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Comment by frostmatthew | Hacker News Reader

Well you can pay to promote a post so it will have a higher reach. Businesses should be more appreciative of the fact that 5-10% reach for free is far more free reach than you will get with TV, radio, Google ads, or anything else short of putting flyers on telephone poles.

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Well, no. I disagree with what you're saying. If I create a page for my business and share coupons and stuff, people are free to come like my page. That means they want to see more of my stuff voluntarily.

Why is Facebook extorting money from the business to allow users to see what they want to see?

Because Facebook is an advertising business. So it's not extortion; it's their business model.

No, it does my mean they want to see a constant stream of every promotion and sale you offer. It means that they liked _one thing_ and your page is no different than the thousand other things I have liked last month. You don't have some entitlement to space on my feed. If I am interested then a constant stream of likes to your content will keep you in view. If you convinced me and ten thousand others to like a single cat picture that does not mean I want to see anything else you post. I may like your television advertisement, but that is not why I turn on the tv or select a particular channel.

You're confused. A like _for_ a page is not the same as a like on a _single post_.

No, you are the one who is confused here. A like for a page, similar to a like on a single post, is not permission to spam my news feed. If I wanted to subscribe to your updates I would actually, you know, subscribe. A like is a coarse-granularity indication that I have some interest in your page, but just like everything else I opted to "like" it is one indicator among many that should be used to build my feed.

The problem with Facebook's behavior is not that their changes insulate you from spam so much that they may encourage it: the new equilibrium for spammers being not to publish less so much as to ramp up publication and reach the same number of people through volume. Meanwhile, smaller publishers who create limited volumes of good content are less likely to bother at all.

It's not "extortion" - Facebook is under no obligation to provide businesses with 100% reach (or indeed any reach) for free. Facebook is not a non-profit or some government service - they are a business. And just like you want to make money for your business, they want to make money for theirs. [And if they don't make money they go out of business and that certainly won't increase your reach]

IMO Facebook should have never offered any free reach for businesses - if the only option was pay for reach nobody would be complaining. Because there has always been some amount of free reach there's an odd sense of entitlement.

IMO Facebook should have never offered any free reach for businesses

It has always confused me that Facebook has done so little to monetize businesses, many of whom now list their Facebook pages in major advertising campaigns rather than their own website. Traditionally the service that Facebook provides to businesses was a pretty high value one, and it wasn't that the businesses brought users -- the businesses went to Facebook because the users were already there.

Because your page is one of the 400 pages the user liked. Some of those pages are hyperactive as far as new content (New York Times, CNN, etc.) How would you prioritize the stories?

Why not just order them by time created. I don't see what the big fuss is. Twitter does just that.

Facebook does that too - little dropdown arrow by where it says "News Feed" leading to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

It's just apparently not something majority of their users need based on their usage patterns. If they switched to this as default, brands would complain as well, as a post appearing at 7 am is very unlikely to be scrolled down to by a user who checks Facebook at 8 pm their local time zone.

You can't switch to this as default, it automagically changes back in few hours/days.

I have that bookmarked in the browser's toolbar instead of default, but you're right, ability to default is highly dependent on how you reach the facebook.com page.

You're not comparing apples to apples. That's 5-10% reach _of people who have opted in to seeing your updates_. The better comparison is that you have 100% reach to people who sign up for your newsletter.

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