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Facebook, I want my friends back

dangerousminds.net

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Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#41

Post by afterburner »

kscaldef wrote: post #17
tomasien wrote: post #3

Look 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…

"And, still, every couple of days Facebook forgets that I've set my sort to "Most Recent" and goes back to "Top Stories""

This is by far the most annoying thing for me. That and the likelihood that most people don't realize that setting is there, and assume they're getting posts in chronological order.

EDIT: my solution, btw, is to make a bunch of my friends "close friends" and set Facebook to send me email notifications for updates from them. Bypasses the newsfeed, brings it back to email, where I like it.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#42

Post by jrockway »

If I'm reading this correctly, the problem is that something that the author thinks should be free costs money, so Facebook is now "demanding that a $365 million dollar ransom gets collected from all the Mom & Pop businesses who use Facebook."

Uh huh. "Mom & Pop business" seems to be the new "won't somebody please think of the children" line designed to extinguish all rational thought. I'm getting a little tired of it.

(I'll save my rant on why I think most Mom & Pop businesses should be out of business for another day. I have to say I'm amused when I see a restaurant in my neighborhood apply a bunch of signs that say "absolutely no laptop use" and then go out of business a month later. Idealism is a bitch.)

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#43

Post by bostonpete »

enraged_camel wrote: post #33
kscaldef wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If you don't like it, you can always deactivate > your account like I did.

...and he can also gripe about it in a public forum in the hopes that if enough people do so, Facebook will change it's behavior. It wouldn't be the first time FB changed their policies due to grumbling users.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#44

Post by drone »

Sounds like a brilliant product plan to me...

"See what we can do for you? See the traffic we can drive and link to you? Want more? Choose your level of traffic, choose your price."

The article makes the assumption that 3rd-party businesses that have been suckling at the teat of the social graph are the value to the facebook users. They're not. The users, the actual people are - businesses are just there to help pay for the whole thing, and follow the personal users. I say this as a business owner who uses facebook heavily, and occasionally pays them for the right to get a little bit back out of them.

I've yet to see a single person in my timeline say "I'd stop coming to facebook if all of these businesses didn't have pages here."

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#45

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

gbaygon wrote: post #18
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #12

He'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.

This "product" meme is inaccurate and misleading. You are the product in the same way that Lebron James is the NBA's product, the same way that a top partner at Goldman Sacs is the product, the same way that Justin Bieber is the product, and the same way that you yourself is the product every time you apply for a job interview or raise funds.

Being the "product" gives you a great position in your relationship with the company and incentivizes them to treat you very well.

Fact of the matter is, and is as demonstrably evident, FB can cares much less about keeping this advertiser happy than about keeping its users happy.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#46

Post by seanc722 »

thenomad wrote: post #37
chaz wrote: post #28

If 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…

Here's +1 to that statistic. If I see more then a few things a day I would definitly hide it. I already do. I love seeing interesting post pop up, but when your posts are takin over my feed you're gone :)

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#47

Post by conradfr »

I have the opposite problem. Bands etc that I "page-like" and who post too much take over my newsfeed and I only have the option to hide everything or view everything (if FB wants).

IIRC there was previously a "see only important messages from this person" choice and it was better.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#48

Post by drone »

jrockway wrote: post #42

If I'm reading this correctly, the problem is that something that the author thinks should be free costs money, so Facebook is now "demanding that a $365 million dollar ransom gets collected from all the Mom & Pop businesses who use Facebook." Uh huh. "Mom & Pop business" seems to be the new "won't somebody please think of the children" line designed to extinguish all rational thought. I'm getting a little tired of i…

Especially considering his intent for them to see his posts on facebook are to drive "viewers" to his site so that he can extract advertising revenue.

Sounds like someone's bitter that their free marketing channel dried up, and they have to make actual decisions about how to fill their pipeline back, beyond just posting on facebook.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#49

Post by patmcguire »

I could tell the general path the HN discussion was going to take - free service, free country, etc. - but the bigger issue is all the companies that have been paying Facebook millions for page like campaigns.

I'd be angry if I'd given Facebook money under the old system only for them to change the value of what I got from them. The basic takeaway is that the rules that were in place where I might be willing to pay $2 for a like - a person who likes your page sees your post - had to be changed because there wasn't that much user attention in existence. Now it's been inflated to be worth about a tenth as many views, which is what you were buying, only Facebook called it a "Like" and it somehow means something completely different now.

I guess the moral of the story is don't invest in anything whose value can be arbitrarily changed by someone else.

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