Facebook Research Warned of ‘Tipping Point’ Threat to Core App
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A decade or so ago, most of the content I saw on Facebook was original content from people I know. Most posts were either text written by someone I knew, or a photo taken by someone I knew. Perhaps not everybody shares this position, but what I most want from Facebook is to keep up with people I actually know. Here are the first 20 posts I see now:
7 shared images from strangers/pages. 1 screenshot from a TV show uploaded by a friend. 1 page updated its website. 1 shared video from strangers/pages. 2 "suggested" videos from a page. 1 photograph taken by a friend. 1 "memory" containing text written by the person who shared it. 3 links to a news story. 3 posts by a page.
That's 2/20 posts of original content from people I know. I've noticed that if I post original content, my friends are less likely to interact with it than a few years ago, probably because they, too are presented with such a huge amount of other content.
I know I can opt in to something like the old experience with the "friends feed" feature. Well, I can on the desktop site (if I bookmark it, click it each time, or use a browser extension); it appears to be missing from the mobile site and the Facebook Lite app. Anything I post is still disadvantaged though, because most people are using the default algorithmic feed.
On Instagram, every one of the first 20 posts I see is original content by a person or page I follow. 16 of those are individual people. I see shared third-party content on Instagram fairly rarely, probably because its UI doesn't encourage that.
What would get me to use Facebook more actively is a change to the algorithm that advantages original content over shared third-party content.
I don't mind terribly if there are a few sponsored posts in any of my social media feeds. I suspect the acceptable rate is somewhere around one per five original content posts.
There’s several large magazines that are 50% ad content. I bet that’s the ceiling.
Second post is always an ad. There’s an ad before they tell you you’re all caught up. And it looks like followed tags effect that ratio as well.
If you go above 50% ads, some print pages will be ads on both sides, and both may easily be ripped out and discarded--the earliest ad-blocker tech.
Pretty quickly I figured out that articles by Steven J Vaughan-Nichols were worth reading and the rest were generally not. But the ads were what we were looking for.
Of course I realized shortly thereafter: "Do I really want better targeted ads on my Instagram feed?"
It's a little too late now but if I had to do it over again I would let it guess, mostly poorly, and that makes it easier to filter out the sponsored content.
Facebook's initial foray into the app/mic biz was troubled and their statement was "we only listen for popular music / TV in the background in order to help you." It also came out that they mine personal messages between users.
"I’m not paranoid to think they are listening to the microphone but the coincidence is super uncanny."
We need to get past the block where we label people as paranoid for thinking these big corps might invade user's privacy.
I've seen the myth that Facebook is targeting ads based on what it hears debunked several times. Do you have a source that shows that it is in fact listening?
I think it's more likely that the same reason someone is talking about something (they're in a demographic interested in that thing) is the reason that Facebook gives you ads for that thing. Add in the Baader-Meinhof effect and it seems like Facebook is listening to your conversations.
Let's say Facebook NEVER listens to you... I'm 100% on board with them and their honesty. It still doesn't matter.
If you let ANY third party app listen to you, and identify you, for example the latest Candy Crush game, then your information along with preferences are being uploaded to databases for re-targeting.
When I do a big campaign in Facebook, or any sophisticated marketer does, I don't ask Facebook for users who like Cats and are looking for brands of organic cat food. I PROVIDE them a pre-vetted list of people looking for cat food that I generated and the emails associated with those Facebook accounts.
Facebook has NO WAY to know how I came up with my list, and no possible way to find out. It could have been from listening to conversations while someone played Candy Crush, or it could have been from a form submitted on my website.
One of these days I'm just going to actually document myself doing this and publish it to a website so more people understand what is happening and how easy it is to use data from people's conversations.
TLDR: Any time you buy a list of potential customers from a market research company, that data could have been gathered with conversation tracking. It's not Facebook's fault, it's just the reality.
Thinking about it, I might just remove it from Google as well since I don't really use voice search.
I just double-checked, and I have mine turned off. So, "requires"?
Evidence? Every time someone claims this it gets debunked.
I ask this because in that infamous Forbes article about Target and the pregnant girl they mention how they now add ads for things they don't think you are interested in, in an effort to creep people out less. (To me this feels a little worse) Plenty of groups do purposefully send false hits to make it less creepy to the target.
It was at its best when you could follow accounts, all of the posts of the people you follow would be displayed chronologically, and clicking on a hashtag would also display all posts under that tag chronologically.
Facebook removed the chronological order of the timeline, made it so you will not see all posts from the people you follow, started injecting posts and ads from accounts I do not follow, and did the same with hashtags where you will only see posts facebook decides you should see via their algorithm. Also, engagement with my page decreased 100-500% across the board and my consistent growth stopped entirely as I was not an "influencer" so people that followed me and checked my hashtags would rarely even see my posts
Facebook changed Instagram from an extremely functional social app that allowed you to easily interact with and become parts of niche communities, to a useless ad platform that limits your interactivity and connectivity to anything that you actually want to see to push you to whoever pays Facebook or whatever the algorithm decides what should be popular which ends up being the same garbage content that has plagued Facebook for years
The PWA version is almost as good as the native app. It lacks a pull to refresh feature as far as I can tell, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Maybe that’s a feature for some though.
I regularly use Firefox Focus (which is also the system wide content blocker for me), but it doesn't seem like its blocking rules are updated often. Not sure if that's because of some limit in the number of rules allowed per blocking extension.
So maybe that tricked the system? My only other theory would be that they somehow know I wouldn't use the service at all if it had ads. I'm a fickle user who happens to produce some quality, original artwork for their service.
What you're seeing is the results of dozens of teams individually optimizing against growth goals, which are actually inputs to a complex system that is difficult to predict.
This is true of any large organization really. It's just that the blind insistence on data at the micro level makes the effect far more profound.
Equally annoying are the notifications menu (the actual notifications, I disabled a long time ago). I've been relying on them since the feed is useless but now they too have become cluttered with things like "posts you may have missed".
I would love a platform that is just original content (text and original media), and where any links are just text WITHOUT previews. Kinda like how Twitter used to be… but they seem to be heading in the same direction as FB, just less aggressively.
Facebook has taken some steps in the same direction too, hiding any long post or comment behind a "read more" link and offering flashy backgrounds for 130 characters or less (plus enlarged text for 85 characters or less).
This comment doesn't fit in a tweet. It doesn't even fit into two tweets.
I've got this vague idea in my head of a WordPress plugin that cooperates with other WordPress installations with the plugin, such that your own blog could turn into a social network. So you publish content to your blog, and your blog pulls content from your friends' blogs with the plugin, and you can all comment on each other's posts and stuff. Tack on some kind of slick mobile app for uploading pictures and the like. I dunno.
But seriously what I have in mind is a lot more interactive than that. Roughly, your blog becomes your "account". You can follow other "accounts" (blogs), and you give other "accounts" permission to post on your blog in the form of comments, etc. When you change details on your account, like a profile image or whatever, it will get updated on all the linked accounts that follow you. I dunno, it all works pretty elegantly in my head.
[1]: https://indieweb.org/ [2]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
I believe that non-comercial social networks like Mastodon are then only places that can consistently show original content without eventually turning bad.
Unfortunately there is not a lot of people hanging out there, personally it's been hard for me to pull my friends away from twitter.
So, I waited and waited and eventually Facebook showed me an interesting ad instead of the non-stop barrage of Blue Apron clones. I interacted with the ad and overnight Facebook ads transformed into a better Reddit.
<50% is new content from friends. 20% is ads. And 15% is marketplace (groups I can hide, I think). The value proposition isn't all that great.
There are two things keeping me on FB's main app - 1 - parents and other older relatives/friends - 2 - a small number of friends use it for event planning/invites.
Instagram is 100% friends posts (again, webpage, not app). When viewed through the app, Instagram is about 25% ads, with 2 "stories" widgets, and the rest is new content. Slightly better content/noise ratio, but the web page is better.
Twitter is basically complete toxic trash and I don't touch it.
There's a few friends that I've considered un-following completely because of how many times I've had to do this on their posts. One of them is my brother-in-law -- I called him out on it the last time I saw him, he admitted it's gotten out of hand.
It's baffling how many dumb meme pages there are. But even more baffling, is how many people actually have the motivation to maintain those meme pages. The people that are willingly following them, well, I've lost hope for them.
They could increase engagement if they simply put this back -- providing filters for original content versus external.
I, too, only want to see original content from people I actually care about. However, "care about" is very loose here, because for people with few connections, this probably doesn't matter much, but for users that have many connections and pages, etc, it makes sense to condense and perhaps rank content that a user likes from their connections higher.
Facebook is more of a visual Twitter for me -- people post articles and we have discussions as Twitter's format doesn't facilitate discussions nearly as well.
So many promoted tweets and the uncanny feeling that my feed is being shaped in strange and unwanted ways.
The straw that broke the camel's back was the banner where twitter declared that it was doing more tracking and targeting so that I would be served better ads, both on AND off of twitter. "Great!", "Learn more" were the two buttons.
I want my mindshare and my thought direction to be in my own control. The feeds are stealing my self control over my own thoughts. I hate it.
I'm sure the spam notifications A/B tested well for engagement though, /eyeroll.
It won't effect their statistics and a larger group get's ( perhaps) a little bit less demotivated to go on Facebook.
The people that click on all says ads, nothing changes.
Also sad that they were so successful in copying Snapchat’s story feature - it made Snapchat so unique. Now nobody is using Snapchat for it anymore and everybody is on IG instead.
All in all I know many people who really dislike FB and would leave it if they could, but the network effect keeps everybody locked in to WhatsApp at least in Europe/Germany.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/7/18215143/facebook-whatsapp...
s/spiel/shtick/He basically said it's based only on financials. Perhaps better to say why you feel he should change his opinion, just need on Snap's spiel?
Between the two I'm more inclined to believe "industry practice + financials" than "marketing spiel".
Do you (or above else) have anything better to go on?
I don't see what's sad about that, if the only thing that made SC unique is a feature that was so easily copied into EVERY FB app (messenger, instagram, even FB itself) then SC was anything but unique.
Ultimately execution is what matters, and snapchat had a terrible app (at least on android) forever.
I wonder if they're regretting not taking the 30 billion Google was offering. Ephemeral image/video/message sharing has become a pretty oversaturated market since their popularization of it, and there isn't really that much more innovation that can be done in that area, I think. And it doesn't seem like they're trying other kinds of things beyond ephemeral communication. They may be in a Foursquare-like situation, except Foursquare actually did manage to pivot from a gimmick to more of a sustainable business (as far as I can tell).
I know this was Google's "we need to turn into a social thing, G+ all the way" era and everything but good god, 30 billion, that figure was insane. Even if you go with "but major social app are worth a lot" just comparing it with how much was paid for whatsapp and instagram makes it even crazier.
It might be hindsight bias on my part, though. The hype at the time was very high, and maybe it was actually rational for them to think they had serious longevity. But still, I'm not really seeking money, and I don't see how I could've turned down that offer.
For Zuckerberg, it made more sense to reject early offers, because he could see the mega-monopoly in the distance. I don't see how Snap could think they could make a monopoly out of their app. For one, the app's not really even a social network.
It was a good idea and good execution, but like so many startup founders, I think the success of the app may have gone to their heads. Users aren't buying into the Snap brand / ecosystem / network, they just like to send ephemeral photos and videos to their friends with minimal friction. This is not a new paradigm in itself; it's a feature. Like many startups, Snap is a cool new feature dressing itself up as a serious corporation, and features only remain new for so long.
One could say the same of Instagram, but the difference is they managed to get the social network stuff right, so they could sustain exponential growth. Maybe Snap could've done the same if they were more willing to branch off from their original feature earlier on in their company's existence. I'm not totally sure why Snap failed to evolve from a sexting app to a social network, but it was clearly their plan, and it flopped.
Also, Snapchat’s app has a unique feel (and works performant enough at least on iOS) which makes it more pleasurable to use than lets say WhatsApp which is the most popular in Europe
Take this with a grain of salt, but:
https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/snapchat-evan-spiegel-only...
I think Line, WeChat and a few others like that could qualify too, although they all seem very regional.
I haven't encountered another group of people who so ardently use Telegram.
Worst is that information meant for public dissemination, like training times or open event details, are now de facto private and require login. I've gone from logging in once every 3 months to once a week. AND messenger on mobile requires mbasic.facebook.com. /rant
I've tried to get people to use Signal instead, but nobody cares enough to make the switch. "Everyone else is on Messenger, and I have an account already" is the most common reasoning.
Both are off-putting experiences and in turn do little to motivate people to switch to them.
It took until Oreo/Pie for the stock messaging app to become equally good or better, and by then none of my contacts bothered with using Signal anymore. It's now 0% Signal, 0.1% text messages, 0.1% WhatsApp, 99.8% FB Messenger, which is really depressing.
I don't plan to delete my account because I want to keep the ability to be in touch with those few friends, and I haven't reached the point where I want to delete the messenger app, but the main FB/messenger duo just doesn't fill any major need for me.
But two things that struck me recently:
1. When opening my stream just to gloss over, there is A TON of ads. Like, the first 4/5 posts are real, then it's one post one ad one post one ad. And the targeting is abysmal. The only ones that are kind of on target are the amazon retargeting, except in typical amazon retargeting fashion it advertises to me stuff that I have already bought (on amazon no less). At least google has the decency to show me stuff I may be interested in, if vaguely.
2. I'm not sure when this was added to android, or if this is a specific samsung thing, but I had a weird warning that I had never seen before: my phone warned me that messenger, while not being open, was trying to access the "microphone" permission. Kudos to android for blocking it and warning me, so I could disable that permission for good. I can't think of a single reason for that app to do it that isn't super evil.
I'm also 99,9% certain it's not even legal where I live (France), I can't record my customers without asking or warning them on each instance of a conversation and with a clear non hidden message, so I doubt they can do that no matter what's in their TOS.
I don't know why it would suddenly ask but I have pressed that voice message / microphone button by accident in the past. Or maybe it's just something the app requests globally on newer versions.
> I have pressed that voice message / microphone button by accident in the past
App in the background. It's not due to a keypress or to do any user-initiated action. Googling it, seems it's not a one off and that the app does indeed access the microphone from the background from time to time to do god knows what
My usage went way down from hours a week to maybe ten minutes. I don't know how the the algorithms work but I just started hitting the report button on ever single ad. There are still some of those insidious ads that pretend to be legitimate posts but my usage is up. I actually get to see interesting content from friends and family.
So on to why I think it's a mistake. Yes, both the core business and the stories rely on the network effects of social networks to gain/maintain popularity. But encouraging users to share ephemeral content makes the switching costs much lower. If some new "yourspace" competitor came along, I'd be hesitant to switch because I LIKE the library of content myself and my friends and family have built up over the years. If literally all that prevents me from switching is where my friends are, I can use both until everyone switches, and then just drop the one entirely.
Don't get me wrong, Facebook is still almost worthless to users without friends using it, but the switching costs are still higher when there's old content.
Facebook is dead, long live Facebook.
I must say that their aquisition strategy is impressive.
I would imagine it to be almost real time there...
Any analysis worth its salt will also need to go through rounds of sense-checking + checks for statistical robustness: this all takes time
It took me way too long to notice, but facebook stopped being an enjoyable thing a long time ago.
Facebook spent billions pickup up Whats-app and Instagram (and probably a fair chunk developing and maintaining messenger).
This wasn't solely to pick up untold millions of new users who'd never used "original blue facebook" - if it had been, you'd need a facebook account to use Whats-app. Point was to ensure you didn't stray from the blue-app, onto something Facebook didn't own/control.
In my humble view, the keeping of messenger and whats-app separate by Facebook is smart - as they have two offerings that appeal to different people (and to many people that happily use both).
You know from all the rumours of "ads on Whatsapp" that internally in facebook they're trying to work out how to leverage all our eyeballs on all those different apps - but the reason they haven't merged them all, is they've worked out they keep more people if they keep the apps separate.
To take my favourite anecdotal example, I used to use latitude on google maps to work out where my friends were (I'm in the pub, when are you turning up?). Then google killed that functionality to try to make us all move to google+.... We didn't, it died.
Now, if a few of us are trying to co-ordinate say a drink after work, we'll use whatsapp. Google lost that feature I use to Facebook.
Its not that threatening - as they already proved they know how to counter through acquisition or competition and have a good track record of being able to monetise new properties.
The strength of a network is n^2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
It makes sense that the more people leaving a network then the utility of said network will decline.
What seems odd is why they care if people move to Insta or WhatsApp, since FB owna both.
Tried removing Whatsapp for something like Telegram but couldn't since I need to convince my parents and sisters and gf and friends to move there too.
I'm also struggling with this issue and I've been contemplating about either moving all of my interactions on a mailing list or a mastodon instance. I don't know how to move the network of my friends into that space.
This list is from a blog I wrote at https://rietta.com/blog/commercial-information-classificatio.... It was adapted from something I originally saw while a student at Georgia Tech. I've consulted with companies that separately developed a substantially similar 5 point list.
* Public
* Company confidential (most things)
* Need to know (only finance people can see some kinds of financials, only people working on a service can see it's logs)
* Legal stuff
* Personnel stuff
* Highly valuable IP (spam detection algorithms etc)
Source: I used to work at Facebook & I know Tom C. personally. I’ve written similar documents four years ago. There were publicly visible internally. Few people really cared outside of senior Product people.
At Google you don't have to disclose your level, but most people do and most of my coworkers know I'm L5. At Facebook my understanding is they've tried to build a culture where people don't know each other's levels, to focus more on "what can you do" instead of "what does management think you can do".
And no, I don't work at Google :)
Plus as you said people will disclose it anyways. People know their level and others even if it is a "secret". People know others salaries too. So the entire concept is rendered moot
Secret Santa, secret key exchange, etc it’s just descriptive.
Facebook isn't innocuous and has a high negative load and reputation. Tack the word "secret" in front of some internal research they did and it puts a darker shade on something every company does (internal research).
Something like ‘Secret Facebook network architecture’ is rather neutral.
“Tesla’s secret battery program”
Neither has negative connotation to me.
Like you said, I think it’s because Facebook regularly acts unethically in public view. Anything they do in secret or private will be viewed with even more suspicion.
> Kellogg’s secret research to make cereal taste better
to me, this sounds negative
> Tesla’s secret battery program
to me this does not sound negative.
This is 100% your opinion.