Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg | Hacker News Reader

Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg

facebook.com

Top comment (for me):

    Hello Zuck, I would like to ask that when our facebook fanpage's reach will be come back? its too frustrating having 100k -likes with only 1k, 2k reach ,& 1m likes with only 10k, 20k reach .. sometimes too low
     
    Don't destroy our hard work and efforts, we want organic reach back !!! im not the only one who is unhappy with pages post reach . , Hope u are not ignoring my comment . thanks

    (i also wanted to know that is there any source to reach you ? if there is, i want to know..and if none..do establish one... a good idea can come from anywhere..from anyone.. )

I've also experienced this, you're only able to reach 5-10% of your fans without paying. Only way of getting a message out to all your fans is to "boost" your post, which will cost you around 0.015 EUR per like the page has. [1]

And on top of that if you ever used Facebook ads to get likes to your page, a majority of those are fake. [2]

[1] Based on my rough calculations on a couple of pages I run.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

Removed quotation sidescrolling:

> Hello Zuck, I would like to ask that when our facebook fanpage's reach will be come back? its too frustrating having 100k -likes with only 1k, 2k reach ,& 1m likes with only 10k, 20k reach .. sometimes too low

> Don't destroy our hard work and efforts, we want organic reach back !!! im not the only one who is unhappy with pages post reach . , Hope u are not ignoring my comment . thanks

> (i also wanted to know that is there any source to reach you ? if there is, i want to know..and if none..do establish one... a good idea can come from anywhere..from anyone.. )

🙌

As a user of Facebook if all of the page's I've liked over the years were able to get my attention whenever they wanted it I would not be a Facebook user

at my company, like many other companies... we've found that advertising on facebook is almost pointless (the paid adverts). the actual engaged customer return you get back is not enough to justify the cost.

Think about it, how many users are on facebook chatting with friends, see an advert, and suddenly say, "gee, i'm going to go buy that!". It doesn't happen often.

Facebook's display ads won't be profitable for every direct response advertiser, but they are incredibly effective.

Have you tried working with third parties like Nanigans or Tellapart to optimize your ads?

> but they are incredibly effective

No they are not. They are only effective for very specific and narrow Brand promoting.

Email marketing, Bing and Google, and Amazon ads are all far, far more effective than Facebook ads are, or ever will be.

You can "Boost" a facebook post, get 100's of thousands of views/impressions and 1000's of likes on it. Yet, maybe a small handful of users actually convert into a sale. That is simply not worth the money nor time. And of the users who have "liked" your ad, very few actually engage again unless you "Boost" another post. There have been countless write-ups about this supposed "Facebook sanctioned click-net" of users who somehow "like" everything yet never actually engage.

Of course, the most-Liked proposed questions such as "when u gonna introduce the dislike button ?" and "Why you forced us to install Facebook messenger ?" are the ones that would never be answered in a million years by Mark, therefore making the "vote on a question you want me to answer by liking it" community selection process somewhat pointless.

Both questions have been answered by Facebook employees on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/Why-is-there-no-Dislike-button

http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-point-of-Facebook-Messenger

I dislike the first answer. Other sites, like Buzzfeed and You.gov, an YouTube allow a wider range of emotional responses to their content.

or "Why can't the news feed stay as 'most recent?"

It has been answered so many times. The data has shown that it actually hurts engagement. The algorithm is better than a simple time-ordered sort.

Overriding a user's stated preference by silently reverting it is what we're talking here, not changing the default.

If you change your view to "Most Recent," it should stay that way, regardless of what they think it does to "engagement."

I'm one of the users that actively changes my feed to "Most Recent" any time it isn't. I've noticed that as long as I'm logging in from the same device (typically my desktop/laptop in desktop mode) that it tends to stay the same. I'm not sure exactly what triggers it to switch back to "Top Stories" but I've definitely had it happen when I log in on my Android phone through a browser (typically Chrome) after having to request the desktop version (I dislike the mobile version and uninstalled the app long ago due to battery consumption). Also, it does give the message "Viewing most recent stories · Back to top stories" if it is still on "Most Recent", so the lack of that message is one way to know to switch back.

That's not even what is frustrating for me. I'm pretty sure that it didn't used to work this way, but now whenever somebody likes or comments on a post it is moved to the top of "Most Recent". Just as a poster above has noted, the main reason Facebook wants you to use "Top Stories" is to increase usage, and I would guess that is exactly the reason they are doing this. When I log in I just want to see all the new posts, but now I have to scroll through a bunch that I have already seen just because more people have liked them, and I have to keep scrolling past several posts I've already seen unless I can remember how many likes/comments they had the last time I checked to make sure I've seen everything that's new. Ironically, I submitted feedback to Facebook about this last night.

The algorithm shows me more stuff I've already seen, and less new stuff from my less-frequently-contacted friends.

Engagement doesn't work the same way for everyone. If I can't get away from seeing stuff I've already seen, I'm less likely to open the app as much...

Annoyingly, if I opened the app less, I'd be more likely to appreciate the algorithm...

That's a reason for Facebook to care, but how does that help me, the end user?

FB Purity http://www.fbpurity.com/

Because: ads.

Easier to just recognize the questions you want to answer as opposed to having to come up with them yourself?

My fav so far was: Will you call future sessions like this question mark?

In case anyone didn't understand it with the punctuation removed:

Can you call future events like this "Question Mark"?

Ha! That's mine. To the moon!

I don't have a Facebook account so I can't post a question. Can someone post this question for me? Ask Zuck why he's invested so much money into making their own frankenstein PHP when they could have just used Java? I mean I like PHP and all. It's great for blogs or personal websites, but why would you invest all of that blood, sweat and beers into build something at that scale on PHP?

By the time they got around to building "frankenstein PHP", it was way too late to switch languages. Before that, there was no time to switch.

The whole development process of Hack is interesting. It was very organic, if the stories I heard were true. Someone got it in their head to try compiling php to c++; they tested it and got a free 20% (ballpark) speedup of everything. Then they made a VM to make it faster and more efficient, and once they had that vm, it was easy to add small, useful features like 'await' and such.

Much of what people hate about PHP isn't in Hack, by the way. It has type hinting, lots of dumb conversions don't happen, and obviously it's not interpreted. Hack is really just a better language they made that, because it shares the same syntax as PHP, was very easy to switch over to while still developing features.

Well, at some point Facebook had a code base with a whole bunch of PHP and it was worth a lot of effort to make it more efficient. One possibility was rewriting stuff, one possibility was this project to make a different PHP compiler. It wasn't obvious what the right strategy was and the Facebook spirit is to try lots of stuff and see what works. So effort went into each, and basically each of the methods turned out worthwhile for some things. Nowadays a lot of components of Facebook are not written in PHP, especially the infrastructural components. But a lot are written in PHP and work goes into the compiler. So the answer is, it didn't happen dogmatically, it happened bit by bit.

so I am wondering whether Mark will able to answer more important questions on privacy and government requests etc if he chooses the most liked ones such as celebrity crush,dislike button,etc?

I asked about it on Quora: http://www.quora.com/What-has-happened-to-Mark-Zuckerbergs-o...

now let's wait for the answer. :)

did he actually answer ANY question? i cant find any...

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