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FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

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Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#221

Post by whywhywhywhy »

pen2l wrote: post #133
darth_avocado wrote: post #37

Yes it’s a negative feedback loop created by the very bad product decisions they made to optimize for local maxima of getting more ads revenue. You inject more and more ads followed by more and more suggested content, thereby reducing the in network content. The in network content doesn’t get as much of traction, therefore people stop posting. This in turn forces the feed to have more and more suggestions and a few s…

It's an interesting exercise to think about: suppose you're in the meeting room and you're the product guy and you'll make this case. Indeed let us not optimize for the presently advantageous local maxima lest it come back to swallow and end us. How is this communicated? And what does it take to convincingly persuade people, or investors of this -- to even bear through a temporary downward period with the understandi…

Convince on vision, not data.

They didn’t build the iPhone or even like Google Maps and Google Images by walking into the meeting room with data. They instead said “what if maps were as easy as we’ve made search”

Of course it becomes a problem when no one even to the CEO level has lost vision. Never put the numbers guy in charge.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#222

Post by gjm11 »

mikewarot wrote: post #3

Use this URL[1] to open it in a browser with adblock . It gives your feed in reverse chronological order, with a 90%+ ratio of friends posts. (Just verified) [1] https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr [Update] If you click anything it takes you away from that feed... that's why I have it in my Bookmarks toolbar. If I find myself going "wait.. this feels different"... I look up and see the URL is now the generic one, and…

With h_chr + SocialFixer + uBlock Origin (but, note, FB have been messing with their HTML in ways that currently break SocialFixer's sponsored-post detection filters, so this is a bit worse than usual) the top 50 items in my feed are:

34 posts from friends, 9 of which are vapid feel-good glurge (I have a couple of friends who post, or rather share, a lot of this)

1 birthday message from one friend to another

5 posts in groups I belong to

10 sponsored posts, of which 8 are completely 100% uninteresting to me and two are only 90% uninteresting (e.g., one of them is an ad for a play I might conceivably be interested in seeing, if I lived anywhere near the place it's running).

The SNR is definitely worse than "90%+ friends" but also much better than "98% suggested pages and barely any friends".

(I am using "friends" in the Facebook sense, but I am fairly discriminating about this and all my Facebook "friends" are people I have actually met in the physical world and would enjoy spending some time with.)

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#223

Post by lemmiwinks »

pen2l wrote: post #133
darth_avocado wrote: post #37

Yes it’s a negative feedback loop created by the very bad product decisions they made to optimize for local maxima of getting more ads revenue. You inject more and more ads followed by more and more suggested content, thereby reducing the in network content. The in network content doesn’t get as much of traction, therefore people stop posting. This in turn forces the feed to have more and more suggestions and a few s…

It's an interesting exercise to think about: suppose you're in the meeting room and you're the product guy and you'll make this case. Indeed let us not optimize for the presently advantageous local maxima lest it come back to swallow and end us. How is this communicated? And what does it take to convincingly persuade people, or investors of this -- to even bear through a temporary downward period with the understandi…

From my comprehension of Mad Men? You hire a PR firm to convince those investors and decision people, to sell them an idea instead of KPIs.

It can go both ways, of course: Mad Men is full of examples of stupid business ideas that went spectacularly wrong. And while it wasn’t the focus of Mad Men, the real world is full of examples of business that went the metrics way and were successful.

But IMHO, if I was the CEO of a social media company, I sure wouldn’t focus on A/B testing and engagement metrics.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#225

Post by ok123456 »

max51 wrote: post #204
ok123456 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people using Marketplace are the people who wouldn't be using the site otherwise, and who are there for the express purpose of doing commerce. No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise.

>No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise. Until their HOA or their sports club start using Facebook as their official platform for announcements and communication. I know there are other free platform that could fill the same role, but you will never find one where literally more than half the adult population already has an account and is familiar with the interface/features. Lots of groups use it…

Enough people don't have or won't use facebook in 2022.

Email is still the lowest common denominator.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#226

Post by donkey-hotei »

ok123456 wrote: post #190
elcomet wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be the reason for you, but there are many other reasons why people still use the site. For example, coordinating events with friends, discover local events, discussing on messenger, sharing photos, discussing in groups...

The people using Marketplace are the people who wouldn't be using the site otherwise, and who are there for the express purpose of doing commerce. No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise.

Might be true for you. But this is so not true for a lot of the world still. Lots and lots of young people (late 20s, early 30s) still use FB. Anecdotally, quite a few of my friends still do, if not mostly for the groups.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#227

Post by legitster »

darth_avocado wrote: post #37

Yes it’s a negative feedback loop created by the very bad product decisions they made to optimize for local maxima of getting more ads revenue. You inject more and more ads followed by more and more suggested content, thereby reducing the in network content. The in network content doesn’t get as much of traction, therefore people stop posting. This in turn forces the feed to have more and more suggestions and a few s…

It's not just the ad revenue or suggested content. FB's most sticky offerings are groups and pages. Well, FB actively hides posts in these to their own followers. You end up having to pay just sponsor messages to your own group.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#228

Post by acdha »

ok123456 wrote: post #83
ineptech wrote: post #61

Crazy idea: FB should stop trying to lure people back from Tiktok with weird features and just lean in to its one remaining strength, which is that among social media sites, it's the most generic and boring and ubiquitous. Being the default place for non-influencers to do quotidian stuff like hearing about school closings, joining the PTA or HOA, coordinating family gatherings, see your nephew's school photos, etc wo…

Marketplace is the only reason a lot of people still use the site. This is since especially true for people looking for beater cars since Craigslist started charging $5 to post ads for cars. If Apple or someone else with an ax to grind with Facebook really wanted to bust Meta's kneecaps, they could off to subsidize this charge. Maybe also help them out with fraud and spam detection, since that's where most of the ove…

That seems to be getting the same Zuckerberg death-spiral: Facebook has lots of users so it’s tempting but everyone I know who’s tried it was deluged with blatant scam attempts & Google MFA phishing attacks. Skimping on abuse just seems to be the corporate default.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#229

Post by topaz0 »

jacobolus wrote: post #158
ipaddr wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are we looking for here? The results seem equally as confusing as the query

The other commenter was obviously interested in the record for high-temperature superconductors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti... Or perhaps more generally for materials with a high Curie temperature, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about this field.

Then again, Tc means different things in different fields. E.g. critical temperatures for all kinds of critical phase transitions. Note that the google search you posted above gives results for various phase transitions many of which are not superconducting phase transitions. I also was lost when I saw the original query.

Re: FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts

#230

Post by hbn »

indigochill wrote: post #70
YouWhy wrote: post #14

Knowing the beast firsthand, there's no trace of doubt in my mind that the convergence to a junk product outcome involved a monotonous increase in ad revenue and likely, engagement metrics. There's a tragic dimension that a system which connected so much of humanity to itself so well would be rendered so toxic as a product and as a community in just a few years.

> There's a tragic dimension that a system which connected so much of humanity to itself How would you say Facebook connected humanity differently from what MySpace was doing before Facebook ate their lunch with a more consistent UI? I also am increasingly of the opinion that humanity is not wired to connect globally. Our local social networks give us a buffer against centralized bad actors. When everyone was connect…

I recall a 4chan post where the author pointed out how before the internet, if you were a person that wanted to have sex with toasters you'd never bring it up and live a better life for it, whereas now you go to Google and find a community with 1000+ members of people who have sex with toasters and inevitably ruin your life.
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