Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 262 posts

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

#221

Post by salvar »

acchow wrote: post #207
ClassyJacket wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but what are the other relevance factors? It's a black box, and basically ends up being "whatever Facebook deems to be the most profitable content to show you".

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

#222

Post by pjc50 »

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…

> he wishes he could change it but the a/b testing shows they get higher engagement with it the way it is

The upshot of this is that if Netflix or Facebook _do_ see a slow drift of users away from the platform, they are institutionally incapable of understanding why. Engagement is not the same thing as satisfaction, which is far harder to measure.

(I'm also now wondering how static the results of A/B testing really are - if an idea fails AB even once does the company abandon it forever?)

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

#223

Post by pjc50 »

firasd wrote: post #33

From my readings, something Facebook has been struggling with for a couple years is getting people to post more personal updates. Thus their Newsfeed changes de-prioritizing articles, and thus (I figure) their experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes, and enabling MySpace-like gradient backgrounds on text posts... This dynamic makes me recall something: Anyone remember how back in the day (like 200…

> experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes

While we're complaining, the Javascript associated with this is particularly slow. On clicking into the text entry box, I find that if I start typing immediately it can result in the letters coming out in the wrong order when it resets the caret.

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

#224

Post by pjc50 »

redmaverick wrote: post #80

Posting on Facebook, right now, is like updating your resume (like LinkedIn) for personal life. It just feels too "public". Sure, you can tweak your social network into different privacy levels. But, that just doesn't feel intuitive or effortless. The exclusivity factor which initially propelled the network is simply not there. At the peak of the facebook madness, you had a need to post whenever anything happened. No…

> It definitely, felt safe

I do wonder how much the "culture war" has affected this. I'm sure all the fighting over the election was good for "engagement" in the short term but in the long term has left people disillusioned.

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

#225

Post by mrweasel »

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…

While arguably anecdotal, I see pretty much what you do. Nobody is posting to Facebook regularly any more. I can pretty much browse my entire news feed in 10 minutes once every two weeks.

What I believe keeps people on Facebook is Messenger. Even people who never post on Facebook is available via Messenger and given that Facebook makes it pretty easy to find people, it's slowly devolving to a "better phonebook".

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

#226

Post by Jaruzel »

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…

> The “auto preview” is so unpleasant that I’ve essentially stopped using Netflix entirely.

If you find a lower powered device such as the previous generation of Amazon Fire TV, it does not auto-preview or auto-run trailers at the top of the screen - instead you just get a static image of the show.

Now if only I could get it to do that on my PS4 :(

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

#227

Post by Jaruzel »

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…

The current version of the FB API doesn't allow posting. So any third party app would be read-only.

Earlier API versions used to allow posting, but of course they took it out.

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

#228

Post by wastedhours »

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…

The most powerful feature for me at the moment is "On This Day" - highlighting to me how my engagement there has changed, and how it was (not to sound too old) better in the old days.

Luckily I'm quite "friend light" on there, but most of my social interaction has moved to WhatsApp (including groups for nights out/sharing photos, organising, and engaging with different people - all of the things I used FB for). Guessing one of the main reasons they bought them.

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

#229

Post by oblio »

drewblaisdell wrote: post #200
axaxs wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook cheated the numbers, so to speak. In every poor SEA country is a Facebook plan, or plan with x data + free Facebook. Stop acting like it was organic growth, it really wasn't and we both know that.

Where can I read more about this?

I'm not from SE Asia, but from Romania. This kind of thing happens everywhere:

https://www.vodafone.ro/shop/abonamente-de-date#tab-1

-> "Detalii abonament"

-> Social Pass: [...] (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, Pinterest, Twitter, Viber)

It's widespread around the world, except for the US, until recently.

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

#230

Post by dom96 »

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 also like auto preview. But I would never want them to start advertising their shows to me (like Amazon Prime does), that's going too far.
Post reply on HN