Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by MarkMc » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 5:32 AM UTC

aresant wrote: post #49

From the analyst covering "They’ve warned about a decline in one of the basic fundamental financial drivers." which was "changes in the fourth quarter that cut the number of viral videos in people’s news feeds. Those tweaks, and others, have already reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day, he noted." I am going to assume that FB is smart enough to have figured out how to trim the 50m hour eng…

Well the average price per Facebook ad rose 43% in Q4 2017 (and only 3% in Q4 2016): https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-earnings-stock-to...

That increase more than offsets the decline in the amount of time users spent on Facebook. So it looks like the value of advertising has improved.

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

#162

Post by intrasight » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 5:33 AM UTC

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 like FB less and less - for all the same reasons that others here have posted. It is especially frustrating and vexing to me because I had build a "Facebook clone" about fifteen years ago that had all the features that I would like to have in a social/informational web service. Surely there are other places we can go online that have a better user experience. I am curious what other web sites people are using to do social blogging. Alternatively, are there any good "Facebook skins" (web clients built against the FB APIs) that provide a better user experience?

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

#163

Post by pfarnsworth » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 5:39 AM UTC

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.

Sometimes I don't know what I'm interested in, which is where TV ads are much better than targeted ads. For example, once I stopped watching TV, I found that I never knew when new movies were coming out, because I never saw ads for them.

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

#164

Post by B0btheBuilder » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 5:39 AM UTC

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…

"A friend of mine died and I didn't know because of algorithms": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956811

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

#165

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

#166

Post by jimmies » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 6:09 AM UTC

floren wrote: post #56

jacobolus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people who used facebook in 2004–2006 had (and used) other ways to chat via their computers or cellphones. Most people’s profiles listed their phone numbers, email addresses and various chat service handles. Facebook wall conversations were not used as a poor imitation of private chat, but a separate form of quasi-public communication.

Yeah, thinking back, Facebook was largely a convenient way to find and keep track of my friends' IM handles. And their phone numbers, back in the day when losing a phone meant losing all contacts because they're stored on the device.

Thinking back, Facebook was really a face book...

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

#167

Post by brain5ide » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 6:18 AM UTC

grogenaut wrote: post #155

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.

Says every product person I've ever worked with who didn't want to actually be data driven.

There are two kinds of product people: those who can't design and those who don't understand statistics.

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

#168

Post by toomanybeersies » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 6:19 AM UTC

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.

In my experience, life events are one of the few things that do show up.

I got "engaged" to a girl for a laugh a while back. Everyone saw it, it had almost 200 likes before I took it down. It was really awkward to explain to my grandma that no, I'm not actually getting married and it was all a joke.

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

#169

Post by toomanybeersies » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 6:23 AM UTC

danudey wrote: post #90

btilly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Facebook's weighting there makes sense to me. Why do you need to see your misso's posts? You see her all the time.

The posts I actually want to see on Facebook are from my friends that are far away. For me though, FB weights posts that are geographically closer to you higher. When I moved to Australia, I discovered through Facebook that I had 3 or 4 friends from high school here in Melbourne, purely because their posts started showing up on my newsfeed.

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

#170

Post by indubitable » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 6:25 AM UTC

As an aside here, I would be cautious of attributing declining growth on Facebook to pretty much anything. They are the first company in the history of our species to take market saturation to such extremes. They have more than 2 billion active monthly users, and growing.

The issue they have is that there are only 3-4 billion internet users in the entire world. Their growth is predictably going to hit an asymptote at some point in the near future - they are simply running out of people.

That also poses an interesting issue from a company perspective. We still live in a world where endless growth is expected. But with a ad-driven service the only way to make more money is to get users to view/click and otherwise interact with even more ads, or to otherwise increase the efficiency of ads. And that in general achieves little other creating a worse user experience, no matter how clever the packaging and delivery.