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Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

nytimes.com

101–110 of 228 posts

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#101
post #91
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a meaningful difference between journalists and advertisers. In the dictionary, sure. In reality, for as long as advertisers are how journalists get paid, that difference is whittling towards nil.

That's pretty obviously not true. I didn't see advertisers covering the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Harvey Weinstein or tax reform, to pick just three things from the last year.

Um. Not really. The media covers that which gets clicks / eyeballs. That gets turned into revenue via advertisers.

When you gather news from enough sources you start to see patterns in what gets a lot of attention, and what doesn't.

Long to short, you're naive if you don't think there's a straight line been the mainstrean news media and advertisers.

Note: The mainstream news media should also not be confused with journalism. The reasons are obvious.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#102
post #20
post #14

I've unfollowed everyone. My feed only shows past memories. I love my feed. I highly recommend it.

Have you ever considered that you might be narcissistic? Why on earth would you want to go on social media only to view self centred experiences?

Yes, unlike those paragons of insight and community spirit taking selfies and updating their feeds with each thought, meal, and bowel movement.

Be real, social media is intended to magnify narcissistic ego through engagement, not disengagement.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#103

Good intentions or not, we must remember that history has proven time and time again, when any entity has far too much unchecked power, it is inevitably exploited by bad actors. A user base of two billion users without any real accountability is a scary thing. The only people policing Facebook are Facebook. We would never agree to a having a single dictator who answers to no one, why should Facebook be treated any di…

Because unlike a dictator Facebook has zero real power over your life? It's a site of puppies and horoscopes, you think we should be dealing with them like we do Kim Jong Un? How have we moved so far on the personal responsibility scale. Why aren't people partly responsible for not making better use of their time? Facebook is an "evil echo chamber", "wasting people's lives", "catering to business", etc - ALL THEY DO…

>Facebook has zero real power over your life

>ALL THEY DO IS HOST YOUR FRIENDS' PHOTOS.

These two obviously false statements completely undermine your otherwise valid point about personal responsibility.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#104

Good intentions or not, we must remember that history has proven time and time again, when any entity has far too much unchecked power, it is inevitably exploited by bad actors. A user base of two billion users without any real accountability is a scary thing. The only people policing Facebook are Facebook. We would never agree to a having a single dictator who answers to no one, why should Facebook be treated any di…

Because unlike a dictator Facebook has zero real power over your life? It's a site of puppies and horoscopes, you think we should be dealing with them like we do Kim Jong Un? How have we moved so far on the personal responsibility scale. Why aren't people partly responsible for not making better use of their time? Facebook is an "evil echo chamber", "wasting people's lives", "catering to business", etc - ALL THEY DO…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#105
post #35

I very much hope this isn't just words. The core problem, IMO, is that content that makes us angry, anxious or jealous is a much better driver of clicks than content that makes us happy. I'm sure Facebook knows this. If they really mean it, they'll accept that they will make less money as a result of this change. It would be the right decision in the long term, but the short term will hurt.

Are clicks the majority of revenue for FB? An ad unit that fills a users screen for a few second as they scroll throughout the day every day is super super valuable to brand advertising. I think that’s ~$450 billion of the total ~$500 billion total annual global ad spend.

To me browsing the fb feed is a lot like like flipping through tv channels used to be. Brand advertising loved that too.

I’d think the More people browse their feeds the more valuable their ad unit becomes to brand advertisers.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#106
post #35

I very much hope this isn't just words. The core problem, IMO, is that content that makes us angry, anxious or jealous is a much better driver of clicks than content that makes us happy. I'm sure Facebook knows this. If they really mean it, they'll accept that they will make less money as a result of this change. It would be the right decision in the long term, but the short term will hurt.

> that content that makes us angry, anxious or jealous is a much better driver of clicks than content that makes us happy

Not for me. I've all but abandoned Facebook because I was tired of being angry all the time. It's a wasteland of political hysterics.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#107

Good intentions or not, we must remember that history has proven time and time again, when any entity has far too much unchecked power, it is inevitably exploited by bad actors. A user base of two billion users without any real accountability is a scary thing. The only people policing Facebook are Facebook. We would never agree to a having a single dictator who answers to no one, why should Facebook be treated any di…

Because unlike a dictator Facebook has zero real power over your life? It's a site of puppies and horoscopes, you think we should be dealing with them like we do Kim Jong Un? How have we moved so far on the personal responsibility scale. Why aren't people partly responsible for not making better use of their time? Facebook is an "evil echo chamber", "wasting people's lives", "catering to business", etc - ALL THEY DO…

> ALL THEY DO IS HOST YOUR FRIENDS' PHOTOS

This is like saying a Tesla car is just a machine that generates heat.

Facebook has built an algorithmically optimized list of content that they believe will drive you back to the site to consume more.

They also have insane amounts of usage data which they are testing for sentiment analysis [0] They've also run tests on content to provoke emotion as far back as 2014.[1]

It's clear that they have the power to influence emotions and impact people in real ways. Because you are strong willed does not mean that others cannot be easily swayed by dopamine release.

[0](http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/27/technology/facebook-ai-suici...) [1](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...)

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#109
post #91
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a meaningful difference between journalists and advertisers. In the dictionary, sure. In reality, for as long as advertisers are how journalists get paid, that difference is whittling towards nil.

That's pretty obviously not true. I didn't see advertisers covering the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Harvey Weinstein or tax reform, to pick just three things from the last year.

I am not saying "journalists only cover what advertisers will cover".

I am saying "journalist's standards are increasingly coming second to the generation of advertising revenue".

Once-reptutable media empires embed Outbrain widgets and generate fad-focused, celebrity-focused clickbait garbage because it makes them money. They are not doing this for Journalism's sake. They are doing it for revenue from advertisers. I understand that this is an ancient phenomenon (PG's "suits back in style" essay comes to mind), but I have observed the scale and shallowness of the phenomenon worsening as the coffers get lighter at the news orgs.

For that reason, I am arguing that the "meaningfulness" of the difference between advertisers and journalists appears to be waning.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#110
I'm beginning to wonder if Facebook has begun to realize that being the source of ads while temporarily beneficial to their bottom line is actually destroying their long-time value to advertisers. Chasing eyeballs for ads necessarily warps the things you present to those eyeballs and eventually you're in a race with every other eyeball chaser. The problem with that race is that you no longer have an undistorted understanding of viewer/user preferences but instead only understand their reaction to your attempts to capture attention and clicks, which is a more mechanical understanding of behavior rather than understanding underlying motives and preferences.

Ad companies have long specialized in the mechanistic side of things so Facebook really brings nothing new to table for them, and merely being "a giant audience" isn't especially worthwhile either since a "run of network" ad buy for Adsense or the like is cheap. Facebook's differentiator was "we have all this insight into users!" and while that was true at the time they began courting advertisers what I suspect advertisers and Facebook discovered was that those insights became less and less accurate as users responded to the changes Facebook began to make in order to try and increase ad effectiveness, thus beginning the distortion spiral.

I wonder if Facebook is making an attempt to return to the insight side of the business, allowing advertisers to use the info Facebook has regarding people as targeting for ads that occur away from Facebook. They return to a demographic/insight source rather than an advertising platform.

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