Pay To “Highlight” Your Facebook Status Updates To More Friends | Hacker News Reader

Pay To “Highlight” Your Facebook Status Updates To More Friends

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52 pointsscapbi49 comments

I find it interesting that "highlighted" posts are not actually marked as paid in any way. There may be no way for users to opt-out of seeing highlighted posts. So what we're left with are essentially advertisements (i.e., spam) indistinguishable from real content.

Suppose a brand or political campaign pays you a premium to highlight favorable posts, guaranteeing visibility in your friends' feeds. Suppose Facebook does this without your knowledge when they detect favorable sentiment about a brand in a post.

We already know they only surface posts to your feed when they cross some relevance threshold. I think its clear now that relevance might mean a lot more than personal relevance, but also relevance to their bottom line.

Why does this matter at all? You should be adding ignore filters from friends who you aren't interested in seeing things from because they are not relevant, annoying, dumb, etc, sponsored or not.

I agree fully, but filters are edge cases, and in general you will see the highlighted posts.

I assume most people don't apply filters, or if they do, only in very limited ways. Obviously if somebody is very annoying they will be filtered, but this is unusual.

I'm tempted to assume the opposite. I filter out lots of people, whose posts are very uninteresting for me - my assumption reflects my behavior, so the question is if the average user prefers to read everything for entertainment's sake, or filter out what's uninsteresting for him/her.

This matters. The whole reason things like Google and Yelp search work for users is because their natural results are uncorrupted by commercial incentives. Advertisers can pay to have their sponsored listings displayed above the natural listings, but there's a clear, transparent distinction between the two.

It's murky to let any sponsored listings intertwine undifferentiated with natural listings. It's an inherently advertiser-first, user-second policy, and it's at the expense of the integrity of the natural service.

It's tough to argue that this is more for any benefit then their bottom line, which, given Zuck's grand "Hacker Ethics" letter, kind of wreaks of bullshit.

This sounds like a win for advertisers and for users. Pay me money to put something on facebook? Sweet. If I do this too many times I will pay for it by being ignored or de-friended by everyone because I am just a shill.

there's just no way, they can justify a 95B valuation at the current revenue streams. if you look at the following estimates:

monthly visitors on google: 190M facebook: 150M

average time on site (from alexa) on google: 11min facebook: 22min

revenues of google in 2011 (from google sites): 26B facebook: 3.7B

this gap is so striking, that I wonder why investors don't realize, that you just can't run ads as well on a social network as you can on a search engine. it does't matter how targeted your ads are or how much you know about your users - it's just not a place where a lot of people click on ads. they are there for the social experience. facebook has some of the best people in the industry and if they can't figure out how to monetize their site, the rest of the social media startups will have an even more difficult time. this highlighting feature is another attempt. i wouldn't be surprised if they actually started charging large corporations like nike for their pages usage (that could really be a profitable income source).

to sum it up: I see facebook much closer to a 30B valuation, with a realisitc P/E ratio of around 20. because if facebook wants to remain the social fabric of the web, it will also remain the web's workhorse.

You know, that's funny. Reading The Facebook Effect, that was actually Facebook's first major revenue source. Such a "sponsorship" type of deal from Apple whereby they could access users. Apple was their sugar daddy for a while at the beginning.

I think you're comparing to fundamentally different companies, so your conclusion is invalid. Facebook's higher valuation is based on the fact that it's traffic is much more engaged then Google. That's valuable to marketers and business who will pay for targetted and engaged users.

"i wouldn't be surprised if they actually started charging large corporations like nike for their pages usage"

That's the thing, I think their valuation is based on the ton of potential revenue opportunities like that they haven't explored yet. There's a ton of companies getting value from Facebook marketing (not ads, pages and so forth), Facebook just (in theory) needs to figure out how to capture some of that value.

And look at stuff like Zynga as well -- they built a billion dollar company on top of Facebook's platform, and now make up something like 10% of FB's revenues IIRC. Are there any similar untapped opportunities for the company that owns the world's social graph? I know it sounds kind of airy trying to value a company on as-yet non-existent revenue streams, but what's the chance they don't manage to find a few more Zynga-scale opportunities in the next ten years?

The popularity of Facebook continues to puzzle me. Because its "all following relationships must be mutual" paradigm is SO BROKEN. People end up following a zillion people they don't give a damn about because that's what you have to do if you want to broadcast there.

I really wish Google hadn't driven off half their early adopters of G+ with their shitfit about "real names only" because it actually has asymmetrical following relationships. When anyone can see your public posts, you only have to follow people you care about instead, and the service doesn't have to do these increasingly convoluted hacks to try and only show you things it thinks you "want" to see.

If you're making some kind of social network, please save your future self - and your future users - this kind of hassle. Allow asymmetrical following.

tl;dr: I miss Livejournal.

I "fix" this by hiding boring people. It's asymmetrical, but opaquely.

Both approaches have value. I value Facebook's closed nature, as it gives me a place to communicate with close friends and family. I live across the country from most of my family, but I see their photos and keep up with them all the time, it's great.

Also, on G+, I have to put people in a circle if I want to broadcast to them (and not to the entire world), right? So I'm still following people I might not want to be following using the asymmetric approach.

The stuff I post on my blog is a totally different kind of communication, and I'm happy to do it outside the context of social networking.

Just as a FYI, you can share to people outside of your circles, if they have it enabled. Instead of selecting a circle to share, just put their names in. Of course, this depends on the settings of the other person and doesn't disprove anything. Just wanted to tell you in case it's of any use for you.

Consider this: Child is born in Germany and all the family members across the world see the picture 10 minutes after he is cleaned up by the nurses. Add other family events and you are in touch with everyone.

The fact that it is somewhat closed is a major plus for me, I do not want them indexed by Google /Bing and held forever

I guess you haven't heard that the ship has sailed on the Bing front: http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/10/3010051/microsoft-new-bing...

> People end up following a zillion people they don't give a damn about because that's what you have to do if you want to broadcast there.

Facebook isn't about broadcasting. Use twitter if you want to broadcast. Facebook is about sharing things with your genuine real friends and family.

Asymmetrical following just leads to twitter - lots of celebrity "broadcasters" and lots of silent followers. Rather than real two way conversation.

Facebook does, they have subscriptions now. You can allow people to subscribe to you and then they will see your stuff without you seeing theirs (like Twitter). Maybe they don't publicise the feature enough, but as you can see it is quite widely used: http://www.facebook.com/zuck/subscribers

The IPO is the signal, and this is more evidence. Facebook is being taken over by an MBA mindset, and that short term, cash first thinking spells doom for the customer experience and then the company.

Lol, no.

The IPO is because Facebook can't continue to attract top talent in the valley without those option numbers meaning something.

Maybe it's a bit of both? Going IPO strictly to attract top talent seems a little naive, no?

Well… Zuckerberg isn't liquid, is he?

I'm sure you can find a buyer for Facebook stock right now, but it seems like the obvious way for all those VCs, angels and early employees to cash out.

Being able to issue more shares to be used as stock options, or making your financials less messy to deal with, is merely icing on the cake

The IPO is because once a company passes certain thresholds of investment/no. of investment, they have to make their accounts public.

While this doesn't mean they have to IPO, once accounts are public, there is little reason not to IPO.

Agreed, I think most people at least consider leaving facebook frequently and with facebook going public investors will push these annoying but lucrative features (Although I almost like this one). If I remember correctly myspace declined steadily after going public itself.

Myspace never went public, it was acquired by News Corp for around $600m.

And no one let them forget it since.

Didn't they get their money's worth out of it, though?

From what I could find, they lost $254 million on it.

I agree. I am an MBA type, and I think Facebook is backing into a valuation that is too high. They are doing stupid things to reach the $5B revenue and $1.5 in profits this year to justify a $100B valuation.

Facebook may never be more than a $25B company, and that is still fantastic, but I hope they don't throw it all away by trying to be the next Google.

Tumblr has been doing this for weeks. Got some hype early then people stopped caring and just kept scrolling through the feeds.

But Facebook is a vastly different beast. Creators and curators have a different relationship with the audience. This is the new $1 bling people used to give each other back in the day.

    Introducing: Highlighted Posts
    February 3, 2012

    Every now and then, a post comes along that’s meant for big things. It
    could be pulling the wraps off your new project, promoting your next
    show, raising awareness for a cause, or just sharing a truly
    incredible photo.

    Today you’ll have a new option to Highlight those extra-important
    posts. For one dollar, your post will stand out in the Dashboard with
    a customizable sticker to make sure your followers take notice!

http://staff.tumblr.com/post/16980189397/highlighted-posts

This seems to be a little different than Facebook's highlighted posts. Highlighted posts on Tumblr are distinguishable and would not be more visible than regular posts. (I'm assuming Tumblr dashboards are not filtered by relevance.)

Tomorrow: Pay to hide or set relationship status to single.

Pay to not have us randomly change your relationship status every 6 months.

Pay for privacy

Pay for friend accept.

God... I really miss the Internet before it became "social".

I'll play devils advocate here. I think this is a good idea. 99% of my feed is basically just cat pictures. There could be great stuff being created by my friends and not showing on my feed because it is pushed down by all the shared crap. Nobody is going to pay for me to see their cat picture, but they will pay for me to see the new project they are working on, or an event they are throwing that I may want to attend, and this is value added for me.

> Nobody is going to pay for me to see their cat picture

Famous last words.

Hard to feel optimistic about this idea even for adults on facebook.

For kids, this seems so wrong it should almost be illegal, or at least on the level of in-app purchases. "Mommy, this update is really important! Can you link your credit card to my facebook account?" &c.

I thought facebook already sorts your news stream by 'top stories'. So things like engagements, weddings, birthdays etc go to the top anyway.

Are they appealing to attention seekers or those whose status posts are so utterly boring that they never make the top of the list anyway?

Really? You get to own all our data and still get to charge us for the service?

Of course they get to charge you. Your data is worthless. Your eyeballs are the only thing of value. And Facebook controls the flow of information to eyeballs. That's what your paying for - access to Facebook's distribution to your friends' eyeballs.

I know this isn't 4chan or reddit, but I couldn't help sharing two specific, and quite harmless (albeit hard to execute), trolls:

- use highlighted posts to literally promote pictures of cats

- make sure FB never reaches 1bn users. Right now they are at around 900m, and growing slower and glower. A coordinated effort amongst people who are on the fence of signing off for good could make sure that number asymptotically ought to reach 1bn, but never does. Wouldn't that be a let down? "Any day now, I think"

Yes, I'm in your typical FB-doesn't-really-add-any-value camp. And as long as FB are having fun to the detriment of the individual, who is to say we as people (coordinated, law-abiding netizens) can't have our fun too?

use highlighted posts to literally promote pictures of cats

Fairly sure this wouldn't wind up differing in any significant way from my existing facebook news feed.

Next up: $x to not show when you view someones profile. So by default, anyone can see if you view their profile.

A stalkers worst nightmare - how many people would sign up for that?

This is exactly how okcupid's premium membership operates. You can always anonymously visit profiles, but unless you're a paid member, it'll no longer show you your visitors. Paying the premium lets you "stalk" others while still seeing who is visiting you.

But on OkC, that's easily avoidable: just create another dummy account and stalk from there.

On FB, you can't just do that because people are now showing stuff to "friends only".

Of course they wouldn't do this, but I've love it if they made you pay $1 for every status update. Would get rid of a lot of the fluff.

The beginning of the end for Facebook.

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