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Facebook, I want my friends back

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Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#51

Post by jakejake »

I don't think that posts ever reached 100% of your friends or fans. I can't find the article but I remember something like 40% was the amount of friends who see any given post. I don't really mind it but it would be nice to have a little better understanding of the logic behind it.

A few years ago Facebook had a feature where you could weight your friends' from 1-10 and that would affect your feed. Now you can just limit by "only important updates" and such. It's not really clear what that even means.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#52

Post by alexsb92 »

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…

I would say it all depends on the reach. If a company publishes 10 posts a day, without promoting them, then I would think that only a few of the fans will get more than 2 or 3 of the posts that day (if we're to go with the 10%-20% estimate in the article).

Now if you were to promote all those 10 posts, and 99% of your fans would see them all, then most will get annoyed. And if they don't get annoyed within the first day, they will get annoyed soon enough,

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#53

Post by gbaygon »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #45
gbaygon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Your examples are making money out of it... facebook users aren't.

Maybe the "product meme" is misleading, but i think that the "customer" label is also misleading.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#54

Post by dasil003 »

tomasien wrote: post #10
engtech wrote: post #6

I had hoped this article was going to be able how to convince your friends to communicate with a medium other than Facebook.

This post misses the biggest logical point that is vitally needed: there was no Newsfeed in the beginning. At all. Then there was a Newsfeed. Then it showed more than just wall posts. Then there were TOO MANY things on it, so they scaled it back. The Newsfeed was an experiment, and it worked, but it needed tweaking. That's why this happened. That they now allow you to pay to promote is secondary to the original origi…

> That they now allow you to pay to promote is secondary to the original origin of why the Newsfeed works like it works.

Sure they had to scale it back, but the conflict of interests is real. People don't necessarily want to see only posts from those who are willing to pay. It's not that I begrudge them the opportunity to make money, but I think this clearly weakens Facebook's usefulness to users.

It's one thing if Facebook is filtering to show me the posts with the most organic engagement in order to decrease noise in my feed. It's completely different if some of the pages I follow have very little chance of reaching me based solely on their inability or unwillingness to pay for access. OA hyperbole notwithstanding, I think Facebook are overreaching here.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#55

Post by martin-adams »

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.

For a free service is sure does come at a cost. I get people I don't know commenting on photos of my 1 year old because a friend posted it to their wall.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#56

Post by sharkweek »

afterburner wrote: post #41
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…

"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 notificat…

After college, I gave all my Facebook "friends" the grocery store test. If I would avoid them if I saw them in a grocery store before they saw me, I deleted them as a friend. Keeps my "top" and "most recent" stories pretty equal, tbh.

And if any brand is overwhelming the newsfeed, it becomes pretty easy to make the decision to unlike their page

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#57

Post by enraged_camel »

bostonpete wrote: post #43
enraged_camel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.

yawn

You have to be delusional to believe that Facebook will change the functionality of a major feature because of a few people who are complaining about it on Hacker News.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#58

Post by ry0ohki »

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…

So what? Annoying pages can get un-liked, and the problem will work itself out. But if someone is a "Fan" of the brand and wants to see all of their 15 posts in a day, it's frustrating they can't. The default in Facebook is always "Most Popular", and even when I change it to "Most Recent" (to see the long tail of my friends activities, since I don't trust Facebook), Facebook always sets it back.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#59

Post by ryanwaggoner »

stephengillie wrote: post #5

Were they your friends or your customers? Or were your customers our actual inventory, what we sell to advertisers ? You built a business inside someone's shopping mall, they started charging rent, so you complain. And at $4 CPK for promoted posts[1], you'll find FB advertising to be slightly cheaper. [1] CPK aka CPM aka cost per 1000 views. Calculated from: To reach 100% of of our 50k+ Facebook fans they’d charge us…

Wouldn't it be a $4 CPK?

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#60

Post by pdonis »

Nowyouknow wrote: post #14
tomasien wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I resist the urge to say "don't be silly" here because not everyone is intimately familiar with the evolution of Facebook. I can understand believing that full access to every single one of your fan's, even the ones who have been ignoring your posts, is a right you have as a Facebook user. The only right you have is to control content on your own pages, for the most part, not what other people see in their Newsfeeds.…

You have to realize, previously, when a page was "liked" that was equivalent to WANTING to see updates from this Facebook page. That simple like was a 2-way contract, you're interested in us, when we post, you will be aware of it. Now the "liker" could be missing out on items they find important, and the fan page is effectively impotent in reaching that fan unless they pay to promote the post. It really is a bait and…

I understand why people are frustrated, but you are failing to identify the root cause of their frustation: they were getting something of value (PR for businesses, sharing of personal information, etc.) from Facebook for free, and now they're complaining because Facebook wants to charge them for it.

Guess what: Facebook owns their site, their servers, and their PR mechanisms. It's up to them what things to charge for, how to control the distribution of information that you put on their servers, etc. If someone doesn't like it, they can pay to set up their own social network.

Edit: Oh, and "bait and switch" isn't really accurate. You aren't Facebook's customer. You're just a user. You agreed to let them change their services without your consent when you signed up for your account.

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