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Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”

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Re: Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”

#31

Post by emodendroket »

mtbcoder wrote: post #28
dcosson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one am hoping that this catches on, walled garden or not I'd rather spend my time reading content on an interface that I don't have to fight against (e.g. full screen overlay ads with a tiny x to close) and I trust facebook to build that better than anyone else. I'm also surprised publishers are going along with it though, it seems a little ironic. The only reason this product is interesting is because so many…

> I'd rather spend my time reading content on an interface that I don't have to fight against (e.g. full screen overlay ads with a tiny x to close) RSS readers solved this problem a long time ago.

As far as I can tell the hegemony of Google Reader kind of stunted the growth of everything else.

Re: Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”

#32

Post by morley »

mtbcoder wrote: post #28
dcosson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one am hoping that this catches on, walled garden or not I'd rather spend my time reading content on an interface that I don't have to fight against (e.g. full screen overlay ads with a tiny x to close) and I trust facebook to build that better than anyone else. I'm also surprised publishers are going along with it though, it seems a little ironic. The only reason this product is interesting is because so many…

> I'd rather spend my time reading content on an interface that I don't have to fight against (e.g. full screen overlay ads with a tiny x to close) RSS readers solved this problem a long time ago.

RSS didn't solve the adoption problem, nor the "it just works" problem.

Re: Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”

#33

Post by emodendroket »

blumkvist wrote: post #22
phreeza wrote: post #2

Sadly, this looks like one more step in the walled garden web direction, somewhat like AOL sites back in the day. I am amazed publishers are apparently going along with this. They must be very desperate for views if they are willing to relinquish this much control.

How is this different than distribution of printed magazines, for example? Publishers produce their product and ship it to distribution centers. You can buy the magazines at the bus stop, or at the gas station, or even have it mailed to you. You can find the article on facebook, or when you searched bing, or maybe even subscribe to their newsletter, get mobile notification from their mobile app on your phone. And how…

Imagine if they sent their articles to the supermarket and the supermarket decided how to lay it out and what ads to run. And perhaps also interspersed your articles with articles from other sources you did not vet ahead of time.

Re: Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”

#34

Post by emodendroket »

cromwellian wrote: post #13

This seems rather pointless given HTLM5 ServiceWorkers. All of the benefits they're claiming with respect to local prefetching content for offline, instant use can be done with that spec. Even push-message content updates when the mobile browser isn't even running can be achieved. The only missing component is IOS support which might be possible to polyfill in via a hybrid. I'm pretty sure Facebook knows about this,…

Absolutely nobody is avoiding reading articles because they take too long to load but they have to have some sort of positive way of describing it.

Re: Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”

#35

Post by timboslice »

emodendroket wrote: post #31
mtbcoder wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd rather spend my time reading content on an interface that I don't have to fight against (e.g. full screen overlay ads with a tiny x to close) RSS readers solved this problem a long time ago.

As far as I can tell the hegemony of Google Reader kind of stunted the growth of everything else.

I never thought of it that way, but it makes sense. The rise of RSS in the mid 2000's gave way to all sorts of plugins to inject ads into your RSS feeds as a way to cope with the lost web traffic

Re: Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”

#36

Post by blumkvist »

emodendroket wrote: post #33
blumkvist wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different than distribution of printed magazines, for example? Publishers produce their product and ship it to distribution centers. You can buy the magazines at the bus stop, or at the gas station, or even have it mailed to you. You can find the article on facebook, or when you searched bing, or maybe even subscribe to their newsletter, get mobile notification from their mobile app on your phone. And how…

Imagine if they sent their articles to the supermarket and the supermarket decided how to lay it out and what ads to run. And perhaps also interspersed your articles with articles from other sources you did not vet ahead of time.

How is this different than what is happening today?

Re: Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”

#37

Post by btown »

Crito wrote: post #17
bobbles wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad for who though? Isn't it good for the writers? More people viewing the content? Isn't it good for the users? A better experience?

Bad for society. Accurate metrics seem to drive down the quality of publications. Websites with near-omniscient metrics often find that the best way to drive traffic is to deliberately produce shit-tier articles that drive clicks through controversy or pandering. In the absence of accurate metrics, the writers/editors are forced to simply try their best to produce the best quality material. Their notion of what the "…

> Writers who are not driven by metrics will push on society. Writers who are driven by metrics will be pushed by society.

It's intriguing to think of this in the context of Plato's _Republic_. A simplistic conception of the philosopher-king might interpolate the positive relationship between knowledge and justice, and argue that the more knowledge one can obtain of reality, the better a leader one would be. Such a leader would seek out every metric available, right? But, as in the Allegory of the Cave [1], where people might become very skilled at interpreting shadows but never recognize the true Form of the hidden objects casting the shadows, metrics are only good when they convey the Truth... which, in the case of publication quality, may indeed be that justice is ill-served by journalistic pandering, and that metrics are inherently short-term.

Of course, Plato was also an advocate of censorship in the very same work [2], so any reading should be taken with a grain of salt. It's very interesting, though, that the idea of an "uncanny valley" of knowledge, of wrongly optimizing on a subset of the Truth, is an idea millennia old.

[1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... [2] http://www.iep.utm.edu/republic/#SH1c

Re: Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”

#39

Post by thanatropism »

smil wrote: post #9
[deleted] wrote: post #5

[deleted]

I read about this earlier today on /r/contentstrategist and they were saying that videos posted directly to Facebook get far, far more "plays" than if they are posted as links to YouTube. This is thanks to Facebook's AutoPlay for native videos, and whether people actually watch the videos more... Is not really interesting because plays/impressions is the metric by which a boss measures the marketing teams work, or ho…

You can't fool bosses for very long.

Re: Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”

#40

Post by Yhippa »

smil wrote: post #12
phreeza wrote: post #2

Sadly, this looks like one more step in the walled garden web direction, somewhat like AOL sites back in the day. I am amazed publishers are apparently going along with this. They must be very desperate for views if they are willing to relinquish this much control.

Of course they're desperate for views. Their whole business model is based on views. Which is why the media is of such awful quality today.

Absolutely. I feel that news "content" is now all very clickbaity which is a huge turnoff. I've had to stop following a lot of trusted media because they're trending towards clickbait. Ever since the WaPo got bought by Bezos and pals a lot of their content has trended that way. It's sad but I guess I understand that that's what they need to do to survive.
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