Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

She may be right.

Facebook has a lot of problems on its plate right now, but one of the worst trends has been the poorly thought out march to video. It came from Zuckerberg (1 and 2) and was repeated by senior FB executives, and then became a mantra for publishers. Many made large investments in video programming for Facebook, only to find the money isn't there and Facebook later decided to demote publisher content (3 and 4).

This is not just large media companies that got burned, I know some smaller producers who believed the "five years the feed will be all video" baloney and shifted their efforts accordingly. Some were doing really important work, too, around causes or local news. What a waste.

Meanwhile, it seems that overall video consumption in Facebook is declining, and it's the one percent that get the most engagement, regardless of who the publisher is (5).

I personally would not mind if Facebook turned back the clock 10 years, when most conversations seemed to be personal and text-based, and the truckloads of memes, ads, gaming achievements, real and fake news, and videos of cats playing the piano had yet to be shoved down Facebook's maw and into our feeds. Old-school text discussions seem to work for HN, why can't it work for Facebook?

1. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-faceb...

2. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/facebook-shares-up-re...

3. https://www.recode.net/2017/1/17/14269406/facebook-live-vide...

4. https://digiday.com/media/digiday-research-publishers-making...

5. https://www.wochit.com/blog/social-video-performance-index-2...

> Old-school text discussions seem to work for HN, why can't it work for Facebook?

People don't really read in the same way as you might have previously expected. ("Reading a short blurb or a tweet" is not the same thing.) Can't or don't want to, I don't know, but they don't. You see the edges of it here, too--tl;drs on HN posts, sometimes, that are less than a screenful of text. And people think you're "spending a lot of effort" when you bang out a post about as long as yours is--and, sometimes, try to frame it as a bad thing.

I tend to think Thomas Pettitt has a point[1].

[1] - https://archives.cjr.org/the_audit/the_future_is_medieval.ph...

The facebook video playing experience is also getting "fixed" to death - getting more horrible with every change.

The ui is bad, the # clicks needed is growing, autoplay random videos vs playing what I actually want to watch[1], all of these issues are getting worse.

[1] If you scroll through a page, and click a video to play it, then keep scrolling, the video comes along with your scrolling. But once you want to watch another video, when you click on the new video in the stream, the old video stops but still stays on the screen frozen. there is some odd interaction between these 2 actions (I'm assuming controlled by javascript) and it's like the videos are fighting each other over what should be shown/played. It's really stupid - I can 100% predict the issue is because the teams working on these 2 features are not communicating with one another, and so are trying to optimize the user to "pay attention" to both things at once. This kind of engineering just turns me off so much that 90% of the time I close facebook and go find the video on youtube and watch it there.

Saving to my feed for later use. Thanks

You can use the safe, free and top rated FB Purity browser add-on to get Facebook back to how it used to be (without ads,memes, images, videos, game posts, etc etc : http://fbpurity.com

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