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

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

#201

Post by garyclarke27 » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 7:45 AM UTC

dpark wrote: post #150

TipVFL wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s funny - I Like the auto preview, in fact I would like them to go further and advertise their content to me, as live TV does. When I watch Netflix at the end of a hard day I’m in lazy consumer mode, I want content to be suggested to me. I hate wading through static dull pictures which give me very few clues as to the content they represent. Netflix are unstoppable - they offer incredible value compared to extortionate SKY, i cancelled their £120 per month package 6 months ago and I have never regretted it.

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

#202

Post by davedx » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 8:19 AM UTC

ewjordan wrote: post #171

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.

A/B testing won’t ever get you a Tesla from a horse. Right. But if you were already selling Teslas, and along came a smooth-talking product designer with a dream to "improve" it by building a horse instead, A/B testing would make sure that change never saw the light of day. A/B testing is not a way to get out of having to come up with good ideas yourself. It's a way to validate that your ideas are any good in the fir…

Indeed. When I was advocating for A/B testing at the last company I worked for, I tried hard to teach people that every test should have a sane hypothesis behind it based on some kind of usability theory. Not just “let’s try changing the header font color to red and see what happens!”

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

#203

Post by taylorexpander » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 8:37 AM UTC

elgenie wrote: post #156

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…

So you think "the problem" is all the things that Facebook started doing when there were 10 million registered users that grew it to 1.4 billion daily actives? A problem that can be rectified by Facebook, literally 11 years after some of the things you talk about, tweaking news feed weights towards personal posts from friends and other changes to allow users to spend time on the site more efficiently is not a serious…

I think this highlights how out of touch you (and the Facebook developers) are.

I’ve had a Facebook account since the days of needing a edu email account to register. During my college years Facebook was a very important thing and all of my friends were very active and it was nice being able to see what people were up to and doing.

Over time Facebook started optimizing away to whatever it is now. I’ve deleted the Facebook app because it’s simply garbage. My friends don’t really post personal things anymore (most don’t even post anything anymore) and the influx of users and this “retweet” culture has made it so my Facebook feed is essentially spam. Why should I have to bother and waste time to curate what I see? Why should I have to hide so many individual pages?

Furthermore, the recent(?) addition of these marketplaces made it just way worse. My news feed activity is constantly telling me about new things for sale here and I just don’t care. I thought I’ve disabled these notifications but apparently I haven’t because they still show up. To be honest I don’t even know how to disable these messages because everything is hidden under 20 layers of options.

Not to mention the whole age/generation issue:

I’m 30, and my sister is 20. I’m at that age where I don’t really meet a lot of new people anymore, so my friends list has been very stagnant. I really just keep a Facebook profile just to let the occasional old friend/family contact me or find me. My sister and her friends look at Facebook and think it’s something old people use. For her everything is Snapchat.

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

#204

Post by kamaal » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 8:41 AM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #148

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 ha…

I quit Facebook immediately after it became a platform for political wars.

Don't know any of my friends who use it actively, and the only time or reason why I log into Facebook is when I have to talk to people who are only on Facebook.

If I were Facebook I would be seriously afraid at this point. The whole thing could be the next Aol or Yahoo. Things go down the drain pretty quickly in products like this.

The biggest change can be noticed, if young people don't create new accounts there. And I think we have already arrived at that part.

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

#205

Post by taylorexpander » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 8:43 AM UTC

robryan wrote: post #130

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.

Ideally everyone on your friends list would see your post. If they no longer care for them they can either unfriend or hide your posts.

That’s a silly take.

I’ve hidden friends before who I have close relationships with, simply because the content they post is trash:

- reshares of “inspirational” and “motivational” memes - post frequency too high - constantly posting pictures of their kids - unfortunately a close aunt is into MLM and I can’t just unfriend her without causing drama - generally only posting things I don’t care for enough to see like guns, cars, etc

Like, just because we are friends, doesn’t mean we have to share the same interests nor does it mean I want to hear everything you have to say on every topic.

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

#206

Post by kurtisc » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 8:55 AM UTC

taylorexpander wrote: post #203

elgenie wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think "the problem" is all the things that Facebook started doing when there were 10 million registered users that grew it to 1.4 billion daily actives? A problem that can be rectified by Facebook, literally 11 years after some of the things you talk about, tweaking news feed weights towards personal posts from friends and other changes to allow users to spend time on the site more efficiently is not a serious…

I think this highlights how out of touch you (and the Facebook developers) are. I’ve had a Facebook account since the days of needing a edu email account to register. During my college years Facebook was a very important thing and all of my friends were very active and it was nice being able to see what people were up to and doing. Over time Facebook started optimizing away to whatever it is now. I’ve deleted the Fac…

I keep hearing that my age group don't use Facebook but this clashas with the multiple relentless group chats and the dozens of notifications from groups that I engage with every day. On the other hand, I post things about myself about once a year, which could make someone on my friends list think I never log on. I wonder if this shift from social network to content aggregation and chat is a significant reason for this perception.

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

#207

Post by acchow » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 9:13 AM UTC

ClassyJacket wrote: post #76

alkonaut wrote: post #63

My preference would be to never see anything, ever, that was shared more than say 50 times. As soon as something is “viral” It’s usually just a timekill. It’s not relevant to me. So a simple tweak to the news feed would be to just stop showing me what my friends “like” or “re-share”. Just show me what they say, or post or show directly. That’s it. For a really dramatic change: remove the ability to pass on content al…

This is what I want from a service like facebook - posts my friends, groups, and pages explicitly post, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, and nothing else. No "John commented on this" or "Melanie liked that". No algorithms. No out-of-order, unless I ask for it. (If 10 friends all reshare the same post, sure, collapse it into one.) But, of course, if they do that, they make it too easy for people to see posts they want without…

If your content stream includes every post your friends make, every comment they add, every post they like, every event they're interested in or join in on and it was sorted chronologically then you would never be able to scroll past the immediate present. It would just constantly generate new content as quickly as you can scroll.

I'm glad they sort by relevance and time is just one small factor in relevance.

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

#208

Post by tomkinson » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 9:17 AM UTC

1- charge advertisers more, for less. Pay to get back what you had.

2- sink the fb fangs deeper into users by promoting 'engagement' content i.e. stuff with better hooks.

3- market the increase in time spend on site, Q418 to the very advertisers.

Brand cryptonite. He holds the poison and the medicine. Depending on public sentiment they dish out the doses of each accordingly.

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

#209

Post by iaml » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 9:42 AM UTC

intrasight wrote: post #162

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…

There are some clients for mobile devices, but I'm pretty sure if anyone were to make such a skin, and it were to gain any meaningful popularity, facebook would just kill its API access or threaten with legal repercussions because its explicitly forbidden to do this [0].

[0] https://developers.facebook.com/policy

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

#210

Post by iaml » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 9:44 AM UTC

mehrdadn wrote: post #160

joering2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, here: https://imgur.com/a/udfB5 (And before anyone inevitably objects: yes, I get that you might actually like the downsized version better. Personally I didn't like a random reddish hue being added to the golden scene, but it's obviously a matter of taste, so let's not judge me here. The point isn't which one looks better, but that they shouldn't look so dramatically visibly different in the first place.)

They oversharpened it A LOT, that brought the whites front and center and ruined the color.