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Big publishers are fleeing from Facebook's Instant Articles
- itchyjunk 9y agoIf people on facebook enjoyed reading long, information rich articles and commenting on the content in an enriching way, i'd probably never have left that platform. But here I am. Images, gifs and short videos seems like a logical step forward for mass consumption. Can't really blame facebook for heading in that direction.
- chejazi 9y ago> Images, gifs and short videos seems like a logical step forward for mass consumption. Yup, their first order of business is to optimize for the widest swath of users. That being said, as feeds become more customized, I'm sure you'll start seeing more rich articles if that's what you desire. Twitter delivers desirable information because the user curates it strongly (it's normal to follow/unfollow users over time), but Facebook will likely replace that effort with algorithms.
- philovivero 9y ago> Yup, their first order of business is to optimize for the widest swath of users. That being said, as feeds become more customized, I'm sure you'll start seeing more rich articles if that's what you desire. You're pretty optimistic. I wish I could share the optimism. They've had over a decade to get there, and as far as I can tell, they're moving the opposite direction they'd need to do what you claim they will. They're doing their best to become irrelevant and die. But their users keep clawing them back to life. Eventually either FB or the users will figure their shit out, and part ways.
- quickben 9y agoWho knows, in my extended circle, Facebook is increasingly being viewed as: "for old people". So we may not get to the direction they are heading towards.
- ballenf 9y agoI keep hearing that from younger friends, but have yet to hear from a single one of them that doesn't open it daily. How many in your circle have actually quit FB (including Messenger)? The impression I'm forming is that these younger people see FB as something like my generation viewed the phone company.
- quickben 9y agoNot that many quit, and these that did was mostly due to privacy issues with Facebook or other people. I like your idea about the phone company.
- bigbugbag 9y agoThey don't quit, they just move their thing elsewhere and stay behind because mom and grandma want them there. https://backchannel.com/a-teenagers-view-on-social-media-1df945c09ac6 https://backchannel.com/a-teenagers-view-on-social-media-1df... http://mashable.com/2013/08/11/teens-facebook/ http://mashable.com/2013/08/11/teens-facebook/ http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/10/24/facebook_and_teen_user_trends.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/10/24/faceb...
- bigbugbag 9y agoFacebook has been for old people for a solid 5 years now if not more. Most young people dislike facebook and stay there as a chore because family and grandma.
- Odenwaelder 9y ago98% of my facebook timeline is pure shit. I once went to facebook to keep up with friends and family. Now, all I see is clickbait and memes.
- dave5104 9y agoI found myself mindlessly scrolling through my newsfeed so often and seeing nothing but the clickbait meme crap. I finally got rid of the app on my phone and it's been great since.
- sofaofthedamned 9y agoI'm not on FB, but I did recently join LinkedIn for work reasons and holy god it's awful - only thing on my TL is posts from recruiters and LI asking me to celebrate somebody spending a year at 'looking for new opportunities'. After I get my next contract i'm off there. Only thing with any value to me is Twitter, and that's only reactively when i'm looking if there's an outage.
- kordless 9y agoI find the latest update to LinkedIn unfortunate, given it's authoring UI is complete crap, UX-wise. I really can't see anything of use to me anymore over there, so my visits are becoming less frequent. I used to have good conversations with connections. Now all I get is recruiter invites and companies looking to do "business" with me, mostly out of Eastern Europe. Twitter, on the other hand, is somewhat entertaining, given I have a decent amount of followers who may or may not be listening to my random rants. A minor ego boost, at best, but still probably a very large illusion on my part. It's fun to pretend though! ;) Honestly, I have to say this place, HN, feels the closest to home. Or playing Rust, depending.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoRust... that game where you gather wood in the nude for five minutes before somebody kills you, over and over? ;P
- davesque 9y agoI recently deleted my Twitter account. Probably in the next few weeks, I'll log onto Facebook, request email addresses, and delete my account there too. Facebook has taken on too much of this "take over the world" corporate attitude.
- rinze 9y agoI deleted both of them at the same time at the beginning of the year (and I was a heavy Twitter user since around 2008, with 6k followers). I don't miss them at all. Sometimes I even find myself involved in thoughts that span several minutes and grasp sending long e-mails to friends that result in proper, meaningful conversations.
- criddell 9y agoAll I have Facebook for is to connect with family. I don't like brands and I don't follow anybody I don't personally know. Twitter is where I follow people and organizations for which I don't have a personal connection. This separation works pretty well for me.
- bigbugbag 9y agoYou should invest in a phone line, those are great way to stay in touch with your family. Direct interaction works way better that going through a middle man.
- criddell 9y agoWhy would you assume I don't use a phone line? Maybe this didn't occur to you, but I also want to share photos and video. I mean, I can describe my daughter's piano recital, but they seem to enjoy seeing and hearing it as well. > Direct interaction works way better that going through a middle man. Who has time to lay all that copper and build their own telephone exchange? I'm happy to pay for middle men to help me out.
- niftich 9y agoFacebook is sitting on the largest audience of real-world identities and hasn't entered the market of microtransactions in exchange for content (like news) yet [1], even though they could single-handedly wipe out the half a dozen or so other firms -- the likes of Flattr, Brave, Webpass, the rebooted Medium, the half-thought-out never-advertised-then-mysteriously-vanished Google Contributor -- the ones who had to build their audience while trying to make this model work for years. This is just bizarre. Instead they let themselves caught up in the 'fake news' fiasco (a factor absent from the article), re-prioritized personal posts, and deprecated their previous actually-kinda-nice attempts to give a proper home to professionally-written journalistic content, such that it's not jarringly intermingled with memes, baby photos, and humblebrags. Part of their problem, perhaps, is the insistence on using the Facebook brand for their homegrown stuff, which is ironic considering they run parallel services under different names. No doubt a lot of it comes from having to harness the idle time of massive numbers of Facebook users sitting in their flagship website or app, but if they started a news portal with micropayments, cross-pollinated with their network of apps and backed with their identities, they would still do more volume within a month than any of their competitors managed to do so in years. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375917
- gumby 9y agoIf your friends are the sort who post, and like to read, actual textual comments, FB is happy to show that to you. I have some friends who posted mostly photos and/or videos but by unfollowing only them my feed became interesting.
- apozem 9y ago> One former employee familiar with the matter said media companies' business models had initially been all but an afterthought. "The idea that these products could meaningfully impact the revenue of the news industry just didn’t really come up," the former employee said. "I don’t know that anyone [at Facebook] took that piece all that seriously." Whoops! Almost accidentally destroyed the business model of a free press! Good thing we encouraged all those bullshit clickbait meme Facebook pages to grow on our platform. They'll do the hard, non-profitable accountability journalism.
- AlexandrB 9y agoMove fast and break things.
- mschuster91 9y ago> Whoops! Almost accidentally destroyed the business model of a free press! Good thing we encouraged all those bullshit clickbait meme Facebook pages to grow on our platform. They'll do the hard, non-profitable accountability journalism. Well, Buzzfeed (which grew to its size mainly due to FB) for example doesn't just produce clickbait crxp, but also high quality journalism these days.
- Tokkemon 9y agoIs that sarcasm? Really?
- Trill-I-Am 9y agoWere you unaware that buzzfeed produced feature longform journalism?
- azernik 9y agoReally. https://www.poynter.org/2016/how-buzzfeed-built-an-investigative-team-from-the-ground-up/396656/ https://www.poynter.org/2016/how-buzzfeed-built-an-investiga... Of course, that includes some irresponsible journalism too. http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/314042-buzzfeeds-report-just-made-life-harder-for-journalists http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/314042-buzzfeeds...
- rblatz 9y agoGood, I don't go to Facebook for news, or really any shared article or video. It's a social network, I want to keep up with my social circle, not get pulled into political fights between family and friends.
- criddell 9y agoI think this is good as well. I hope news organizations realize that what Facebook and Google (with AMP) gave readers was a page that loaded quickly. News orgs don't need AMP or instant articles, they just need a little self-restraint.
- bigbugbag 9y agoFacebook is not a social network, it's middle man that derives value from its inbetween position and used provided content. (It seems to me people registered on facebook are useds and not users)
- malchow 9y agoIt isn't a popular opinion, but my feeling is that publishers' power in the marketplace is severely underestimated. For those of us on HN who do use Facebook, the content experience is pretty similar: a few juicy friend updates per [day? week?]. One or two good articles. Then a morass of terrible, spammy content. It's clear that actual users don't put enough into the FB ecosystem to make FB interesting for people each day, despite FB's best efforts. Content owners therefore have quite a bit of power. Because if FB suddenly stopped surfacing one or two great The Atlantic pieces per day, FB gets noticeably worse for me as a single user. The old economics of journalism are: publications get 100% of ad revenue. The Google economics (2001 - 2012) are that publishers get ~65% of revenue and Google gets ~35%. That is self-evidently failing. [1] And Facebook built instant articles on those now-failing economics. The price system is working. Which is why IAs are getting less popular. Maybe a decentralized web isn't such a bad thing. [1] I'm self-interested: I cofounded a software company in this space, premised on empowering content producers.
- AznHisoka 9y agoI see your point. It does not help that .01% of the general internet population create most of the web's useful content.
- grogenaut 9y agoI would posit that pretty much all useful content is generated by .01% of people across all mediums.
- bigbugbag 9y agoThe atlantic pieces have nothing to do on a service made to interact with friend and families, unless the atlantic is your uncle or something.
- Trill-I-Am 9y agoWhy do so many of the complaints I see about Facebook in almost all forums seem to instead be about the complaintant's friends and family and the things they share? Why you would be Facebook friends with someone who shares stupid or uninteresting things? And if you feel obligated to maintain that friendship, why would you complain about it? How is it Facebook's fault that your friends and family share stupid content?
- jknz 9y agoI solve the quality issues of my facebook feed by "unfollowing" all of my friends. There is a section in facebook settings where you can do this all at once. The resulting feed has no post and displays "no more posts to show". It is still possible to use messenger and to browse profiles. But this empty feed has been a massive time saver!
- olivermarks 9y agoFacebook is the packaged shallow tabloid version of the web, I've always felt it would be hard to make the leap to anything deeper.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]