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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

#141

Post by whateveruser »

banku_brougham wrote: post #102
danudey wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This looks like a dark and completely likely situation

Fortunately for me, it didn't go that far. But I know that feeling, because I've been there. I cut off facebook after a pretty low point in my life, and to this day, it has been the best decision I ever made.

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

#142

Post by henrikschroder »

matwood wrote: post #36

Since the newsfeed changes I noticed that I spent a bit more time on my FB feed. Normally I would see one of those idiotic posts, and wonder WTF was I doing on the site. Now I actually see stuff from friends (pics and stories), and I linger a bit more to see what's going on. Clearly I'm not the real FB demographic though.

I'm with you. I love the changes they did to the newsfeed, because now I'm seeing way less viral shit, and way more actual interesting posts and updates by my friends. And since everyone gets the same interesting content promoted to them, there's also more comments on that content, making it better.

Love it, love it, love it.

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

#143

Post by mehrdadn »

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…

A tangent on one of your points: Facebook not only lowers photo resolution, but it also visibly deteriorates color quality in some cases. I had a beautiful golden meadow turn into a pretty ugly dry yellow (edit: orange-ish, not yellow -- I misremembered) field after uploading a photo. It was quite astonishing switching tabs and seeing the difference.

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

#144

Post by throwaway2048 »

mygo wrote: post #129
nojvek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess A/B testing will tell you if the horse will become faster if you change from iron shoes to carbon fiber ones. A/B testing won’t ever get you a Tesla from a horse.

If you do enough binary switching, you eventually will get a Tesla. Assuming a Tesla is optimal. Let’s test to find out. How do you think the eyeball arose from unicellular eukaryotes?

local maxima trap hill climbing style optimizing, many (most?) times improvements require jumping large sub optimal chasms that can never be crossed by gradual improvement.

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

#145

Post by saas_co_de »

spyspy wrote: post #34
perseusprime11 wrote: post #19

The title makes it seem like the growth slowed after the questions on societal impact were raised. I think the growth stalled years ago and has been declining even before the questions were raised.

If that was the case, FB has been lying on every single earnings release since they went public, which seems unlikely.

> seems unlikely

I can't imagine why anyone would lie when they stand to make billions of dollars from it. What an odd idea.

That aside, there is a gray area between lies and not really digging into truths that you don't want to know the answer to, like how many of your accounts are actually fake.

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

#146

Post by joering2 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #143
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…

A tangent on one of your points: Facebook not only lowers photo resolution, but it also visibly deteriorates color quality in some cases. I had a beautiful golden meadow turn into a pretty ugly dry yellow (edit: orange-ish, not yellow -- I misremembered) field after uploading a photo. It was quite astonishing switching tabs and seeing the difference.

Would love to see that - any chance for a screengrab?

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

#147

Post by sosilkj »

btilly wrote: post #84
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…

Worse yet, do you know how frustrating it is to be told that there are no more updates available while you know that you a missing life events from friends that actually posted them. After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because they will similarly not show up for friends. Cutting back on FB has become ever easier over time.

"After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because they will similarly not show up for friends."

Glad I'm not the only one. I once set up a list for viewing posts just from family etc. It would only show me 24 hours worth! There seemed to be nothing I could do to adjust it. Everything about facebook is a usability shitshow.

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

#148

Post by qwerty456127 »

Who and why uses Facebook today anyway? All my friends use messenger apps like WhatsApp or Telegram to communicate to people they know in real life, sites like Reddit and HN to communicate to random crowd sharing their interests and Instagram to share pictures they take. I personally feel like Facebook is a concept fading into the past.

UPDATE: The only thing I used to use Facebook for a couple of years ago when I had more spare time was finding events to attend for fun. Does anybody know a good alternative? There probably is a special app just for this. Another useful feature of Facebook seems to be the groups directory: there are groups in WhatsApp and Telegram but they are harder to find - isn't there a project building a directory of them already?

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

#149

Post by Franciscouzo »

mygo wrote: post #129
nojvek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess A/B testing will tell you if the horse will become faster if you change from iron shoes to carbon fiber ones. A/B testing won’t ever get you a Tesla from a horse.

If you do enough binary switching, you eventually will get a Tesla. Assuming a Tesla is optimal. Let’s test to find out. How do you think the eyeball arose from unicellular eukaryotes?

You won't get out of local minima/maxima with hill climbing though.

Eyeballs are nowhere near optimal either.

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

#150

Post by dpark »

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…

> In the short term very few people are going to cancel Netflix because of this, but enough of these decisions in succession is erosive to customer goodwill.

The “auto preview” is so unpleasant that I’ve essentially stopped using Netflix entirely. I’ve no doubt that their testing shows it increases engagement, but I find it so jarring and abrasive that I rarely open the app any more. I’m sure they still have content I want to watch, but I can’t stand the experience of trying to find it.

I would love to have more insight into their A/B engagement metrics. I’m sure they capture if immediate engagement goes up when a feature is enabled, and probably the same over time periods of days or weeks. Do they also capture if total app usage declines 75% over 6 months after a feature is enabled?

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