When I had Facebook I was passionate about several topics, but I limited my posting to only 1 - 2 times a month. Initially when I started I got some engagement, questions, etc. As the years wore on I gained some friends who cared about those topics too, who liked my posts, shared, etc. Dozens of likes at times.
Well, turns out people paid less attention over time, or seemed too. Those posts got fewer likes and shares. Well, perhaps people just got turned off to my "activist" posting, bored, etc? If I posted a stupid life update about getting a new strainer though, fucktons of likes of course... Decided to ask my girlfriend and a couple family members if they even saw my posts on privacy or what have you, nope. It was buried or not shown on the feed when it came out.
It's not just the feed either, the ordering is bleeding elsewhere. When I asked my girlfriend if she could see specific posts she went directly to my profile and couldn't even find them often times because Facebook now controls the order of items on someone's feed. They show "trending items" and them semi ordered older ones.
I think this article, and some personal experience, shows some of the consequences of being tied to a social platform that controls just the order of news on your feed. It is trivially easy for them to bury topics either because they just don't like them or think they "hurt user engagement." It's a sort of super stealthy shadow ban, where sure, you content is "visible" but only in the loosest meaning of the word.
I had misgivings about Facebook initially from a privacy standpoint, but how much power they have to moderate content, virtually imperceptibly, was one of the final straws that got me off of it. We're not just giving away personal information, we're giving away our ability to persuade and connect in meaningful ways.
For me, I'm only interested in postings about "stupid life updates" as you call them when I'm on Facebook. I got so sick of the "10 ways batman is better than superman" articles that I started blocking every external site I saw being posted on my feed. And I mean everything, wsj, nyt, USA Today, etc etc etc.
Facebook is not a newsreader, it's a place where I go to see "stupid life events" from my friends and family that I don't get to see very much. There are a million other places I can go to read the news, I'm glad Facebook is nuking priority on external article posts, I wish they would do it more.
As I grow older, one thing I value more and more from friends is their opinions, knowing what they care about and perspectives they have to share.
I don't think I was alone in spending too much time on Facebook thinking I was connecting to my "friends" talking about important things. Facebook seems to have intentionally or unintentionally stifled that, so I left.
If you view it as a "vapid" place to share, and do important talking elsewhere I think that makes sense, I find it hard to separate those though, and think many do.
Agreed re: the separation. I don't know that I find that all that "hard", though.
Facebook is the place where I can see posts from all my high-school/college/work acquaintances and my extended family. Do I like these people? Sure! Do I want to know what they think about anything? Please, no; every time that happens I end up liking them less! And do I want them to know a single thing about me? Even less! Giving them even the slightest awareness of my actual interests would be a moralizing disaster for everyone involved!
Now, my friends, I have a Discord server for. There, we share all the stupid things we would say to one-another in person, but never ever if it was going to be on a big searchable record somewhere where my Grandma might see. I have some of those same friends added on Facebook, but none of us ever post there. There's no need.
I wouldn't "delete Facebook", as I actually do value keeping up with acquaintances and relatives... from a distance. It's very easy to keep it separated from my "important talking"—because nobody I'd ever want to do any "important talking" with would ever see anything I wrote there.
There's validity in both positions. I am generally the same in that I only use Facebook for stupid life events and keeping in touch with people. Then again, I'd prefer not to use Facebook at all, but these days you are pretty much a no one without a FB profile. Nobody answers their phone and they hardly even text at this point.
Anyway, the problem is that Facebook pretends that it wants to make people "more connected", yet they also want to be the place where people get their news, and the only comments on current events that ever bubble up are the first handful of inflammatory nonsense. Post anything even 30 minutes after the fact, and the likelihood it gets seen drops drastically. Note that this mostly applies to comments made on posts from the media. Make a non-vapid comment on a friend's post, or make a post that's more than a sentence long, and it may never get seen. There were plenty of times when I made posts or comments that should have offended my friends, but when asked if they sae that activity, they had no idea what I was talking about. Yet they somehow always know about my family photos when I add them.
I'd be okay with it if Facebook wasn't also full of shit about being a place for discussion and for aggregating news. Sure, you and I can get our news elsewhere, but most people will continue to use the trending posts as a lens to view the world with. For things that arent vapid, I am going to move to Minds.com. I'm getting sick of Zuckerberg.
Texting sucks and is extraordinary frustrating to try and keep up with massive group texts (almost borderline anxiety-creating), and phone conversations are always difficult and frustrating. However, FaceTime and similar video-calling is great. I wish we could make phone just default to this.
You're crazy! I find the whole concept of synchronous conversations soul-destroying; and the higher-bandwidth they are, the more about you they reveal, the worse it is. The concept of a video call is, to me, on par with a job interview, in that it makes me instantly lose every shred of self-esteem about my appearance, body language, and speaking mannerisms I've ever built.
How about we all just go back to writing letters, so we can take months to compose an air-tight, well-considered, face-on reply, without that being uncouth?
Then stop wasting your time talking to people that make you feel like talking to them is soul-destroying. Either that or go get help for your sociopathy.
It covers how FB uses "influencer" activity to determine what a "viewer" would see. There's nothing new here that I see, but for all the people talking about and trying to understand FB I don't see anyone reading their patents.
It's a lot of work and takes some practice parsing things out, but there is value there in understanding the general direction FB is going or where they are spending their r&d dollars.
Side note: all the people asking why a good FB alternative hasn't arisen should take a look at these patents to realize how much of what we take for granted that FB does is prohibited for a competitor. FB is defining and locking out competitors from what the worlds thinks a social network is.
Facebook isn't helpful in following the stupid life updates either.
Every now and then I try to use Facebook to check out what people are doing because I'm interested in their life updates but I don't really have a clue. I see some random posts from some friends, but not all nor necessarily the important posts. There are friends whose postings I haven't seen for ages, and when I go look back on his/her wall Facebook gives me a curated view with most posts hidden by default so I can't skim through the most recent twenty-or-so posts and make up my mind myself.
And don't get me started on posting to Facebook myself. If I want to say something it's an equally mystic selection of friends who might see it, or "see" it if they downloaded the post but never browsed that far. I think that the post saturation is close to 10%, at most: that many of my friends might actually see my posts.
I grant that Facebook is trying to solve a hard problem. I have a Facebook list that contains all my friends and looking at that list of chronological posts exhausts me before I exhaust the list. So there needs to be a filter, however, the algorithm to filter posts should be known to users. I would probably settle for "Most liked posts from recent days from each your friend", or something similar. Something that is finite and defined. The current views are none of that.
Why is it so terrible that they control the order of the feed? If the feed was just sorted by date then it would be unusable for most people. I feel like a lot of objections to how Facebook does things come down to thinking Facebook is something different from what it is. It is not, nor is it intended to be, something that shows you every single post from every single friend.
I tried to spell out why, but here you go, my personal experience is this out of order sorting meant that if I tried to post anything besides vapid updates few people saw them. If Facebook wanted to go from chronological to some other transparent metric, like hotness, I'd be more okay then whatever this is. The fact this is on the feed, my profile, and heck, even searching for events last I saw, is disturbing.
Also, sorted by date was great for many years when they initially got popularity. I (and others IIRC) were pretty unhappy when it changed to this.
I'm seeing this with blog posts, too. Where a serious topic is discussed, but it's illustrated with appropriately-captioned meme images. I wonder if they do it to please today's meme-craving reader, or just to avoid overly long sections of text without any breaks (what Germans lovingly call "Bleiwüste", i.e. "lead desert").
Because there's no way to ensure you have the option of seeing everything unless it's in chronological order. Even if there was just the option of sorting chronologically then a different sorting being the default could be fine, but when you click "sort by most recent" it doesn't, not really anyway. Currently when I click that option there are zero posts displayed. That's not a typo or exaggeration, literally zero posts display under "most recent".
Another way to put it -- it's not so much that ordering by something other than date is an issue, it's that ordering by date is (one of) the only neutral ways to sort. Anything else introduces a bias to some degree. Popularity of posts may be another way, although this gives older posts undue weight.
Sorting by an opaque algorithm gives FB the power to control the conversation.
> Why is it so terrible that they control the order of the feed?
Because for more and more people, social media is becoming 'the news', and this gives Facebook certain obligations to treat content fairly and act transparently.
Whether this state of affairs is intentional or not is moot - FB knows its power and reach. (Though I struggle to believe FB really is just some naive company that suddenly had greatness 'thrust upon them' - they've spent a good ten years proselytising their "platform", after all)
Not knowing how/where/to-whom my posts would show up (and how/where others' posts or status updates or whatever could be seen) was my biggest (non-privacy-related) problem with Facebook when I briefly tried it back in '09 or so. Their UI was so damn confusing that I quickly gave up on it. Seems like it's only gotten worse, but I guess most people don't mind not knowing what a given action will actually do. It felt to me like a giant step back as a communication tool, adding levels of uncertainty and chance for no good reason.
Add the fact that their weighting of posts also shapes conversations in possibly-unpredictable (or predictable, deliberately-manipulative) ways and yeah, I object to it.
Then again I also find Twitter's UI to be fairly confusing (and really stressful, god it's messy). Less so, but still. So maybe I'm just bad at understanding GUIs. Back to SMS, IRC, and Basic HTML GMail for me.
This isn't referring to the general Newsfeed, where sure, they can reorder. It's referring to the fact that on _my profile_ FB will rearrange my stories, so most recent isn't always on top.
if Facebook is personalizing everyones feed based on what they click, isnt the clicker to blame for the result of personalization, not the technology provider. it sounds like your friends didnt engage with your posts, they did engage with other posts, and the facebook feedback loop built them a filter bubble of things they liked more than your posts.
I blame Facebook. I've ranted on HN about what I consider to be an abuse of 'curation' in the past, but I think 'curation' is killing the internet.
I agree with the grandparent about Facebook killing engagement, but the place I noticed it first was Last.fm. I used to spend tons of time on Last.fm looking up music. I made sure every track I played was scrobbled, and I listened to their recommendations all of the time.
As time passed, the recommendations got worse. Mind you, the recommended songs were closer to what I was listening to, but I appreciated when Last.fm used to recommend music that was somewhat off the wall. If it was a draft, I guess you could call that kind of recommendation a flier.
I personally blame machine learning. The recommendations I get in Last.fm now sound a lot like music I'm already listening to. Not only is it boring, but it's stupid, in the sense that finding music that sounds almost exactly like music you already like is easy.
I want content to be curated the way a friend would curate it for me. For instance, I had a friend recommend the band Sleigh Bells to me, because he knew I listened to punk all of the time, but that I really loved pop (and noise). Last.fm has never recommended me anything remotely as great as that.
I'm almost loathe to like anything on social media anymore, since it basically means I'm going to get similar posts shoved down my throat until I completely give up on the site.
Seems like you dislike bad curation specifically, rather than curation itself. After all, Last.fm was already curating the songs they recommended (it wasn't like they literally threw a random sample of all their catalog).
That said, I agree with you that this kind of "finding the closest match" model is quite silly for recommendation systems. And you can see the same problems with ad matching too.
>Seems like you dislike bad curation specifically, rather than curation itself.
Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at by putting 'curation' in single quotes. It's not really curation if you aren't specially choosing things. For instance, if I used Google to search for "bands that sound like [x]", nobody would claim the results are 'curated'.
These systems are basically search functions that return the most similar results that are distinct from the ones you already know about.
I think the fundamental issue is that Markov Chains are actually really terrible at curating content in the long term, but in short-term they are fantastic.
personally i somewhat agree with you. watercoolers like drudge report, techmeme, aldaily, redef show everyone the same page, not some regurgitation of their past. you experience new things by being shown something other than timehop.
No. Which people and pages's posts I get to see because I follow them is up to me no matter how many times I click on their content. I am old enough to unsubscribe or ignore them by myself.
In the simple case where they look at what your likes are to determine the bubble they create around you, sure. But I don't think that's all they look at. Content could be being buried simply because a friend of a friend doesn't like that content, but likes a bunch of other content you like. It's not as simple as a reaction to your action. There's a lot of "secret sauce" that goes into it that makes it not quite so transparent.
Facebook's "news feed" (or whatever they're calling it, now) is one giant funnel towards the lowest common denominator.
The only parameter you control over this, is your social network. But that's a pretty imprecise control frequently at least somewhat orthogonal to your interests. And in the last few months, I'm seeing more "promoted" content that none of my friends are specifically posting.
Giant funnel. Lowest common denominator.
I keep my network pretty small and limited to "real friends." I see enough of their posts to keep coming back; it leaves me at least a little in touch with their daily lives.
But I find myself increasingly motivated, if not compelled, to stay away from FB.
I have suspected that facebook punishes your visibility if you don't post frequently (like a few times a day). Have you tried posting much more often than two times a month? Try two a day and see if your average engagement increases.
I've found the opposite — posting frequently results in decreased visibility in my experience. My wife and I trade off posting family photos of our kid, and whenever one of us has recently posted the photo gets much less of a reaction (i.e., 25 likes instead of 65).
>"I had misgivings about Facebook initially from a privacy standpoint, but how much power they have to moderate content, virtually imperceptibly, was one of the final straws that got me off of it."
Pair this with Zuckerberg's potential future political aims, the role of segmented social media advertising in this past election and privacy, that should be very concerning for one person to have so much power.
Some people are extremely happy to ritualistically watch the 3pm saturday star trek rerun before going out. They're not in order, its OK if you miss one, in fact variety is cool because you know next week will be at least average even if today was one of the "bad seasons". My friends and I loved that experience.
Some people are extremely happy to binge watch an entire season of star trek in precise order. I loved that and in my opinion its really the only way to enjoy the much maligned DS9. DS9 is essentially the seven year epic adventures of Garak, its the only Trek where the main character isn't a human star ship captain. Sisko is weak and boring because he's a minor supporting character, not like main character Garak.
Everyone hates it and flips out when they want option A or B and "the man" refuses them and gives them the opposite of what they asked for. About half the population hates facebook, may even be a majority. Note that once you narrowcast enough you can drop user engagement until the survivors 100% love what you're doing, even if 97% of the population refuses to watch it, which ironically is the state today of legacy TV, such as "Survivor" the TV show.
Right, but the tools you use to interact with society (engage, persuade, argue) are a bit more consequential than Saturday evening mindless entertainment.
It's interesting to see how Facebook is taking increasing control of news and publicity on its service. In a sense, we're long past the point of questioning whether it's ethical, since they've obviously been influencing content for a long while, but this is one of the strongest arguments for FOSS alternatives like Mastodon.
Hopefully, if this continues, big businesses will push the shift to open instances for a more level playing field, and the users will follow.
I left FB ~4 years ago. One of the straws that broke the camel for me was that it was obvious FB was "curating" my feed for me. Without notifying or consulting me. Posts from friends wouldn't show in my feed and vice versa. The privacy issues were bad enough but when I couldn't trust the platform to fulfill the only need I had for it, I walked.
The worst part is you can switch it back to the chronological view, but Facebook will undo your change at their earliest convenience. You have to make a bookmark to the correct feed to keep it showing up properly.
It is annoying, but I'm not a power user. I only check it once every few days to keep up with the relatives, maybe post once a week or so. It's pretty low maintenance.
AFAICT even the "chronological" view is not chronological. I don't know -- I switched over to mbasic.facebook.com because it works without JavaScript -- but I remember posts randomly appearing and disappearing.
If it is a complete machine-learning backed algorithm (I have no idea if it is), it could learn that if you find a time sensitive post after the deadline, it gives you FOMO and you start checking FB more frequently. That is, the algorithm is optimizing for engagement.
Given that you were frustrated by not seeing all of your friends' posts and their not seeing all of yours, how are you better for it now that you see 0.0% of your friends' posts of any kind and now that you can now share your own content with only 0.5% of them (personally or through email etc)?
To answer your question, the only thing worse in practice than no news, is fake news.
There are relationship negatives to censored personal news. My wife was tangentially involved in a family feud where facebook randomly promoted or hid various attacks and defenses and apologies of the two major factions. Its just not a platform useful for social interaction anymore. The censorship of the family feud and the resulting weird interpersonal drama reminds me of some incidents in the meme-war on facebook leading up to the election of Trump which is interesting.
Superficially it sounds awful to have family drama increased by hiding half the posts, much like playing a board game where half the moves are deleted sounds terrible. However, for a short period of time, until the users are completely alienated, FB made money by increasing the depth and length of that family feud by increasing readership during the height of the feud. In the long run people won't use FB at all, of course.
i'm in this situation as well, i've moved to a slack group with my work friends and direct messaging with others, facebook was just a shitty way to talk to people i don't really care about where my posts were spirited away almost immediately
0.5% is being generous, i had almost no interaction with people i cared about while i was on there and i'm glad i've switched to other platforms where they aren't as interested in feeding me their stuff and just letting people talk
That would utterly annihilate its corporate use if there was even a rumor they randomly censored content like operations and QA/QC discussion. My company also pays extra money to slack for the "we log everything for your e-discovery enjoyment" so there would be substantial legal issues if they randomly started hiding stuff we're paying to be e-discovered. Slack has problems, but weird censorship stuff isn't one of them.
Weird as it probably sounds, FB sucks for humans because its users are people not corporations.
Depends on how he reacted to the change. I started talking to my friends on the phone more often. I probably also reduced the overall number of friends I have - but then are they really friends if you won't make the effort to contact them? Maybe I'm just old enough to feel comfortable letting past friends, colleagues, etc. fade into the past in favor of focusing on the people right in front of me.
What makes you think I see 0.0% of my friends' posts? What you're actually saying is that people who have left facebook see 0.0% of stuff on Facebook.
That's not a problem.
Friends will share important stuff outside of Facebook because that's how friendship works.
And there are many other platforms where things can be shared too. People can post the same or similar things to multiple platforms quite easily these days.
Facebook is likely trying to maximize the time people spend on browsing their feed. Surface too many "boring" news articles in a row and user might go away. Put a nice mixture of news, goofy stuff, updates from friends, some fake news to provoke action and user remains.
Hundreds of millions of people stare the news feed on weekly basis and interact with it. This creates a spectacular opportunity for employing machine learning to optimize things. Facebook has huge amount of data and it is easy to run various tests automatically to see what works in practice.
If this is the case, then it may be difficult for the others to compete. Facebook might be doing exactly what customers want - even if they don't know it themselves.
Assuming they aren't selling this "boring" evaluation (or submitting to any other kind of pressure for making suboptimal decisions), keeping users reading their feed is still not necessarily what users want.
Facebook is doing what maximizes revenue, but there's no evidence that is the same thing that will encourage users to keep using it in the long term.
That's a very good point that I did not think about. Even if they would be able to hit the right buttons in my mind to keep me browsing, I might find the overall experience dissatisfying and quit the whole thing. Like does anybody really feel "good" after spending one hour browsing Facebook or imgur?
Exactly, I remember when the main complaint was "there's too much irrelevant spam on my timeline". Now I only hear the opposite "I missed this and this important announcement"
I don't see how these are not the same things. I see lots of posts from people I don't know that are liked by some of my friends, but often never see original posts by other friends. And I only have about two dozen friends that I follow.
I don't think it's exclusively one that follows the other. Users push for content migration, and content encourages user migration. However, there's not much draw for users right now to move away from Facebook, so we're more reliant on content to make the shift.
If content follows users then how did Facebook develop such a big user base? Every single Facebook user chose to create an account there. Why? Because of the content they knew they would find there.
"Follow the users" is a good way to decide where to do some content marketing next week, but it's incomplete if you're looking at how the overall information ecosystem evolves. You have to account for how new services attract users, in order to understand what established services are doing to try to keep users.
The other reason why we're long past the point of questioning whether it's ethical is because pretty much the entire press insisted that it was a moral imperative for Facebook to take control of news on their service because of people sharing "fake news". There weren't really any dissenting voices on this point from what I recall.
The perils of depending on someone else's service, especially when you have no contract with them that defines what they are supposed to be doing for you.
Big business loves censorship, they go straight demands it if not offered, look at the Youtube boycott that is happening right now. They are surely not fan of FOSS or freedom of speech.
They love it until it causes them to lose control over distribution or user retention/acquisition. See: "native articles" and how poorly received they were by news publishers.
Business likes anything that helps profits, and hates anything that hurts profits.
The threat of communist takeover permeated most of the 20th century as the ultimate threat for private enterprise, but the military-industrial-complex had a wonderful time.
FB has always prioritized content which doesn't lead them to see ads elsewhere (like photos instead of links), but maybe it's something else.
I live in Chicago and subscribe to the Sunday edition. I also read the digital edition, and have found it lacking, particularly since inauguration. In recent months Michael Ferro became the majority shareholder in the Tribune, a person obsessed with celebrities and not so much in local or even national news coverage. He's the guy that fired all the Sun Times photojournalists and mandated reporters use their iPhones instead.
The paper has struggled to find its place in trying to be like the NY Times or Washington Post, covering important national issues, but without the same resources. Meanwhile, hyperlocal sites like DNAinfo have filled the niche, which has strong FB engagement because it provides content people are interested in, but the Tribune isn't providing.
Instead of blaming a third party which bears no obligation to send traffic, the Tribune would be better served in providing better local news coverage and less in areas which aren't compelling (celebrity gossip) or where it can't compete (national coverage like NYT).
I work for the Trib, and read it every day. While your comment about Ferro is true, being interested in hanging with celebrities, I have not noticed a change in the content with Ferro in charge.
The Trib has always focused on very local stuff - city and state politics, the midwest, local sports teams, the spike in murders, etc. I don't think that is going to change. I think the editorial board would like to believe it has a higher national profile since we live in the 3rd largest city in the country but in reality we're very regional. We also own the LA Times which actually does have a higher national profile. But I digress.
I'm not going to dispute some of your legitimate gripes. I'm not a fan of celebrity gossip either. I only know a couple of journalists but I suspect they would agree with you. Facebook or other 3rd party does not have any obligation to us.
But the simple truth is our print circulation is declining at a rate faster than our digital circulation is rising. All newspapers are dealing with this issue.
The NYT and WashPo has done much better with revenue and digital circulation, 2 papers that do an excellent job of covering subjects of substance. However those rises are directly related to Trump. Even we have seen a rise in subscriptions at the CT as well as LA Times due to Trump. And The LA Times does a really great job of the kind of coverage you are looking for.
I feel like you are missing the point of the article. More eyeballs hopefully leads to more advertising revenue, which leads to more money for better coverage, or at least pays the salaries of reporters who provide that coverage. If a third party that previously was delivering more eyeballs is declining that is a concern. All the quality coverage in the world will not change that. It's a legitimate concern for us.
I don't disagree with the type of local content (crime, politics, sports) you describe. But that's only a small part of what people are interested in. Though the writing is sometimes sensationalist and click-baity, DNAinfo is eating the Trib's lunch for local engaging content. The number of links to DNA in my fb or twitter feed vastly outnumber Trib ones because friends share/click articles about their city or neighborhood -- that go well beyond only the crime/politics/sports staples.
You're right in that I did miss the point of the article, but not entirely. The fb engagement on what the Trib seems to cover (national/international focus) has likely decreased because of Trump, while resulting in more clicks on WaPo/NYT. While it's likely fb changed their algorithm, content also makes a big difference in what gets surfaced. And I think the original article ignored the role that it may have played.
It sucks that journalism and livelihoods can suffer because of a monolithic walled garden, but there is probably more to the story.
There is active discussion right now internally about this issue. We're not the only newspaper seeing this decline in views from facebook.
I'm not here to whine. The news business is what it is. We rely on outside sources to drive our traffic. Traffic means eyeballs which translates into ad revenue, hopefully anyway.
When google changes its algorithm that might hurt our web traffic we have to respond accordingly. SEO people have all kinds of discussions, and write articles, when google makes a change. This article is something similar.
It seems like facebook has been changing their algorithm determining what appears in a user's feed, which is effecting our traffic. The same efforts we put in 6 months ago using facebook are having diminishing returns. The point of the article is its effecting us, and apparently not just us.
Whether facebook will address this issue, either in public or private remains to be seen. However I see there is an advantage of talking about it publicly, to determine if it is just us (it's not) or if its affecting others (apparently it is) and what can be done to remedy the situation.
On a side note I like DNAinfo as their content is hyperlocal. It's probably harder for the Chicago Tribune to do that.
In a world where distribution is unlimited and unbounded by location, it seems unlikely that focusing on local content will continue to work for them if they want to grow.
Yeah, the Trib has been 'meh' at national news reporting for a while now... But while they used to have good local reporting, now DNAInfo and The Chicagoist are totally eating their lunch.
There are content issues for sure, but I suspect their presentation strategy isn't helping either - the Trib reacted to the growth of digital readership by putting up paywalls and obtrusive ads, essentially driving away digital readers... straight to their competitors.
PS. But it still has to be weird for a big newspaper that owned its own distribution and sales channels, to now be so dependent on an opaque third party distributor, which is so in control that it doesn't even bother to tell them when it's altering its distribution, and they have to reverse engineer it from traffic patterns...
I find it fascinating that media companies like news papers have completely tied their success to a 3rd party platform like Facebook. They have essentially given all of the publishing power to Facebook. AMP is another one that comes to mind.
If I run a shop that sells magazines, and I order a four magazines to fill some rack space in the shop the distributor does not decide to send you two and black hole the rest of your order.
They send you what you ordered.
Facebook is not a distributor. They are acting as gatekeepers, too.
Came here to say the same thing, except with me it's more of a facepalm type of thing. To see a major newspaper allow its business model to depend on an arbitrary, self-interested black box... groveling for views... wasting time analyzing it... complaining about it like a typical user (like a bitch, if you'll forgive me) is frustrating to watch.
I have a strong distaste for FB as much as the next HNer, but you have to go to where the potential customers are and an enormous amount happen to be and stay entirely on FB.
Facebook's model of popularity and personal relevance to the top will never be the right platform for news. It alarms me that it's the #1 news source for like 70% of adults in the US.
More alarming is how this trend is matched with the move away from hard news towards 'pundit celebrity' commentary by almost all networks.
I think there's something in the human psyche where the best feelings come from confirmation of your own biases. This hack wasn't useful when only a few network news programs had to appeal to mass audiences, but it's provided really useful as media has splintered and become personalized.
I have this weird personal exercise where I pull up 5 different news tabs all at once. It's AMAZING how different the world looks from different websites, all coving the same events from drastically different perspectives. There has always been slant, but it's become 10x worse in the last decade.
People simply like too many pages that produce too much content. There has to be prioritization and people have a natural limit to how much time and attention they have to scroll down all the way.
So this is a fundamentally hard problem to solve. You can already prioritize posts from a page to appear at the top of your feed if you really don't want to miss posts.
The real issue is that people underestimate the amount of content they're going to get with a like.
> We went from roughly 20 posts per day to 24 posts per day.
If you post that many articles to Facebook then I'm simply going to unfollow you. Imagine I have ten sources posting that much, or one hundred sources. You think I'm going to engage with everyone? Heck no. Post one thing a day, two absolute tops. Ideally one thing a week but obviously that's not many sources ideal model.
If I really want to follow you I'll add your RSS feed to my reader. Facebook, Instagram, et al, have become one big screaming match and this is only going to get worse until people realise that less is more. If they decide to change their feed algorithm, well, sucks to be you.
There are Twitter accounts (I'm looking at your Politico) that constantly repost their stories. I swear they're actually automating deleting their tweets and simply tweeting them every hour (disclaimer: I haven't validated this hypothesis). I don't even follow political Twitter accounts anymore, over tactics like this. I keep them all in a (private) list and browser the list when I want to see what's going on in US politics.
Possibly they're trying to game the algorithm. I follow a few photo sources on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and RSS feeds from their sites (when offered). The consequence is that I see the same posts multiple times, not just across the various feeds but from a single feed. It's not them deleting and reposting, it's more posting slight variations of the same article (again, possibly trying to game the algorithm).
But the screaming match drives me nuts. What good is 100,000 views anyway if only 100 people actually click through and engage? Better to have 1,000 views and 200 click through/engage. Target better, stop throwing shit at walls.
Just as an example - I recently had a little project featured on one of the top 10 photo channels on YouTube - 300k+ subscribers. The video currently has had 13,000 views in three weeks, and in it I get a full minute long feature + a link to my site. How many sales have I made through the feature? Zero. When I first posted the project on a niche site, a couple of years ago, I had ten sales within the space of a couple of days.
Slate's Twitter reposts many of their stories as well, but the duplicate tweets remain intact. Duplicate tweets redirect to the same web page but have different Slate-branded short URLs so perhaps that's how they get away with it.
Yesterday I checked Facebook at least 5 times. It kept putting the same post at the top of my news feed. There weren't even new comments on the post or anything. For me, that behavior is broken.
>There has to be prioritization and people have a natural limit to how much time and attention
I agree that this is probably the root cause. The top of the FB newsfeed is a zero sum game because each person has a finite amount of time.
Since the pixels of a newsfeed is always filled with <something> instead of being empty, it means there should be a corresponding "something" that increased in frequency which in turn, diluted the frequency of the Chicago Tribute. E.g., a person "likes" Marvel films and NFL/NBA/MLB sports so they get more of those posts which crowds out the newspapers' posts. It can either a rash of "new likes" or a FB algorithm change that re-prioritized them.
Kurt Gessler is only able to see the audience stats from the vantage point of Chicago Tribune instead of total stats from the audience perspective. Therefore, it's like the proverbial blind men feeling around the elephant.
> Kurt Gessler is only able to see the audience stats from the vantage point of Chicago Tribune instead of total stats from the audience perspective.
Getting a wider perspective seems to be exactly why this post was written. The main call to action at the end of the blog post is to other content creators, to see if they're experiencing the same thing. Get enough data points, and you can start to form testable hypotheses about what's being prioritized now.
>The main call to action at the end of the blog post is to other content creators,
I'm not a FB analytics expert but to me, it seems like it would be better to get statistics from a bunch of "bots" that saw posts from the audience side. Correlating with other creators still seems to be a very limited form of analysis.
Of course, one wouldn't have to do any of that if Facebook cooperates and transparently explains to the publishers how the zero-sum game has been reprioritized against them.
Which is why I much prefer Reddit than Facebook. Content is curated by each community and not some corporation. There is a "hot" algorithm but you are free to switch to "top", "new", etc, if it doesn't work for you.
This is only a feature of hyper-centralized news curation systems. Once we figure out the issues of moderation and allowing illegal content to be purged while preventing purging of legal content, and someone figures out a way to get a bandwagon going, it will hopefully no longer be necessary for a news curation platform to have to "play ball".
LOL - Reddit has been caught literally editing the content. They then play the "community powered" card when in reality the mods are groomed and selected for major sub-reddits.
The level of total control is the same - the mechanisms are different. Nothing else.
True, perhaps what's happening here is that Facebook made a change that genuinely made the experience better for people in terms of relevant content that they see, and page owners are now unhappy how this impacted their stats.
I'm also curious if the end of the elections had an impact on newspaper story interactions? Sure, there's no end to stories after Trump was elected and sworn in, but maybe people are just tired of wall to wall politics coverage?
So, Facebook has a vast cache of data on what people do and don't like and respond to in their feed. Facebook also has any number of 'features' in ML language they can slice and dice this data by, from likes and shares through to time spent on article before returning to the main feed.
Browsers of the Facebook feed themselves have any number of ways of accessing information, which they did not have before. If I want sports news on teams from Chicago, I'm no longer beholden to Chicago Tribune or even Facebook for that, I can download something like Bleacher Report TeamStream and have a customized feed of what I find interesting and nothing else.
It's probably not massively difficult to work out the kind of content that makes people like, share and click at scale on Facebook - humans are humans after all - but it's probably not consistent with the output of the Chicago Tribune (national stories that are covered in greater detail elsewhere and content which is probably only of any real interest to Chicagoans).
This is probably even more the case at the moment with so much of the action politically happening at a national level - Trump is a once in a generation kind of news story.
It seems they have two options:
- Accept that Facebook is a pay-to-play platform and that they will have to pay to narrowcast news to Chicagoans
- Accept that Facebook is going to account for an ever-declining share of their traffic.
Either way, I'm not sure there is a way forward for online media that doesn't involve a huge rethink about what the product they serve up is. Blaming the algorithm seems incredibly fruitless.
I miss the days when Facebook (and Twitter) just had a chronological timeline. At this point, I only see posts from my actual friends if I've set up notifications for their new posts. If this curation is supposed to make me stay on Facebook more, I don't think it's working, because the same post will stay at the top of the feed for six or eight hours, which makes me less likely to check it.
Hopefully they're taking into account the actual active times of the fans of a page. If your fans are fairly local, which would map a lot of sense for a newspaper, a page could have huge swings in engagement throughout the day on the same content.
If they're smart they have a model of how they expect a post to behave given who they've shown it to, and show posts more/less widely based on whether it's over/underperforming their prediction.
At some point, a Google search or a Facebook timeline will be covered 100% with very smart, personal, native ads next to your organic search result or your mom saying you "Happy Birthday".
Because, Quarter after quarter post-IPO management (at Facebook, Google and others) are denting the returns and eating into ROI margins across worldwide industries and services of an endless spectrum by converting free organic "reach" or "impressions" or "time spent" into advertiser ones. At some point GOOG and FB will stabilize at some market capitalization, defined by their ability to maintain a steady revenue stream from advertisers.
Even with over 1000 friends on Facebook - the maximum engagement that my posts reach is probably in the range of 10 to 200 or at the max 300.
One thing I have noticed is that the friends with whom you engage the most - chat, like, comments - in turn get to see your posts often and engage with them.
Anyone with whom you have not interacted in a long time - more than a few months - will never see any of your posts. I don't see any point of being Facebook friends with anyone with whom I haven't interacted in a while. You aren't getting their updates and they aren't getting yours. Facebook is a social network which I mostly see as a place to broadcast life events to all my broader friend networks and acquaintances.
For close friends and family I always prefer medium of communications that are more intimate in nature - phone calls, video calls.
> Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of Chicago Tribune’s posts
Of course. That's the whole premise of the FB Newsfeed. It started in late 2011 - up to that point the news stream was in chronological order and you saw all posts (depending on your geographic the feature was enabled maybe on a different date). Then the newsfeed showed what FB algorithms provided you depending on your click-, browsing-, friend- and like-history. It's called a filter-bubble, you suddenly see just mote of the same, no variation. It marked the tipping point of FB as social network tool (at least for me).
I promoted posts on a Facebook page successfully a few times several months ago. Facebook has been surfacing those posts constantly bombarding me with reminders that they were successful and people are liking the posts and page. Everyday, such and such person liked your page.
Maybe Facebook is targeting the smaller people by having the algorithm push their posts over larger companies. This might be a good thing. Do you do better with 1000 duck sized advertisers or 1 horse sized advertiser?
This is just a thought, but perhaps this is due to an internal effort at FB to filter out "fake news". The changes in their algorithm might be showing some unintended consequences, or maybe the stories from the Tribune that are getting killed really are of dubious quality (I'm not a reader, so I really don't know). The timing of the Tribune's downward trend in post reach would seem to fit this narrative at any rate.
Fake news is about determining bad sources, not individual articles. It's about finding propaganda sites that are intentionally and maliciously inventing false stories. A fake news algorithm wouldn't apply to a credible, established newspaper.
If that's the case (and I don't doubt it is, I really don't know how this filtering is supposed to work), isn't that sort of missing the point? The way I understand it, plenty of "credible, established" media outlets are on the hook for propagating unverified, "fake" news. Filtering out the obvious conspiracy theory and propaganda news outlets seems like some really low hanging fruit.
Unfortunately, the world we live in requires some money to have professional journalism. Even if these folks were non-profit, they'd still need some money to get by and do the stuff (pay reporters, curate a website, print physical newspapers, and so on).
They have to play to survive. Sure, this could be fixed in a myriad of ways, each having their own set of issues, but most of us aren't in a position to do that.
It;'s pretty clear to me that, yes, while it's a turn of phrase, they are clearly intensely focused on metrics like shares. He talks of "misses" and "strike outs" in other places.
It's no wonder that the mainstream has been adopting more and more of the tactics of content farms with clickbait headlines and articles that are more about generating outrage and "shares" than anything else.
A "great" article is defined by how many shares it gets. It's no wonder that high quality, long form, real journalism is slowly fading away. It doesn't pay to do any of that when the only money left is chasing FB shares all the way to the bottom.
Well, turns out people paid less attention over time, or seemed too. Those posts got fewer likes and shares. Well, perhaps people just got turned off to my "activist" posting, bored, etc? If I posted a stupid life update about getting a new strainer though, fucktons of likes of course... Decided to ask my girlfriend and a couple family members if they even saw my posts on privacy or what have you, nope. It was buried or not shown on the feed when it came out.
It's not just the feed either, the ordering is bleeding elsewhere. When I asked my girlfriend if she could see specific posts she went directly to my profile and couldn't even find them often times because Facebook now controls the order of items on someone's feed. They show "trending items" and them semi ordered older ones.
I think this article, and some personal experience, shows some of the consequences of being tied to a social platform that controls just the order of news on your feed. It is trivially easy for them to bury topics either because they just don't like them or think they "hurt user engagement." It's a sort of super stealthy shadow ban, where sure, you content is "visible" but only in the loosest meaning of the word.
I had misgivings about Facebook initially from a privacy standpoint, but how much power they have to moderate content, virtually imperceptibly, was one of the final straws that got me off of it. We're not just giving away personal information, we're giving away our ability to persuade and connect in meaningful ways.