I Just Paid Facebook $7 | Hacker News Reader

I Just Paid Facebook $7

johnnystartup.com

93 pointsphprida55 comments

So now facebook, a network that I signed up for, has stopped showing my friends what I post on my status and has started charging me to do just that ? Isn't there a conflict of interest here ? The default functionality of the platform now appears to be a paid offering ?

I find it quite disconcerting that someone else gets to decide what aspects of my friend's lives are 'interesting' enough for me to know about. I find it even more disconcerting that some of my friends would need to pay to highlight some aspects of their lives to me. Creepy :O

> I find it quite disconcerting that someone else gets to decide what aspects of my friend's lives are 'interesting' enough for me to know about. I find it even more disconcerting that some of my friends would need to pay to highlight some aspects of their lives to me. Creepy :O

Both of those things are self-regulating. Your newsfeed is already controlled by your FB habits...people you chat with/stalk the most naturally end up appearing more often in your newsfeed.

As for those who continually pay to self-promote...you have ways of blocking them, some less blatant than others

I'm not worried about people self promoting. I'm worried about them having to. Do I want to hear about my friends getting engaged ? Yeah! Do I want them to pay for that to happen ? Hell no!

> Your newsfeed is already controlled by your FB habits..

That's not necessarily a good thing.

Also, I want to know what happens with everyone on my news feed. The ones I don't want to know about, I either unfriend them or block them. The issue is that it's already quite messed up that a 3rd party algorithm decides what I should/shouldn't see. There are obvious challenges with all of this and I know that facebook is working on them. However, that doesn't make it any less creepy or intrusive.

Ideally you would hear about your friends getting engaged without Facebook.

Although that's true, Facebook wants to change the game, no? Facebook wants to be the tool you use to tell all your friends about being engaged. So what is ideal is irrelevant if Facebook manages to change the game and become the preferred tool over phone, direct email, handwritten letters, and surprise dinner parties. Difficult road, especially replacing surprise dinner parties.

and without providing metadata to advertisers about it in the process

For what it's worth, I recently announced that I was changing jobs and moving countries on Facebook, and pretty much all of my friends saw that message, because it's the sort of thing everyone likes and so Facebook will designate it as important whether you pay or not.

An engagement would be similar. Events and PMs too, because you get notifications for those.

This feature, it seems to me, would be most suitable for things that you may think are very important but that are easy to miss or ignore for your friends. Like a benefit dinner at your kids' school or whatever. Things that are in between personal and promotional.

Doesn't freak me out. Don't know why it should.

I think it depends on your habits. Facebook is unreliable for social interaction on a deep level for me because there is a negative cycle of reinforcement based on poor data.

My closest friends are the ones who I want to hear the most about, and yet for some reason, their updates are the ones I see the least. Part of the reason was because my feed was flooded by people who used Facebook voraciously, though I considered many of them only acquaintances to whom I was connected to keep in touch, but nothing more (i.e. Facebook is my social rolodex, while LinkedIn is my professional rolodex).

But I'll comment on what's in my feed, and so I'm interacting with those for whom I care less. That interaction is recorded by Facebook as saying, "Look, these guys must be good friends, they're interacting with each other." So Facebook sends me more of their stuff, giving even less opportunity for my closest friends' stuff to pop up in my feed.

It's no wonder that with my closest friends, we rather use email for our interactions, which ironically further reinforces to Facebook that I'm not close to these people: wow, look, these people don't interact at all, they must hate each other! Let's not send him any more updates from those people! Path was an interesting idea for intimacy, but why sign up for yet another service when email is so easy and already proven? We even tried setting up a private Facebook group titled Posse to stop using email. Didn't work for various reasons.

I still log into Facebook because I enjoy seeing what's up with people, etc. But I never go there to interact with my closest friends anymore. That ship somehow sailed a long time ago, and I'm not going to go through a manual process of ranking people to a special group, or anything like that, to fix the issue. Ironically, as Zuckerberg once famously said in response to Circles, "We found out that people hate making lists."

Add those people to your "close friends" FB friend list (it's a default list that everybody has and can't delete) and you'll get a FB notification every time they do something. It can be noisy but if you have a small core of people it'll ensure you never miss what they're up to.

Quoting myself:

That ship somehow sailed a long time ago, and I'm not going to go through a manual process of ranking people to a special group, or anything like that, to fix the issue. Ironically, as Zuckerberg once famously said in response to Circles, "We found out that people hate making lists."

If that feature were there when my Facebook friends numbered below 50, sure. Easy to sift through 50 to find 40. At over 600, to find 40, not so easy, and laziness dictates don't bother when email is working just fine.

edit: I can see the rebuttal coming: if you know 40 people's email addresses, you know 40 people's facebook names. Should be easy to add them to the special list. The point is not just that I be able to track them. It's also that we be willing to contact each other. There needs to be some momentum for us to all start caring to message each other on Facebook, otherwise the negative cycle continues. And we're too lazy to bother now. Honestly, I think anyone who tries to solve this problem doesn't realize that the problem's stakeholders don't care if it's not solved. Perhaps that's only in my case, I don't know.

You can't remember the names of <10 people that you count as your best friends and are already connected to on Facebook?

Quoting myself (this edit happened long before your reply):

I can see the rebuttal coming: if you know 40 people's email addresses, you know 40 people's facebook names. Should be easy to add them to the special list. The point is not just that I be able to track them. It's also that we be willing to contact each other. There needs to be some momentum for us to all start caring to message each other on Facebook, otherwise the negative cycle continues. And we're too lazy to bother now. Honestly, I think anyone who tries to solve this problem doesn't realize that the problem's stakeholders don't care if it's not solved. Perhaps that's only in my case, I don't know.

Email is the least secure technology you can pick. For my communications, sharing birthday-pictures and so on, Id like to know that it takes more than to just sniff the somewhere along its path.

Practically speaking, in most cases, whoever is in control of your SMTP server and whoever is in control of the recipients mail server can read the email. (Reading it in between those would usually require deep packet inspection).

Similarly, if you post it on Facebook, people with access to Facebook's databases can see it. The risk seems to be pretty comparable to me, it's just different companies you trust. Certainly sniffing your email off the wire would take a lot more effort than somebody at Facebook reading your posts, and moreover has to be done while the email is in transit.

Email has the option to provide more security through encryption, and is less dependent on a single company.

For communicating anything of importance to my friends, I prefer phone or email, in this way I'm pretty sure that they'll receive it. To Facebook I post chit-chat and interesting tidbits for which I don't care who reads it and who misses it.

If you use the same provider as your friends, and connect using a secure channel (IMAPS, HTTPS, etc), it's the exactly the same.

As sad and undesirable as it may be, I have a lot more sensitive information than simple birthday pictures in my inbox. Email simply makes sense compared to other options from a usability standpoint, especially when communicating with people who are not technically inclined. It's a risk that many of us still take, even if we know better, because the alternatives are not user friendly or mainstream.

> Also, I want to know what happens with everyone on my news feed.

I just added ALL my "friends" to the "Close friends" list. :)

(Actually, if you then start reading FB via the "Close friends" link instead of the "Newsfeed" link, you get a creepy amount of updates and comments and tags)

> Also, I want to know what happens with everyone on my news feed

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can still see everything if you check Facebook enough and scroll down enough. The algorithms just decide which posts to show for the vast majority of users who don't take the time to read every update from all of their X00 friends. If that's true, Facebook is not really hiding anything, they're just guessing which posts you want to see if you're only going to see Y% of the posts anyway.

This shows a problem of one-size-fits-all design.

It's good to make design choices. It's bad to then prevent users from being able to re-configure those choices if they need to.

I only have 40 people in my list. 2 of those people make very frequent posts, and I don't want to see those. But I do want to see every post that every other person in my list makes. The setting for that resets pseudo-randomly, meaning I need to keep changing it. (and it has a frustrating mouseover non-selecting thing making it hard to clicky.)

Hiding people's posts, and then offering them a fee to not hide their posts, feels a bit scummy to me.

Note that I don't care about promoted posts. Even if FB is showing me all posts from everyone they can still give prominence to promoted posts, or leave them up top for longer.

And I hope that they never go back to "apps can spam the heck out of everybody's walls".

When he talked about the IPO, I really tought that the value per share had dropped to 7$.

For what it's worth: I made a living for years promoting personal and community projects primarily through social media. I didn't spam people, I focused on engaging people with meaningful content.

I would use the shit out of this feature, and plan to use next week to announce a buddy of mine's album release because I honestly think it's something the majority of my Facebook friends will love to at least check out. As people discover that kind of use case and the potential to reach 1,200 rather than 200 people, they'll start to use this, but only GOOD content will actually benefit. That will be the filter that keeps it sustainable.

You are a spammer

That's a pretty strong term, especially on HN. I don't know tomasien personally, but I find no reason to jump to your conclusion based on his comment--I, for one, would be happy to see a promoted post from a band/cause I like/care about, and that sort of content doesn't usually last long enough to be noticed on a feed dominated by daily/hourly/faster social interactions.

For email the definition is nice and easy - unsolicited bulk email is spam.

But there are different expectations for social media, where you expect a bunch of fluff. The whole point is that you've signed up for unsolicited bulk nonsense. I'm not sure what the difference is between someone who just posts a bunch of "come see my band" posts, and someone who pays to promote a bunch of "come see my band" posts.

I'm getting irritated with the watering down of the word "spam" to mean, essentially, "any communication I am not or do not believe I would be thrilled to get".

Spam is permissionless mass mailing. If someone has Liked a friend's band on Facebook, they've given permission for contact. If you're just not a fan of self-promotion, fine, say that, but don't claim that something's spam when it is nothing of the kind.

Typical binary response. If you are a fan of Lady Gaga, getting notices from her is not spam. Granted, most people won't be fans of or want to hear from, say, Brillo Pads Inc., but the commenter pointed out his next use is for a band. I personally like hearing what musicians I follow are up to. More broadly, I think we are in a golden age for music, and social networks and crowdfunding platforms are making it possible.

I appreciate the support guys, but this is just trolling. Whether this poster was serious or not, he didn't have enough information to make this judgement and he did, emphatically. Classic trolling.

So for promoting bands on social media, what I would is provide interesting content to the broader audience, like if we made a cool youtube video, and then be sure people knew where to find information about shows, I.E. the event pages for those shows.

However, I did creep into the world of spam from time to time: I would post unsolicited posts on my friends walls about really important shows. However, I did this very carefully, posting it only on my friends walls who I KNEW were strong supporters and wouldn't mind. This increased visibility without annoying anyone too much.

But it was kind of spammy and I'm not here to defend myself on how I promoted local art and made a living. I think spam comes down to intentions and being open to feedback: if you don't want to see my messages anymore, I would stop sending them to you IMMEDIATELY, including sending you event invites , and excluding individuals from those used to be really hard.

> but only GOOD content will actually benefit

No, only commercial content will benefit.

Only good content that is tangentially commercial. I would read Dan Shipper's article "Selling Umbrella's in a Synagogue" for perspective on this

http://danshipper.com/selling-umbrellas-in-a-synagogue

One HUGE part of Facebook is photo sharing. It's the de-facto place to store and share your snaps. Why aren't they trying to make money out of this?

I see two obvious routes they could take:

Paid-for high-quality storage and sharing. One pays an annual premium to store high-quality versions of their photographs AND get copies of photos they feature in (subject to the appropriate permissions being gained). This one might be a hard sell/maybe most people don't care.

Printing. Photo printing. Bloody photo printing. It's a fucking tangible product that people buy. Why isn't this an option already? They wouldn't even have to set up their own infrastructure, just create a network of regional partners and skim off their 15%.

> _Printing. Photo printing. Bloody photo printing. It's a fucking tangible product that people buy. Why isn't this an option already? They wouldn't even have to set up their own infrastructure, just create a network of regional partners and skim off their 15%._

Perfect! This has two advantages - money from printing business plus it will urge people to upload more photos.

I've never understood why fb didn't jump on the photo-sharing aspect of their platform. I got off fb years ago, but when I was on, that was the single biggest thing anyone did, post/share photos.

The problem that exists is that for in order for Facebook to deliver a higher ROI, with a paid method than the freely showing most engaging/relevant posts method, is that they are competing with eachother. People are on Facebook, stay on Facebook, and engage on Facebook to see those posts.

Since releasing their sponsor posts I have noticed two things:

- I don't get as much engagement from as many people when I post things. The fewer people that do engage are some of the ones I would expect to, so in a way it's cleaner - obviously you can't kill all algorithmically-decided engaging material or people would leave.

- The other thing I noticed though, which is actually worse, is that I see more posts from people I don't care about, or even don't really want on my Facebook - but they're there. So with this I've been actively hiding those people (unsubscribing) from those people, and that will diminish who's posts I will see and the pool size of the amount of posts I can potentially see.

What should exist is allow the user, like the Starring ("Friend") they implemented, is that a user can state who's posts they absolutely want to see. That would hurt the sponsor posts model though, so I don't see this happening.

Also, it's pretty true that only people who have something to gain - that they can't gain naturally (for whatever reason) - will be constantly willing to spend $7 to promote it to X number of followers. So they either have a business or a big personal announcement - which I don't see people being happy paying for. And you can't forget that there are other ways of reaching people.

From what I understand, the Promoted Post fee varies by your number of friends. My friend with ~400 people said Facebook wanted to charge her $7 for post advertisement... someone who commented said that her own rate would be $90, apparently because she had 5,000 friends on there.

I'm not a Facebook user, but it seems to me that "promoted" (or bribed) posts could be very damaging to their business, because it confuses what's interesting with what has been paid for. If the idea takes off then users are increasingly only going to see commercial spam in their streams, and not stuff that they're actually interested in. At some point the noise becomes greater than the signal.

I think this is a poor substitute for engagement/wedding/etc announcements in the newspaper. While he could, I suppose, buy ad space for an engagement announcement in a newspaper, they are submitted/printed for free (and put on the paper's website). Furthermore, it is seen by a wider audience than just your facebook friends (in fact it enters the public record), and you get a nice newspaper clipping. For example, my co-workers (whom I am not facebook friends with) brought in a clipping of my child's birth announcement and picture from the newspaper. I think it will be nice to show that to my child in later years. Would you show your child a screenshot of your facebook page? Print it out for a baby book?

(I realize that in his example he promoted a political joke, something that the newspaper wouldn't publish for free, and that it someone might want to supplement a newspaper announcement with a facebook thing.)

I'm curious if Facebook displays "sponsored" text or a banner of any sort for personally promoted posts? Does anyone know?

The image in the article says "Sponsored"

I haven't seen one personally yet but from what I understand it does indicate that the post is sponsored.. Whether or not that image is from the POV of the poster or another user, I have no idea

Promoted posts are far more useful for businesses, I think, than people. As much as there are some things that I want my friends to know, they aren't generally worth paying to get the word out. Businesses are used to advertising (and often need to) so they are probably much more likely to pay for promoted posts.

A lot of businesses are trying this right now, along with the Facebook exchange retargeting stuff. The big question is going to be though whether businesses see a big enough ROI to continue to reinvest. Facebook burned through a lot of businesses with the regular ads who gave up, new ad products give them another chance but unless some of it sticks it is only a matter of time before revenues start falling.

I don't follow Facebook closely, but I've wondered when they would do this. So many businesses advertise their Facebook presence that it should be easy for FB to upsell things like promoted posts, opt-in email marketing, flash sales, coupon distribution and tracking etc.

8% of 800million @ $7 would be half a billion dollars.

Yes it's ridiculously unrealistic to suggest this is going to equate with actual use and revenue figures but when you've got the users base that FB have it seems that micropayments wouldn't half add up.

It was nice to see the analytics FB provided on the number of views. I definitely understand the author's reasoning that most people like him will probably have no desire to spend $7 to promote a random status update, photo, or post. I imagine though that this feature is more targeted towards FB pages like businesses, bands, groups, etc.

I for one will be using it personally to promote my brother's clothing brand and its current Kickstarter campaign (shameless plug: http://goo.gl/QTzn5). For a small business, $7 for some extra exposure is well worth it if you have a few thousand followers.

I'm proposing to my girlfriend this week. I will promote the post and report back my findings. It'll be interesting.

Oh, and if you look back at my comment history, you'll see what type of ring I bought.

Facebook was cool back in the day because it was personal.

This is consistent with their trend of becoming less personal, and less cool.

I'm a little surprised that nothing has come to take the place that Facebook held back when it was restricted to universities. For a brief couple of years, you had quasi-private communities, and it really felt like something special, a place not only to keep up with friends but to meet new people.

Now Facebook has mutated into something else entirely. It's boring.

It was just a question of when.

Curious to see how much pushback there is, or if 'Sponsored' posts are stigmatized or accepted.

I should have posted this earlier when people were still reading this thread, but Dan Shipper's "Selling Umbrella's in a Synagogue" is really, really relevant to this

http://danshipper.com/selling-umbrellas-in-a-synagogue

I was hoping for some more content when I clicked on this. I am curious about the sponsored posts viability and popularity; the article just sounded like one of the million other 'I told you not to buy FB stock' posts with a HN link bait title.

This is not a terrible idea. But it runs into that slippery slope whereby the more people use it, the less valuable it becomes to those users.

I expected that binder to be an Amazon referral link, and then go on to tell us about all the people who bought it.

Thanks to the original poster for paying Facebook so I don't have to.

Thank you

any "friend" of mine that would be using this trick would deemed to be a spammer and shall be deleted from my friend list.

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