How is anyone even surprised about this? If you're making money off of someone else's platform, it's only a matter of time before they're gonna ask for a cut.
Facebook, I want my friends back
31–40 of 195 posts
Re: Facebook, I want my friends back
#32He's confused, he thinks he's facebook's customer. Facebook's customers are its users. Keeping the uexperience up is the first priority.
Facebook users aren't its customers, facebook users are its products. Better think again.
His point is still valid...
just for the wrong reason.
And you are wrong also, by the way, the Facebook product we are talking about right now is the ATTENTION of the users, not the users themselves. They CAN sell users... but that's not what the feed does.
I told you all of that to tell you this... Facebook needs to sell a high quality product.
Now the author's assertion is that he should be allowed to lower the quality of Facebook's product because it should be his right. I'm not sure I agree with that.
Re: Facebook, I want my friends back
#33Look I can understand the "oh it's so convenient that you can now pay to promote your posts" but the "turning down the volume" on the Newsfeed was done because our Newsfeeds were getting overrun. People added too many friends, thousands more than the 150 it's been proven we can reasonably empathize with, and people were doing more and more on the network. You can STILL see posts of your favorite bands by going to the…
I object to Facebook making this decision for me. I _didn't_ add too many friends. My newsfeed _wasn't_ overrun. Yeah, I had to hide a few annoying Apps, but no big deal. And then, one day, I stopped seeing posts from lots of people, including many of the people I most wanted to see posts from. It took a while before I even realized this was happening. Then I slowly had to go through and fix the settings for people t…
>>I object to Facebook making this decision for me.
Facebook makes a lot of decisions for you. It's a free service, so it's their prerogative. If you don't like it, you can always deactivate your account like I did.
Re: Facebook, I want my friends back
#34The whole premise of this article is "Facebook gave me this access to their platform for free hitherto, so I'm entitled to this access on those same terms in perpetuity; it's unfair for them to start charging for it." I don't see the author explaini why s/he is entitled to these same terms forever.
Its a funny thing. When I read your comment I remember it saying exactly that on the Facebook Sign up page. Something along the lines of "Its free (and always will be)".
Re: Facebook, I want my friends back
#35This post is pretty overboard with its exaggeration. But one thing I find interesting is the concept that Facebook is a paid publishing platform. They'll deliver your posts to 15% of your followers as a freebie, but to reach 100%, you pay. And I hadn't thought of it that way before.
That perspective actually gives me increased hope for Tent (https://tent.io), the decentralized social networking protocol that could one day be a Facebook alternative. When Tent was announced here on HN, a common criticism was that if you're popular, and you host your Tent server yourself, you end up paying a lot for the bandwidth cost of sending each post to thousands or millions of followers. Whereas the perception is that on a centralized social network you can send a post to millions of followers for free.
For now, that's still the case on Twitter, but on Facebook, apparently not. If you really want significant reach, you pay to publish even to people who already (by liking) signed up to follow you. So the situations aren't actually that different. I guess there really is no free lunch.
Re: Facebook, I want my friends back
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook users aren't its customers, facebook users are its products. Better think again.
Yeah but it's a little bit trickier than that. If Facebook does things that alienate users, then those products will walk off the shelf - and not into someone's shopping cart.
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Re: Facebook, I want my friends back
#37If you're posting 10-16 posts a day and you forcibly put each of these into 100% of your fans, you're going to shrink your base. If you did that to me, I'm going to hide or Unlike your page. If you emailed me those posts, I'd be hitting unsubscribe in half a day. The Facebook News Feed isn't an RSS reader, and the Like button isn't Subscribe. I would suggest just posting once a day, and using the Promoted Posts for t…
Do you have any large-scale statistical tests backing up your assertion that if you push 10 posts a day to peoples' Facebook feeds, your readership will shrink?
I don't disbelieve your assertion that you personally would find it annoying, but I know a good number of large, successful blogging brands do indeed push to social media multiple times a day, and it seems to work for them. Several of said brands have indeed published articles suggesting that publishing multiple times a day serves to boost, not diminish, your popularity.
In addition, some counter-anecdata: I don't really use Facebook, but I've certainly not found myself put off by those blogs I follow which post that often to Twitter, for example. Indeed, I think I'd find it more annoying if they reduced their posting frequency - I'm not on Twitter 24/7, and if they only linked to their posts in a single digest-style tweet, I'd probably miss it.
Re: Facebook, I want my friends back
#38I think the problem here is assuming what the purpose of the 'like' button is. It's not a 'follow' or 'sign up for mailing list' or even 'add friend' button. I think the meaning of this button will have to be defined by users, the company and page owners over time, if one stake-holder has too great a voice then the button will fail, for this action to be useful all parties involved will need to gain from it and that means some compromise will be needed as well until the correct balance is reached.
Re: Facebook, I want my friends back
#39They're doing the same thing with non-fan pages. If you want your content to go to your friends you now have to pay for the privilege. It's nuts. I haven't been on Facebook since I saw this, they can keep their social graph.
Facebook has enough data to know how close you are to people, and there's even a "Close Friends" list you can add people to in order to see all of their posts. Your friends who want to see your posts will see them. Those who are ambivalent might not, and you can pay to make it show up for them.
Which is nuts. If they don't want to see it, don't show it to them regardless of if there was money involved. With their new system they have perverse incentives to not show your friends your content.
Re: Facebook, I want my friends back
#40Also there is no option to see "Photos" anymore like it used to be, I'm almost at the verge of abandoning Facebook!