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Comment by amirathi | Hacker News Reader

There's a business angle to the newsfeed that's not being talked at all. Your news feed being "algorithmically controlled" is a huge advantage to the platform from advertising perspective. Facebook at this point has liberty to show me a promoted page because one of my 700 friends liked it at some point of time. If none of my friends has liked it then it's promoted as "Popular across Facebook".

I believe promoted tweets work in a similar way. If a platform provides any sort of control over newsfeed it looses the leverage to show you what it wants you to see.

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Which is exactly why Facebook and Twitter have "blurrified" your content by making it have no verifiable order by default ("top posts" meaning "totally arbitrary order").

This, as you highlight, probably brings in the big bucks. This makes me think Google had something similar in mind when they "personalized" the search results (a wildly unpopular move), going to show that when you are the product, there may be no UX too unpleasant to sink to.

The upside of this is that these incremental UX sacrifices leave the market open for an alternative, either of the same ad-driven kind or, hopefully, of the more sustainable kind.

Hey, a man can dream.

I think the - actually usable UI as opposed to the dumbified abortion most of the big sites have - train is long gone.

A usable UI (for non-niche sites) is one of those things you can get nostalgic about with "back in my day...". It's not coming back as long as advertisers pay for things.

I fail to see how the ad driven model isn't sustainable. If anything a non ad driven model is less likely to be sustainable. I doubt what Facebook is doing is driving away that many users.

The ad-driven model will show as many ads as possible, while making the user experience just barely tolerable. Usually, they forget about remaining tolerable -- see popups, animated GIFs, Flash ads, etc. -- and get slapped down by technology that actually serves the user. See also the VCR, which let people record TV shows and fast-forward through the ads. Ad-driven media will always cannibalize itself.

Indeed, but the opportunity of that control also carries the potential for ruin. Skew the algorithm for maximum profit and the result is less long-term revenue thanks to a reduction in usefulness to the user, which leads to either inattention or abandonment... no eyes, no ads.

Providing user control (even limited) over the newsfeed actually increases leverage with regards to long-term revenue, since it's an expression of user intent... which is a clear datum for targeting. What it dampens is the kind of "run of site" or "simple demographic" advertising that sites often accept because it's "found money!" Except that in the long-term it isn't, due to inattention/abandonment problem mentioned earlier.

How so? They can give you control and still insert ad cards with any targeting they want.

Banner blindness and ad blockers mean you’re more likely to see something shared by a friend than an ad.

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