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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

One very notable difference between Facebook circa 2010 and Facebook circa 2020 is notifications circa 2010 had a very good signal to noise ratio. Basically 100% of notifications were ones I wanted to see.

That also meant on many days I'd have no notifications at all. A week could go by with 0 notifications. Since the quality of notifications used to be so high, I used to treat FB notifications the same as I treat my email inbox (no email goes unseen).

Over time, they started jamming in "fake" notifications like "Your friend posted a new video!" whereas in the past, I'd simply have 0 notifications for the day. After that, it became impractical to keep up with the never ending notifications.

They need to be looking at the quality of their notifications rather than their frequency.

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IMO they really messed up by tracking and using time spent on page per day (or something like this) as a metric. That’s something that makes sense if you’re building a side-app, or an app focused on addictive content like tik tok. But if you’re trying to build a useful tool for people then you’re going to move away further and further from that vision. Which is what happened imo: the useful tool was transformed into a content-consuming app due to tracking the wrong metrics.

The best thing that any PM with enough clout at fb could do right now is force the org to track a different metric, and move the content consuming side to a different app (because there’s still a lot of growth value in communities, watch, etc.)

When a metric becomes the goal, it ceases to be a useful metric.

Yeah this quote doesn't really work if the metric is your actual goal. If I make daily revenue for my e-commerce company (or daily ad engagement for Meta) my goal, it does not cease to be useful.

By making the metric the goal, it could be that the underlying assumptions change. Maybe previously all time spent on Facebook was "positive" time where the user feels engaged and is interested in ads. After adding dumb notifications. The time spent might become partially "positive" and partially "negative", where the user feels abused and might hate the ads. Is the metric still the goal then?

That stays the most fitting metric for facebook though: the bulk of their revenue comes from advertising, and anything related to ads needs your presence: they need data to target you and increase ad price, and they need your eyeballs to be there to watch those highly priced ads. There's just no way around it.

Meta might come up with different revenue streams and different strategies, but for the blue app that ship has sailed.

That’s why I suggested in another comment to also create a subscription strategy

  > force the org to track a different metric

Like adsClicked / serverResourcesConsumed? Interesting how that would stand up for users that e.g. post text vs users that post video, and the fallout of their followers.

I think “new meaningful connection” would be a great metric.

> IMO they really messed up by tracking and using time spent on page per day (or something like this) as a metric

FWIW, in my time at FB from 2019-2021, we were explicitly disallowed from using time on app as a success metric for the products my team worked on. Instead, we focused on the utility of the experience as the goal, i.e. people finding the product useful was more important than simply using it.

I wasn't working on the newsfeed though, so I'm not sure if that applied to that part of the app.

This is just a result of the business model based on selling the ads, where the time on site correlates to a number of ads seen corellates to money earned. Everything else you describe necessarily follows.

This is one of the reasons I stopped using Facebook completely. Every notification was fake and meant to increase engagement. All it did was push me away. When it was more like notifying a mention, it was useful. I stopped using it for several years now and never see myself going back.

On another note, I stopped using Twitter recently for obvious reasons. I check it occasionally to see if there's anyone new that moved to Mastodon. And I noticed an increase in fake notifications there. Another reason to never go back there either.

> noticed an increase in fake notifications there

I started using Twitter again and in order to kill fake notifications, you have to go to "Push Notifications" settings and uncheck everything except for "Related to you and your Tweets" section.

Twitter seems to respect those settings, while Facebook still finds an excuse to push fake notifications even with tweaked settings. I basically disabled notifications entirely via OS for FB.

I think reddit is even worse. A fake facebook notification is at least still a notification.

But official reddit app and website in other hand, generate notification badge WITHOUT NOTIFICATION. What did you even expect me to do about that? It's just dumb-ass.

In the end, I just wrote a userscript to remove notification badge of reddit web page, given how useless and distractive it is.

I’ve never seen this with old reddit nor 3rd party clients (which beyond possibly costing a nominal fee, I don’t know why you wouldn’t use sans some minor features like polls).

I do use 3rd reddit client on phone.(the fake badge is literally the reason I installed it) But I still use the new reddit page on browser because reddit I visit commonly are mostly media-rich. Which is the old reddit not useful for.

Oh my issue with reddit.com is similar but different: I'll get a notification badge, tap it, see "Messages (1)", tap that, and then get "there doesn't seem to be anything here" under the Unread tab.

Once I switch to "Inbox" I can see the new message. Of course, if it's a long thread I have to find the bottom of it first.

So you're clicking around, raking up page views, looking for the message? Seems like page views is the metric that misfeature was designed to improve.

I have a high confident that the badge is fake because I already used ublock to ban[1] the update socket of reddit webpage, there is no way I can actually get a notification without reload the page.

[1] due to this issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/rj0u77/reddit_redesig...

I think Facebook in 2010 just had a very good SNR because they didn't add algorithm generated crap to the feed which was basic and chronological.

Later they came with their timeline which omitted stuff I wanted to see (updates from my friends) and added stupid posts from randos. That's really what forced me off the platform. It broke the whole point of it.

Unfortunately Instagram is doing the same now with their TikTok style "suggested posts".

In 2010 things were going on in Facebook that I wanted to be notified about. Now, at best, there’s one post a month I might find actually interesting. For years Facebook promoted trash, divisive people, and ads. I got bored with getting sucked into debates with extremist acquaintances on both sides and removed them from view, everybody else did the same or settled down in life and had less to post about. Every once in a while somebody will post something I want to see, but it’s gone from once an hour to once a month and really the only reason I still have an account is to keep very distant connections alive.

It would be nice if meta went back to the original inspiration of a “face book” and made a product that was just a photo or two and links to social links and contact information.

For me, the decline in notification quality started with the rise of FarmVille.

The implications of this being what?

You need to water your crops.

I never played FarmVille, but some friends did, and FarmVille sent notifications to your friends as well. Only a handful of friends playing FarmVille meant 1-2 daily notifications from that game. Notifications were effectively unusable at that point, until Facebook separated game notifications from other notifications.

After that, it never really got any better, for me at least. Notifications tended to be less relevant than before and I disabled them on all devices.

I only ever used Facebook for farmville

This is what caused me to delete the app in favor of Instagram and fb messenger. Not sure if they changed notifications or if I simply never enabled them, but my fresh install of the fb app is less annoying

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