Hacker News Reader

Comment by ry0ohki | Hacker News Reader

So what? Annoying pages can get un-liked, and the problem will work itself out. But if someone is a "Fan" of the brand and wants to see all of their 15 posts in a day, it's frustrating they can't. The default in Facebook is always "Most Popular", and even when I change it to "Most Recent" (to see the long tail of my friends activities, since I don't trust Facebook), Facebook always sets it back.

View on HN

The author is expecting that all 54k fans should see the page's posts, and that fewer impressions are feeling like extortion. That expectation is both incorrect and unreasonable. There will always be users who don't log in each day. Even if FB queued up the News Feed to show the post, the impression will never be driven because they haven't scrolled far enough down.

I do agree about the sort preference -- I wish it was sticky.

Why are you thinking from just on page's perspective? Most of the time a page is liked when a friend of the user shares a post from the page that the user finds interesting, it may be a kitten image, funny joke, a post about your favorite movie/actor, or about a good food on a restaurant etc. Number of pages he likes depends on how much he uses Facebook. If he is moderately active the number of pages he likes would certainly reach 3 digit number. Now imagine 15 posts per day from each of the pages! It is definitely annoying. Now you are saying about "Most Popular" setting, on which criteria will you define a post belongs to popular category? Recommendation engine is a hard problem. Page owners may complain that their pages are not getting any traction. So I think it is a fair option to pay a small price to Facebook to make sure that the post of the page will surely reach to its followers.

As a rule, I don't "Like" sites, but I was unaware that it actually meant "subscribe me to this."

That bugs me too. I like a lot of things, but I don't want to hear or see any of them in my timeline.

I used to click "Like" on various things in Facebook, but after starting to see them in my feed I immediately un-Liked them. I'm willing to tell my friends I like Logitech keyboards, but I'm not willing to see whatever posts the Logitech PR decides to write. If I'm interested to learn about what new keyboards/mice there are in the market, I'll find it myself, thanks.

Clicking "Like" used to be a fun, whimsical thing. Now it's been turned into a marketing vehicle (I don't fault FB for doing that), so now it's more like a "Spam me please" button. It feels like more of a business exchange rather than an expression of my preferences.

This is a tricky thing. Facebook's business model, and its value proposition to advertisers to a large degree depends on oversharing, and your "Likes" are an example of this. If somebody asked me if I wanted my email subscriptions broadcast to all my friends, I would say "heck no." But if nobody agreed to share their subscriptions, then how would advertisers get word of mouth?

So they phrase it a bit differently. You don't subscribe, you "like." And your likes and dislikes are a part of your personality, which is something you want to share with your friends. The subscription is just a side effect of liking, and it allows marketers to use your name to spread their brand among your friends and acquaintances.

If they just called a spade a spade, it would be a disaster for them.

In this case, to call a spade a spade would be to call EdgeRank a spam filter, and "promoted posts" a paid option to circumvent it - right?

Nice. I'm stealing this line. :-)

But if nobody agreed to share their subscriptions, then how would advertisers get word of mouth?

By people talking with each other naturally?

This sums up very nicely the conundrum that facebook finds itself in. I read somewhere, probably on HN, an analogy that Google is like a phonebook - a place one actively is trying to seek out information and lookup things that may be purchased, so ads follow logically from this scenario. Facebook is like a yearbook or chatroom, where people are engaging with their friends, not in a search for product information or trying to shop. I'm sure this can be tweaked and messed with over time, but inevitably any attempt to try to inject shopping or advertising into communication with friends is going to be met with resistance. And that resistance level is met earlier on a mobile platform.

It's a little disconcerting the way Facebook is subverting and dismantling language. First "friend", and now "like".

That's exactly what I was thinking. If you like a fan page you should expect to get stuff from it. I don't get mails from facebook saying someone posts stuff, I only get notifications up on the little globe icon so I don't care when Princess Bride or Pulp Fiction sends out little pictures of whatever. It's not annoying at all. (Unlike farmville requests, which I swear I block these apps weekly but they always notify me anyway)

If you have a page you're interested in following just add it to your interest lists on Facebook. This way you can turn Facebook into your own personal reader. The main Facebook feed has its downfalls and limitations but if you take a couple minutes to create your own personalized friend lists and interest lists you bypass this problem completely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com