11 ms·

Biggest drop in Facebook organic reach we have seen

231 points by stdclass 9y ago

ersiees 9y ago
I think this is a great turning point for Facebook and might even bring Facebook back on the map SOCIAL media wise. Since almost all people I know barely use Facebook anymore for communication, because you just don’t see any posts by your friends no more.
- caio1982 9y ago
  Yet they over time created this crucial need of local/small business to have a Facebook page if they want to engage with potential customers and such, but now they change this “contract”.
  - jazoom 9y ago
    The truly evil thing here is that page admins are prompted relentlessly by Facebook to purchase "likes", which Facebook makes more and more worthless.
    - fapjacks 9y ago
      Not to even mention how totally fucking useless Facebook ads are. You'll only be seeing fake likes and followers from developing countries that only serve to dilute your reach and make you pay even more. Facebook is not and never will be in a hurry to change how many fake accounts are doing this kind of "like farming".
- muse900 9y ago
  Yep its all about memes and 'news' (fake news, dailymail stuff). I found something interesting on my FB feed. I haven't liked any meme or news pages etc. So I'd get mostly what my friends liked from their liked pages. Recently I liked an online newspaper. For the past 2 months 4 out of 7 posts are from this newspaper. It feels like FB knows its a newspaper and its just serving me news, to get me more addicted to it...
- fnwx17 9y ago
  Actually, they're just forcing businesses that have pages to pay for ads. Like if you have a well known page that has grown through shares and likes, you'll be needing to pay money to reach the people that have liked your page.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    I don't have a problem with Facebook asking people to pay for the value provided, especially if it actually increases my utility of it as a user. (Which, admittedly, I'm not anymore - partially due to this problem.)
- sparkzilla 9y ago
  Actually, I've found the opposite. My feed is almost entirely social now, and it's very difficult to find news.
- jbverschoor 9y ago
  I use fbpurity, which removes all the cruft. So basically I only see friends. Not much is happening on fb, except by a hand full of people
IndrekR 9y ago
To an outside observer (I do not have a FB account), this looks like a good plan from the FB side. Kind of like GMail inbox categories/tabs. All about reducing the signal (friends) to noise (something you may have liked 3 years ago) ratio. You will still see as many ads, but the content between those will be more relevant. Too bad FB does not offer ad-free account as an option.
- AndrewDucker 9y ago
  How is it more relevant to remove content that I've deliberately chosen to see from my feed?
  - stdclass 9y ago
    That's exactly what annoys me about it. I liked those pages, so I choose to see the content. Their solution to put it into the "Explore"-Tab, mixed with content of Pages I didn't even like makes it worthless.
  - IndrekR 9y ago
    Is it removed or moved? Social networks so far are between humans. Removal is bad, categorization to 2..3 subgroups may be good. I guess this is what they are testing.
- swampers 9y ago
  I didn't like it when Gmail did it either, and removed tabs almost immediately. Let me control what I see and how I see it. Provide me the tools to move things into other 'feeds' if I want to, but don't force me into using these tools. Otherwise, give me what I've asked for (posts, emails, etc) in the order I've received them.
  - maneesh 9y ago
    And I loved it immediately when Gmail did it.
AndrewDucker 9y ago
The annoying thing here, as a Facebook user, is that if I've liked the "Cute Puppies" page it's because I want to see their cute puppies. To then strip them entirely out of my Facebook feed unless they hand Facebook some cash feels like a step back in my usage of Facebook.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  The annoying bit is that (with the current model), if my friend likes cute puppies, then I'm forever cursed with them too, at the expense of all the things I actually want to see.
  - AndrewDucker 9y ago
    That is absolutely annoying as well. It's as if Facebook should show me the things I've asked it to, and show you the things you've asked it to, and not try and take mine away or give them to you.
    - yellow_postit 9y ago
      Inferring that people that are “friends” may share the same interests doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me.
      - bpicolo 9y ago
        Fine inference, but the implementation degenerates to spam. My news feed has almost nothing other than things-others-liked now, mostly because Facebook seems to be trying to push video heavily into your feed because (I assume) it increases their engagement statistics drastically on the average
      - wolco 9y ago
        It is very unreasonable for users who hundreds of friends to expect interests to he similiar. This could be excused for a smaller site but facebook has detailed metrics on what I liked where I visited outside of facebook and what purchases I made. Using that targeting is much more effective compared to friend's interest.
phrygian 9y ago
It is their platform, right? I’d assume they are within their rights to determine how Information flows within it. Obviously they’d want it to be in a way that positively impacts their bottom line. If the ability to reach people on their platform through pages is valuable, then i should not be surprised if they want those who use it to pay for it.
- adventured 9y ago
  That's going to become increasingly the debate, as with Google. You're starting to see more and more arguments in the media, in Washington DC, among anti-trust and anti-corporate power groups, that these platforms should be treated more like utilities. Given the culture at the moment, I'd expect those arguments to get a lot louder yet. The platforms are responding predictably: "Tech Pours Millions Into Lobbying While Pressure Mounts in Washington" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-20/tech-pours-millions-into-lobbying-as-washington-pressure-mounts https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-20/tech-pour...
  - yellow_postit 9y ago
    Is there a proposal of what "like a utility" would look like for social media platforms?
alkonaut 9y ago
What are even facebook "pages you follow"? Is it anything that isn't a personal fb account in the friend list? Do groups count in this category, or are groups a third category? I don't think I follow any "pages" such as those created by companies or artists (apart from personal accounts). If "pages" were basically fb's equivalent of corporate accounts, why would you want to follow them? Isn't that like signing up for commercials in your feed?
- miskin 9y ago
  Exactly as you mentioned - Facebook Pages are for anything that is not a person, pretty much. We run FB Page as info page for kids playground, for example. If you are frequent visitor and you liked/followed our page, you'd get notification when playground is closed due to birthday party etc. Well, until now :).
- tbihl 9y ago
  To give you a counter example, I follow nothing except pages most of the time. My real account sticks around in case I want to contact friends, and because some people insist on communicating via FB messages. But all my browsers are logged into a second account, which has no friends,and follows a non-profit, a news site from my hometown, and a few think tanks. It only exists because one or two of those don't put out their feeds anywhere else.
- davidcbc 9y ago
  I follow several pages because they are businesses or organizations that I am actually interested in hearing from. Local businesses that make announcements that I'm interested in, Musicians who post updates on when they are going on tour/release new albums, the companies that I work for because I like to keep up on what we are announcing publicly. There are plenty of reasons that I want some organizations to advertise to me.
- basch 9y ago
  any newspaper. https://www.facebook.com/bloombergbusiness/ https://www.facebook.com/bloombergbusiness/ https://www.facebook.com/APNews/ https://www.facebook.com/APNews/ https://www.facebook.com/RollingStone/ https://www.facebook.com/RollingStone/ https://www.facebook.com/roadsandkingdoms/ https://www.facebook.com/roadsandkingdoms/ https://www.facebook.com/IEEE.org/ https://www.facebook.com/IEEE.org/ the best is to make a list. i have 200 pages in a list, and use it as my facebook bookmark instead of my newsfeed.
bad_user 9y ago
The best part about Twitter is the simple timeline. Twitter doesn’t care about what the account represents, so all accounts have the same priority. Yes, Twitter has started to mess with its timeline, but that’s besides the point. Facebook’s noise problem is one that they themselves created. Countless of times I found myself subscribed to some page only because I liked one of their posts. Which is bullshit, because in my vocabulary Follow != Like. Then they tried fixing this by prioritizing posts based on a bullshit ranking system only they understand. That didn’t work either. Oh well, maybe we’ll go back full circle after all.
- ahussain 9y ago
  Also, why is the second item in my newsfeed always a "Sponsored Link"
  - Beltiras 9y ago
    Because of ad money to pay for the service?
  - orwin 9y ago
    I'm not using facebook (not since they had this anti-adblock stuff), but if it is always the second item for everyone, it should be quite easy to hide with a small greasemonkey script (that you don't even have to code yourself, someone probably already did).
    - wilbert_abreu 9y ago
      Here's a chrome extension that works for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsored-posts-blocker/cefgndhbngdogmalpnhnidnnlkmbicig?hl=en&authuser=3 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsored-posts-bl...
      - numbsafari 9y ago
        A chrome extension that uploads all my FB data to its servers? Neat!
dingoonline 9y ago
Big difference between what the article says: "The idea behind the Explore Feed is to help Facebook users discover more content across the social network, beyond posts from friends and Pages you already follow. Instead, this feed surfaces recommended content it thinks you might find interesting." And what the author of the Medium post says: "All posts by pages are moved from News Feed to Explore Feed. In main News Feed are now just friend and sponsored posts." If the first is true, then eh. Another useless tab I won't ever use. If the latter is true, then this is a gamechanger. Facebook has turned into the literal feed of news for many people for many years at this point. If it's reduced back down into what it was in 2010, it's going to outrage a lot of older people who use it for more than a friend feed.
- josteink 9y ago
  > If it's reduced back down into what it was in 2010, it's going to outrage a lot of older people who use it for more than a friend feed. And some people (like me) would be really happy. For me at least, the facebook feed at this point is just pure SPAM and garbage.
  - visarga 9y ago
    They could have let it to the users to decide if they want news or family posts. Then there is no conflict between them any more.
  - dingoonline 9y ago
    Likewise. But I know plenty of people who would be livid if suddenly they couldn't see the crap clickbait on their feed.
- smcl 9y ago
  The "News Feed" => "Explore Feed" thing reminds me of this image, someone on Twitter created it when Twitter starting muddling around with their feed: http://zdnet2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2017/03/31/05706b1f-125b-42bc-a731-8904457b2e52/e22fd9a7865a31d79074951eeac63cad/twitter-140-characters-in-replies.jpg http://zdnet2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2017/03/31/05706b1f-125b-...
sparkzilla 9y ago
While this is a good move for Facebook's users, who will get a less cluttered feed, it's a disaster for publishers who use Facebook for content distribution. For example, over the past year my company has been supplying news to a network of two million MMA fans on Facebook. With this change it's very difficult to make enough revenue to continue: less reach = less clickthrough to our site = less revenue. The silver lining is that if publishers write off Facebook as a distribution method then perhaps they can work more on other distribution methods, generating some innovation. <insert reply about platform dependency here>
- miskin 9y ago
  Yes, dependency is bad, but you target platform where your customers are. We operate small indoor playground for kids. Sure, I wanted to have website, but since almost all moms with small kids are on FB 24/7, Facebook Page was obvious choice. Yes, it makes us platform dependent, but I won't expect our target audience to play with RSS... Now this step bite us in the backside a bit. It really sucks to be in the bad part of A/B test :)
yosito 9y ago
This is wishful thinking, but maybe this move will push content creators back to providing RSS feeds so their audience can follow them without needing to use Facebook.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Makes me wonder if killing RSS was an FB condition.
- Mikushi 9y ago
  More than wishful thinking, and no offence, but it's simply disconnected with reality. RSS is not dead, it was never alive to begin with.
  - qznc 9y ago
    It's the other way round for me. I read feeds but no Facebook. Works fine. Which content producers are missing?
visarga 9y ago
That's what happens when we abandon protocols (RSS feeds) in favor of walled gardens.
- jkaljundi 9y ago
  RSS feed ads used to be quite a thing.
  - cat199 9y ago
    quite a thing that you have the ability to filter if you wanted to..
- jasode 9y ago
  >That's what happens when we abandon protocols (RSS feeds) Yes, in general terms, there's always an abstract discussion about RSS vs Facebook,Twitter,Google AMP, etc. However, your particular comment is not relevant to this particular blog post. The RSS protocol is "free" but that doesn't matter if it does not address the targets that Facebook does. (Besides that, the journalist writes for DennikN and they didn't "abandon" the RSS feed. It's at: https://dennikn.sk/rss-odber/ https://dennikn.sk/rss-odber/) We can't just reflexively reply with "RSS" every time the trigger word "Facebook" comes up. It needs to be relevant. RSS is not applicable to what the journalist is talking about. RSS is not relevant to the perspective of the publisher for metrics of "audience reach". RSS feed is a convenience tool for the reader and the blog post isn't about that perspective.
- Frondo 9y ago
  RSS feeds aren't social. Social functionality might not be important to you, but it is very important to many, many people. (Services that graft social functionality onto RSS feeds could satisfy the same need, but then we're not talking about RSS feeds anymore...)
  - r00fus 9y ago
    Arguably, using social feed for ads isn't social either. It's advertisement. So the argument still stands. RSS was a much better mechanism to distribute updates and could have been made "social" if companies like Twitter and Facebook weren't intent on dominating that space.
ankyth27 9y ago
If you are a small business owner and want to do paid promotion.Please not spend on likes, and boosting posts also doesn't help much. Create ads with very specific targeting and take users to your landing page and try to catch them again with retargeting. This will help you reach better audience and let you calculate definitive ROIs.
dep_b 9y ago
If I see how many companies don't create a homepage but rely on Facebook entirely. Or have a very stale homepage while they keep posting news on Facebook and Instagram. And I don't get it, if you use a free Wordpress setup with a few simple plug-ins you can already post all of your content immediately to all social media channels together with an update on your homepage.
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  IG engagement is so much higher for many categories, people just don't interact with websites like they do with social media
  - dep_b 9y ago
    I see bars and restaurants always post stuff happy Friday pictures with food photos all of the time yet information about what beer or food they actually serve remains a mystery on their social media channels. If they didn't bother with a website I'm basically just guessing based on what they took pictures of.
    - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
      In that case they're probably just looking to grow their following by having a high enough engagement to appear in the featured page of IG, and remind their existing followers that they exist. Here it's less about promoting the food and more about promoting the image of the food, so it gets shared more widely.
      - dep_b 9y ago
        Very paradoxical as social media should give companies the opportunity to engage more directly with their customers. It's like meeting a very interesting Hacker News poster IRL and the only thing that person can talk about is some kind of sports team you don't give a shit about.
- mrgoldenbrown 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
maaaats 9y ago
> In main newsfeed are now just friend and sponsored posts. Haven't seen many posts by my friends this year, only people commenting or liking stuff on various pages. Not sure if it is because my friends (including me) have stopped posting, or if it just drowns in everything else.
- venturis_voice 9y ago
  I've found this too, seems the whole platform is just becoming a cavalcade of adverts, click bait and reaction videos. I don't post updates anymore and I only really use FB to follow local events in town i'm interested in.
- abtom 9y ago
  Can confirm. In my friends list only activity is tagging on memes and posting life events. All personal sharing has moved to Instagram and "stories" on Facebook/WhatsApp/Messenger.
  - maaaats 9y ago
    I've only once seen someone use the stories feature of Messenger/facebook, and he is a Facebook employee. All my friends use snapchat to share our days.
bhouston 9y ago
Facebook pulling a bait and switch for newspapers that forces them to pay to reach an audience they used to reach for free (organic reach)? This has only happened repeatedly in the history of facebook. Facebook is like a game where the difficulty rises after you've had a taste of success. And by difficulty I mean you have to pay to reach your previous levels of success. Facebook did this for those first games (e.g. Farmville), then for pages (remember the idea of advertizing for likes to raise the visibility of your page in the news feed? https://www.matthewbarby.com/facebook-likes-dont-matter/ https://www.matthewbarby.com/facebook-likes-dont-matter/), now for newspapers. All in the service of "keeping the news feed clean/relevant for users", but really it is just effective monetization of the attention of Facebook's users. Never become dependent on Facebook's feebies in any way, because you will soon be paying for them. But I figure everyone already knew this strategy of Zuck's Facebook -- it is nothing new, it is "The Strategy" over there.
- tehwebguy 9y ago
  I don’t know - how many posts is an individual meant to consume in a day? X friends + Y followed pages x Z average posts per day. What’s the baseline X for an average user, 100? 300? What about Y pages liked / followed, another hundred? Plus if like half the feed is “A friend liked this post: “ you have even more content to consume that you didn’t even sign up for directly.
  - cat199 9y ago
    yeah wow, it's almost like if FB let you store and categorize things in a chronologically ordered list, and filter posts based on customizable preferences, people might be able to manage their feed GASP... themselves!
    - taneq 9y ago
      But then how would they know about all the highest-ranked paid/sponsored/promoted posts from Facebook's closest friends?
  - TuringNYC 9y ago
ungzd 9y ago
Looked at this "Explore feed" today. Only "viral videos", "funny animals" videos, listicles about casual topics. Recently I started to see the same content in Instagram Explore tab too. This is how their super-targeted AI trained on terabytes of behavioral data works? The same quality of targeting as on TV. Why they gather data on users at all?
j-c-hewitt 9y ago
Frankly the only stuff that is not completely brain-melting on Facebook can be found in groups, which mostly doesn't do a lot of moving posts around based on what the system thinks you'll engage with. I only use Facebook to advertise to people, having long grown disgusted and bored by the main timeline as a user.
PeanutNore 9y ago
As a former active user on Facebook, this sort of change may succeed in bringing people like me back to the site. The minimal effort required in hitting that "share" button means that every page that organically reached my friends would end up polluting my news feed as well with crap that I wasn't interested in and got in the way of what I had originally joined FB for. If my friends aren't seeing these posts, they won't be clicking "share" on them either. I've had my account on Facebook since 2004 when it first became available at my university. Since the very beginning it's first usefulness was as a Rolodex, basically. I recently stopped using the site (without deactivating my account, because it still serves that digital Rolodex function) because >75% of the posts on my newsfeed were either "organic" ads or propaganda. Most of the offending posts were things that had been "shared" by my friends and not necessarily even posted by pages I had "liked" or "followed" A principle I've been using recently to help me understand the world around me is that I am not special or unique, and when I do something, a lot of other people who are broadly similar to me are doing the same thing. So, I assume that there are others like me who have recently been deleting the FB app and avoiding the website, if not deleting their accounts entirely. Facebook is almost certainly aware of it, and while publishers are always going to see stuff like this as a money grab, it may be necessary for the health of the platform for FB to clamp down on publisher patterns that are driving users away.
- kevstev 9y ago
  Agreed here. I feel like I am constantly fighting to filter out all this "content" from external sites. I feel like I can't even see the stuff I joined FB for- to see pictures/updates to see what my friends are up to. Instagram is much better for this these days, the signal/noise ratio is getting so low on FB that I find myself going on just out of habit, not because of the information I get from there. It has shades of slashdot, which for awhile was just in my daily list of sites to visit because it always had been, eventually though it dropped off. Note that you can eliminate a lot of this crap by changing your news feed from "top stories" to "most recent." This change will not persist, can not be changed on the app, and you will have to manually change this every time you log on- you can't even save the url as a bookmark. Still, its waaay closer to the FB I used to really like.
_pmf_ 9y ago
"Captain, it looks like we have reached a MySpace singularity!"
dreamdu5t 9y ago
Rats in a cage.
jerkstate 9y ago
Won't someone please think of those poor, helpless brands?

231 points by stdclass 9y ago

I think this is a great turning point for Facebook and might even bring Facebook back on the map SOCIAL media wise. Since almost all people I know barely use Facebook anymore for communication, because you just don’t see any posts by your friends no more.

caio1982 9y ago
Yet they over time created this crucial need of local/small business to have a Facebook page if they want to engage with potential customers and such, but now they change this “contract”.
- jazoom 9y ago
  The truly evil thing here is that page admins are prompted relentlessly by Facebook to purchase "likes", which Facebook makes more and more worthless.
  - fapjacks 9y ago
    Not to even mention how totally fucking useless Facebook ads are. You'll only be seeing fake likes and followers from developing countries that only serve to dilute your reach and make you pay even more. Facebook is not and never will be in a hurry to change how many fake accounts are doing this kind of "like farming".
muse900 9y ago
Yep its all about memes and 'news' (fake news, dailymail stuff). I found something interesting on my FB feed. I haven't liked any meme or news pages etc. So I'd get mostly what my friends liked from their liked pages. Recently I liked an online newspaper. For the past 2 months 4 out of 7 posts are from this newspaper. It feels like FB knows its a newspaper and its just serving me news, to get me more addicted to it...
fnwx17 9y ago
Actually, they're just forcing businesses that have pages to pay for ads. Like if you have a well known page that has grown through shares and likes, you'll be needing to pay money to reach the people that have liked your page.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I don't have a problem with Facebook asking people to pay for the value provided, especially if it actually increases my utility of it as a user. (Which, admittedly, I'm not anymore - partially due to this problem.)
sparkzilla 9y ago
Actually, I've found the opposite. My feed is almost entirely social now, and it's very difficult to find news.
jbverschoor 9y ago
I use fbpurity, which removes all the cruft. So basically I only see friends. Not much is happening on fb, except by a hand full of people

IndrekR 9y ago

To an outside observer (I do not have a FB account), this looks like a good plan from the FB side. Kind of like GMail inbox categories/tabs. All about reducing the signal (friends) to noise (something you may have liked 3 years ago) ratio. You will still see as many ads, but the content between those will be more relevant. Too bad FB does not offer ad-free account as an option.

AndrewDucker 9y ago
How is it more relevant to remove content that I've deliberately chosen to see from my feed?
- stdclass 9y ago
  That's exactly what annoys me about it. I liked those pages, so I choose to see the content. Their solution to put it into the "Explore"-Tab, mixed with content of Pages I didn't even like makes it worthless.
- IndrekR 9y ago
  Is it removed or moved? Social networks so far are between humans. Removal is bad, categorization to 2..3 subgroups may be good. I guess this is what they are testing.
swampers 9y ago
I didn't like it when Gmail did it either, and removed tabs almost immediately. Let me control what I see and how I see it. Provide me the tools to move things into other 'feeds' if I want to, but don't force me into using these tools. Otherwise, give me what I've asked for (posts, emails, etc) in the order I've received them.
- maneesh 9y ago
  And I loved it immediately when Gmail did it.

AndrewDucker 9y ago

The annoying thing here, as a Facebook user, is that if I've liked the "Cute Puppies" page it's because I want to see their cute puppies. To then strip them entirely out of my Facebook feed unless they hand Facebook some cash feels like a step back in my usage of Facebook.

bpicolo 9y ago
The annoying bit is that (with the current model), if my friend likes cute puppies, then I'm forever cursed with them too, at the expense of all the things I actually want to see.
- AndrewDucker 9y ago
  That is absolutely annoying as well. It's as if Facebook should show me the things I've asked it to, and show you the things you've asked it to, and not try and take mine away or give them to you.
  - yellow_postit 9y ago
    Inferring that people that are “friends” may share the same interests doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me.
    - bpicolo 9y ago
      Fine inference, but the implementation degenerates to spam. My news feed has almost nothing other than things-others-liked now, mostly because Facebook seems to be trying to push video heavily into your feed because (I assume) it increases their engagement statistics drastically on the average
    - wolco 9y ago
      It is very unreasonable for users who hundreds of friends to expect interests to he similiar. This could be excused for a smaller site but facebook has detailed metrics on what I liked where I visited outside of facebook and what purchases I made. Using that targeting is much more effective compared to friend's interest.

phrygian 9y ago

It is their platform, right? I’d assume they are within their rights to determine how Information flows within it. Obviously they’d want it to be in a way that positively impacts their bottom line. If the ability to reach people on their platform through pages is valuable, then i should not be surprised if they want those who use it to pay for it.

adventured 9y ago
That's going to become increasingly the debate, as with Google. You're starting to see more and more arguments in the media, in Washington DC, among anti-trust and anti-corporate power groups, that these platforms should be treated more like utilities. Given the culture at the moment, I'd expect those arguments to get a lot louder yet. The platforms are responding predictably: "Tech Pours Millions Into Lobbying While Pressure Mounts in Washington" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-20/tech-pours-millions-into-lobbying-as-washington-pressure-mounts https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-20/tech-pour...
- yellow_postit 9y ago
  Is there a proposal of what "like a utility" would look like for social media platforms?

alkonaut 9y ago

What are even facebook "pages you follow"? Is it anything that isn't a personal fb account in the friend list? Do groups count in this category, or are groups a third category? I don't think I follow any "pages" such as those created by companies or artists (apart from personal accounts). If "pages" were basically fb's equivalent of corporate accounts, why would you want to follow them? Isn't that like signing up for commercials in your feed?

miskin 9y ago
Exactly as you mentioned - Facebook Pages are for anything that is not a person, pretty much. We run FB Page as info page for kids playground, for example. If you are frequent visitor and you liked/followed our page, you'd get notification when playground is closed due to birthday party etc. Well, until now :).
tbihl 9y ago
To give you a counter example, I follow nothing except pages most of the time. My real account sticks around in case I want to contact friends, and because some people insist on communicating via FB messages. But all my browsers are logged into a second account, which has no friends,and follows a non-profit, a news site from my hometown, and a few think tanks. It only exists because one or two of those don't put out their feeds anywhere else.
davidcbc 9y ago
I follow several pages because they are businesses or organizations that I am actually interested in hearing from. Local businesses that make announcements that I'm interested in, Musicians who post updates on when they are going on tour/release new albums, the companies that I work for because I like to keep up on what we are announcing publicly. There are plenty of reasons that I want some organizations to advertise to me.
basch 9y ago
any newspaper. https://www.facebook.com/bloombergbusiness/ https://www.facebook.com/bloombergbusiness/ https://www.facebook.com/APNews/ https://www.facebook.com/APNews/ https://www.facebook.com/RollingStone/ https://www.facebook.com/RollingStone/ https://www.facebook.com/roadsandkingdoms/ https://www.facebook.com/roadsandkingdoms/ https://www.facebook.com/IEEE.org/ https://www.facebook.com/IEEE.org/ the best is to make a list. i have 200 pages in a list, and use it as my facebook bookmark instead of my newsfeed.

bad_user 9y ago

The best part about Twitter is the simple timeline. Twitter doesn’t care about what the account represents, so all accounts have the same priority. Yes, Twitter has started to mess with its timeline, but that’s besides the point. Facebook’s noise problem is one that they themselves created. Countless of times I found myself subscribed to some page only because I liked one of their posts. Which is bullshit, because in my vocabulary Follow != Like. Then they tried fixing this by prioritizing posts based on a bullshit ranking system only they understand. That didn’t work either. Oh well, maybe we’ll go back full circle after all.

ahussain 9y ago
Also, why is the second item in my newsfeed always a "Sponsored Link"
- Beltiras 9y ago
  Because of ad money to pay for the service?
- orwin 9y ago
  I'm not using facebook (not since they had this anti-adblock stuff), but if it is always the second item for everyone, it should be quite easy to hide with a small greasemonkey script (that you don't even have to code yourself, someone probably already did).
  - wilbert_abreu 9y ago
    Here's a chrome extension that works for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsored-posts-blocker/cefgndhbngdogmalpnhnidnnlkmbicig?hl=en&authuser=3 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsored-posts-bl...
    - numbsafari 9y ago
      A chrome extension that uploads all my FB data to its servers? Neat!

dingoonline 9y ago

Big difference between what the article says: "The idea behind the Explore Feed is to help Facebook users discover more content across the social network, beyond posts from friends and Pages you already follow. Instead, this feed surfaces recommended content it thinks you might find interesting." And what the author of the Medium post says: "All posts by pages are moved from News Feed to Explore Feed. In main News Feed are now just friend and sponsored posts." If the first is true, then eh. Another useless tab I won't ever use. If the latter is true, then this is a gamechanger. Facebook has turned into the literal feed of news for many people for many years at this point. If it's reduced back down into what it was in 2010, it's going to outrage a lot of older people who use it for more than a friend feed.

josteink 9y ago
> If it's reduced back down into what it was in 2010, it's going to outrage a lot of older people who use it for more than a friend feed. And some people (like me) would be really happy. For me at least, the facebook feed at this point is just pure SPAM and garbage.
- visarga 9y ago
  They could have let it to the users to decide if they want news or family posts. Then there is no conflict between them any more.
- dingoonline 9y ago
  Likewise. But I know plenty of people who would be livid if suddenly they couldn't see the crap clickbait on their feed.
smcl 9y ago
The "News Feed" => "Explore Feed" thing reminds me of this image, someone on Twitter created it when Twitter starting muddling around with their feed: http://zdnet2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2017/03/31/05706b1f-125b-42bc-a731-8904457b2e52/e22fd9a7865a31d79074951eeac63cad/twitter-140-characters-in-replies.jpg http://zdnet2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2017/03/31/05706b1f-125b-...

sparkzilla 9y ago

While this is a good move for Facebook's users, who will get a less cluttered feed, it's a disaster for publishers who use Facebook for content distribution. For example, over the past year my company has been supplying news to a network of two million MMA fans on Facebook. With this change it's very difficult to make enough revenue to continue: less reach = less clickthrough to our site = less revenue. The silver lining is that if publishers write off Facebook as a distribution method then perhaps they can work more on other distribution methods, generating some innovation. <insert reply about platform dependency here>

miskin 9y ago
Yes, dependency is bad, but you target platform where your customers are. We operate small indoor playground for kids. Sure, I wanted to have website, but since almost all moms with small kids are on FB 24/7, Facebook Page was obvious choice. Yes, it makes us platform dependent, but I won't expect our target audience to play with RSS... Now this step bite us in the backside a bit. It really sucks to be in the bad part of A/B test :)

yosito 9y ago

This is wishful thinking, but maybe this move will push content creators back to providing RSS feeds so their audience can follow them without needing to use Facebook.

dredmorbius 9y ago
Makes me wonder if killing RSS was an FB condition.
Mikushi 9y ago
More than wishful thinking, and no offence, but it's simply disconnected with reality. RSS is not dead, it was never alive to begin with.
- qznc 9y ago
  It's the other way round for me. I read feeds but no Facebook. Works fine. Which content producers are missing?

visarga 9y ago

That's what happens when we abandon protocols (RSS feeds) in favor of walled gardens.

jkaljundi 9y ago
RSS feed ads used to be quite a thing.
- cat199 9y ago
  quite a thing that you have the ability to filter if you wanted to..
jasode 9y ago
>That's what happens when we abandon protocols (RSS feeds) Yes, in general terms, there's always an abstract discussion about RSS vs Facebook,Twitter,Google AMP, etc. However, your particular comment is not relevant to this particular blog post. The RSS protocol is "free" but that doesn't matter if it does not address the targets that Facebook does. (Besides that, the journalist writes for DennikN and they didn't "abandon" the RSS feed. It's at: https://dennikn.sk/rss-odber/ https://dennikn.sk/rss-odber/) We can't just reflexively reply with "RSS" every time the trigger word "Facebook" comes up. It needs to be relevant. RSS is not applicable to what the journalist is talking about. RSS is not relevant to the perspective of the publisher for metrics of "audience reach". RSS feed is a convenience tool for the reader and the blog post isn't about that perspective.
Frondo 9y ago
RSS feeds aren't social. Social functionality might not be important to you, but it is very important to many, many people. (Services that graft social functionality onto RSS feeds could satisfy the same need, but then we're not talking about RSS feeds anymore...)
- r00fus 9y ago
  Arguably, using social feed for ads isn't social either. It's advertisement. So the argument still stands. RSS was a much better mechanism to distribute updates and could have been made "social" if companies like Twitter and Facebook weren't intent on dominating that space.

ankyth27 9y ago

If you are a small business owner and want to do paid promotion.Please not spend on likes, and boosting posts also doesn't help much. Create ads with very specific targeting and take users to your landing page and try to catch them again with retargeting. This will help you reach better audience and let you calculate definitive ROIs.

dep_b 9y ago

If I see how many companies don't create a homepage but rely on Facebook entirely. Or have a very stale homepage while they keep posting news on Facebook and Instagram. And I don't get it, if you use a free Wordpress setup with a few simple plug-ins you can already post all of your content immediately to all social media channels together with an update on your homepage.

albertgoeswoof 9y ago
IG engagement is so much higher for many categories, people just don't interact with websites like they do with social media
- dep_b 9y ago
  I see bars and restaurants always post stuff happy Friday pictures with food photos all of the time yet information about what beer or food they actually serve remains a mystery on their social media channels. If they didn't bother with a website I'm basically just guessing based on what they took pictures of.
  - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
    In that case they're probably just looking to grow their following by having a high enough engagement to appear in the featured page of IG, and remind their existing followers that they exist. Here it's less about promoting the food and more about promoting the image of the food, so it gets shared more widely.
    - dep_b 9y ago
      Very paradoxical as social media should give companies the opportunity to engage more directly with their customers. It's like meeting a very interesting Hacker News poster IRL and the only thing that person can talk about is some kind of sports team you don't give a shit about.
mrgoldenbrown 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

maaaats 9y ago

> In main newsfeed are now just friend and sponsored posts. Haven't seen many posts by my friends this year, only people commenting or liking stuff on various pages. Not sure if it is because my friends (including me) have stopped posting, or if it just drowns in everything else.

venturis_voice 9y ago
I've found this too, seems the whole platform is just becoming a cavalcade of adverts, click bait and reaction videos. I don't post updates anymore and I only really use FB to follow local events in town i'm interested in.
abtom 9y ago
Can confirm. In my friends list only activity is tagging on memes and posting life events. All personal sharing has moved to Instagram and "stories" on Facebook/WhatsApp/Messenger.
- maaaats 9y ago
  I've only once seen someone use the stories feature of Messenger/facebook, and he is a Facebook employee. All my friends use snapchat to share our days.

bhouston 9y ago

Facebook pulling a bait and switch for newspapers that forces them to pay to reach an audience they used to reach for free (organic reach)? This has only happened repeatedly in the history of facebook. Facebook is like a game where the difficulty rises after you've had a taste of success. And by difficulty I mean you have to pay to reach your previous levels of success. Facebook did this for those first games (e.g. Farmville), then for pages (remember the idea of advertizing for likes to raise the visibility of your page in the news feed? https://www.matthewbarby.com/facebook-likes-dont-matter/ https://www.matthewbarby.com/facebook-likes-dont-matter/), now for newspapers. All in the service of "keeping the news feed clean/relevant for users", but really it is just effective monetization of the attention of Facebook's users. Never become dependent on Facebook's feebies in any way, because you will soon be paying for them. But I figure everyone already knew this strategy of Zuck's Facebook -- it is nothing new, it is "The Strategy" over there.

tehwebguy 9y ago
I don’t know - how many posts is an individual meant to consume in a day? X friends + Y followed pages x Z average posts per day. What’s the baseline X for an average user, 100? 300? What about Y pages liked / followed, another hundred? Plus if like half the feed is “A friend liked this post: “ you have even more content to consume that you didn’t even sign up for directly.
- cat199 9y ago
  yeah wow, it's almost like if FB let you store and categorize things in a chronologically ordered list, and filter posts based on customizable preferences, people might be able to manage their feed GASP... themselves!
  - taneq 9y ago
    But then how would they know about all the highest-ranked paid/sponsored/promoted posts from Facebook's closest friends?
- TuringNYC 9y ago

ungzd 9y ago

Looked at this "Explore feed" today. Only "viral videos", "funny animals" videos, listicles about casual topics. Recently I started to see the same content in Instagram Explore tab too. This is how their super-targeted AI trained on terabytes of behavioral data works? The same quality of targeting as on TV. Why they gather data on users at all?

j-c-hewitt 9y ago

Frankly the only stuff that is not completely brain-melting on Facebook can be found in groups, which mostly doesn't do a lot of moving posts around based on what the system thinks you'll engage with. I only use Facebook to advertise to people, having long grown disgusted and bored by the main timeline as a user.

PeanutNore 9y ago

As a former active user on Facebook, this sort of change may succeed in bringing people like me back to the site. The minimal effort required in hitting that "share" button means that every page that organically reached my friends would end up polluting my news feed as well with crap that I wasn't interested in and got in the way of what I had originally joined FB for. If my friends aren't seeing these posts, they won't be clicking "share" on them either. I've had my account on Facebook since 2004 when it first became available at my university. Since the very beginning it's first usefulness was as a Rolodex, basically. I recently stopped using the site (without deactivating my account, because it still serves that digital Rolodex function) because >75% of the posts on my newsfeed were either "organic" ads or propaganda. Most of the offending posts were things that had been "shared" by my friends and not necessarily even posted by pages I had "liked" or "followed" A principle I've been using recently to help me understand the world around me is that I am not special or unique, and when I do something, a lot of other people who are broadly similar to me are doing the same thing. So, I assume that there are others like me who have recently been deleting the FB app and avoiding the website, if not deleting their accounts entirely. Facebook is almost certainly aware of it, and while publishers are always going to see stuff like this as a money grab, it may be necessary for the health of the platform for FB to clamp down on publisher patterns that are driving users away.

kevstev 9y ago
Agreed here. I feel like I am constantly fighting to filter out all this "content" from external sites. I feel like I can't even see the stuff I joined FB for- to see pictures/updates to see what my friends are up to. Instagram is much better for this these days, the signal/noise ratio is getting so low on FB that I find myself going on just out of habit, not because of the information I get from there. It has shades of slashdot, which for awhile was just in my daily list of sites to visit because it always had been, eventually though it dropped off. Note that you can eliminate a lot of this crap by changing your news feed from "top stories" to "most recent." This change will not persist, can not be changed on the app, and you will have to manually change this every time you log on- you can't even save the url as a bookmark. Still, its waaay closer to the FB I used to really like.

_pmf_ 9y ago

"Captain, it looks like we have reached a MySpace singularity!"

dreamdu5t 9y ago

Rats in a cage.

jerkstate 9y ago

Won't someone please think of those poor, helpless brands?