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Facebook, I want my friends back

dangerousminds.net

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Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#61

Post by quanticle »

>'I despise it.' Hear that beleaugered holders of Facebook stock? That kind of talk would make my blood run cold. How many companies can you name that you actively despise?

Actually? Quite a few. I despise Comcast. I despise the big-4 cell phone companies (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint). I despise the oil companies (BP, Chevron, Texaco, et. al). Notice a pattern? Despite my (and presumably many others) despising these companies, they are all enormously profitable. I think Facebook has got to the state where they at least think they have a monopoly on their users' social graphs and are willing to raise access prices sky-high. I'm not surprised it happened. I'm surprised it took this long.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#62

Post by king_jester »

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…

> 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.

I think this comparison is valid, but realize that most people are not a Lebron James or a Justin Bieber and they have very little ability to influence a company directly. In fact, for record labels and the NBA, there have been numerous examples of smaller players getting a bad deal or being screwed over. Being a user or consumer of a service does not mean that the service provider is looking to treat you well.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#63

Post by pdonis »

bennyg wrote: post #26
gbaygon wrote: post #18

Earlier 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.

> If Facebook does things that alienate users, then those products will walk off the shelf

Hasn't happened yet, from what I can see.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#66

Post by dromidas »

ry0ohki wrote: post #58
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.

That's exactly what I was thinking. If you like a fan page you should expect to get stuff from it. I don't get mails from facebook saying someone posts stuff, I only get notifications up on the little globe icon so I don't care when Princess Bride or Pulp Fiction sends out little pictures of whatever. It's not annoying at all. (Unlike farmville requests, which I swear I block these apps weekly but they always notify me anyway)

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#67

Post by tocomment »

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…

I'm curious why you think they should be out of business.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#68

Post by wtvanhest »

OK, I get that DangerousMinds posts a ridiculous amount and would definitely be deleted from my account and probably should have to pay for advertising on an ad platform, but what about other use cases:

I run a nonprofit alumni association here in Boston and I use FB as a way to update alumni of changes in events so that we can limit the numbers of emails we send. We were using Facebook as sort of an information platform and don't profit or make any money in any way.

I am very careful to not post too much, even entering in to specific agreements with the national alumni association so that they do not to post ads on our page for their merchandise etc.

What am I supposed to do now? Should I pay out of my pocket to reach users who definitely want to be reached already?

Facebook provides a great service, and they should be compensated, but I will now have to look at other options to potentially reach our group.

--- And the flip side of this is that I would like to see posts from everyone I am friends with that I haven't explicitly blocked from my feed, going through all those names to re-add them seems like an amazing amount of trouble for me.

--- The OP is hard to sympathize with, but he/she has a good point.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#69

Post by tinkupandey »

https://www.facebook.com/business/power-of-advertising this claims facebook gets 3.2 bn likes everyday. http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/facebook-now-has-9... this says facebook has 500+ mn daily users.

I going to describe my own hypothesis called "Dilution of your likes":

The above two numbers mean, one user is doing 6 likes on an average. And that fellow is doing the samething everyday. He is of course going through more brands & websites. No. of likes in a year is 6365=2190. Your site has garnered 50000 likes so far. Lets assume all are from different users. And you had been in business for 2 yrs (I think you mentioned it above). Over NEXT (assuming the same stats for facebook and your like growth) two years, your existing 50000 unique fans have also liked 219050000=109,500,000 (100 mn likes). And you are expected to have another 50000 to 100,000 likes with a similar growth. A single like on your website is valued at 1 in 1 mn + (1 to 2 mn) = 2 to 3 mn. taking account of your new likes also.

Everybody is talking about the number of likes in their website and thats what facebook is showing. EdgeRank (IMHO) looks at the ratio between your likes and their all other likes - let me tell you why - in order to compare yourself to others and decide which post is relavent to him. And I am also making an educated guess that EdgeRank also looks at the timestamp of the like they gave you.

I liked you yesterday. Today I like Coke. That could be interpreted as Coke is my new Dangerousminds (to some degree atleast). And tomorrow Pepsi is my new Coke. Just speculating here... And I request someone who understands EdgeRank can correct my guess please. And your frequency of writing 12 posts a day could also be made known if I am facebook, I will see the latest like on your site and for 24 hrs / 12 = 2 hrs you are not updating your content and maybe facebook wants to take its users to new posts that they will like in those two hours. And Coke is not your competition because don't forget he has liked 1 mn other things which even if 1 % of them is creating a new post only once 1 day, your post is competing with 10,000 posts within those 2 hours. And Even if the user is refreshing for new posts every second of the two hours, 7200 times, you have more than 1 competition.

Every post on facebook must be given a number using some logic. You can compare only two numbers and decide. And EdgeRank assigns a number to all fed posts.

And they cant compare your post with all other posts to decide. One obvious way is to cluster the ones according to the user and decide as quickly as possible (within one sec max). How much computation can EdgeRank do for one user by the way? Cloud computing for 1 user? You might need the whole sky.

All are seeing the number of likes. Thats the numerator. But the total number of likes by the users in facebook is the denominator. And that is growing. Diluting the value of your post each time your own fan who liked you is liking something else.

Please comment. Thank you.

Re: Facebook, I want my friends back

#70

Post by lotharbot »

natrius wrote: post #23
jonknee wrote: post #8

They'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.

Facebook's data doesn't tell them how close you actually are to people, only how often you like/share/respond to their content -- and how many other people like their stuff.

The guy who spams 30 lame political memes per day, who I might argue with a couple times a week, gets treated like my best friend. My mom, who posts maybe once a month and has a limited friends list, gets hidden away in the deep recesses of the system.

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