Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#151

Post by nora4 » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 4:10 AM UTC

mygo wrote: post #129

nojvek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess A/B testing will tell you if the horse will become faster if you change from iron shoes to carbon fiber ones. A/B testing won’t ever get you a Tesla from a horse.

If you do enough binary switching, you eventually will get a Tesla. Assuming a Tesla is optimal. Let’s test to find out. How do you think the eyeball arose from unicellular eukaryotes?

I don't think so. A/B testing is like gradient descent which is a greedy algorithm. You move in the direction that locally looks best. Evolution on the other hand allows for suboptimal species to persist for enough time to let them develop their advantage. (In the language of optimization evolution allows you to go past the local optimal and reach global optima by allowing you to move in non-optimal direction -- as long as the move is not catastrophic.)

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#152

Post by nora4 » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 4:15 AM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #148

Who and why uses Facebook today anyway? All my friends use messenger apps like WhatsApp or Telegram to communicate to people they know in real life, sites like Reddit and HN to communicate to random crowd sharing their interests and Instagram to share pictures they take. I personally feel like Facebook is a concept fading into the past. UPDATE: The only thing I used to use Facebook for a couple of years ago when I ha…

I wonder what will happen to the Facebook the company as this progresses. It would be quite funny if the main product of Facebook becomes Instagram -- and the original product fades.

One thing we might be discounting though is other nations. (I assume you live in N.A.) I don't know how widespread Facebook is elsewhere. It could be that Facebook gives up on N.A. market and let Insta handles their interest there and focus itself on emerging markets.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#153

Post by rdruxn » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 4:28 AM UTC

ridgeguy wrote: post #118

It seems like nobody at Facebook is allowed to play the long game. In the long game, quality wins. In the long game, an organization that puts quality of information at top priority persists and becomes a long-lived resource for civilization. Like Google has become a persistent Web search resource, setting aside its short-lived ancillary forays into more clickable, trivial services. So long as Facebook prioritizes vi…

Except their moves and announcements in recent weeks suggest that they're in fact prioritizing higher quality content e.g. local news (https://www.axios.com/facebook-to-prioritize-local-news-in-n...)

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#154

Post by qwerty456127 » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 4:34 AM UTC

nora4 wrote: post #152

qwerty456127 wrote: post #148

Who and why uses Facebook today anyway? All my friends use messenger apps like WhatsApp or Telegram to communicate to people they know in real life, sites like Reddit and HN to communicate to random crowd sharing their interests and Instagram to share pictures they take. I personally feel like Facebook is a concept fading into the past. UPDATE: The only thing I used to use Facebook for a couple of years ago when I ha…

I wonder what will happen to the Facebook the company as this progresses. It would be quite funny if the main product of Facebook becomes Instagram -- and the original product fades. One thing we might be discounting though is other nations. (I assume you live in N.A.) I don't know how widespread Facebook is elsewhere. It could be that Facebook gives up on N.A. market and let Insta handles their interest there and fo…

A probable role Facebook may take in future is providing digital "passport" kind of identity. The Chinese Facebook clone is doing it already and the Russian Facebook clone does too though in much smaller degree.

I live in Europe, not N.A. We use messengers a lot here and many people still use Facebook. I've heard that people use SMS and MMS much more actively in the USA (I have never used MMS and have stopped using SMS years ago).

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#155

Post by grogenaut » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 4:36 AM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #114

TipVFL wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've probably done testing and found that for some significant percentage of married couples, seeing their spouse's posts caused them to reduce their Facebook usage. So unhappy marriages are ruining it for everyone. I feel like the general trend of UI simplification and a/b testing everything has companies chasing after anything that will push their general metrics up in the short term, at the expense of slowly di…

I guess A/B testing will tell you if the horse will become faster if you change from iron shoes to carbon fiber ones. A/B testing won’t ever get you a Tesla from a horse.

Says every product person I've ever worked with who didn't want to actually be data driven.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#156

Post by elgenie » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 4:56 AM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #78

I didn’t see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook’s own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos and pictures by “viral marketing” firms onto it. They replaced groups (inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were given permission to crap all over it b…

So you think "the problem" is all the things that Facebook started doing when there were 10 million registered users that grew it to 1.4 billion daily actives?

A problem that can be rectified by Facebook, literally 11 years after some of the things you talk about, tweaking news feed weights towards personal posts from friends and other changes to allow users to spend time on the site more efficiently is not a serious problem.

And the analysis of photos is spectacular nonsense. First, albums existed very very early in the time you were talking about. Second, the photo uploading features you mention (including hi-res photos) were added at most a billion daily actives ago. Third, building a platform that allowed "a dozen apps" to get created was pretty clearly higher leverage. And finally and most damningly, Instagram doesn't have high-resolution photos or albums and certainly didn't at the time of acquisition: how are those the features that FB had to buy to win users back?

Disclosure: I worked there for 8.5 years, including writing Facebook Chat.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#157

Post by MarkMc » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 5:01 AM UTC

From the article: "Yes, the time spent on Facebook in the quarter declined by 5 percent, but it was by Facebook’s design, executives said, in order to promote a higher quality experience. Yes, there was a dip in North American user numbers for the first time ever, but only because Facebook is already so dominant in the region.”

Can someone explain why a 'higher quality experience' didn't lead to more active monthly users in North America? I would have thought there were people who hadn't checked out Facebook for a few months, but now start using it more regularly.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#158

Post by philipov » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 5:06 AM UTC

DashRattlesnake wrote: post #134

danudey wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an article that I can't find for the life of me about how someone suffering with depression had killed himself, and it was only a long time afterwards that any friends friends knew because Facebook hadn't been showing his posts. IIRC they looked through his feed and there had been basically cries for help, but no one had seem them because Facebook was prioritizing engagement and not personal content. How ma…

> someone suffering with depression had killed himself, and it was only a long time afterwards that any friends friends knew because Facebook hadn't been showing his posts. > IIRC they looked through his feed and there had been basically cries for help, but no one had seem them because Facebook was prioritizing engagement and not personal content. Don't worry! Facebook is working on an AI to detect such posts and ref…

If you want to sell glass, better go break some windows.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#159

Post by jeffmould » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 5:07 AM UTC

danudey wrote: post #90

btilly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse yet, do you know how frustrating it is to be told that there are no more updates available while you know that you a missing life events from friends that actually posted them. After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because they will similarly not show up for friends. Cutting back on FB has become ever easier over time.

My wife and were 'in a relationship' on Facebook within a few months of meeting each other. Then we were 'married'. Even still, for the first four or so years that we had each other on FB, it wouldn't show me her posts. They just weren't in my feed, I'd scroll down so far I was seeing content from months ago, but I'd never see anything she'd posted that week. Eventually it took me telling FB I didn't want to see post…

Can completely relate. The other annoying thing I have found is that FB will show posts that are outdated. For example, prior to replying here, I scrolled through my feed and over half the posts were from yesterday or two days ago. Even more frustrating is when those posts are from media outlets and contain outdated news or other articles of interest. I know the SOTU was last night, I don't need several posts from various media outlets trying to tell me where to watch. I know the problem is I don't engage often enough or with the content I want to see, but it would be nice if I could have more control over what content I see in my timeline without having to engage.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#160

Post by mehrdadn » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 5:09 AM UTC

joering2 wrote: post #146

mehrdadn wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tangent on one of your points: Facebook not only lowers photo resolution, but it also visibly deteriorates color quality in some cases. I had a beautiful golden meadow turn into a pretty ugly dry yellow (edit: orange-ish, not yellow -- I misremembered) field after uploading a photo. It was quite astonishing switching tabs and seeing the difference.

Would love to see that - any chance for a screengrab?

Sure, here: https://imgur.com/a/udfB5

(And before anyone inevitably objects: yes, I get that you might actually like the downsized version better. Personally I didn't like a random reddish hue being added to the golden scene, but it's obviously a matter of taste, so let's not judge me here. The point isn't which one looks better, but that they shouldn't look so dramatically visibly different in the first place.)