I Just Paid Facebook $7 • Hacker News Board

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#41

Post by joshuahedlund » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 11:29 AM UTC

ashray wrote: post #16

danso wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Both of those things are self-regulating. Your newsfeed is already controlled by your FB habits...people you chat with/stalk the most natura…

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…

> Also, I want to know what happens with everyone on my news feed

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can still see everything if you check Facebook enough and scroll down enough. The algorithms just decide which posts to show for the vast majority of users who don't take the time to read every update from all of their X00 friends. If that's true, Facebook is not really hiding anything, they're just guessing which posts you want to see if you're only going to see Y% of the posts anyway.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#42

Post by code_duck » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 11:37 AM UTC

From what I understand, the Promoted Post fee varies by your number of friends. My friend with ~400 people said Facebook wanted to charge her $7 for post advertisement... someone who commented said that her own rate would be $90, apparently because she had 5,000 friends on there.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#43

Post by thenomad » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 12:11 PM UTC

pootch wrote: post #23

tomasien wrote: post #12

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…

You are a spammer

I'm getting irritated with the watering down of the word "spam" to mean, essentially, "any communication I am not or do not believe I would be thrilled to get".

Spam is permissionless mass mailing. If someone has Liked a friend's band on Facebook, they've given permission for contact. If you're just not a fan of self-promotion, fine, say that, but don't claim that something's spam when it is nothing of the kind.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#44

Post by alexhawdon » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 1:26 PM UTC

One HUGE part of Facebook is photo sharing. It's the de-facto place to store and share your snaps. Why aren't they trying to make money out of this?

I see two obvious routes they could take:

Paid-for high-quality storage and sharing. One pays an annual premium to store high-quality versions of their photographs AND get copies of photos they feature in (subject to the appropriate permissions being gained). This one might be a hard sell/maybe most people don't care.

Printing. Photo printing. Bloody photo printing. It's a fucking tangible product that people buy. Why isn't this an option already? They wouldn't even have to set up their own infrastructure, just create a network of regional partners and skim off their 15%.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#45

Post by TillE » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 1:38 PM UTC

studentrob wrote: post #29

Facebook was cool back in the day because it was personal. This is consistent with their trend of becoming less personal, and less cool.

I'm a little surprised that nothing has come to take the place that Facebook held back when it was restricted to universities. For a brief couple of years, you had quasi-private communities, and it really felt like something special, a place not only to keep up with friends but to meet new people.

Now Facebook has mutated into something else entirely. It's boring.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#46

Post by tatsuke95 » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 1:50 PM UTC

This is not a terrible idea. But it runs into that slippery slope whereby the more people use it, the less valuable it becomes to those users.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#47

Post by mikeevans » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 2:06 PM UTC

I expected that binder to be an Amazon referral link, and then go on to tell us about all the people who bought it.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#48

Post by HorizonXP » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 2:24 PM UTC

I'm proposing to my girlfriend this week. I will promote the post and report back my findings. It'll be interesting.

Oh, and if you look back at my comment history, you'll see what type of ring I bought.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#49

Post by loceng » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 2:48 PM UTC

The problem that exists is that for in order for Facebook to deliver a higher ROI, with a paid method than the freely showing most engaging/relevant posts method, is that they are competing with eachother. People are on Facebook, stay on Facebook, and engage on Facebook to see those posts.

Since releasing their sponsor posts I have noticed two things:

- I don't get as much engagement from as many people when I post things. The fewer people that do engage are some of the ones I would expect to, so in a way it's cleaner - obviously you can't kill all algorithmically-decided engaging material or people would leave.

- The other thing I noticed though, which is actually worse, is that I see more posts from people I don't care about, or even don't really want on my Facebook - but they're there. So with this I've been actively hiding those people (unsubscribing) from those people, and that will diminish who's posts I will see and the pool size of the amount of posts I can potentially see.

What should exist is allow the user, like the Starring ("Friend") they implemented, is that a user can state who's posts they absolutely want to see. That would hurt the sponsor posts model though, so I don't see this happening.

Also, it's pretty true that only people who have something to gain - that they can't gain naturally (for whatever reason) - will be constantly willing to spend $7 to promote it to X number of followers. So they either have a business or a big personal announcement - which I don't see people being happy paying for. And you can't forget that there are other ways of reaching people.

Re: I Just Paid Facebook $7

#50

Post by drumdance » Mon, Oct 22, 2012, 3:01 PM UTC

pootch wrote: post #23

tomasien wrote: post #12

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…

You are a spammer

Typical binary response. If you are a fan of Lady Gaga, getting notices from her is not spam. Granted, most people won't be fans of or want to hear from, say, Brillo Pads Inc., but the commenter pointed out his next use is for a band. I personally like hearing what musicians I follow are up to. More broadly, I think we are in a golden age for music, and social networks and crowdfunding platforms are making it possible.