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Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
- halviti 10y agoi.e. - facebook wants to be paid by advertisers instead of being a free promotion platform. Really it makes sense all around though, and you have to wonder what took them so long.
- itchyouch 10y agoLock down the growth first, then charge when it's too painful to give up the attention. If they charge too early, then the little to moderate traffic from FB is easier to give up.
- raverbashing 10y agoThey are already getting money for ads, I don't know why you think they aren't
- grenoire 10y agoFree promotion in the sense that you could create a page for a product or company, and be promoted significantly solely by the likes and shares you get.
- raverbashing 10y agoAh yes, but those type of posts have been having their reach diminish in the past years
- angry-hacker 10y agoIt doesn't work like that for long long time already. For small businesses / pages FB has been very difficult, if not worthless.
- habosa 10y agoThis might get me to browse a little bit more. I have about 1000 friends on Facebook but 60℅ of my feed is news from a small group of publishers (ESPN, The Onion, NYT) and ads.
- Super_luigi 10y agoAgree - If I want to learn more about Brexit I go to NYT, WSJ, etc. FB is for learning about old friends' whereabouts, new babies, etc. Wonder how this will affect the political discourse for the elections this year...
- omarchowdhury 10y agoBut your friends are going to discuss current events, because that is what people do.
- mrweasel 10y agoNo, they're not. None of my friends that care about current events really use Facebook, but if I want a picture of a forklift, bacon, or anything else that was on Imgur last week, Facebook is right there for me. Honestly it's pretty hard do discus Facebook, what Facebook does, what it's used for and how people see it, because it's so different from person to person.
- pcora 10y ago> No, they're not. None of my friends that care about current events really use Facebook you are really lucky
- kalleboo 10y agoIs that because your friends keep resharing posts from those publishers or because you're following the publishers themselves? Facebook already has tools to hide posts from certain friends or shares of links to certain publishers (click the disclosure arrow in the top right). I think the basis for all these "post selection algorithms" that people are continually outraged about is the fact that people are completely unwilling to prune their feeds. Then they get overwhelmed with crap posts and complain about how there's nothing interesting. Then Facebook/Twitter try to figure out what people want to see, and people complain they don't get to see everything.
- danso 10y agoSmart move by Facebook...though I say that as someone who, when I want the news, I use Twitter or HN, or direct visits to newsites. FB is where I go to keep up with what my friends are doing. Not so great a move if you're a news publisher who has invested time in optimizing your reach on Facebook, though...
- yeukhon 10y agoLook at the bright side. If people leave facebook because they don't see friends' and family's photo, but ads and ads and ads, then the number of active users will decline and facebook will eventually become nothing.
- dchuk 10y agoThis is how Facebook operates. Open up the platform until everyone piles on and basically ruins it, then tighten it back up and start charging those same people to do what they were previously doing for free. They did it with games (they became basically spam until they locked it down). Then when they opened things up to advertising, you could basically run any ad you want to any offer you want. Then they tightened that down once it got adoption. And now they're going to lock the news feed back down a bit. It's interesting how well they've pulled this off without poisoning the well and alienating their user base.
- NegativeLatency 10y agoPersonally I've been alienated, and many of my non techie friends have been too, but the network effect is just too strong and pulls you back in when old-so-and-so plans their birthday party or whatever.
- itchyouch 10y agoThat's it. I use it purely for answering invitations to events and a handy address book. Otherwise my social media time is away from FB, though, I still spend time on FB in the form of Instagram.
- ryanSrich 10y agoInteresting. I don't think I've ever used Facebook for anything productive (like RSVPing to something). My newsfeed is a complete and utter wasteland, but there's something interesting and addicting about it. It's like watching a car wreck. It's awful, but you can't look away.
- adrianratnapala 10y agoI find Facebook pages visually ugly -- unpleasant to look at at a level that has nothing to do with my opinions about the site. But that's just me. I find that British tabloids like the Sun look similar -- and they are designed that way to attract rather than repel eyeballs.
- muglug 10y agoTech companies have demonstrated over and over that they love to flirt with journalism, but they never want to commit (a notable exception is Amazon's Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post[1]). I hope this encourages news organisations to disentangle themselves from tech companies as fast as possible. [1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/washington-post-jeff-bezos-donald-trump.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/washington-post...
- franK_ 10y agoAfter overloading the world with information it can't ever process, I don't think either news companies or tech companies know what the fuck they are doing or what they need to do next.
- umanwizard 10y agoJeff owns the Washington Post in his capacity as a private individual. It's not affiliated with Amazon at all.
- system16 10y agoI guess they need to do something to increase engagement because - anecdotally, yes - the amount of sharing and engagement in my feed has dropped dramatically in recent years. A rough guess would be ~3/4 of the content I see now are just likes/reactions and comments my friends made on other content (usually articles or memes). I'm sure most of my friends have no idea I'm seeing this, and if they did they would probably interact with FB even less. I'm very hesitant to interact with FB at all now, and just do a quick scroll through every other day.
- artpepper 10y agoYeah, at some point my FB feed became dominated by links to other sites, essentially not much different than Upworthy. Like you, I found myself doing the "quick scroll through" until I finally deactivated my account.
- 0x0 10y agoI found I get a much more interesting "news feed" in the iOS app by searching for "Posts by my friends". Gives you a long scroll view with none of the Pages fluff.
- mrweasel 10y agoThat should be an option on the website as well. I don't care about people comment, shared or re-shared stuff. I just want to see the things my friends post directly. I guess it not really something that Facebook can turn a profit on.
- Thlom 10y agoYeah. When you are "friends" with your grandmother, boss, Mary from elementary school and your ex's mother you won't share that much. And those who will share anything in that kind of environment are the people you don't want to hear from ... Yes, you can group your friends and just share with some of them, but who has time for that? I'm even hesitant to write anything in semi-open groups as I'm not sure if what I write will show up on my friends wall. It's not like what I'm writing is extreme or private, I just don't need it to be actively shared with all my "friends.
- exabrial 10y agoIt was focused on that until they introduced all the features people hate
- sharkweek 10y agoAs someone who runs a niche news site, it's hard to see the point focusing on running a Facebook page anymore. We kind of go through the motions to keep up with appearances, but Facebook is less than 5% of our total overall traffic, and 95% of that portion is all from individuals sharing our content, not from our page directly. It's just impossible to "bid" on traffic via Facebook and win out over companies that have far bigger budgets, and most importantly feel that eyeballs are far more valuable. A visitor landing on one of our news stories likely is worth less than a few cents. A visitor to a consumer retail site could easily be worth hundreds of dollars. Guess who has the budget to bid big on traffic acquisition here. There isn't that much real estate for advertisers on FB, and with that it has become incredibly expensive for a media company to grow a legit audience through FB anymore as well. As a regular FB user though, I think this is an interesting move. I stopped using it to see what my friends are up to long ago as everyone moved to Instagram and Snapchat for their daily happenings. Facebook became a news aggregation service for me, much like Twitter. Might just be my friends, but only a handful are active on the service much anymore with daily updates.
- dredmorbius 10y agoWhat's your leading source of traffic? Is it Facebook in aggregate, some other site, or variable? Just because your FB shares don't directly feed your traffic doesn't mean they're useless. You might try A/B tracking on promoting stories through FB or not, and see how they track for views. (Though I've also had experiences with organic spread of stories -- sometimes something just hits a nerve and balloons.)
- rokhayakebe 10y agoToday I saw someone spend about 3 hours or more on Facebook (mobile): my new flatmate.
- staticelf 10y agoI help run a site that is completely dependent on links from large facebook pages/groups. Basically because it's almost 100% clickbait with some classic buzzfeed-kind of crap. This change has potential to bring the income way down from that site.
- amaks 10y agoPretty straightforward goal like others mentioned - de-prioritize publishers, get them pay more to promote their posts, prioritize them back. Nothing has changed, publishers pay more. So much for "focus on Friends and Family".
- jbb555 10y agoMost of my "friends" post lots and lots of political annoying rubbish. I hope it doesn't start showing me more of that,
- Frank2312 10y agoIf you click the small Arrow in the top right of a post, there are usually some options to manage that post. Often, there is "See less of X person", "See less of this kind of post", "Unfolow X person" and other other similar options. I use it all the time and ended up with a feed that doesn't change much (maybe one new post per day, but that contains content I actually care about.
- rdslw 10y agoIt's smoke screen move. FB knows that family and friends emit not enough content to keep us on FB as long as FB would like to. This is simply to be able to charge companies more for sneaking their content into your so-called FriendsAndFamilyAndHighPaidAdContent. In other news: Tesla can give you any model you want. If you pay.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- cygnus 10y agohow is this even a news?
- reachtarunhere 10y agoLife is easy for 9gag now.
- Nursie 10y agoAll I want from facebook is a time-ordered list of everything all my friends post. No filtering, no reordering by 'importance', no weighting by how often I 'like' or respond. No "you clicked off the page and back, we're gonna show you different stuff!". Just a simple time-ordered list. Apparently this desire is wrong.
- mrweasel 10y ago>Apparently this desire is wrong. Because it's not profitable.
- gvurrdon 10y agoThat, and the ability to conceal my birthday from everyone, would go some way towards persuading me to use it.
- james_pm 10y agoFor the birthday thing: From your Profile page > About tab, then Contact and Basic Info. Click on the pen icon to edit your birthday and you'll see a dropdown to determine who can see the date and/or year of your birth. I've got mine set to "Only me".
- gvurrdon 10y agoThanks, I didn't realise that it was possible to hide it; if it is possible to conceal both date and year then that leaves only the timeline, sinister data collection and general tediousness as issues.
- slig 10y agoYou can do that, AFAIK. I've hidden mine since I first signed up and it doesn't show it to anyone.
- pimlottc 10y agoThere'll still be at least one person who knows your birthday already posting on your wall every year...
- okto84 10y ago>The side effect of those changes, the company said, is that content posted by publishers will show up less prominently in news feeds, resulting in significantly less traffic to the hundreds of news media sites that have come to rely on Facebook. Then, I might use facebook less than usual.
- hitr 10y agoI think the changes have big effect on Indian Media ,they already lost 100 million page views http://factordaily.com/indian-news-sites-lost-100-million-page-views-500k-three-weeks-no-clue/ http://factordaily.com/indian-news-sites-lost-100-million-pa....
- corobo 10y agoThere's also been submissions here regarding Indian media where they've started blocking adblockers.. Maybe there's just a lot of people using adblockers and this is coincidence?
- mtgx 10y agoThis is hilarious. Wasn't this supposed to be Facebook's original goal until they got greedy and started pushing all sorts of other nonsense to a user's feed? Now they're realizing that that same greed is making them lose users over the long term. Whoops.
- igl 10y agoThat is 10 years overdue and the main reason I closed my account years ago. It was like looking at a sponsored gawker newsfeed. Today people do not even mention it anymore. Wether i meet new people or when i connect with old friends. Facebook disappeared from my life as quickly as it came in. Do HN people still use Facebook?
- lmm 10y agoYes. It's still the only decent way to organize a party, group trip to a museum or anything like that - Meetup costs money, Slack costs money or requires a dodgy hack, other groupchat programs are too noisy, setting up a dedicated mailing list or website is too much effort, emails-to-everyone it's too hard to get everyone to add or remove someone from the list. I put events on there, occasionally a few holiday photos or whatever, and check updates on my commute. I defriend people I'm no longer close to, and hide as much political news as I can, so mainly I see photos, personal-blog-like posts, and events. It's great for short-notice events - if I see someone's going to something cool tonight I can ask if they want to meet up. It's great.
- pcora 10y agoYes. I was out for 2 years, but during this time, I pretty much lost contact with everyone not in my work circle. Even some family members on different cities. So I got back. I rarely browse the timeline. My phone only has the Messenger installed. And as I said in an earlier comment, small business pretty much depend on it where I live. People don't browse the web anymore, they just use facebook (and it's sad and pathetic..)
- bbradley406 10y agoI still do, but strip away as much of the interface as possible using uBlock Origin style rules, FB Purity, and Newsfeed Eradicator[1]. I use lists extensively to organize friends into groups (work, school, various hobbies). The number of unread posts in a list appears next to it, so I can see the amount of activity in each at a glance instead of endlessly scrolling. If I really care to see what someone is up to, I just go to their profile. Maybe it's due to my age bracket (early 20's), but having a an account is a major social benefit and I don't have everyone's email address. [1] https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator - Highly recommend this, it's a great anti-time-waste plugin.
- marcusgarvey 10y agoCan't help but wonder if this has something to do with the recent allegations against them of having a bias against certain kinds of news.
- cddotdotslash 10y agoI am so tired of seeing "things my friends liked" as essentially my only stream of posts. The sponsored posts haven't been too bad, but around 80% of my news feed is "John liked this" (picture of someone I've never met), "Mary commented on an article" (some stupid comment like an emoji), "Sam reacted to a photo" (picture posted by Sam's friend of a friend who again, I've never met). I think in the last week I've seen maybe ten actual posts from friends and thousands of reactions, likes, etc. that i have no interest in.
- bezaorj 10y agoI would really like an option of hiding "things my friends liked". I constantly click on "Hide this post" to see if the algorithm can learn from that, but it doesn't happen.
- delecti 10y agoHide the source. "Mary liked this" hide all from HuffPo, "Steve liked this" hide all from Energy Crystals Whatever, "Joe liked this" hide all from Sue McWhoever (you've never met her anyway). My feed is much more manageable since I started hiding just about all the pages, leaving it pretty much solely picture and text posts of people I know.
- bezaorj 10y agoI'd do that, but it would be a battle fought daily, one at a time, against individual friends of friends you never met... A "Hide all posts from friends of friends" option would be great but not that interesting for Facebook.
- anthony_romeo 10y agoIt actually is pretty effective. I went through an unfollowing frenzy a couple weeks ago and my feed became far less cluttered since. I'm glad Facebook is making some adjustments, because absent aggressive unfollowing the news feed became even more of a waste of time than it already was.
- uptownJimmy 10y agoFacebook tweaks its algorithms constantly. Facebook's algorithms tweak the algorithms constantly. This is just PR fluffery.
- perseusprime11 10y agoI am sure they are making these changes based on their engagement data but ultimately how many of us here believe that their engagement data is really down because some of the activity between friends is happening on Snapchat.
- ulfw 10y agoI get the feeling Facebook is running out of ideas and just rejigger the same thing over and over again. How often had the newsfeed changed? How often for the better?
- gumby 10y agoGood for them if true: FB goes back to being user-driven engagement. Getting news from FB would be like getting news from television. Neither reliable nor practical.
- josh_carterPDX 10y agoIMHO what is likely happening is that FB is trying to change things because of recent world events. I'll admit that I've stopped going to FB often because it's filled with very depressing news events. Some of it comes from pages I follow or friends of mine, but overall it's just filled with depressing content. So perhaps they're hoping the community will post more positive life experiences.
- brebla 10y agoAnyone else think this is related to the meeting they had with Glenn Beck, et al.?
- brokentone 10y ago(disclosure, used to work for GB), but doubtful that changed much. It's likely the fact that feeds have been dominated by published and pirated content for a long time. Individuals are publishing less: http://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/facebook-sharing-crisis.html http://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/facebook-sharing-crisis.ht...
- cft 10y agoToo late. It used to be cool to post your pictures on Facebook, and now it's cool not to post your pictures on Facebook. The show is over.
- kirykl 10y agoMy facebook feed has helped me realize how much I hate my friends and family