Removing Trending From Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Removing Trending From Facebook

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114 pointschampagnepapi104 comments

Those “We apologize for fake news” ads on TV and the subway from Facebook seem really weird to me. Like FB thinks that the reason their numbers are down is because people are mad about them and some ads saying “we’re sorry” will fix it. I think Facebook has been supplanted by a variety of better tools, some of which they themselves created, and it’s now going to be a long term stagnation and decline

Those ads seem to indicate to me that things are much worse, traffic wise, than it seems from the outside. Moreover, IMO there is a danger of Streisand effect for users who may be using FB despite everything..

As someone who left Facebook awhile ago mostly because life got busy, those ads seem to solidify an (alternative?) narrative of why I left rather than urge me to come back.

Fake News / Facebook's impact on the 2016 election is only part of why I avoid it now. I also believe the site caused / causes instagrammification of people's lives. Which is sort of like Fake News of personality or false lifestyle chasing meaningless likes.

I believe other institutions have caused people to live out false lives prior to Facebook as well. But I can actually damage facebook by _not_ posting content and not sharing my life there. I don't even have to encourage others not to. I just have to avoid resolving the domain.

I don't think likes are meaningless — they tap into a very primal need for social status and peer approval. It's a stupid game, but like many other stupid games, it's effective!

I grant you that, it is effective at getting page views and ad revenue.

They miss out on the social status a dislike can give. To be against something is easier for many then to be for something.

That too. I saw the ad for the first time yesterday during the Warriors game, as we don’t watch live TV, only stream. Two observations:

1) as you said there was nothing in that ad that would make me come back, rather if I had not already been aware of it I would have searched about it to learn - the Streisand effect.

2) there was another similar ad, from another company, about breaking trust, Wells Fargo bank -> nuff said.

Uber is running the same sort of ads, featuring the new CEO talking about doing right by customers

Of course they are. And we knew engagement dropped significantly last year before the Cambridge Analytica happened. I found it weird how so many people still believed Zuckerberg when he said the scandal hardly affected them. As if Zuckerberg would never try to be misleading with the facts.

I had not previously seen theses ads you describe, but I found a photo of one here: https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/99893040218522009...

I went to see Upgrade last night and they played some facebook apology tour ADVERTISEMENT (because that's what it is) before the movie. Just ridiculous... "we care about your privacy"... yea, not really.

I really hated that trailer while waiting to see Deadpool 2. Sad when I recognize his voice and knew where it was headed. The guy is creepy even when we can't see him.

What numbers are down? lol.

Their numbers with anyone under 20. Their pipeline is dead, the user base has peaked and will decline.

While I am still technically a user my engagement has drastically gone down due to the excessive "trending" and "suggested" post bullshit

God forbid they manage to get their hands on other apps to capture that market... oh wait. People have been predicting the death of facebook for the past decade. It does tend to get old after a while.

None. They're talking out of their ass. The best argument anyone can come up with is that teens don't use it as much, and yet they're very happily using Instagram...

they don’t apologize, the ads say “fake news is not your friend”

Are there numbers down? Stocks up 20%-ish since the deleteFacebook movement.

Hmm, curious too. Are the numbers down?

I quit facebook because they kept showing peoples links I didnt care about.

It just happened to be around the same time as all of the drama.

I just dont like it anymore. Bring me back to when friends had statuses rather than links.

DAUs can be down while revenue per user is up, user data ingress (eg: users sharing/liking posts) and revenue ingress move in parallel but not in lockstep.

Instagram is likely driving much of their revenue growth.

Yup pretty sure instagram will produce the next president. FB produced Obama (thanks to Obama every politician on the planet got onto social media). Twitter produced Trump. And since attention spans to read text have gone down the tube, the Russians will have to start honing their fake image skills. At the end of the day, all I want to see after Kim K gets elected, is Zuck back at a hearing explaining how fake images on Instagram are a thing nobody paid attention too cause why would we when it's doing so many positive things and keeping the company afloat.

I'd assume ads like that in SF are aimed at developers and general tech talent. Facebook bulkheaded themselves from shifting tastes in social media by buying insta and whatsapp but they've got to be concerned at their brand being toxic for hiring. It's death by a thousand cuts.

Those ads area in Chicago too.

If they were aimed at devs and tech ppl, why is it phrased in grandparent-friendly terms? This isn't just a True Scotsman, it takes money and time to refine their message into something so plain and comprehendable by everybody.

I left because I got tired of getting into meaningless spats with my conservative friends. Particularly when the same conversation in person would almost always provide to be terrifically interesting. Pre-election, a lot of what they posted was garbage content. Post-election, everyone appears to be posting garbage.

TL; DR Terrible easy-to-share content on Facebook motivated my friends and I to switch to iMessage groups.

The thing that drove me away from Facebook is not fake news, but that there is news (and other viral content) at all, fake or not. 90% of my feed is content about people and events I have no connection to or care for. I thought to whole point of FB was to connect with people you know.

For me it was the fact that the spammy hyperactive friends were prominently featured, whereas knowledgeable silent types that posted once in a while were completely removed from the feed. It should be exactly the other way round.

The feed thing is pretty easy to fix. You just have to tell Facebook you don't want to see posts like that (three dot menu). I did that a while back and don't get any memes or shared links on my feed anymore.

You would think so wouldn't you? But if you tell it you don't want one thing on your feed it is then supplemented by 10 others. It is virtually endless and there is no hiding all content that is not hand written by your friends and family.

I tried that. It builds up quickly again, because you can only disable individual sources. I have no interest in tending a viral garden. If Facebook wants to keep me around they'll instate a binary option to disable all 3rd party content.

Just unfollow everybody. Believe me you won't miss your feed.

That's my strategy also, can't recommend it enough.

I use a stylish plugin which masks the feed entirely. It was useful when I was having to use facebook often to promote a brand. Nowadays though it's eliminated the vast majority of facebook's use for me. 95% of my notifications are random 'so and so invited you to an event' and 'so and so posted in some group'. I realized that the fb feed had become a content aggregator, much like that other website we all know and love(?), but instead your f&f were the contributors. Blacking out the feed of inane content effectively made fb useless for me.

I did same thing. It makes you ignore newsfeed by default because it will only contain ads.

And slowly, I started to check facebook less often. Now I log onto facebook maybe once or twice a week. And that is only if I need to contact someone.

I've been hoping there would be a feature added to FB that would be simply "do not show any posts with links" or "do not show any posts sharing posts from another account." The number of things people post linking politics, news, random crap, memes, etc. is enough to almost drive me up a wall. I've tried putting lots of effort into curating by "hide things like this", etc, but inevitably more like it ends up in the feed. I really, really do not like the inability to disable that kind of content from the news feed showing up.

I would love that!

I go to Facebook for the cat and baby pictures, and knowing what people are actually doing in their lives. I want to see vacation pictures and people just living and enjoying themselves. I don't want to see re-shares from accounts who post polarizing shit that's mean to make everyone angry.

I'm not sure you even want this. Several studies have shown that it correlates with people being depressed about their lifes. Eg http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Of course correlation is not causality, but one should still be careful

I imagine that's where they get the vast majority of their ad-targeting signals, though. They can't show ads based on how much you like the random thoughts of an acquaintance of unknown proximity, they need us to signal our feelings toward fixed commercial targets and sources that can be analyzed reliably for sentiment.

It's a Faustian bargain.

Instagram has been really horrible about this. The app constantly suggests that I follow the same people even after I “x” their suggestion. I don’t need a random person I went to elementary school with and haven’t talked to since to show up in my feed everyday. I could block them but that seems like overkill.

yep. i saw one of these on the subway this morning.

i really do not appreciate corporate apology tours breaching my adblockers and reaching my everyday life. it's creepy. it's annoying as hell.

and it just convinces me that the only company that would go this far to profess their own innocence is guilty as hell.

the fact that the entire campaign focuses on "fake news" is a bit tone deaf.

people aren't even upset with facebook over the fake news so much as their business model of stealing user data then selling it.

best case scenario is they're toast in 10 years due to demographic decline.

Facebook, Uber, and Wells Fargo are playing "I'm sorry, we're trying to be better now" ads on TV. During one playoff game they all played in the same ad segment! Is this the first big wave of apology ads? I can't recall ever seeing ads like these before.

Domino's had an ad campaign that straight up apologized for having bad pizza. It's not a new idea.

All licensed media have to push government propaganda to not lose their rights. Good example are stories about cannabis or other drugs. Often these contain scaremongering, half truths or outright lies and questionable studies. If you want to see which outlet is trustworthy, just check how they report drug stories. I Facebook wants to get rid of fake news I wonder if they are going to ban most of mainstream media. Otherwise they'll still publish fake news, but tell people they now only show true stuff.

Not just there I saw one in the movie theatre when I went to see Deadpool 2. I don't want to see Facebook outside of going through the effort to type it into a browser. No thanks. This will be my last year or 2 on that "platform" anyway.

Every day or two I see something new about facebook on hackernews front page, and pretty much all the discussion boils down to "how awful facebook is", "oh, I quit it five years ago, I don't understand those people who still use it; oh, they sell our data to generate so much profit". Facebook has more than a billion active users, and is probably the most used social network in the world.

I wish hackernews users stop repeating how awful facebook is and rather provide some constructive criticism.

> provide some constructive criticism instead

Call your Congressman, Senator and State Attorney General and advocate for Facebook being broken up under antitrust law.

Broken up into what? I don't understand what meaningful monopoly Facebook has, especially when compared to Apple and Google.

Likes, interests, social relationships. Mostly every social data that is not provided by either pictures, internet history or contact list (which is about all Google and Apple have).

And I forgot geolocation but all of them have it anyway.

Is there a precedent for this? Is it a monopoly if there's nothing preventing you from starting your own competing product collecting the same data? Of course Facebook has a monopoly over Facebook's own product.

I don't know, but probably. Sometimes you had your information for shady reasons, and it would be almost impossible to recreate it. It is a bit what's happened with Facebook if you agree that the public lacked a sense of data-privacy until then, and got abused because of that.

I guess that's what GDPR is about too. We used to discard the value of digital data, mostly I guess because it could be generated and exchanged at the speed of light. When people realized they could make money out of it, giants sitting on huge databases of personal data suddenly became the norm. And they don't share unless you pay them (if it is even in their business model).

> Is it a monopoly if there's nothing preventing you from starting your own competing product collecting the same data?

First, remember Facebook has more than two billion active users. I don't think you can realistically compete against that.

Anyway, this is a thin line argument. In some countries, I've been told, Facebook acts almost like a hub for the internet. I guess you cannot either compete against the pipes themselves.

I think Monopoly regulations are not about punishing evil corporations. They exist because such situations restrain innovation (including from companies having the monopoly) and generally disrupt free market by having one player able to do price-fixing. Honestly, I think Facebook is being hit hard by that first part by totally failing to appeal to a younger audience while becoming the dreamland of advertising.

> First, remember Facebook has more than two billion active users. I don't think you can realistically compete against that.

What about Snapchat, Twitter, and LinkedIn?

Can you start your own product and compete against these ?

Also, technically, Twitter has 336 million active users per month [1], Snapchat has 200 million daily active users so we can easily double that amount for monthly usage [2], while LinkedIn claims 550 million users, but the monthly visits are about 100 millions [3]. Whereas Facebook is indeed 2.2 billion monthly active users [4].

All of these three huge players combined still only add up to less than a billion, notwithstanding people who are counted thrice by using each platform. I'm surprised how huge the gap remains.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/

[3] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/by-the-numbers-a-few...

[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

They should’ve obliged to allow for data portability with other social networks. There is no reason they can hold onto your friends list as a hostage. If you could move to other social networks and interop with their messenger and feed (how hard can that be anyway) they would be a lot less shitty in my view.

They used to allow far more data portability/access and that's exactly what got them in trouble (Cambridge Analytica).

No, what allowed Cambridge Analytica to do what it did was lax privacy controls that allowed your friends to give CA permission to your data when they registered for the personality test app.

That is not the same thing as data portability.

Split out WhatsApp and Instagram again, so we have some competition. Good for end users.

see, you snuck in an entirely legitimate and factually true criticism in there: they sell our data. let's unpack that for a minute so we can put this "facebook criticisms are unreasonable" meme into its grave.

there's nothing non-constructive about faulting their core business practice of stealing user data and selling it against their consent and often without their knowledge whatsoever. nobody would opt into any of it if there was not the carrot of a social network provided to people well before they understood the consequences.

criticizing FB in this way is a propositional statement: IF a company sells my data, THEN that company is undesirable for me to interact with. that is a 100% actionable piece of information for FB. there is no higher form of constructive criticism.

FB has all the information about what people don't like. it's their job to have the information.

they don't care what the users like, is the thing. they don't sell to you, you are their product.

so yeah, it isn't that the constructive criticism isn't out there. it's that they rely on not hearing it and not putting it into practice.

That’s not remotely “factually true”.

Please tell me, where can I buy this user data you speak of? Do you have a Facebook URL you can share where I can spend money to buy user data?

I’m especially interested in buying stolen user data from Facebook, too.

So please, if you can point me to somewhere that I can buy a giant zip file of stolen user data from Facebook, that’d be awesome.

I suspect what you actually mean is that I can run ads that are targeted based on aggregate user data, but that’s not even remotely the same as buying user data. It’s not even close. I can’t run ads against small audiences either, so if someone clicks on my ads I know some general stuff about them based on my campaign targeting, but I’m certainly not getting a data dump about them, there’s no way for me to identify them, etc.

And none of that targeting data is “stolen”, either. It’s all provided voluntarily by the user to Facebook in accordance with their privacy policy.

Your contention is probably that people would never provide that data if they knew it was going to be sold, so it’s basically “stolen”.

My response would be that: a) it isn’t sold, as we established, and b) people actually don’t care that much about this. If they did, they’d actually read the damn privacy policy they agreed to. But no one does, because they don’t really care enough to be bothered.

It's certainly true that Facebook sells access to user data! Though you're right there's no API. Facebook doesn't make it easy, the technical resourcefulness of a grey/black adtech company are required.

Much of this is non-obvious, even to web-savvy technical people.

> I suspect what you actually mean is that I can run ads that are targeted based on aggregate user data ... so if someone clicks on my ads I know some general stuff about them based on my campaign targeting

> but I’m certainly not getting a data dump about them, there’s no way for me to identify them, etc.

An effective way to personally identify someone who follows a link and loads a page (and nothing else) is through browser fingerprinting [0]. Fingerprinting is more powerful and ubiquitous than many on this site realize.

So, if a greyhat adtech company has data on a person's browser fingerprint history, then the Facebook targeting data can be _easily_ associated. Browser fingerprints should really, REALLY be considered as PII because that is how they are used.

The data is relatively limited, but invaluable for future ad-targeting off the Facebook platform. And, if there's already substantial information in the database on a person, the high quality Facebook data can be used for quality control for other data sources.

It's a tricky problem for Facebook to solve, but they have zero incentive to try. So they don't (that I've seen).

...and then there's the data they were selling via the developer interface. If anyone thinks Cambridge Analytica is the only example of this, I have a startup to sell them. One might notice that even Facebook is now branding the CA scandal as a 'breach' rather than 'system operating as expected', because of this criticism. Facebook may not have sold access directly, but by giving developers (and dark adtech companies) such unrestricted access to the data, Facebook pumped up their platform numbers which had a relative positive effect on the company's share price.

This has all been conscious on the part of Facebook leadership -- there's enough smart people at Facebook, you can bet some of them raised red flags over the years.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/now-s...

lol

a) yes, it is sold, sorry. refer to the other responding comment for a concise explanation.

b) irrelevant to my objection and muddying the waters of the issue. was there consent? no, not genuine consent. end of story, data was stolen.

> and rather provide some constructive criticism

Sure, from a more-or-less former-user perspective:

-Facebook should stop abusing the notification system. Try enabling it. It kind of sucks. You expect notifications about X, but they also give you notifications that are X-like-ish-kinda-if-you-squint-but-really-Y. Now try not using Facebook for a few days. Facebook will act like a 15-year-old who didn't hear from bae for 2 hours. It's a seemingly nonstop deluge of notifications about people and things you probably don't care about. Did you know my mom's cousin just made a post? Neither did I. I also didn't care. I don't even think my mom cares. I was surprised we were even FB friends. I haven't seen her since her wedding 30 years ago.

-Friend suggestions are generally useless. Facebook doesn't seem to have figured out that if my aunt, uncle, and my cousins are friends with someone but not friends with anyone else in our family, that they are either a family friend or a relative from the other side of the family. Sure, I might be friends with that person, but this makes up a huge portion of my suggestions, and it's always useless.

-Friend suggestions are also creepy. I will start a new class with a woman I've never seen before in it. We will not exchange numbers or email. We will share no phone numbers. We might have different majors. We have no mutual friends. We will generally not interact or possibly she will flirt. Time will go by. My (unusual) last name will appear in print. Then I will get a friend suggestion. If I were single it would be great to know which girls are looking me up, I guess...?

-The interface is noisy and designed to get me to engage more with Facebook, but it's so off-putting I can't stand to be on it for long. Literally half my browser window gets ignored. Less is more. "Games Your Friends Play", "Instant Games", "Games"... and then right next to it in the chat component, "Instant Games","Your Games". I don't even play games on FB. The ones I have linked to Facebook are all phone apps which coincidentally I could (but don't) also play on FB.

I could go on, but meh.

"Facebook has more than a billion active users, and is probably the most used social network in the world."

Eat shit!

10 billion flies can't be wrong...

People think if they can control facebook, they can swing elections. Hillary just recently made that comment if she controlled facebook.

Look how Yahoo news and Google news pushes editorial pieces above news, almost like an agenda. Same thing was happening with facebook.

It's not almost like an agenda, it is an agenda.

Wikileaks revealed email showing that FB was actively helping Hillary as they did Obama. She did control FB and it still didn’t work.

FB were actively helping Trump too [0]. They offered employees to both campaigns as "embeds" to help coordinate social media outreach.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/08/trump-dig...

It seriously annoys me how major publications have editorial content on their main domain, on their main site, with the same template. Sure, it says "editorial" below the headline, but at first glance it looks like news. Washington Post, NYT, etc all put the full weight of their name behind content that's literally just a random blog from some random person with no fact-checking.

If I see a headline on HN or Reddit or Facebook that says "'Giant Meteor Likely to Impact Earth' - NYTimes.com", how do I know if that's an impending disaster or just someone saying "NASA says it's theoretically possible"? The only way is to click the article and look for the "editorial" line, at which point the newspaper has already won.

WaPo has 3 Opinion sections, only one of which they label "Opinion" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/)

The have /news/the-fix", something they call "Analysis", where they mix fact and editorialism https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/

and they have "Perspectives", also filed under /news

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/

It was a constant source of bad publicity when offensive things would hit Trending. Once Facebook conceded that manual curation would be necessary, it was just a matter of time before they deemed it not worth the cost.

All you need to know here is that where Trending is algorithmic, Breaking News is a flag set by a trusted set of content providers. On the plus side, this simplification should allow Facebook better control of how to steer its users towards revenue generating content.

Won't those providers be tempted to set the "breaking news" flag on every post, just like they do on their TV news channels?

Sure, but they might lose their privileges if FB doesn't like their choices.

We already did it for you with a custom uBlock rule, thank you.

I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull apart the div element and replace it with a random image from an imgur subreddit gallery*. I'm certain far better javascript programmers could take this and improve on it. Calling myself a novice would be embellishing my skills.

https://gist.github.com/GrahamBlanshard/d7211436088e0159164a

I heard it conflicts in ways with the facebook chat sidebar which I never use, so if you're interesting in fiddling around with that on GreaseMonkey or TamperMonkey just keep that sort of thing in mind.

EDIT: Example of what it does on the sidebar for you: https://i.imgur.com/Yqc2jdY.png

This move comes two weeks after they announce a new strategy to fight against "misinformation and foreign interference," namely, by partnering with the Atlantic Council, a think tank heavily funded by NATO allies, gulf states, and weapons contractors. While Facebook was never really the democratic information platform everyone assumed to be, this move seems like a death blow. Does anyone else view it that way?

Please remove everything except Events.

This was interesting: "However, it was only available in five countries and accounted for less than 1.5% of clicks to news publishers on average. From research we found that over time people found the product to be less and less useful. "

I've found it to be somewhat useful on Facebook - and LinkedIn has a very similar feature as well. I wonder if the clickthroughs on LinkedIn are somewhat similar.

Facebook is now a newsertainment media platform. Same playbook as LinkedIn.

Neither have anything to do with ‘connecting people’ anymore.

I don’t get it. News media is dying. Why would you want to copy them? How is this profitable?

When I used to use Facebook, I had it filtered because I avoid any targeted news headlines. I think targeted news headlines are dangerous because they can be used as propaganda devices.

>However, it was only available in five countries and accounted for less than 1.5% of clicks to news publishers on average.

"on average"

Don’t you think Facebook looks tired?

"Doctor! What did you say? Doctor!!!"

Amazing how the rumor spread from 1 person. Fiction I know but still amazing.

> and increasingly through news video

Well, yes, because Facebook's timeline is optimised to surface videos over other content. If you priorities one type of content, it's no wonder it becomes what people consume the most.

They seem to suggest that it is being removed because it wasn’t being used. Does anyone else find that hard to believe? Obviously it’s totally antectodal, but I checked that EVERY time I logged onto Facebook.

Just because people don’t click on it doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t read it.... Afterall it’s visible right in the top right of the site. To be honest this kind of sounds like Facebook is trying to skirt around the real reason for removing it (it was contributing to promoting fake news).

Does anyone know if all of the trending items were reviewed by editors? If so, then I’d be more inclined to believe their explanation

Yeah, they want it gone because people are making a stink about the agendization of what news is shown on the feed.

I'd like to see trending reflect my geographical trends more than anything. What are my hometown friends talking about, and that sort of thing.

I don't give a shit about what the average person talks or thinks about, that's the whole point of only having my friends on facebook, or so I thought. Turns out I am supposed to read fake news, click ads, and shut up.

Since it only includes a link and summary, no value added, why not submit original link? https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/removing-trending/

Kind of unrelated: when I click this link in Firefox, it seems to erase the history for the current tab, and the back button doesn't work. It looks like it works in Chrome though. What is going on?

Facebook using dark UX patterns?

I checked in Firefox Quantum 61.0b and it doesn't disable the back button, so this potentially only affects the stable version.

Firefox's Facebook Container. Segregate any FB url from the rest of the browser state to minimize tracking etc.

I submitted that link a couple hours ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17206065), but it got no upvotes, and eventually duped to this submission.

Yes, sorry—there's randomness in what gets upvoted and the order we happen to see things in. The best current answer for this is "keep posting good things and it evens out in the long run". But we're working on some ideas about how to link related submissions and distribute karma more fairly. It's not that the karma matters so much, but I do think that rewarding earlier submitters would incentivize the most valuable behavior on HN, which is to find good stories that haven't been posted yet and post them.

Or it'll incentivise people to post like bots and submit everything possible.

The old guideline (don't post so much that you dominate the page) feels a bit out of date.

That problem is detectable. If we have to, we'll write software to deal with it. In the meantime, if you see someone dominating the /newest page with their submissions, it would be good to let us know (hn@ycombinator.com) so we can rate-limit the account.

>but it got no upvotes

I guess it's because of the title "Removing Trending from Facebook". The title is OK on Facebook news site. But in here it sounds like a guide. Your second submission has a more clear title.

I am not able to click on this due to having facebook blocked at my router, but the original link worked.

Url changed from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-01/facebook-..., which points to this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com