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Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

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Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#131

Post by AndrewKemendo »

jokermatt999 wrote: post #128

Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent? They don't make it easy, and I don't think you can default to it, but I just point all my bookmarks to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr Still though, Facebook could be so much better. The problem is that a profit-driven social media site is always going to have different goals than its users. Free ones seem to never gain traction. Currently, most of my friend gro…

Wow thanks for that link, it totally transformed what I was shown on the feed.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#132

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

bitoneill wrote: post #103
bertil wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like your post is very US-centric and that is a big part of the misunderstanding. Facebook should not be so focused on one country. And they are not: some of the problems were visible for the Brexit and the subsequent parliamentary vote in the UK; they have already addressed some issues with recent the French and the German elections. There certainly are many more elections before November, see: https://en.wik…

> I mean, Facebook even has to consider how to protect the integrity of the Russian election later this year. OK, that was a joke. The day will come during the election, when Putin accuses Facebook of anti-Putin fake news

Fortunately for Putin, the majority of people use VK in Russia, not Facebook. :)

Still might complain about it mind you (has a userbase, but its half as big as VK..)

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#133

Post by Terr_ »

analogic wrote: post #62
JoshTko wrote: post #59

Main problem is that Facebook is too public in that most friends are actually acquaintances. People are less likely to share intimate updates with acquaintances and instead will only post generic neutral, non-controversial things which dont’t drive deep engagement.

basically. guess thats what the whole g+ circles thing was, and im sure fb can do too now, but if i have to spend basically any effort thinking about who's going to see it I'm just not gonna post. (or worry about who won't see it because of the black-box algorithm) I'm prob not the target market anyway, as im paranoid and social media and human interaction in general is strange and frightening to me, but that's a maj…

IMO Google+ circles were a step in the right direction, but Google shot themselves in the foot with their "one real-name account to rule them all" bullshit.

People don't just want to separate their "lists of other people", people also act a different role in different contexts.

In other words, humans want to maintain different identities too. That doesn't always mean pseudonyms, but the single human behind "Bob from the Accounting Department" probably wants to use a completely different set of contact-information and profile-pictures when he's in the role of "Bob, Death Metal Biker" or "Bob, Single Parent Looking For Love."

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#134

Post by DashRattlesnake »

danudey wrote: post #93
nikanj wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posting anything deeper than dank memes & news seems futile, when The Algorithm decides who can see your post. If they want people to make better content, they need to start figuring out why people feel like their better content gets no audience.

There was an article that I can't find for the life of me about how someone suffering with depression had killed himself, and it was only a long time afterwards that any friends friends knew because Facebook hadn't been showing his posts. IIRC they looked through his feed and there had been basically cries for help, but no one had seem them because Facebook was prioritizing engagement and not personal content. How ma…

> someone suffering with depression had killed himself, and it was only a long time afterwards that any friends friends knew because Facebook hadn't been showing his posts.

> IIRC they looked through his feed and there had been basically cries for help, but no one had seem them because Facebook was prioritizing engagement and not personal content.

Don't worry! Facebook is working on an AI to detect such posts and refer the suicidal users to help! No need to bring his friends down with his negativity and decrease their engagement! /s

I wish I was joking: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/28/16709224/facebook-suicid.... Social networks like Facebook have contributed to a big rise in depression, but instead of course correcting, we get buzzword tech band-aids.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#135

Post by ehnto »

I think both time on site and engagement are narrow metrics to judge a site's usefulness and effectiveness.

Reduced engagement on Facebook is probably a good thing for society, but it could arguably mean it's also achieving it's goals as a social platform more succinctly.

As an advert stream of course, that's bad. But I suspect an amount of truth in Zuckerberg's somewhat altruistic new vision.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#136

Post by DashRattlesnake »

askafriend wrote: post #115
IntronExon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While true, that kind of understatement seems calculated to miss the point. FB is targeting the individual, tv targeted entire demographics. It is a poor comparison.

Counterpoint: I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in. So by that metric, Facebook is far better than generic Ads I see on TV.

> I'd rather see Ads about things I'm interested in than things I'm not interested in.

You're not going to see more ads about the things you're interested in, you're going to see ads that have a higher potential to manipulate you into commercially profitable behavior. There's a big but subtle difference between those things. You are definitely not going to see ads for your interests that bring you more joy but aren't easily monetizeable.

The coarseness of TV targeting meant people had more opportunity to assert their own priorities against the less effective manipulation.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#138

Post by rhizome »

TipVFL wrote: post #112
danudey wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife and were 'in a relationship' on Facebook within a few months of meeting each other. Then we were 'married'. Even still, for the first four or so years that we had each other on FB, it wouldn't show me her posts. They just weren't in my feed, I'd scroll down so far I was seeing content from months ago, but I'd never see anything she'd posted that week. Eventually it took me telling FB I didn't want to see post…

They've probably done testing and found that for some significant percentage of married couples, seeing their spouse's posts caused them to reduce their Facebook usage. So unhappy marriages are ruining it for everyone. I feel like the general trend of UI simplification and a/b testing everything has companies chasing after anything that will push their general metrics up in the short term, at the expense of slowly di…

Did you ask what their definition of engagement is, and why it's the primary measure?

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#139

Post by DashRattlesnake »

amasad wrote: post #94

Instead of Facebook flailing about trying to come up with the best news feed algorithm to please everyone they should just give the consumer a choice. Imagine an "algorithm store" that lets developers build and publish ranking algorithms that users can buy and use.

That's won't happen. The mistake you're making is assuming that Facebook wants to "please everyone." It doesn't. It only cares about pleasing itself, and it does that through manipulating the algorithm to attempt to get its users to do what it wants.

Giving up control of the algorithm means giving up control of its user-products, and it's not going to do that.

Re: Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

#140

Post by kosmet »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #78

I didn’t see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook’s own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos and pictures by “viral marketing” firms onto it. They replaced groups (inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were given permission to crap all over it b…

I am also so disturbed by Facebook’s “keep the user always logged in” policy. If you click on a link inside a reminder mail sent when one of your friends post something, you are automatically logged in. I noticed it after forwarding such an email to one of my friends. At least they could explicitly indicate such behavior in the email.
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