[_archon_]

Correct. Your democracy is not his laboratory. His website, however, is. If you want to control the behavior of Fbook, buy it. If you want pageviews from people's news feeds, make things which people decide are worth sharing.

From a user perspective, doesn't moving non-person-related (actually social media) things to a separate feed make the ux better?

[mantas]

The problem is FB indoctrinated users and soft-killed most alternatives. A regular user don't care to signup for a newsletter or RSS feed. They "like" page on FB and think that's enough to get updates.

I asked around and many non-tech people think liking a page equals subscribing. Both pages owners and regular users. They think they communicate to each other. Well, in fact they don't.

FB is dangerously close to monopoly if it isn't one already. But I wonder if any gov has the guts to deal with it. Even EU seems to be in bed with Zuck.

[watwut]

That is because most pages worked exactly this way for years - every update was shared on facebook too. It was comfortable for sites for a while - people were likely to hit like on facebook and got you in the feed they visit daily for unrelated reasons. They are less likely to give you e-mail or start with rss feed they don't use.

The alternative is not rss. The alternative is news aggregator few months down the line when sites stop asking people to like them.

[acqq]

My partner is again and again disappointed that all her "friends" don't "respond" to what she posted on her page, even if I explained her many times that Facebook algorihtmically selects what to show to each of them, and that nobody sees everything posted by those who are "friends" or "liked."

Nobody is entitled to the visibility or exclusive treatment on the Facebook. There are much more posts than anybody can read

It seems the media are "disappointed" the same way. And when they don't get the reach on the Facebook that they wrongly expect to "deserve" they wrongly call that "an attack to democracy."

[moron4hire]

When a corporation's actions with its own private property becomes a threat to the public good, it is well within the purview and established precedent of government to regulate that specific corporation.

[rplnt]

Hiding spam is not a threat to the public good.

[cisanti]

Why are you talking about spam, did you even read the article?

[rplnt]

They didn't selectively choose this media organization, they did it for every single page. Users still have choice to see the content, if they are interested. I would argue that engagement should be higher if people actively opt in to view this content, as opposed to having it mixed in with their social feed.

[kirillzubovsky]

I believe the issue isn't that the articles aren't been shared Natively, but that in order to even appear for a chance of being shared, page owners need to use the "promote" feature first, which costs money.

Users don't go to pages on FB to find new info, they expect to see it in the feed. This way only paid content gets seeing, and otherwise you are SOL.

Not to say that it isn't expected, FB needs to chase growth and likes, but it's still unpleasant in a world where people are making FB synonymous with the internet.