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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

#261

Post by bazeblackwood »

fairity wrote: post #258
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…

No, this isn't a consequence of the status quo newsfeed algorithm. This is a consequence of Facebook making a purposeful strategic shift away from in-network content to suggested content. This strategic shift was highlighted in their last earnings call as a way to compete with TikTok, whose success is partly explained by their focus on suggested content. On the earnings call, they signaled that they were shifting mor…

Bad strategy, imo. Sounds like they should have tried to answer why people used their product in the first place. “A competitor does it” isn’t a valid excuse—its like suggesting The French Laundry switch to fast food because McDonald’s is a competitor.

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

#262

Post by ziddoap »

cbozeman wrote: post #206
WHYLEE1991 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in what respect is Instagram a dating app for women or anyone? Because it's a social media site primarily used by younger-ish people? by that metric any site that features young people is just an over-glorified dating platform. (not to say that this is a negative implication, dating websites are great to some extent) Do you believe that young people are capable of using social media platforms for things other than ba…

This wasn't meant for you, but the other guy deleted his question, so here we go. Instagram is a photo-sharing application at it's core. So when you share photos, you're sharing your lifestyle. You're advertising. This is especially prevalent down here in Miami. So much so that people oftentimes at clubs don't exchange phone numbers; they exchange Instagrams. The women can see by your Instagram posts what kind of lif…

I can see your argument, and it's certainly an interesting way of looking at it, but this just explains the "dating app" part of your assertion ("... it's a dating app for women,"). It's missing the explanation on why it's a "dating app for women".

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

#263

Post by throwmamatrain »

I noticed I saw way less information about shows in my area, the only thing I used facebook for. I missed nearly two months of shows at my local venues due to relying on facebook before I realized something had changed. Maybe they increased how much you had to pay to advertise or increase reach? No idea!

Looks like I'll be writing my own scraper, fun times are here.

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

#264

Post by yamtaddle »

Bakary wrote: post #59
mmmpop wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean you don't like Star Wars, everyone likes Star Wars, May the Forth and lol anjklsdnajkdsnfkasfasd Star Wars!!!! i'm so unique

I actually really enjoyed the second movie of the new trilogy because it seemed to be a shockingly self-aware deconstruction of some of the Star Wars tropes and its place in culture in general. How it ever got greenlit by Disney of all entities is an enduring mystery.

The second one's the only one of the new trilogy worth saving from a fire. Though I also can't really recommend it to anyone because it doesn't stand very well on its own, and I sure wouldn't want to recommend either of the others to most people (IX has some "so bad it's good" qualities that make it fun for a certain kind of viewer, but I wouldn't say it's any kind of major hit even in that respect)

Man. That trilogy. Good actors, excellent in some cases, and they sure did try. But it wasn't enough.

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

#265

Post by languageserver »

edgyquant wrote: post #181
umeshunni wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and now it's moving away from that and pushing more suggested content. The death spiral is: 1. Show friends content to attract users 2. Realize that friends don't product enough content to increase engagement. 3. Start introducing suggested content to increase engagement 4. Friend stop producing content since their content is deprioritized and not getting engagement 5. Now your feed is full of suggested content and i…

Almost like building a business around “engagement” is a model that leads to a death spiral. Social media sites are basically giant MLM schemes that sell the idea that become real companies before the scheme runs out.

ahhh,,... I would say billions in revenue makes it anything but. A short lived idea, maybe, a novelty, maybe

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

#266

Post by nradov »

ok123456 wrote: post #233
yojo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People gave Google a ton of crap for buying YouTube for 1.6 billion (~16% of annual revenue at the time). That $10B FB spent is more like 8.5% of their revenue. I’m skeptical of the metaverse, but I was also pretty skeptical of user-generated video. And given their current ad take, $10B is not a crazy bet.

Everyone wanted to watch and share video clips on their computer directly on the web without and without having to care about codecs, file formats, and hosting. No one wants to have business meetings wearing VR headsets or give NFTs to virtual panhandlers or any of the other silly usecases for a modernized version of Lawnmower Man.

At one point no one wanted to have business meetings on Zoom, but the technology improved and the culture changed such that it's now ubiquitous. Metaverse technology is still really clunky today and used only by a few early adopters, but it's entirely possible that the experience will improve a lot in 10 years. Who knows?

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

#268

Post by noneeeed »

This is just an extreme form of my problem with both Facebook and Linkedin, both of which have become utterly unusable over the last year.

Linkedin is particularly aggressive with the "someone you know liked a comment by someone you don't know on a post by someone else you don't know, from three months ago about an even that has alredy happened...". Utterly irrelevant crap that it is convinced will get me to come back.

I actually like the basic idea of social media, I want to know what my friends and family have been up to, or the people I'm professionally connected with, it's a nice way to stay connected to people you might not get to see regularly.

The SM companies have all managed to utterly ruin their own products to the point where I don't/won't/can't use them.

I would love it if someone could make a site that helped me stay in contact with my wider social circle without trashing it in the deperate pursuit of ad dollars. Sadly I can't see something like that happening and not then being ruined.

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

#269

Post by fnordpiglet »

bazeblackwood wrote: post #261
fairity wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this isn't a consequence of the status quo newsfeed algorithm. This is a consequence of Facebook making a purposeful strategic shift away from in-network content to suggested content. This strategic shift was highlighted in their last earnings call as a way to compete with TikTok, whose success is partly explained by their focus on suggested content. On the earnings call, they signaled that they were shifting mor…

Bad strategy, imo. Sounds like they should have tried to answer why people used their product in the first place. “A competitor does it” isn’t a valid excuse—its like suggesting The French Laundry switch to fast food because McDonald’s is a competitor.

I think your analogy is too generous. It’s more like putting an engine on your stapler because people buy cars more often than staplers at a higher margin despite having a monopoly in the stapler market.

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

#270

Post by ok123456 »

nradov wrote: post #266
ok123456 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone wanted to watch and share video clips on their computer directly on the web without and without having to care about codecs, file formats, and hosting. No one wants to have business meetings wearing VR headsets or give NFTs to virtual panhandlers or any of the other silly usecases for a modernized version of Lawnmower Man.

At one point no one wanted to have business meetings on Zoom, but the technology improved and the culture changed such that it's now ubiquitous. Metaverse technology is still really clunky today and used only by a few early adopters, but it's entirely possible that the experience will improve a lot in 10 years. Who knows?

Yeah, no. Zoom had a product that worked good enough (send out invite email and join a video conference) at the right time (global pandemic).

Step one of the metaverse is everyone invests in a VR headset. This is a complete non-starter. There is no counter-factual where this becomes a success.

I still can't believe this is the "A Game" of a public company worth $550bn. If this is the best they can come up with, whatever of "Meta" that is left in 10 years won't be worth 1/20 of that.

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