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Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#91

Post by untog »

RickS wrote: post #62
untog wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a meaningful difference between journalists and advertisers. I know it's fashionable to bash "the media" but I wouldn't want to live in a world without journalism. Advertising I could take or leave.

> There's a meaningful difference between journalists and advertisers. In the dictionary, sure. In reality, for as long as advertisers are how journalists get paid, that difference is whittling towards nil.

That's pretty obviously not true. I didn't see advertisers covering the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Harvey Weinstein or tax reform, to pick just three things from the last year.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#92

Post by freehunter »

eckza wrote: post #76
jcadam wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, at this point I'd be willing to pay $10/month for a social network that respected my privacy, didn't bombard me with ads, and just generally treated me as a customer , rather than product . The trick of course is convincing anyone who isn't me to pay :) Heck, maybe it should be a non-profit.

Just... get your real friends to text you. If they won't text you, they're not your real friends. (This isn't always true, but I'd say that it's 95% accurate.) I'm not being condescending or pretentious. I have done this, over the last few months, and it's helped me to realize who's really worth having in my life on a daily basis, and who's not.

I don't want my friends texting me everything. That's far more disruptive than a passive feed I can glance at. And I don't want to text my friends everything either.

One of the great things about Facebook is the unexpected social interactions. I post a picture and someone I haven't talked to in a while comments something really great on it and sparks a conversation and rekindles the friendship. That's not going to happen over text.

People in my life on a daily basis are in my life on a daily basis. People in my life occasionally are on Facebook.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#93

Post by freehunter »

hrasyid wrote: post #64
guy98238710 wrote: post #48

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.

> They lost tens of percents of traffic overnight This is not necessarily a bad thing for users

It is if those users wanted to see that content.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#94

Post by losteric »

thinkloop wrote: post #74
archiepeach wrote: post #45

Good intentions or not, we must remember that history has proven time and time again, when any entity has far too much unchecked power, it is inevitably exploited by bad actors. A user base of two billion users without any real accountability is a scary thing. The only people policing Facebook are Facebook. We would never agree to a having a single dictator who answers to no one, why should Facebook be treated any di…

Because unlike a dictator Facebook has zero real power over your life? It's a site of puppies and horoscopes, you think we should be dealing with them like we do Kim Jong Un? How have we moved so far on the personal responsibility scale. Why aren't people partly responsible for not making better use of their time? Facebook is an "evil echo chamber", "wasting people's lives", "catering to business", etc - ALL THEY DO…

Traditional media only broadcasts content to millions, and they are regulated. Why isn't Facebook regulated?

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#95

Post by dfee »

I wonder if enough of the core-base was eroding that they were forced to make this change. I've been logged out of Facebook since October, and I know a few other friends who have as well. That's not really relevant, except that this group all had membership on Facebook at the 1 year mark - early 2005.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#96

Post by so33 »

thinkloop wrote: post #74
archiepeach wrote: post #45

Good intentions or not, we must remember that history has proven time and time again, when any entity has far too much unchecked power, it is inevitably exploited by bad actors. A user base of two billion users without any real accountability is a scary thing. The only people policing Facebook are Facebook. We would never agree to a having a single dictator who answers to no one, why should Facebook be treated any di…

Because unlike a dictator Facebook has zero real power over your life? It's a site of puppies and horoscopes, you think we should be dealing with them like we do Kim Jong Un? How have we moved so far on the personal responsibility scale. Why aren't people partly responsible for not making better use of their time? Facebook is an "evil echo chamber", "wasting people's lives", "catering to business", etc - ALL THEY DO…

FB does far more than host photos. In addition to being a platform to disseminate any sort of media, from cat videos to news to political commentary (so much so that they developed Instant Articles), it serves as a platform for text/video chat, event coordination among friends and organizations, web pages for small businesses, forums (which is basically what a Group is), games, and countless other stuff I haven’t listed here.

Facebook really does want to be your homepage and their products currently released all point to an all encompassing strategy to get you to stay on Facebook in order to look at more ads. In light of their ambitious strategy that extends far beyond the scope of traditional media, it really is not something to laugh off.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#97

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

gumby wrote: post #18
masterleep wrote: post #5

The FB feed has been terrible since it changed from a chronological list. Doubt this will improve anything.

Unless you have a small number of FB contacts (AKA “friends”) chrono is probably rapidly overwhelmed. I wanted chrono too, but it’s just too much. OTOH it’s absurd that if you want to see again that post you saw last week — or this morning! — you probably can’t find it. That can be true in the HN firehouse too though sometimes you can dredge it out of your browser history. Good luck trying that w/FB My gf works on th…

It worked fine for me when it was chronological previously - albeit, I was using it differently.

In fact, I would say its harder to find stuff nowadays because if you close the page and then come back and the algorithm has weighted something off the page, you can't find it again.

Back in the day, I used to use it like a messageboard essentially, communicating at peak times with my group of friends.

If there was a post I was communicating on earlier, notifications let me know it was still happening, or I could go onto the page of the person who wrote the status.

Nowadays, its more like a blog of the popular stuff and I see the same people dominating my feed and the same posts appear for long periods - which is one of the reasons I go onto it very rarely nowadays.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's not what I enjoyed about it back when I actually used it regularly.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#98

Post by milankragujevic »

Important to note, Facebook has been hiding posts by pages in the feed to users in Eastern Europe (Serbia, where I live), and it results in a much cleaner and less noisy feed, but people can still go to the Explore Feed and see posts by pages...

More on this: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/23/facebook-page-feed/

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#99

Post by dboreham »

freehunter wrote: post #77
roywiggins wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. Some people use Facebook "likes" as a crappy replacement for RSS, so it's probably not great for them.

As someone who runs a business partly driven by people who use Facebook as a crappy replacement for RSS, I can confirm. Facebook made a change a while back where people who explicitly followed my page to keep up to date on local events and businesses suddenly were not seeing anything I posted. I had to start paying Facebook to keep them showing things to people, but even that is far slower than it had been. Out of ab…

This, essentially, is Facebook's business model.

Re: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share

#100

Post by freehunter »

dboreham wrote: post #99
freehunter wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who runs a business partly driven by people who use Facebook as a crappy replacement for RSS, I can confirm. Facebook made a change a while back where people who explicitly followed my page to keep up to date on local events and businesses suddenly were not seeing anything I posted. I had to start paying Facebook to keep them showing things to people, but even that is far slower than it had been. Out of ab…

This, essentially, is Facebook's business model.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing... I pay to get access to my audience. I wish I only paid to get access to a new expanded audience, but I understand the reality of business.

My main complaint is, people explicitly chose to follow my content and got used to seeing it... and now it's all gone. They still follow, but they don't see. Even if I pay, it's not guaranteed to hit the same audience I had before.

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