How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

Personally, I think Facebook would be broken if every message every person or group I'm connected to made it directly into my feed. The feed has been algorithmic for a very long time and paid placement is neither a surprising nor nefarious input to that algorithm. Paid posts are clearly labeled and, even if paid, don't guarantee distribution volume, but do provide analytics. If you don't like the results you're getting, then don't pay for them.

If you think that you can complain "But they are my fans! They belong to me! I deserve the right to be in their feeds" then be happy that Facebook is smarter than you: All those lovely fans would be gone in a heartbeat if Facebook didn't protect the advertisers from themselves. If you and all your advertising friends had it your way, you'd spam users until there were no users left to spam.

Is there a button available to users that will cause stories posted by pages and friends to actually show up in the news feed? It seems like there is no solution available on the receiving end.

Facebook is betting this will all blow over and everyone will accept it as the new status quo just like 80% of the previous evil changes they implemented. They are continually pushing the envelope to see what they can get away with, and I think in this case they will probably pull it off like they usually do.

The article describes it as "as plain and malignant a case of conflict of interest can get", but I don't see it; Facebook's interest is to make money, not to guarantee equality of Facebook's posting. Even if you grant that their primary interest is to assure the highest quality feed, this doesn't go directly against that either since a paid post is not inherently worse than free one even if it skews that way.

What people are really objecting to here is the blurring of the lines between ads and organic content. Certainly it smells bad, but it's not the same as an investment bank shorting the very securities they're selling to clients, after all, you can still get something for free. All they've done is just is turned a formerly free service into a freemium service without removing any functionality. Sure they can ratchet up the cost arbitrarily, but you have no excuse to be screwed by that because you can dip your toe in any time to figure out if the ROI makes sense. If they didn't offer you the opportunity to pay for placement you would have been drowned out by the noise anyway. I think the business justification is precisely that: the stream is so noisy for most people that paid placement can be done without significantly degrading its quality. They may be wrong about this, but I don't see why they aren't justified to try.

You can control the level of access a friend or page has. You can set it from None - Some - Most - All of their posts.

OT:

One observation I have made is how facebook launches big changes in staggered roll-outs.

Among all the other obvious benefits, I feel a big one is that all people never get to complain at once. So even the most drastic of changes will be met with pockets of protests/backlash, giving enough time between different pockets for the uproar to cool off.