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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

#51

Post by greggman »

dasil003 wrote: post #6

Facebook is betting this will all blow over and everyone will accept it as the new status quo just like 80% of the previous evil changes they implemented. They are continually pushing the envelope to see what they can get away with, and I think in this case they will probably pull it off like they usually do. The article describes it as "as plain and malignant a case of conflict of interest can get", but I don't see…

You seem to have missed the entire point of the article. That point is there is a conflict of interest between Facebook and its advertisers. Something that's not true of most Internet advertising systems according to the author. That is the specific problem. Not that it used to be free and now is pay.

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#52

Post by glhaynes »

RougeFemme wrote: post #49
tomasien wrote: post #45

If users wanted Twitter-like, see 100% of posts as the default, Facebook would have done it. They maximize for engagement 1st and then they monetize that engagement. For example, if people were most engaged seeing every post (which they wouldn't be, because of the nature of Facebook where you're mostly friends with people you don't care about), they could have far more Timeline "Suggested" of "Featured" posts than th…

I think most users do want Twitter-like 100% visibility. And, at least when they first signed up (for those who signed up more than a year ago), they thought they were getting that. I think that the typical user has just given up on trying to keep up with and compensate the every-changing features and have settled for what they get and/or moved on to something else.

Perhaps most users, if asked "would you like Facebook to show you everything or should it filter some stuff out for you automatically?", would pick the former. But it's not necessarily the case that they'd actually prefer that in practice.

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#54

Post by Semaphor »

snprbob86 wrote: post #46
guelo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That is not what users expect. It is called a timeline for a reason. Is that reason because things are roughly sorted by time? It's a timeline of interesting events in the recent history of your friends and interests. Being a "timeline" doesn't mean that it has to include everything. Should a timeline of the history of the USA include every event in the history of China? Not if you actually want to succeed in commu…

>Again, Twitter is a totally different use case. I might not want to unfriend my Aunt, who loves me very much, but I sure as hell don't want to see her every little post. I don't interact with her messages, so Facebook stops showing them to me. That problem seems solved to me...

People whose FB posts annoy me, I can easily remove from my newsfeed without unfriending them or waiting for the algorithm to kick in.

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#55

Post by namenotrequired »

It's not broken, it's working exactly how it's told to work. It's just not how you'd personally prefer it.

I'm personally happy to put up with advertisements and whatever they think they need to do to optimise their earnings on this so long as they don't screw up so badly that there's no longer any value for me in using the site. That said I'd happily get a paid membership for a couple of bucks a month, to browse it free of ads (and sponsored stories etc) and perhaps get to beta test changes. I don't believe any such thing exists but I think that would be cool :)

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#56

Post by tedks »

cowholio4 wrote: post #31
obviouslygreen wrote: post #15

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

Since I discovered that this existed, I've slowly stopped going anywhere else on Facebook. I care about new music from the bands I like on facebook far more than the mundane crap going on in my friends lives.

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#57

Post by Semaphor »

dm8 wrote: post #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.

Fully agree, I really like edgerank. I sometimes need to optimize it by removing a specific person from the feed, but besides that its great. Can't agree on the sponsored stories though, so far I haven't seen a single one relevant to me or my interests.

And as someone with a lot of people in my friendlist that often post in languages I can't understand, I wish they allowed me to filter non-image posts by language (so I'd only see German and English posts).

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#58

Post by Semaphor »

whiddershins wrote: post #48

hmm, I think some different, unrelated issues are getting conflated here. - Your feed is determined by edgeRank, just like your google results are (let's say for the sake of simplicity) determined by pageRank - You can switch your feed to 'most recent' which ignores edgeRank, and simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, like FB used to, like tumblr does, twitter did (not sure about twitter right now), et…

> - You can switch your feed to 'most recent' which ignores edgeRank, and simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, like FB used to, like tumblr does, twitter did (not sure about twitter right now), etc.

That's not true. I use most recent and while it's probably filtering less, it still filters.

Re: How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

#60

Post by andrewflnr »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #47
guelo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That is not what users expect. It is called a timeline for a reason. Timeline and Newsfeed are two very different things. The feature in question is the newsfeed. If you go to somebody's timeline (previously "wall") you will see every post they've made in roughly chronological order.

I don't want to have to go to all my friends' walls to see what they're saying. I want it to be in my feed, unless I explicitly remove it, or give Facebook permission to choose. I'm not holding my breath, though.
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