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

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

#231

Post by dom96 » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 12:30 PM UTC

Ntrails wrote: post #219

garyclarke27 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely the video is muted by default, why is that a problem?

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

#232

Post by criddell » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 12:30 PM UTC

rm999 wrote: post #52

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…

>That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone. The wall was never a good way to do this. It's neither as powerful nor as flexible as pretty much any competing way for a small group of people to communicate, including chat programs, email, txt, snapchat, etc. Facebook's deprioritization of the wall and buy-in on messenger/whatsapp, instagram, and the newsfeed…

Facebook never clicked for me. I've had an account for a long time, but log in maybe once or twice a year.

But Instagram I love. I check it a couple of times a week. I love seeing images from my friends and having comments barely visible is exactly what I like. My only problem with it is the increasing frequency of ads. It's sucking a lot of the joy out of the platform for me.

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

#233

Post by oblio » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 12:31 PM UTC

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/

Hah! Cool, he blogged again.

The key question here is: does self-regulation work for social media? I'm not sure it does. Their end goal is to create a Skinner box. That's all there is to it. And that goal definitely conflicts with what we actually want/need.

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

#234

Post by iaml » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 12:45 PM UTC

mehrdadn wrote: post #217

iaml wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep, for some reason I thought the images were in other order.

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

#235

Post by lossolo » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 1:04 PM UTC

resu_nimda wrote: post #212

taylorexpander wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 marketpla…

Do you have wife and kids? or maybe you are single? I think you are not representative for your demographic. I agree with OP here, it matches my experience and experience of most of my friends and their friends.

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

#236

Post by candiodari » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 1:40 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #222

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…

> 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 a…

But engagement is what advertisers pay for, isn't it ? Clicks ! Clicks ! Clicks !

So I'm pretty sure that they are institutionally incapable of understanding why for a very good reason.

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

#237

Post by dpark » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

dom96 wrote: post #231

Ntrails wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely the video is muted by default, why is that a problem?

It is not muted by default. Nor is there any way to mute short of muting your TV.

The website doesn't autoplay, but per Ntrails, it's "a laggy piece of shit with miserable discover-ability". I don't actually use the website so don't have an opinion there.

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

#238

Post by dpark » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 2:53 PM UTC

Jaruzel wrote: post #226

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…

> 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 :(

I'm definitely not planning to buy a dedicated crappy device for Netflix, though. :/ I want fewer devices. I've only still got an Xbox One for Blu-Ray/DVD and HBO Now, which inexplicably isn't available for my TV.

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

#239

Post by axaxs » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

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?

Ah I had never read an article about it, just saw the phone plans and talked to folks when I was there. Minimum googling brought me here - https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/333313/milliions-of-face...

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

#240

Post by grogenaut » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

ewjordan wrote: post #185

grogenaut wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I understand the fear, though - when you're data driven, you can actually numerically measure the contribution of every feature that's tested, and in a lot of cases figure out the exact impact on revenue. In a culture where everything is tested, it's a very small step from there to stack ranking your product designers based mostly on how the features they designed did. I'm not necessarily against that as a valid way…

valid point. However I also often see "politics optimized sales" where the current pet project of whoever has the most swing goes up front even if it's a terrible product and death to revenue.