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How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

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Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kind of just arguing that one scenario is better than another. Why not a third scenario?

They've made a distinction between 'friends' and 'fan' etc. pages. It seems logical that providing a full/friends-only/fan-page-only set of feeds would be a good way to manage spam, with the existing ability to unsubscribe from fan/friend pages. With all the resources and experience at their disposal, you're right, it's a bit ridiculous to suggest there's no way to avoid killing usability/usefulness without satisfyin…

Well they do have a specific feed for pages.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/feed

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#32
post #14

Y'know, Google has been doing this for a long time with AdWords: if your site doesn't have a high PageRank for the keywords you're targeting, you have to pay more. I think the real problem here is the PR problem of charging for something that once was free. It wasn't a great idea, and the Tumblr example serves to illustrate how it could've been done differently.

I'm not sure that's comparable; that's rewarding ads for being more relevant to the original search (or penalizing ads for being less relevant.) CPC services get paid for clicks but have views for inventory, so it makes sense they'd favor showing an add where the chance of a click is higher, raising the CPM.

On FB, you're getting charged just to show the post, so it's more of a CPM model.

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#33
I don't understand the hoopla behind edgerank. Personally, I really like it. My feed is much cleaner. I get all status updates from the most important people in my life. And from other friends I get the most important updates.

As far as sponsored stories go, I prefer to those ugly banner ads. Much better UX and lot of times sponsored stories are relevant to me.

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a world of difference between Google changing their search algorithm and Facebook holding friends & followers an entity has already reached, connected with, and/or "acquired," hostage for money.

changing their search algorithm Changing it but what's the real reason of the algorithmic changes, not the stated one? Google controls both search and advertising. Facebook cannot afford to let every business spam every person that has a "like," it would replace email spam in a short time. Of course Facebook would go out of business soon

[deleted]

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've made a distinction between 'friends' and 'fan' etc. pages. It seems logical that providing a full/friends-only/fan-page-only set of feeds would be a good way to manage spam, with the existing ability to unsubscribe from fan/friend pages. With all the resources and experience at their disposal, you're right, it's a bit ridiculous to suggest there's no way to avoid killing usability/usefulness without satisfyin…

Well they do have a specific feed for pages. https://www.facebook.com/pages/feed

Well played, Trebek.

Really, though, it's good that they have this. It'd be much better if this and a friends-only feed were the main way they distributed content.

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#36
It's interesting to me that Facebook is getting called out on this when Twitter does the exact same thing. I know a few folks with +1M Twitter followers that have stopped using the service because they were upset that Twitter was not delivering their Tweets to every one of their followers.

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#37

It's interesting to me that Facebook is getting called out on this when Twitter does the exact same thing. I know a few folks with +1M Twitter followers that have stopped using the service because they were upset that Twitter was not delivering their Tweets to every one of their followers.

Source? I haven't heard anything about this.

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#38

Personally, I think Facebook would be broken if every message every person or group I'm connected to made it directly into my feed. The feed has been algorithmic for a very long time and paid placement is neither a surprising nor nefarious input to that algorithm. Paid posts are clearly labeled and, even if paid, don't guarantee distribution volume, but do provide analytics. If you don't like the results you're getti…

That is not what users expect. It is called a timeline for a reason. Twitter works that way and nobody thinks it's broken. If someone spams your timeline it's really easy to unfollow and solve the problem.

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#39
post #28

Personally, I think Facebook would be broken if every message every person or group I'm connected to made it directly into my feed. The feed has been algorithmic for a very long time and paid placement is neither a surprising nor nefarious input to that algorithm. Paid posts are clearly labeled and, even if paid, don't guarantee distribution volume, but do provide analytics. If you don't like the results you're getti…

In an ideal product, this would just be left up to the user to decide. You should have control over your own news feed.

Ideal for a small percentage of users, horrible in general. Facebook already has to many ever changing options related to privacy that people don't get. It already has things like lists and close friends people can use to control their feed further but don't get.

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#40

It's interesting to me that Facebook is getting called out on this when Twitter does the exact same thing. I know a few folks with +1M Twitter followers that have stopped using the service because they were upset that Twitter was not delivering their Tweets to every one of their followers.

Source? I wasn't aware that was happening.
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