Is Facebook “broken on purpose” to sell promoted posts? | Hacker News Reader

Is Facebook “broken on purpose” to sell promoted posts?

arstechnica.com

119 pointsmolecule73 comments

The post linked to in the article from Facebook's ad engineer is here, for easier access: http://www.facebook-studio.com/news/item/news-feed-engagemen...

Facebook has been ranking the posts in your News Feed for a long time. The incentives are aligned, Facebook wants you to engage with items in your News Feed. Page owners want people to engage with their posts. If you don't like it as a user, you can change the News Feed sort to "Most Recent." Advertisers who don't want engagement can potentially buy different kinds of ad units to accomplish whatever it is that you care about (clicks, sales, etc).

I do think Facebook wants to keep you on Facebook, so they paid attention first to making "native" ads that work on Facebook. If you are only going for traffic to your site, you are not using your Facebook Page for what it's best at, which is helping you naturally become part of a conversation that people are having with their friends. I think that's very meaningful and a much better advertising experience. If you care about traffic, Twitter's promoted tweets are very good at sending traffic to your site. If you think about it, that also makes sense because that's what's "natural" on Twitter (i.e. we use Twitter to discover interesting content online that we can then click on to go consume).

With that said, Mark Cuban did recently get really angry about this too (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=460717227304430&...) and I understand why. He worked hard to get 2.3M fans on Facebook for the Dallas Mavericks because that's what Facebook was about before. But then a post only reached 27k fans organically and he was asked to pony up $3k to reach ~50% of his fans. That just sounds too much like blackmail. Facebook failed to communicate and manage the expectations of Page owners. They didn't know that their posts were never reaching 100% of the fans, and when that became apparent, they noticed that the algorithm was updated and depressed the reach numbers significantly. With the recent IPO, Page owners think Facebook is money hungry, and then they noticed the new Promoted Posts so they fired back. Facebook could've just communicated more to manage people's expectations along the way.

>If you don't like it as a user, you can change the News Feed sort to "Most Recent"

I have done this probably hundreds of times. Facebook seems incapable of remembering this, or unwilling to. I have taken a highly scientific poll of at least a dozen of my friends and they see the same thing. It is annoying to have to keep saying "no, really, most recent", pretty much every day. So much so I would say it has lessened the amount of time I spend on Facebook, which is probably a net-positive for me personally, but I suspect that was not Facebook's goal here.

Same here. I only use FB to keep up with brands and bands that I like. I don't use it to connect with friends so it is incredibly annoying that I have to click to see the top stories every time I visit. I also can't stand that they remove posts... I don't "like" things to see just some of what they post.

A good example is that I went to a show that was canceled the other day because that post wasn't in my feed like it should have been. I have to go to individual pages to make sure I'm not missing anything, which defeats the purpose of a feed.

Switching the sort to "Most Recent" is a negative signal that they can track in order to refine the default sort. When you stop switching it (or as often), they'll know their algo is meeting your wall needs.

That is a wrong metric, people eventually will stop changing status if ever changing them. I certainly don't go to the options menu too much. I expect that something will be the way I left it yesterday. Facebook is playing too much with the feed and I have noticed that my friends are posting much less as a result. When I enter facebook lately is more usual that nothing new is happening(even checking individually). So I am checking facebook less and less. Is like coming to your favorite place but having to ask every time where the stuff is because somebody keePs changing it with out prior notice. I don't think that "break things" continuously and at all parts of the page is a good idea. Eventually they are going to break themselves out of the market.

I don't understand your first sentence, but I think you misunderstand where this setting is: at the top of the activity stream. Of course, visiting Facebook itself is its own set of signals, but among those who are still visiting, whether or not they change the sort criteria is a separate measurement.

Furthermore, the unspoken counterpart to "break things continuously" is "fix things continuously," which is a hallmark of software development and release engineering these days. "Release early, release often" is repeated as mantra. Sometimes it breaks, sometimes it doesn't. I'm pretty sure mostly it doesn't, even in Facebook's case.

Lastly: some time ago, months and months after the last big Facebook interface redesign ("where is everything?"), I posted to my wall, "remember back when Facebook changed everything and we all hated it?" Nobody flinched. Consider that you may be substituting your own taste for the majority's when you say people are going to visit less and less as Facebook screws with the site. It has happened several times over the past 5 years and Facebook is bigger than ever.

Yep, sorry I wrote it from the Iphone, and later when I saw the mess it was too late to edit.

What I mean is that if they are doing it like you say (tracking the behavior of the people who changes their filters), they are doing it wrong. I think tracking that users set again and again something, is the wrong metric.

Speaking purely as a user:

- Is very usual to check in and find they have changed stuff around. It makes me difficult to find what I am looking for, its very distracting and annoying. - They also change the way you see your friends feed, but I didn´t want to change it, give ME the option to change it when I want to(as google does when there is a new layout for example, you keep the old options till you choose the new ones, and if the force it at least they advice you). - For me it is not about the ads (I find them easy to ignore). - It is not only me, my friends are visiting less and less, I suppose this is normal after the initial honeymoon, but there is a trend here. They are also annoyed for all the continuous morphing of buttons and functions.

I am familiar with "ship early, release often", but as a user I don´t see much continuity in the Facebook UI. Maybe they release super often, but when I begun using Facebook I had to think much less to find something or do some action it was much more easy to use. They certainly are breaking the "don´t make me think" rule pretty often. I don´t know if there is somebody trying to keep a coherency in the releases of the different teams, but certainly has to work harder.

I love the idea of Facebook, I think it is really useful and is here to stay, but if they keep making it incrementally uncomfortable eventually somebody will replace them. You say that Facebook is bigger than ever and is true, but the changes they make are not that dramatic now that they have the network effect but could be like global warming changes. You push a little and nothing happens, push a little more and nothing happens again, till you reach a tipping point and all goes downhill fast.

If everything is so good why they keep changing and changing stuff when they still have so many things to fix (like the smartphone app)?. Obviously they have to find the way to monetize properly. I just hope they don´t get lost in their quest.

It pisses me off too.

Try changing your Facebook bookmark to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

That might do the trick, until they change the request parameter for sort order.

People say this all the time, but I have never once had this problem. I set it to one time and that was it.

I wonder what causes the difference?

AB testing?

It is especially annoying because the downarrow dropdown for 'report / block' interferes with my ability to click the 'sort' dropdown.

Install the browser plugin 'FB Purity' (http://www.fbpurity.com/) which can 'force' FB to always display the 'most recent' posts. It also can do a lot of other useful things like filter out the app notices, game notices etc.

I've been using it for the past 6 months and it's really removed a lot of the things that aggravated me when I used FB.

Note that facebook could have handled this by letting users filter, exactly how G+ does it where you put your friends together in circles then you say, "I want this circle, now I want this circle"... FB is controlling that filter because they want to monetize it. They could have allowed you to control the filter, by allowing you to put people into groups then you could, say, show all posts by users in certain groups. But then facebook loses control, or as they might say, "we know best wink wink". Facebook wants to be the gatekeeper for what you receive, and they stand to make a tidy sum off of that. They could have allowed users to filter based on group.. G+ does this. But Google makes their money differently. Facebook has chosen the monetization path. Shareholders want to see revenue. Facebook will say, "Hey, we need to fight spam." Fine, but in G+, I fight spam by filtering on circles. Why can't facebook do that? Less money.

Note that changing the sort order to "Most Recent" will reset to their special sauce "Sort" after 12-24hrs of inactivity.

However, it's plain that FB is going to keep changing things in this direction. They can't not.

This is also a big issue for small community groups which have a few hundred people and used their facebook page as a way to distribute news to their members. All of whom actually do care about it.

I never thought that FB was a good way to do that (even before the changes). This relies on people being on FB to get the news. Email distribution would be a better option for communities.

Agreed. Also, Facebook offers Groups for just such a purpose. A collection of users who can share messages rather than a brand home page.

I think it's pretty obvious that "Promoted Posts" are not the answer to Facebook's revenue problem, but their desperation to make it work says a lot about the lack of options that they have. While it may have been technically unrelated to the introduction of "Promoted Posts", Facebook's culling of people's news feed smacks of a shake down. Unfortunately, Facebook has played fast and loose with their user's trust, to such an extent, that nobody trusts their motives anymore. Mark my words, Facebook's eventual downfall will be do to it's burned bridges, way more than any poor design/feature implementation

Do we know how good or bad the promoted posts revenue stream is?

But if we Mark your words, how can we trust that you won't change them later?

[Sorry for the bad joke. I myself hate seeing jokes on Hacker News, but I just couldn't resist.]

And here I remember the days where the very concept of a news feed was controversial for Facebook. The site still has considerable value without it.

> Unfortunately, Facebook has played fast and loose with their user's trust

I just did an informal (ie verbal) poll over four non-technical, but intelligent friends. I said "Have you guys heard of Facebook Promoted Posts" 3 yeses and 1 no. Then I said to the yeses "Has it changed your Facebook experience in any way?" One friend said "Not that I know of" and the other two agreed.

The only people who are upset about this change are advertisers and geeks. Facebook isn't burning any bridges tweaking feed rankings in the exact same way Google doesn't burn any bridges when they tweak search result rankings. Advertisers aren't going to flee Facebook for the same reasons they haven't fled Google: Facebook and Google own the eyeballs. Advertisers go where the eyeballs are. Full stop.

This seems like a brilliant move for Facebook. Users see fewer posts by Pages. Facebook receives additional revenue. And the big spenders in advertising are so delighted with their increased impressions, that they are willing to spend even more. Seems strategically sound to me...

Anecdotal and unscientific in terms of not comparing apples to apples.

You would need to show your friends the posts they missed at best, or at least show a competing service, over the same set of messages, which isn't possible.

The fact that people aren't upset doesn't mean that the user experience is the same. Perhaps it's a bit shitier now, but they just don't know it, like a frog slowly boiling.

re: comparing to google, google can tweak algorithms, then users use bing _to search over the same data set_. That is competition, and Google must constantly be on top of things, so users who are happy with google, tend to know way more than users who are supposedly happy with facebook.

What this means is Facebook could very well be slowly boiling their users in order to get more cash, or you may be right and users really don't mind. If there were real competition to facebook, we would find out. Unfortunately, facebook doesn't want you to export your data so you can find out.

Even if you did export your data, you can't export your friends to a competing social network. The real reason there's no threat to Facebook is because of the network effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

The concept of network effect has been taught by B-school professors as a rule or law rather than a theory. Not enough research has been done to show how network effect can be broken up since it is just recently (last 10 years or so) been taught. 5 years ago, before Facebook started stealing MySpace’s users, you could have put the same wiki link and said the same thing.

One could even argue that Facebook is destroying their network effect by not allowing people to see all posts. The fact that Linkedin, Meetup, Twitter, heck even the new myspace all exist, there are lots of networks with varying degrees of network effects which could slowly take facebook share until the tipping point is crossed.

I’m not predicting facebook’s demise, rather I’m stating that network effects are important, but have not been proven to create a long term sustainable competitive advantage.

"... taught by B-school professors..."

Feeling a little pretentious today? Your point was valid, but your tone was off-putting.

I think we can all agree that the network effect exists, its only its power and longevity are what is really in question.

You've reached DH2 on Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html . Please try responding to content, not tone.

There are two barriers to entry: the network effect, s.t. the utility I derive corresponds to the friends I have on the social network, and their utility derives partly from me being on the social network, so at a critical mass it's hard to justify going onto another social network.

The network effect kicks in at a certain critical point. If you created a really compelling social network and added the feature s.t. people could say, "import from facebook", choosing your facebook login/pw, then if enough people did this, critical mass would be reached. The network effect just states that this critical mass might take awhile to reach, but it's not impossible. Facebook disallowing you from exporting your data makes it so competing networks cannot reach that critical point quickly enough.

>"Not that I know of"

Well their experience has changed, and in ways they are not made aware of. Smacks of censorship, even if not politically motivated. There is danger in not knowing.

When it comes to Facebook, never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.

Step 1: Sell ads designed to generate likes. Step 2: Hold those previously purchased likes hostage by forcing everyone to buy promoted posts in order to reach their likers. Step3: Wait, come back everybody!

Facebook says that "all content should be as engaging as the posts you see from friends and family." But how does the company square that with the sly offering of the opportunity to override the irrelevance or poor quality of a post with dollar bills?

I think Ars Technica is conflating reputation and quality with audience size. Number of Likes and Fans corresponds to 1 to 5 star ratings on Amazon—a measure of quality and reputation; Subscriptions (a relatively new Facebook feature) correspond to voluntary signups to a newsletter. Growth in the former doesn't—shouldn't—have anything to do with the later.

You don't buy away the problem of irrelevance or quality: the measure of that on Facebook is obvious. Lots of Likes = High Quality.

You are just buying a bigger audience. The ads are like buying more Subscriptions, targeted to people who are likely to Subscribe to your content anyway.

Dangerous Minds wrote about how it rose from 29,000 to 53,000 Facebook likes even as traffic to its site from shared Facebook posts went down by one half to two-thirds in the same time period.

Dangerous Minds doesn't get it. Just because you're high quality doesn't mean you automatically have a huge audience!

I think this is the right move for Facebook from a design point of view. Likes aren't Shares aren't Subscriptions. Separating the audience measure from the quality measure helps everyone get better information out of these numbers.

"Promoted Posts" - I see a promoted post. I read the comments. I see some people saying "are you going to the pub tonight john?" (being confused about who posted the post); I see people generally in favour of the post; and then I see people who attack the organisation that posted.

IKEA (one of the largest charitable organisations in the world) gets many "pay your tax" comments.

Facebook may have opened the door to something like sarcastic Amazon reviews.

Another thing: The article talks about this from the perspective of someone posting to many people. I'm interested in the perspective of someone receiving posts:

I want an option to receive everything that everyone I like or subscribe to posts. I can turn down my receive frequency if they post too much. Or I can unsub if they post a ridiculous amount. But this option is not available to me - I have to go through every single one of my contacts and select this option.

And then I want to be able to set [SORT] to be 'most recent' AND NEVER HAVE TO TOUCH IT AGAIN rather than having to reset it every few days. The fact that the sort dropdown is harder to click because the report / hide dropdown down-arrow interferes with it just makes this more irritating.

Sorry, mildly off topic but had to jump in here to add additional information. IKEA is the worlds largest charity in terms of cash it's sitting on, but it is not the worlds largest in terms of what it gives away. In 2007 it only gave away 1.3million euros, despite sitting on 31billion and earning far more. The stores also still pays between 700million and 1billion to the founding family. lastly the money it does give away is for the furtherment of architecture.

So while it may be large, I don't think we can let it off the hook of its tax arrangements, just because it's a charity. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14675

I always took it as read that it's a charity because of the tax arrangements (i.e. if they didn't benefit from setting it up that way, they wouldn't be a charity at all).

"IKEA" is a network of many different companies. Some of them are registered as nonprofits (not charities) as a tax optimization which is probably what you are remembering. There is also the charitable organization that was mentioned above but afaik that's not for tax purposes.

(http://www.economist.com/node/6919139)

Here's another link about the complex accounting of IKEA.

> Facebook may have opened the door to something like sarcastic Amazon reviews.

Remember the Chik-Fil-A debacle? Their FB page became ground zero for Chik-Fil-A's opponents, and that was without promoting any posts--they were trying to downplay Dan Cathy's gay marriage comments by stealthily releasing a statement via Facebook, to the exclusion of all other channels.

But I don't know if there's a solution. FB is getting so bloated and unwieldy for advertisers AND end users (I'm both).

When users had 10 active posters as friends and liked 10 things, it was reasonable to show "all that you like".

When users have 100 active posters as friends and like 1000 things, most of the posts do have to be discarded - and money can affect which ones are "more important".

One of the few headlines that are the exception to Betteridge's Law.

(Yes.)

The ads being stuffed into my Facebook feed are the first time I've really thought about leaving FB. I don't watch any media with commercials.

You should stop thinking about it and do it. I cancelled mine June of 2010.

I didn't so much "leave" as I just stopped going.

I've taken the same approach. Also no longer using Facebook Connect to sign up for new services - which is one of the only reasons for maintaining an account.

You are the epitome of "not the target market".

Facebook: No one goes there any more, its too crowded.

(apologies to Yogi Berra)

It's a pretty smart strategy. Charge people to communicate--it should reduce spam and bring FB more revenue. One thing I'm not sure of is how effective promoted posts are. I built a website and tried a few different ad platforms. I saw the best performance from Google's Adwords and the worst performance from Facebook.

But isnt that the same as saying "we are protecting your feed from spam", (unless someone pays us enough to trash your feed with spam) - in which case your feed is spam...sorry.

Interesting use of punctuation here...

If you build a fan/business page, and get 100 fans. People that enjoy you or your service. Why should you have to pay to promote your posts just to reach those very people that already said they enjoy your company/person/brand/posts. It is a shady way for Facebook to try and milk their users to keep their shareholders happy. We understand why it's happening but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do to your users.

Because you are using a service that you did not develop ? Of course facebook is here to make money , like you are.

I see you're point, but when I look at the history of promotion and communication; companies have always had to pay to advertise. From commercials, to newspaper ads to those dreaded dinner time phone calls; Every medium charged promoters to communicate with customers.

Facebook was allowed to run a hobby until they went public and realized that they need to make money. This strategy of charging for using the communication medium just falls in line with what older traditional businesses have done for decades. At the end of the day, either the content creators and/or content consumers are going to have to pay--Facebook chose to charge the creators and I think that's good. If they charged me as a content consumer, I'd shut down my account.

With the current users (product) not being worth enough they are trying to flip the table and turn their users into customers too.

I would suspect a subscription model to follow shortly in order to be able to have your posts distributed in news feeds as before and no longer carry the 'promoted badge'. If you like the service pay, is that too much too ask? Well, I think Facebook thought it was too much to ask right away, but if they offer more expensive option, like promoted personal posts, a subscription seems like a fair deal.

I think this is one of the more transparent moves Facebook has made. This would not have happened pre IPO (the transparency or begging for money).

I think a distinction must be made among users between individuals and brands. Individuals and their 'likes' are still valuable to Facebook, but brands and their Fan presence are not. I don't see anything wrong with asking brands to bring something to the table in order to use Facebook's infrastructure as a broadcast alternative to Twitter.

If Mark Cuban was using the Mavs fan page as an advertising platform, he should be willing to pay as long as it provides enough value. Otherwise, go ahead and move to MySpace or Tumblr. Facebook probably won't miss the traffic.

One thing I've noticed is that I cannot seem to stop notifications from a user whose posts I know longer want to see. Just tired of the endless electioneering.

Hopefully, this problem will be fixed in a few days :-)

my usage of social media plummets during election season. it's quite a nice change of pace when it all finally blows over.

a wise choice. one can get a pretty negative impression of things and get too involved in it as well.

Leave it to the users to sort out the clutter - allow them to specify for each page / person they "like" whether they want to see all, some or just popular posts of that page/person.

As for promotional posts I have to wonder about FB's claims (and the options displayed on the screenshot): I have had a promotional post in my feed recently that did not belong to any of the pages I "liked", nor to any of the pages my FB-friends "liked" (because I have exactly 0). So I guess that's a bit broken too.

A lot of social sites are "broken on purpose" to catalyze monetized features — if the product people are smart.

The problem with Facebook is that they changed an existing feature when people were closely watching it, and didn't offer any opportunities to go with it.

Generally speaking, it is a no-go to "force" people to use features. It just doesn't work, and it makes people resentful.

However, if you structure the features in such a way that it "motivates" users to pay for them, suddenly you get some action.

Facebook should have provided a "carrot" for users in the form of a highly-coveted free spot for posts that genuinely deserve attention. Nobody complains about being able to buy the top spot if you can also earn it for free.

That's what Dropbox does, for example. Buy storage or recruit friends to earn it. All love, no complaints, lots of action.

But Facebook didn't do that, so they get backlash instead. Even the big sites don't really know what they're doing sometimes.

And don't even get me started about how promoted content hurts the general idea of an Edge Rank-driven feed...

It's funny that those things reappear pretty frequently.

Google is sinking pages on purpose so they buy ads. Facebook is sinking posts so they buy promoted posts. Yelp is sinking down businesses so they buy ads.

It's possible that those are not without merit, but I am a little sceptical to those claims. In the long term, it's in their best interest to NOT downrate non-paying websites/posts/businesses.

>Google is sinking pages on purpose so they buy ads.

[citation needed]

He wasn't saying that they actually do that. He was saying that people frequently make these claims with only anecdotal evidence and therefore he's sceptical about him. Effectively, his entire post amounts to a [citation needed] :)

I think there was a story like that on frontpage of hnews few days ago.

I just think that once a service is as big as google/facebook, these things just happens without malicious intent. Especially if you have a culture of "hack first, worry later" as Facebook does.

I remember reading the Dangerous Minds post when it appeared on HN and thinking "How is this not price gouging at best, or extortion at worst?".

I didn't ask at the time as I prefer not to get embroiled in possible flame topics, but seriously... how isn't this very shady and likely to result in a class-action?

I ask only to understand, my knowledge of US law isn't extensive (UK citizen here).

Today, people in general is aware of the bad behavior of Facebook. Just a year ago, if I mentioned that I do not have an account, I was meet with strange looks, like it was something unnatural. Today, I get meet with a "aha, ye, I can understand that" instead.

The sponsored posts on my Facebook News Feed are quite annoying and increase the noise in my social stream. This has led to decrease in my Facebook activity.

That picture is creepy because the eyes don't line up...

I see parallels here with Google converting their free traffic streams in to paid clicks; Adwords, Product Listing Ads, etc..

Facebook is "broken on purpose" in more ways than one. This is not a difficult logical leap to make.

related comments ( 11 days ago )

"Facebook, I want my friends back (dangerousminds.net)"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693655

Its just as possible that the currency of likes has simply devalued as like buttons have spread to every corner of the web with facebook login syndication. What kind of engagement does that really amount to? So maybe likes dont drive traffic when not done directly on the page itself.

If I understand your point, I can't imagine what the walls of my friends who Like Washington Post articles, or Target ads, or whatever. I'd like to see a FB anonymizer service that can handle screenshots or page scrapes in order to display the effects of different peoples' preferences on their walls. Like a homepage gallery, I guess!

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