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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

#211

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

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…

I agree. You can't even leave Netflix running on a device and leave the room because it will just start playing something without any actual user input! And it appears none of the apps let you turn this behavior off.

Netflix already seems to have no problem getting people to watch hours and hours of shows as a result of having high quality content. Why do they need to perform cheap tricks like auto-preview to bump up user stats, as others have pointed out, at the expense of user happiness/preference?

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

#212

Post by resu_nimda »

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 love how many people are acting like their own personal experiences and gripes are highly representative of some large segment of the userbase. Frankly, I don't think disgruntled HN users are their core demographic.

I'm also 30 and registered in 2005. Lots of my friends post frequently. Curating by hiding people I don't want to see takes a negligible amount of time and effort. I've barely even noticed the marketplace. The idea that 30 is "that age" where you don't meet many new people is bizzare to me. I regularly make new friends and the standard way of exchanging contact info is FB.

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

#213

Post by aikinai »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #113
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…

yes, a/b testing optimizes for an average user that dosent exist, and everyone is unhappy with.

A/B doesn’t design for an average user; it can be all, a tiny niche, or something in between depending on what you’re measuring. For example, DAU and engagement will be affected by drastically different distributions of users.

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

#214

Post by mtgx »

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…

All very good reasons, but I think the training of users to use Facebook messenger is what ultimately killed them, because people could then use any other messenger just as well. Messengers have made a comeback and now "social networks" are done. Stick a fork in them.

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

#215

Post by muse900 »

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.

You are totally right. Noone of my friends post anything about their lives.

Its all about friends commenting someones name on some memes and then getting to see a meme or a viral video instead. Which is definitely not what I want to be spending my time with.

Cutting off fb is way easier.

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

#216

Post by shaqbert »

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…

Indeed it is. Joel had a great analyis on what went wrong[0] at FB (and to some extend Twitter). They were optimising for the wrong metrics, forgetting user utility and happiness in the process. Fixing this will mean making less money. But also a much higher chance of long term relevance.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/01/12/birdcage-liners/

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

#217

Post by mehrdadn »

iaml wrote: post #210
mehrdadn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Confused, are you mixing the two up? The original is way sharper and less red than their version. Or is there something about it that indicates it was oversharpened despite that?

Also note that there is a resizing (downwards, not upwards) I had to do in Photoshop to make them the same dimensions, since Facebook both lowers the quality and the dimensions, so it was impossible to match up the pixels without that. If it did any sharpening along with that I have no idea, but I don't notice any changes on Photoshop's side.

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

#218

Post by pawelk »

username223 wrote: post #125
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.

> 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. Or trying to find something you saw in your feed, which then disappeared for no obvious reason. I can't decide whether I'm a pigeon in a Skinner box run by humans, or a human in one run by pigeons, but either way, the experience is unp…

> trying to find something you saw in your feed

Sometimes it's right here on my phone, third post in my feed. I want to leave a lengthy comment, but it's nowhere to be found on the desktop browser.

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

#219

Post by Ntrails »

garyclarke27 wrote: post #201
dpark wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 extor…

I'm listening to music or half-watching twitch whilst scrolling through Netflix to decide what I'll watch with supper. It's incredibly frustrating to have them autoplay video content, to the extent that I've started going back to browsing torrent sites instead.

It doesn't help that their website is a laggy piece of shit with miserable discover-ability. But, you know. Ugh.

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

#220

Post by avip »

shaqbert wrote: post #216
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…

Indeed it is. Joel had a great analyis on what went wrong[0] at FB (and to some extend Twitter). They were optimising for the wrong metrics, forgetting user utility and happiness in the process. Fixing this will mean making less money. But also a much higher chance of long term relevance. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/01/12/birdcage-liners/

Thanks. Great read - and too bad that's not the OP.
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