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by dasil003
4849 days ago
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Facebook is betting this will all blow over and everyone will accept it as the new status quo just like 80% of the previous evil changes they implemented. They are continually pushing the envelope to see what they can get away with, and I think in this case they will probably pull it off like they usually do. The article describes it as "as plain and malignant a case of conflict of interest can get", but I don't see it; Facebook's interest is to make money, not to guarantee equality of Facebook's posting. Even if you grant that their primary interest is to assure the highest quality feed, this doesn't go directly against that either since a paid post is not inherently worse than free one even if it skews that way. What people are really objecting to here is the blurring of the lines between ads and organic content. Certainly it smells bad, but it's not the same as an investment bank shorting the very securities they're selling to clients, after all, you can still get something for free. All they've done is just is turned a formerly free service into a freemium service without removing any functionality. Sure they can ratchet up the cost arbitrarily, but you have no excuse to be screwed by that because you can dip your toe in any time to figure out if the ROI makes sense. If they didn't offer you the opportunity to pay for placement you would have been drowned out by the noise anyway. I think the business justification is precisely that: the stream is so noisy for most people that paid placement can be done without significantly degrading its quality. They may be wrong about this, but I don't see why they aren't justified to try. |
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