A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24

This is why Facebook is buying other companies because people are migrating away from Facebook.

One flaw Facebook has, when everyone's been on it for years they collect hundreds of friends from random old parts of their life. This waters down the experience because random people you barely know posting all the time turns your feed into something less interesting.

Toss in more ads combined with old acquaintances, and distant family members and you have a spammy feed.

Plus advertisers are mad because they invested in broadening their reach only to have it taken away from them unless they pay to promote.

A new social network is a fresh social network, void of your parent's family friends and clothing companies you no longer care about.

Facebook is myspace all over again.

The most telling decline stat, my older sister who is a soccer mom and was obsessed with Facebook for years recently told me, "we don't really go on Facebook anymore, we use instagram." uh-oh, it's the non-technical family member indicator. She was the last one of us to get a smartphone too.

That's why Facebook is buying other internet properties. Because their's is on the decline with actual engaged users, their stats might show new users joining quickly, those are probably bots, spammers, and foreigners. Facebook's future is a universal login tool and a place to see you're great aunt's inspiration quote spam.

Honestly I still don't get the hubbub over this algorithm change by Facebook. It's a scaling issue Facebook is attempting to solve, in a dramatically different (and IMHO superior) way than Twitter.

On both networks, every time you look at your feed you'll only look at the top X items. On Twitter, that'll just be the X most recent items. On Facebook, those X items are picked algorithmically based on the degree of engagement. The latter seems 1000x better and more intelligent than Twitter, even though it technically means not every post I'm subscribed to will make it into my feed.

As people spend more and more years on Facebook, we naturally accumulate more friends and pages (personally around 1200 friends and 200 pages). Thus, we're subscribed to more content. Far too much to reasonably make it into our feed. Given that X is fixed, the percentage of any particular source's posts which will make it into X should decline. It seems totally reasonable that which posts make it in are dictated by how much engagement those posts had.

Aside from the reasons everyone else listed, I've used it customer support too. I've reached out to bands to ask last minute questions about their shows and actually have a better response rate with getting in touch with AT&T over Twitter than via email or sometimes phone.

The only things I follow on Facebook are things I actually want to see on Facebook: 2 friend's bands, a watchmaker I like, a casting agency to let a couple friends know when something fits for them, etc. I don't have any 'like us to win' or symbolic/guilt likes.

But the Facebook news feed has never been a reliable delivery mechanism for updates you actually want to receive, because there's always been a huge volume of content with imperfect filters in place; if you really want to check on a brand you either go direct to their Facebook page which is entirely unaffected by filter algorithms or follow them on Twitter or by email. Users who only ever saw a fraction of the brand communications in their main feed anyway aren't particularly upset by changes in the filter that mean they see an even smaller percentage (if they get more friend updates instead they might even see it as a net win). Brands whose free advertising reaches 1-2% of eyeballs rather than 10-20% of the ones upset here, as with the Gmail "promotions" tab.

Eat24's marketing team aren't stupid: they know this which is why you don't get coupon offers on Facebook, you get meme graphics, jokes about food and pictures of pizza. You get coupon offers by email without the jokes or on Twitter with them.

Edit: disagreement by downvoting is particularly lame when it comes without an explanation of why I'm supposedly wrong. You don't see everything that every person or brand has posted in your newsfeed, haven't done for a long time, and in practice wouldn't do without a lot of scrolling even if they didn't filter at all. Whether Facebook's intent in filtering Pages posts to your feed more aggressively than Friend posts to your feed is purely commercial, purely driven by user engagement metrics or something in between, it's hardly a new development or something that only applies to brands.