Comment by rickyyean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rickyyean | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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