51–60 of 228 posts
He has a lot of work and convincing to do to fulfill these lofty goals and inspire us to take him seriously. Nothing against Zuckerberg specifically, even -- just that corporate incentives and business momentum are mighty forces to be contended with, even assuming Mark is acting in good faith and full capacity.
I very much hope this isn't just words. The core problem, IMO, is that content that makes us angry, anxious or jealous is a much better driver of clicks than content that makes us happy. I'm sure Facebook knows this. If they really mean it, they'll accept that they will make less money as a result of this change. It would be the right decision in the long term, but the short term will hurt.
If they're providing less engagement to content discovery from businesses in the feed, it increases the value of the traditional advertising on the platform. Perhaps their plan is expected to simultaneously push up the ad rates they can charge to access users, as an offset.
It's also likely to increase the value of the content Facebook is going to curate/push on its own platform via Watch. They're going to build out a substantial streaming business in the coming years, rivaling YouTube. The user obviously has finite time, this will probably ultimately shift more engagement time to Watch, less time to stray business or media content.
Overall it strikes me as a classic later stage of platform evolution. First you have an ecosystem with large numbers of external parties that are deriving immense value from the platform (whether businesses or developers or other). Then you eat the ecosystem, replacing it with your own systems and on-platform content. For example, instead of promoting a Craigslist (eBay, Poshmark, whatever) post, if you're Facebook you promote on-platform "marketplace" listings. Instead of an external YouTube post getting attention, that goes to Watch. By doing that, they technically fulfill their claimed plan (if only in their own opinion). Twitter, Microsoft Windows, eBay, Google, Netflix, nearly all platforms do this aggressively eventually.
This change was tested for months in several smaller countries including mine. I am not on facebook, but I know that media here hate the change. They lost tens of percents of traffic overnight.
Mark Zuckerberg's post on this change: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104413015393571 Facebook press release: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/news-feed-fyi-bringing-...
The very first sentence of Zuckerberg's FB post says: > One of our big focus areas for 2018 is to make sure that the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent. "Time well spent" is also the name of an organization that is one of Facebook's strongest critics: http://timewellspent.io I wonder if the phrasing is deliberate.
I've unfollowed everyone. My feed only shows past memories. I love my feed. I highly recommend it.
Sounds like Facebook, and indeed the internet, is an unneccesary middleman for you.
I understand this is an hyperbole, but it sounds really too far fetched. Facebook is not the internet.
So, like it was in the beginning? That's some innovation right there, boy.
I've unfollowed everyone. My feed only shows past memories. I love my feed. I highly recommend it.
FB constantly nags me to "add more friends" to see more posts. I love my happy feed. :)
This change was tested for months in several smaller countries including mine. I am not on facebook, but I know that media here hate the change. They lost tens of percents of traffic overnight.
This plus the Adblock wars makes me wonder if there's anything that would make both consumers and media happy at the same time, or whether the relationship is pseudo adversarial by nature now.
Publishing a static set of lightly styled HTML pages to massive audiences is shockingly cheap.
I have long critiqued Facebook for chasing after ad revenue at the expense of the experience they offer users. In light of this news, the following quote comes to mind: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." I generally feel that Facebook has traveled so far in the wrong direction, coming back to any sense of morality will be an extremely hard job. That being said, I wonder if th…
I've unfollowed everyone. My feed only shows past memories. I love my feed. I highly recommend it.
Sounds like Facebook, and indeed the internet, is an unneccesary middleman for you.
Edit: OP says they “unfollowed” everyone, as opposed to unfriending, which is what I’m basing this off of.