent posts of your total friends list.

Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent?

Do you think most recent really is everything in reverse chronological order, or just a slightly different algorithm?

Naively, yes, yes I did. Dammit Facebook. There's a reason why I changed the settings. I figured it was like browsing the new queue here.

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter usage are all down.

People are just spending less time on social media apps for some reasons these days.

That is interesting. Too much noise , too much distraction?

It's a cesspool, imo. My Facebook is overwhelmed by extremely ugly political obnoxiousness these days, which makes it almost worthless (I'd have to hide 3/4 of the conversations/posts by friends). Between that and the junk content and general corporate spam, maybe 3-5% of what I've seen on FB in the last year has been legitimately valuable social content. The majority of people I know hate Facebook as a product now. They don't just not want to use it, they hate it. Facebook knows what their product has become, it's so bad now they stopped trying to pretend otherwise. They're basically facing their Microsoft Internet tsunami moment, they either quickly adapt or fade from here. If they fade, what will happen is a dozen new social competitors will spring up and begin stripping fringe corners off the core FB network, amounting to tens of millions of users in eg North America. It'll simply break up at the edges, and retain a large foundational user base that will be a lot less engaged.

All the political stuff just ends up making me mad and probably ends up pissing off certain acquaintances if I jump into a thread. Why would I want to continuously look at that stuff?

I've been thinking about how much I hate Facebook as a product. I think the idea might not be wrong and centralization of trust might not be a horrible idea. Implementation is important. There just needs a GNU or Wikipedia of Facebook to exist. A place that has a great code of conduct and not-for-profit agenda.

The only people left now are people who REALLY like to show what they are up to.

I can only hope things are not going to be so self centered anymore.

I'm curious if it's related to the concept of push notifications.

If I have my online network of friends configured in such a way so that I get a notification on my phone, I don't need to stay on Facebook all day wading through cruft. If a close friend posts something, I'll get a notification and check it out. I read/watch and I'm out.

I doubt it, push notifications have been around for years now...Could just be fatigue from it all. Millennials are also getting to their 30s/mid-30s on the old side and are having families, so probably less time/need for a bunch of social networks.

The trend is moving towards private chatrooms (whatsapp, telegram, slack, messenger groups). People are tired of public social media.

Even as a pretty public twitter/fb/etc person, I'm finding that my social activity increasingly happens in private and semi private chats. For most of my friends, they use chat groups exclusively. The only times they post on Facebook/Instagram publicly is when they need to brag about some semi-big event.

Instagram Stories are popular tho. They seem to have mostly replaced the old casual personal posting.

Discord also seems to be growing rapidly.

Honestly, how many of those can someone juggle a day? I'd struggle with two yet still more show up every year. It's not big in the US, I heard, but for me it's 90% WhatsApp. MySpace used to be huge, then facebook came along. I feel like Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter are slowly replacing facebook. And what makes any of them so perfect to suggest they're the last in line?

"we compared app data from Q1 2015 to Q1 2016"

this data is 2-3 years old now.

For me FB has become too samey.

- News: the same articles everyone is posting everywhere. Plus nutter conspiracy theorists educating us all about why the earth is flat / we never went to the moon / we should embrace communism/capitalism on completely unrelated threads.

- Friends: same people going on about the same things. One guy has a special hatred for Trump that he vents every day. Another guy talks about local affairs for his little island community. Both people I know IRL, but online they become cartoons.

- Groups: same messages over and over, with news mixed in. Sports team group news is a filter for your team. So I see all the transfers for my team, and all the game updates and comments from the fans. Pretty low quality, as in "anyone know this guy we're buying? Yeah, he's a midfielder". And permanently "We should fire the coach / He's the best coach ever".

- Baby pics / anecdotes. These are great, but take about 5 seconds to consume and like.

Main problem is that Facebook is too public in that most friends are actually acquaintances. People are less likely to share intimate updates with acquaintances and instead will only post generic neutral, non-controversial things which dont’t drive deep engagement.

basically. guess thats what the whole g+ circles thing was, and im sure fb can do too now, but if i have to spend basically any effort thinking about who's going to see it I'm just not gonna post. (or worry about who won't see it because of the black-box algorithm)

I'm prob not the target market anyway, as im paranoid and social media and human interaction in general is strange and frightening to me, but that's a major part of the reason i never post anything.

IMO Google+ circles were a step in the right direction, but Google shot themselves in the foot with their "one real-name account to rule them all" bullshit.

People don't just want to separate their "lists of other people", people also act a different role in different contexts.

In other words, humans want to maintain different identities too. That doesn't always mean pseudonyms, but the single human behind "Bob from the Accounting Department" probably wants to use a completely different set of contact-information and profile-pictures when he's in the role of "Bob, Death Metal Biker" or "Bob, Single Parent Looking For Love."

When Google forced the real name bullshit on Youtube and Places reviews, I knew I had it enough. I just wanted to leave a stupid, lighthearted comment on a video talking about a socially taboo topic, and I can't. I just wanted to leave an honest negative review on a business that fucked me over, and I can't.

biker139 is different than John M Businessman. I don't want people reading that review to know I'm John.

Surely this has something to do with the sheer number of users they have, right? There's only like 8 billion people on Earth and Facebook has 2 billion monthly active users. If you take away 1.5 billion people in China who can't/don't use Facebook, this means that it has 2 billion out of like ~6.5 billion possible users. And many of those people are either children (<13 years old), don't have reliable access to internet, and/or have no use for social media. So it really doesn't seem that bad to me (unless I'm missing something important).

I have a company page/account where I daily automatically post updates. I guess that counts into this number.

Pages are not counted as a user in their DAU counts.

Sure, but there is a user who is the admin for the page. This "admin" is entirely a bot.

You have a bot that logs in as a regular user? I’d be surprised if that is common, there are APIs for automation that wouldn’t count against DAU. And you would run the risk of getting your admin account blocked.

I think this is spot on.. but you've actually understated FB's market penetration, because only 1/2 of the world population is on the internet.. as of 2016: 3.4B. 750m of those are in China.. so 2.7B. (of course it'll be a bit higher than this, because it has certainly grown somewhat since 2016.)

And from that, now you can exclude children, reliable access, and people who dont want to use it, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

Who and why uses Facebook today anyway? All my friends use messenger apps like WhatsApp or Telegram to communicate to people they know in real life, sites like Reddit and HN to communicate to random crowd sharing their interests and Instagram to share pictures they take. I personally feel like Facebook is a concept fading into the past.

UPDATE: The only thing I used to use Facebook for a couple of years ago when I had more spare time was finding events to attend for fun. Does anybody know a good alternative? There probably is a special app just for this. Another useful feature of Facebook seems to be the groups directory: there are groups in WhatsApp and Telegram but they are harder to find - isn't there a project building a directory of them already?

I wonder what will happen to the Facebook the company as this progresses. It would be quite funny if the main product of Facebook becomes Instagram -- and the original product fades.

One thing we might be discounting though is other nations. (I assume you live in N.A.) I don't know how widespread Facebook is elsewhere. It could be that Facebook gives up on N.A. market and let Insta handles their interest there and focus itself on emerging markets.

A probable role Facebook may take in future is providing digital "passport" kind of identity. The Chinese Facebook clone is doing it already and the Russian Facebook clone does too though in much smaller degree.

I live in Europe, not N.A. We use messengers a lot here and many people still use Facebook. I've heard that people use SMS and MMS much more actively in the USA (I have never used MMS and have stopped using SMS years ago).

That's what we call "texting", but very often texting isn't done using SMS. With the iOS market share hovering slightly below 50% in the US, it's iMessage that is the main messenger, at least where I live. The iOS Messages app seamlessly switches over to SMS when the receiver doesn't have iMessage - and shows a visual distinction - but in my case, that's a minority of the people I text with.

I don't use Whatsapp nor was I ever invited by someone to use it, but I heard it's basically the iMessage equivalent in the EU and in other places where the iOS market share is lower.

I quit Facebook immediately after it became a platform for political wars.

Don't know any of my friends who use it actively, and the only time or reason why I log into Facebook is when I have to talk to people who are only on Facebook.

If I were Facebook I would be seriously afraid at this point. The whole thing could be the next Aol or Yahoo. Things go down the drain pretty quickly in products like this.

The biggest change can be noticed, if young people don't create new accounts there. And I think we have already arrived at that part.

My preference would be to never see anything, ever, that was shared more than say 50 times. As soon as something is “viral” It’s usually just a timekill. It’s not relevant to me.

So a simple tweak to the news feed would be to just stop showing me what my friends “like” or “re-share”. Just show me what they say, or post or show directly. That’s it.

For a really dramatic change: remove the ability to pass on content alltogether.

This is what I want from a service like facebook - posts my friends, groups, and pages explicitly post, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, and nothing else. No "John commented on this" or "Melanie liked that". No algorithms. No out-of-order, unless I ask for it.

(If 10 friends all reshare the same post, sure, collapse it into one.)

But, of course, if they do that, they make it too easy for people to see posts they want without pages they follow paying for ads. So they put in an "algorithm" and say they're "making the news feed more personal".

If your content stream includes every post your friends make, every comment they add, every post they like, every event they're interested in or join in on and it was sorted chronologically then you would never be able to scroll past the immediate present. It would just constantly generate new content as quickly as you can scroll.

I'm glad they sort by relevance and time is just one small factor in relevance.

True, but what are the other relevance factors? It's a black box, and basically ends up being "whatever Facebook deems to be the most profitable content to show you".

I am effectively banned from facebook.

I was on the platform a few years ago, but deleted my account and didn't miss it at all. Then, a couple months ago, I became interested in a new Chinese amateur radio transceiver, and the best source of English information was through a Facebook group of a couple hundred owners. So naturally, I joined facebook, joined the group, and had several weeks of a really enjoyable experience. I didn't add any friends or pictures or anything like that; I had no interest in really using Facebook with people I knew in real life, and as a result my newsfeed was an endless list of really great discussions about amateur satellites, straight key century club, Xiegu transceivers, etc. I think what set it apart from something like Reddit is the civility that comes when you make hams post with their real name.

Then, all of a sudden, "You Can't Log In Right Now". I was actually forced to upload an image of my face to get back into the site. This was a sort of funny thing to ask, because I didn't have any images of myself on the site up to that point-- so how are they supposed to know what I look like, anyway? (I'm being sarcastic here, I'm sure that Facebook has my face profiled in their databases somewhere.) So I uploaded my photo, a handful of days went by, and then I was allowed back in, and again started using Facebook as an awesome discussion platform full of meaningful interactions with people that shared a common interest with me.

A couple weeks go by, and yet again, "You Can't Log In Right Now". I upload my face again, but this time I've never been unbanned. I think it's been this way for over a month now. I still get email notifications with subject lines like, "See what people are talking about in your group AMSAT North America", but when I click "Read Post", I'm not able to view the content. (I also can't unsubscribe from the emails, as editing email settings is hidden behind a login prompt, which I am obviously not able to get through. I also can't file a bug report about the lack of ability to unsubscribe... because that, too, is hidden behind a login prompt.)

It's just so incredibly ironic that as soon as I started using facebook for content I was interested in, instead of seeing political posts from people I went to middle school with, I get permabanned on suspicion of being a fake account.

Geeze. For some reason I never bothered to make a Facebook account, and as time went by I bothered even less so this might be less shocking to the seasoned, but to me that sounds absolutely horrendous.

What legitimate reason (in my interest) would Facebook have in me uploading a picture? It's not a transaction where I need to prove identity. They aren't a government issuing ID's (yet). So no fucking way! And why would anyone? I don't get it.

This is a chance before the U.S mid-terms for them to prove to the public they've learned from their mistakes..

1). prevent the spread of fake news.. they need a better solution than the user-tagging bs if an article is valid or not. there was a scientologist that had an account that wasn't active for 5+ years, that started posting how puerto rico wasn't that bad when the storm first hit. why is this account not being banned or suspended when people are reporting it and they're reposting pictures from texas claiming it to be all good.

2). prevent outside interference with elections. the first baby step is if they're accepting rubles for political ads targetted at americans, ban it. simple as that. then it'll get more complex and interesting handling proxies doing the dirty deed. the hearing w/ congress was pathetic and makes fb even more untrustworthy.

3). ban fake accounts / tie in a real human behind the account. 100000 fake users means a lot less to me if i'm an advertiser than 10 real people.

even though pretty much everyone i know is on facebook, i'm itching for another platform with better integrity to jump ship to.

> 3). ban fake accounts / tie in a real human behind the account. 100000 fake users means a lot less to me if i'm an advertiser than 10 real people.

so i posted this in another thread in response to twitter, and it got kind of drowned out but with regards to authoritative/oppressive governments subpoenaing facebook to get a user's identity for voicing an opinion that isn't in line with the regime's. how do you solve this while giving every account an identity? anonymity on facebook/twitter seems to be one way to practice freedom of speech in countries where there isn't really any

In German there's a term called Eierlegende wollmilchsau. A wool pig that gives milk and lays eggs.

A reason that term exists is because there's a tendency for Germans to wait to commit to, or outright dismiss choices because they do not meet ALL of a list of requirements.

I bring it up because I do not believe that it is possible to have an identity and anonymity concurrently while the service achieves all of its goals.

Either the service caters to anonymity, or it caters to identity. Trying to sit on the fence too long results in more specialized services dividing the customer base.

i don't disagree. but what's more important? personally i'd vote on people being able to be heard. however, those messages are diluted or hidden if massive amounts of bots are spamming something else

Anonymity and bots are an interesting problem. As users become more anonymous, by creating interest-specific accounts, changing their posting behavior, and use proxies, they converge on the behavior of bots trying to masquerade as humans.

Total anonymity means total freedom of speech and total lack of trust in speech.

Facebook needs to find it's balance between anonymity that increases activity while eliminating trust, and strong trusted identities that limit activity based on social pressures.

I think "fake accounts" is definitely a problem ... however, don't think it's the true issue. They should take a note from the financial industry, and self-impose more stringent KYC and content regulations for those posting political ads.

I feel like your post is very US-centric and that is a big part of the misunderstanding.

Facebook should not be so focused on one country. And they are not: some of the problems were visible for the Brexit and the subsequent parliamentary vote in the UK; they have already addressed some issues with recent the French and the German elections. There certainly are many more elections before November, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_electoral_calendar_20... and there was a handful of Special ones the US.

Facebook leadership used to be too US-Centric and I was very happy to see during the US Congressional hearing that it had changed (their counsel was trying to explain but failed). The reason it matters is that this means that they cannot a custom-build solution that assumes that the issue is:

- Fake News: the issue is, depending on who you ask, raise in inequality, more international migrations, the rise of populism, a systemic challenge to the Nation-State; the problems go from raising tension between political groups and non-constructive political speech; normalisation of racism; the expansion of satire beyond recognition; the two-step of outrageous statements, partial correction and dog-whistling; acceleration of political news cycle; leverage of non-factual or non-representative statements for political inflammation; etc. The over-simplification or confusing all that into that lumpy bag of a concept that is “Fake News” is highly problematic, even if you focus on one country.

- preventing outside interference: that’s actually a lot easier without so much corporate money: massive ad campaigns, or ads-only approach is mainly a US problem; creating puppet accounts and using them to discredit a group, or pouring more oil on the fire is more the type of vector we have seen overall. That is generally done training local volunteers as was seen in France, or apparently almost entirely internal influence, as was seen in Germany.

- ban fake accounts: Facebook has been fighting fake account forever, so yeah, this is clearly a problem; but the issue is that there is no clear definition of fake. To simplify greatly, you have:

1. people who use a modified version of their name (no one cares);

2. people who have two accounts (justifiable but made harder by 1.);

3. people who do 2.) to have a raging account where they exposer views on race, gender and religion that their friends and relatives would not accept (certainly some cases where that can be justified, like closeted gays);

4. people who do 3.) whose other account is deeply hateful, threatening or just plain dickish (we are getting close to banning territory);

5. people like 4. whose other account was blocked or banned so they set up a new one to keep on talking about how smart Hitler was (see where this is getting?) and how they are going to act on his ideas;

6. people like 5. but who know how to code and preventively create more accounts because they expect the first dozen they created to be blocked soon;

7. people who are better developers than 6. and offer to help them creating many realistic-sounding people who like to comment about the upsides of Slavery, below advertising for the NYTimes;

8. people who learned how to do 7. but figured out you could make money off it — of more simply, who went straight to that step.

And for 9. people who figured out you get more, less scrupulous friends faster if you use picture set scraped from porn sites.

The direct advertising loss from fake accounts is presumably massive; the loss of targeting relevance probably much bigger; the loss of trust and long-term profit orders of magnitude bigger -- so you are right to think this matters to Facebook, but for the right reasons. It’s just not simple, not exclusively politics and certainly not a problem that should be though as US-vs.-Russia. It’s much more complex.

I mean, Facebook even has to consider how to protect the integrity of the Russian election later this year. OK, that was a joke.

> I mean, Facebook even has to consider how to protect the integrity of the Russian election later this year. OK, that was a joke.

The day will come during the election, when Putin accuses Facebook of anti-Putin fake news

Fortunately for Putin, the majority of people use VK in Russia, not Facebook. :)

Still might complain about it mind you (has a userbase, but its half as big as VK..)

I would actually be surprised: Putin has the redeeming quality of autocrats, he doesn’t complain about trivial things. He certainly instruments threats, made-up or otherwise, and he might occasionally get people excited over confusing displays of nationalism, like that foreign food strike last year, but the whole message around it was grave.

Saying that a freckled teenager in California can challenge his popularity by writing nonsense on the internet… it’s unbecoming.

I don’t think anyone really cares about societal impact. IMO, Facebook is a faddish activity that many people have turned into a defacto obligation.

People are getting Facebook fatigue. In my social circle, Facebook use seems to have switched to Instagram.

Personally, I check on it once a week now to keep up with a few friends who I don’t see anymore. It’s an effort, because Facebook refuses to show me what I want to see, and I need to specifically search for people.

I'm seeing some of that Instagram move as well. Having a service that's more about what's happening in people's lives is better than the mess that's facebook.

From the analyst covering "They’ve warned about a decline in one of the basic fundamental financial drivers." which was "changes in the fourth quarter that cut the number of viral videos in people’s news feeds. Those tweaks, and others, have already reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day, he noted."

I am going to assume that FB is smart enough to have figured out how to trim the 50m hour engagement # from an ad cohort that is likely not that profitable or important.

Because guess what - the brand advertisers that elevate overall CPM already don't want to be in your shitty viral cat video, or your stupid publishers-gaming-FB with autogenerated content.

I would go a step further and predict that within this quarter we see an internal FB study for advertisers suggesting that their algorithm that trimmed that 50m in hours has actually IMPROVED the value of the advertising by a commiserate level.

Well the average price per Facebook ad rose 43% in Q4 2017 (and only 3% in Q4 2016): https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-earnings-stock-to...

That increase more than offsets the decline in the amount of time users spent on Facebook. So it looks like the value of advertising has improved.

Respect for journalism is as much about avoiding headlines like this that sneakily imply some sort of baseless causation via - in this case - the word "After" as it is about bad science in Fox News coverage of global warming.

When we let poor journalism like this headline go uncontested we erode public trust.

Headlines are why I rarely read online news articles anymore, and typically just view the comment sections, either here on HN, or Slashdot, etc. It never used to be this bad. One would think that with public trust in the media at an all time low, they would make an effort to be less sneaky and clickbaity, at the very least with their headlines, but....... nope.

> public trust in the media at an all time low

Is that a fact or opinion? Likely they're seeing ad-revenue increasing with the clickbait titles, giving them a data-driven reason to pursue this (short-sighted) strategy. Long-term, they may lose their readership once they catch on.

Looks like it hit the absolute bottom in 2016 [0], with a slight uptick in 2017 according to some [1][2], but still, overall, according to various studies it's been at an all-time low during these last couple of years.

[0] http://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-medi...

[1] https://www.poynter.org/news/poynter-releases-new-study-exam...

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/40503393/americans-are-more-trus...

The only people I know that still use Facebook are people over 50 years old, and to them it is crack cocaine that consumes their whole life. I think not growing up with things like this their whole life, they have been ill prepared for it when it breaches their world.

That pretty much sums it up for me too.

It seems like nobody at Facebook is allowed to play the long game.

In the long game, quality wins. In the long game, an organization that puts quality of information at top priority persists and becomes a long-lived resource for civilization.

Like Google has become a persistent Web search resource, setting aside its short-lived ancillary forays into more clickable, trivial services.

So long as Facebook prioritizes viral clickbait, so long will it be in danger of collapse, irrelevance, and extinction. That's ok with me.

Except their moves and announcements in recent weeks suggest that they're in fact prioritizing higher quality content e.g. local news (https://www.axios.com/facebook-to-prioritize-local-news-in-n...)

Identifying "quality" content algorithmically seems like a hard problem to me. If Facebook wanted to play the long game by promoting high quality content in the feed, how would you propose they identify it in order to promote it?

    if content.is_quality():
        content.promote()
    else:
        content.demote()

Four lines, Facebook...

Your question is excellent and gets to the heart of the matter.

How could Facebook, in a neutral way, cull crap and promote quality?

I wish I had robust answers. All I have at the moment is opinions.

• Algorithmic methods can't deliver near term solutions. Algorithms embody the biases of their human coders. I doubt we currently know how to algorithmically evaluate inputs for quality in the Facebook or "fake news" context. We need more time and effort to learn how to do this.

• Promoting quality currently requires humans, who are expensive. If Facebook really prioritizes feed quality, we'll see serious hiring. If we don't, then evidence of commitment is lacking.

• I believe (no proof to offer, mainly intuition) quality can eventually be algorithmically determined, but it's a hard problem. It will take years, lots of smart people and $ to figure out how to make it work at scale.

• I don't think Facebook's announced path, which is to solicit those who are arguably more susceptible to "fake news" to be arbitrators of quality, will succeed.

Facebook, like others, is caught between maximizing 90 day quarterly profits and becoming a persistent human resource. I don't envy Zuckerberg at all. I hope he can do the right thing.

We'll see.

I feel they have crossed several lines in their constant push for engagement, to the point where, previously, a notification from Facebook was generally worth my time (and directly related to an action a friend has taken), whereas now, most of the notifications are irrelevant, effectively short term boosting engagement at the cost of mid/long term engagement drop. I have flat out disabled notifications from Facebook at this point.

I deleted the Facebook app on my phone a few months ago and only use it for messenger. My life has been improved so much.

I used to feel this way until I started telling FB to hide or stop certain notifications. Now, most all my notifications are useful.

I think with all the high profile hyperpoliticization of who and what gets into the Facebook feed of the average person, the idea that Facebook is a private space where friends create their own private worlds together has been destroyed. Now it's just another public space like Twitter and that essentially makes people not want to post personal stuff on it. This has also led to the opening in the market that Snapchat filled and a bit of a revival of twitter.

Yes, like Twitter, but the late night infomercials version of Twitter where some guy is trying to sell you miracle tanning cream.

I wonder if the cause really is the news feed. What if it was the first decline ever and then they made some quick algorithm changes.

Then they went public with it, before releasing the numbers

This is the most likely explanation.

Based on what?

Engagement numbers are averaged across Q4 2017, I assume. Zuck announced the news feed algorithm changes in mid-January 2018. Now, they were likely A/B testing it for part of the past quarter, but it seems quite likely that these changes were not 100% live for all of North America for the entirety of the past quarter.

Therefore, speculatively, engagement in Q4 was likely flat or declining across NA already. What is more uncertain is the order of operations here. Did they publicly announce these changes in advance of the earnings report to get ahead of bad numbers?

The title makes it seem like the growth slowed after the questions on societal impact were raised. I think the growth stalled years ago and has been declining even before the questions were raised.

If that was the case, FB has been lying on every single earnings release since they went public, which seems unlikely.

The updated title is much better! Thanks.

> seems unlikely

I can't imagine why anyone would lie when they stand to make billions of dollars from it. What an odd idea.

That aside, there is a gray area between lies and not really digging into truths that you don't want to know the answer to, like how many of your accounts are actually fake.

Maybe it's slowing because they hit over 1.4B people? I doubt people are concerned about societal impact, regardless of what the media would love you to believe.

As an aside here, I would be cautious of attributing declining growth on Facebook to pretty much anything. They are the first company in the history of our species to take market saturation to such extremes. They have more than 2 billion active monthly users, and growing.

The issue they have is that there are only 3-4 billion internet users in the entire world. Their growth is predictably going to hit an asymptote at some point in the near future - they are simply running out of people.

That also poses an interesting issue from a company perspective. We still live in a world where endless growth is expected. But with a ad-driven service the only way to make more money is to get users to view/click and otherwise interact with even more ads, or to otherwise increase the efficiency of ads. And that in general achieves little other creating a worse user experience, no matter how clever the packaging and delivery.

Since the newsfeed changes I noticed that I spent a bit more time on my FB feed. Normally I would see one of those idiotic posts, and wonder WTF was I doing on the site. Now I actually see stuff from friends (pics and stories), and I linger a bit more to see what's going on. Clearly I'm not the real FB demographic though.

I'm with you. I love the changes they did to the newsfeed, because now I'm seeing way less viral shit, and way more actual interesting posts and updates by my friends. And since everyone gets the same interesting content promoted to them, there's also more comments on that content, making it better.

Love it, love it, love it.

Hope Google shares latest YouTube hours tomorrow and we can compare. Last quarter Google shared

"As I mentioned in the last earnings call, YouTube now has over 1.5 billion users. On average, these users spend 60 minutes a day on mobile. "

Which I guess means 1.5 billion hours a day of YT use daily. Be interesting to compare to FB.

I would shorten this to 'Facebook User Growth Slows'

Instead of Facebook flailing about trying to come up with the best news feed algorithm to please everyone they should just give the consumer a choice. Imagine an "algorithm store" that lets developers build and publish ranking algorithms that users can buy and use.

That's won't happen. The mistake you're making is assuming that Facebook wants to "please everyone." It doesn't. It only cares about pleasing itself, and it does that through manipulating the algorithm to attempt to get its users to do what it wants.

Giving up control of the algorithm means giving up control of its user-products, and it's not going to do that.

I wonder if we as humans at some future point would evolve to understand and consume only sane and specialized content based on lessons of Facebook? History and behavioral psychology tells us people don't learn from the past just because they simply can't recall it.

BUT perhaps what might work, and only hope, is a spectacular fall of this kind of interaction model(and the business) so that no one touches it with a 10 ft pole for some time. Like the terrible Nazi stuff of WWII.

Hopes of healthy competition in the industry and the democratization of quality content in a way that precludes brand loyalty, will probably never happen as long as Facebook lives. It will just acquire and buy its way to monopolize everything.

From the article: "Yes, the time spent on Facebook in the quarter declined by 5 percent, but it was by Facebook’s design, executives said, in order to promote a higher quality experience. Yes, there was a dip in North American user numbers for the first time ever, but only because Facebook is already so dominant in the region.”

Can someone explain why a 'higher quality experience' didn't lead to more active monthly users in North America? I would have thought there were people who hadn't checked out Facebook for a few months, but now start using it more regularly.

Good.

The less people use Facebook, the better and healthier society becomes.

I think both time on site and engagement are narrow metrics to judge a site's usefulness and effectiveness.

Reduced engagement on Facebook is probably a good thing for society, but it could arguably mean it's also achieving it's goals as a social platform more succinctly.

As an advert stream of course, that's bad. But I suspect an amount of truth in Zuckerberg's somewhat altruistic new vision.

> "We made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people's time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day."

Weren't the changes to the news feed just announced? This sounds like spin. They planned all along for people to stop using our service. Right.

1- charge advertisers more, for less. Pay to get back what you had.

2- sink the fb fangs deeper into users by promoting 'engagement' content i.e. stuff with better hooks.

3- market the increase in time spend on site, Q418 to the very advertisers.

Brand cryptonite. He holds the poison and the medicine. Depending on public sentiment they dish out the doses of each accordingly.

It feels like Facebook started out as Geocities and has ended up as your cranky aunts forwarded chain e-mail.

Okay, that ship is sinking. Time to burn it; Facebook has long outlived the usual online social network lifetime. What's the next one we jump to this time?

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3240

> Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that those changes have already reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day.

Or, to put this another way, people have saved 50 million hours that they formerly spent scrolling past stupid videos and memes they'd already seen on Reddit.

It feels like they want to move towards being more "useful", a la WeChat:

http://blog.ycombinator.com/lessons-from-wechat/

There are like 3 of my friends who I like and want to hear things from, but they post about 10x per day. Facebook has decided that because of this volume ALL I WANT TO SEE IS THESE 3 FRIENDS' POSTS. It's irritating. I wish I could fall back on Twitter to show me everything, but now between "tweets you may have missed" and randomly showing me posts (4 or 5 times) that other people have liked, it's feeling more and more like Facebook, just with different people.

Encourage more personal photos. And ban links from Newsfeed. It's really that simple.

The stock has already recovered and is above $190 now (up 3.6% vs. close).

Will probably hit $200 tomorrow

Why is this article so certain this related to fake news correction?

when you already have a large percentage of the online user base you are going to have to 1) wait for that underlying user base to grow 2) offer something new to capture people you dont have with your current product

They have reached the point where its a lot easier to lose someone then gain someone. I dont think its societal impact ... its people getting older and dropping off while at the same time its really hard to replenish that use base when already have so many of the young people already on your site.

So maybe they need to understand user rentention vs aging , I think that would be a place to look, societal impact ... no one uses or drops a product becuase of societal impact.

How many diamonds and how many electronics or clothes do we use that have a dubious labor practices. Its the product quality that speaks loudest.

What could they possibly be doing with 25,000 staff? That is insane.

Building the thing called Facebook, to be sure, but also building Oculus VR, Onavo (data collection company), WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, as well as their open source stuff like React, Flux, Relay, and myriad other JS/Haskell/OCaml/C++ projects, and don't forget the people building out Internet.org and content for Facebook Watch.

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