FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by vineyardmike » Wed, Sep 14, 2022, 8:35 AM UTC

ok123456 wrote: post #270

nradov wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, whate…

> Zoom had a product that worked good enough (send out invite email and join a video conference) at the right time

They also had a product that worked terribly at the wrong time [0].

> Step one of the metaverse is everyone invests in a VR headset. This is a complete non-starter.

Subsidizing it seemed to get a lot more people to buy it over the last few years. I 100% see a world where you don't buy a monitor, you buy a headset to use your computer. Monitors are big, ugly and fragile, and not portable. In 2-5 years when the screen tech is better and I can use a virtual monitor instead of a real one, I will 100% do that, and I think many will. Lots of younger people never buy traditional desktop or laptops.

Also, a lot of "meta verse" dialog came from not-meta, eg web3 NFT shit, so I wouldn't place too much into that being their vision. Part of a strategy for attention is certainly to get people excited, and attaching "meta verse" to random trend du jour seems like a solid way to get attention. There are crypto pumps related to the queens recent death, but that doesn't mean the queen would have wanted anything to do with crypto.

> I still can't believe this is the "A Game" of a public company worth $550bn.

TBF they started to back out of making this their only thing, and they still sell a crap ton of valuable ad space to lots of people. Its not like they abandoned their existing cash cow.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689644/apple-zoom-web-s...

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

#422

Post by CaptainZapp » Wed, Sep 14, 2022, 9:11 AM UTC

TrevorJ wrote: post #367

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…

Facebook is the fax machine. The real danger FB finds themselves in is that the initial value prop (make and maintain your friendships with less friction) is LONG gone. Instead, they are relying almost entirely on the network effect now. You have to be on Facebook because your grandma is on Facebook. This is not sustainable long-term, for obvious and perhaps morbid reasons.

Since 2012, when I "deleted" my Facebook account grandma - or anybody else for that manner - needs to either call me, text me or send email.

This suits me just fine and it works well for friends who actually deserve this moniker.

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

#423

Post by swores » Wed, Sep 14, 2022, 9:11 AM UTC

danaris wrote: post #334

nostromo wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common complaint. The reason they do it is because... it works! It can be counter-intuitive but this is often seen in recommendation systems. In music for example, the song most likely to be played after a song is... that same song again.

It may work in the general case. However, it is painfully clear that there are very obvious categories of products that it does not work on. 99% of the time, if someone buys a refrigerator, they will not be interested in buying another refrigerator. It would not be that difficult for Amazon to detect these product types and give other kinds of recommendations for them. Unless their algorithms and the data that drive…

Nope, even with items like fridges it's intentional.

Most people have not bought a fridge in the last month. Most people will not buy one in the next month. Taking your estimated 99%, that leaves 1% who just bought a fridge but it doesn't work, or didn't fit their room, or for whatever other reason they've sent it for a refund... and are about to want a fridge again!

1% might sound low, but if you look at the group of people who haven't just bought a fridge... maybe only 0.1% of them will buy one in the next year, vs. that suddenly huge-seeming 1% of recent fridge buyers. Suddenly, not such a bad idea to advertise to them :)

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

#424

Post by alkonaut » Wed, Sep 14, 2022, 11:04 AM UTC

smileysteve wrote: post #395

alkonaut wrote: post #357

Facebook has lots of good corners of their products. Marketplace is ok-ish. Events is OK. Even Messenger is an ok sub-app of Facebook. The one app that’s unusably bad is the “feed” (or whatever it’s called these days). I use Facebook almost daily but can’t understand why anyone would use the feed bit. Even back when it was friends’ posts it was bad. Now that it’s half commercial half TikTok rabbit hole why does anyon…

Market place, through messenger has significant fraud for sim/phone hijacking. Things Facebook's controls are supposed to achieve that Craigslist suffered from

What's that fraud? To me all it does is let me send a FB messenger to someone on my block who's selling some used gadget, and I walk over there and buy it. How does fraud or phone numbers even enter into it?

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

#425

Post by sph » Wed, Sep 14, 2022, 11:10 AM UTC

danudey wrote: post #218

nostromo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon seems to have taken a different route. Keep margins low and don’t make too much money in order to starve any potential competitors of capital. Of course - you still need to grow revenue for this to work - just not profits.

Doesn't help that their recommendations are always "Oh, you bought an air conditioner? Come look at this wide variety of other air conditioners we have!" rather than, say, adapters for connecting air conditioners to different window types or home electricity usage monitoring or something.

Or the random notifications I get on my phone from Amazon: "We thought you'd like a new air fryer." I bought one 6 months ago from you, I don't need a new one.

Somehow it's always about some big appliance that lasts years and I just bought. It's never about "you might be running out of toilet paper."

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

#426

Post by The_Double » Wed, Sep 14, 2022, 11:14 AM UTC

yojo wrote: post #180

nradov wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be the low risk strategy. Just run it as a cash cow value business and extract as much profit as possible until it dies. However, Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to bet the company on AR/VR and is investing $10B into that area. If they get it wrong then he'll look like an idiot. If they get it right by building the next major platform for humans to communicate then he'll look like a visionary genius. We won't k…

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.

Isn't user-generated video mostly dead though? The vast majority of videos on Youtube, at least by viewership hours, seems to be produced by professional youtube creators. These range in scale from the "web content" branch of large media corporations to one person doing research, presenting and editing, but all are effectively just companies. There seem to be very few videos from regular people sharing something interesting. These videos can mostly be found on Facebook, Telegram, imgur gifs, Twitter, etc.

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

#427

Post by rixrax » Wed, Sep 14, 2022, 11:17 AM UTC

Sort of not related at all, but I decided to try FB marketplace for selling a couple of extra laptops. And oh-my-gawd, it's even worse than Craigslist. In first 24 hours this pattern with semi obvious fake accounts trying to buy the laptop has repeated already 3 times (and come on FB, I refuse to believe you cannot detect this crap if you actually wanted to, and at minimum WARN the seller that you're likely dealing with oredatory buyer):

Me: Daryl: Is this still available? Me: It's still available Daryl: okay good. did you have an idea if what the shipment cost to Scotland?? I want to get it for my Scottish girlfriend. I'm currently in Scotland Me: No dice. If you want it, come pick it up from Santana Row. I'll sell for cash only.

I don't know what's the actual scam here, but all these guys ask (in Spanish too btw) Is it available? If yes, they have some excuse for wanting it NOW, but not being able to pick it up, and then ask me to use a courier etc. Suckers!

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

#428

Post by Bakary » Wed, Sep 14, 2022, 11:55 AM UTC

cbozeman wrote: post #138

Bakary wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Congratulations, you also figured out why it was so polarizing and why more than half the audience hated it... assuming you believe Rotten Tomatoes. It's Star Wars . People don't want a goddamned political deconstruction of…

I understand exactly why fans hated it and the mediocrity of the corporate choices the Mouse made. What I'm saying is that there were elements (such as the green milk scenes) that made it appear like the director was speaking to us like an old man coming to terms with his childhood dreams and understanding the futility of escapism. I found it remarkable to find this in a mass-market, focus-group devised children's movie.

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

#429

Post by danaris » Wed, Sep 14, 2022, 12:03 PM UTC

swores wrote: post #423

danaris wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may work in the general case. However, it is painfully clear that there are very obvious categories of products that it does not work on. 99% of the time, if someone buys a refrigerator, they will not be interested in buying another refrigerator. It would not be that difficult for Amazon to detect these product types and give other kinds of recommendations for them. Unless their algorithms and the data that drive…

Nope, even with items like fridges it's intentional. Most people have not bought a fridge in the last month. Most people will not buy one in the next month. Taking your estimated 99%, that leaves 1% who just bought a fridge but it doesn't work, or didn't fit their room, or for whatever other reason they've sent it for a refund... and are about to want a fridge again! 1% might sound low, but if you look at the group o…

But if I've bought a fridge from Amazon, and it doesn't work, surely the first thing I'm going to do is try to return it to Amazon?

Most people, after all, don't really have the spare money to buy two fridges at once, so they're going to want their money back from the first one before they buy the second.

Once they've started the return process, then Amazon can start recommending new fridges to them.

Again: this is all data Amazon totally has access to. Whether they are failing to gather it, failing to recognize its value, or simply choosing not to use it when they know it's creating a lot of bad recommendations, is unclear.

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

#430

Post by spywaregorilla » Wed, Sep 14, 2022, 12:05 PM UTC

hbn wrote: post #230

indigochill wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hmm no I think that's not quite it. I think it's more likely that you would be a fan of toasters and then, via exposure to the toaster community and various group identity salience maneuvers, find yourself aligning with the sexual subniche; and then failing to recognize that you were just falling into a new social role and instead concluding you joined this group due to an independently and organically formed attraction to toasters.

I'm relatively certain this is how the porny subculture of the brony community occurred. I'd wager that it's largely responsible for the furry community as well.

The thing is, people are extremely malleable and subconsciously willing to change if they see an opportunity to join a warm and welcoming group. I don't think there is any malice or even intentional manipulation in it from any party. But it'd be nice if people could do the attribution analysis a bit better than the post truth "I have always been this way" kind of thing.