[jschuur]

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.

[leejo]

This. From the article:

> 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.

[jschuur]

Also, wow:

  However, Facebook’s formal guidance is 24 to 48 posts per day.

Facebook recommends 24-48 posts PER DAY? Surely this is an error. Where is this recommended? That's insane.

[jschuur]

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.

[leejo]

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.

[frenchpress]

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.

[sp332]

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.

[jasode]

>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.

[jsnell]

> 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.

[jasode]

>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.

[pier25]

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.

[intoverflow2]

Reddit (the corporation) highly curates many parts of their site actually. It's not much different these days.

[cmdrfred]

There have been allegations of Reddit playing around behind the scenes as well. It seems once you get so big you have to play this game.

[kakarot]

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".

[alttab]

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.

[tdb7893]

But people have always liked too many pages so I'm not sure it can explain the recent drop

[jschuur]

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?