I Just Paid Facebook $7

For what it's worth: I made a living for years promoting personal and community projects primarily through social media. I didn't spam people, I focused on engaging people with meaningful content.

I would use the shit out of this feature, and plan to use next week to announce a buddy of mine's album release because I honestly think it's something the majority of my Facebook friends will love to at least check out. As people discover that kind of use case and the potential to reach 1,200 rather than 200 people, they'll start to use this, but only GOOD content will actually benefit. That will be the filter that keeps it sustainable.

So now facebook, a network that I signed up for, has stopped showing my friends what I post on my status and has started charging me to do just that ? Isn't there a conflict of interest here ? The default functionality of the platform now appears to be a paid offering ?

I find it quite disconcerting that someone else gets to decide what aspects of my friend's lives are 'interesting' enough for me to know about. I find it even more disconcerting that some of my friends would need to pay to highlight some aspects of their lives to me. Creepy :O

I'm not worried about people self promoting. I'm worried about them having to. Do I want to hear about my friends getting engaged ? Yeah! Do I want them to pay for that to happen ? Hell no!

> Your newsfeed is already controlled by your FB habits..

That's not necessarily a good thing.

Also, I want to know what happens with everyone on my news feed. The ones I don't want to know about, I either unfriend them or block them. The issue is that it's already quite messed up that a 3rd party algorithm decides what I should/shouldn't see. There are obvious challenges with all of this and I know that facebook is working on them. However, that doesn't make it any less creepy or intrusive.

It was just a question of when.

Curious to see how much pushback there is, or if 'Sponsored' posts are stigmatized or accepted.

I think it depends on your habits. Facebook is unreliable for social interaction on a deep level for me because there is a negative cycle of reinforcement based on poor data.

My closest friends are the ones who I want to hear the most about, and yet for some reason, their updates are the ones I see the least. Part of the reason was because my feed was flooded by people who used Facebook voraciously, though I considered many of them only acquaintances to whom I was connected to keep in touch, but nothing more (i.e. Facebook is my social rolodex, while LinkedIn is my professional rolodex).

But I'll comment on what's in my feed, and so I'm interacting with those for whom I care less. That interaction is recorded by Facebook as saying, "Look, these guys must be good friends, they're interacting with each other." So Facebook sends me more of their stuff, giving even less opportunity for my closest friends' stuff to pop up in my feed.

It's no wonder that with my closest friends, we rather use email for our interactions, which ironically further reinforces to Facebook that I'm not close to these people: wow, look, these people don't interact at all, they must hate each other! Let's not send him any more updates from those people! Path was an interesting idea for intimacy, but why sign up for yet another service when email is so easy and already proven? We even tried setting up a private Facebook group titled Posse to stop using email. Didn't work for various reasons.

I still log into Facebook because I enjoy seeing what's up with people, etc. But I never go there to interact with my closest friends anymore. That ship somehow sailed a long time ago, and I'm not going to go through a manual process of ranking people to a special group, or anything like that, to fix the issue. Ironically, as Zuckerberg once famously said in response to Circles, "We found out that people hate making lists."