5 ms·
First, you need to look at human attention as a commodity just like gold - available in fixed quantity and everyone wants piece of it. It turns out that FB mana
by sytelus 7y ago
First, you need to look at human attention as a commodity just like gold - available in fixed quantity and everyone wants piece of it. It turns out that FB managed to conquer large portion of human attention after it emerged. This also meant massive attention transfer from news media to FB. However until year ago, FB benevolently gave back significant pie of its attention share to news media by heavily promoting their stories. After last year's WEF meeting, FB took sudden unilateral decision to reduce sharing its attention pie with news media. Several media companies saw their traffic dropped precipitously, sometime cut down all the way to 90%. The management folks at these media companies tried reach out to FB management to appeal but it all fall on deaf ears. The result is the barrage of articles from news media for any and everything they can possibly find on FB. If someone publishes little study on "FB is bad for you" you can count on news media to amplify it all over. If there is nothing new available then media folks get opinion writers to write zero-information articles. It's surreal to see this war for attention playing out between FB and media.
- jamesjyu 7y agoNit: the avg person in the US spends 27 minutes per day on Facebook. This is small compared to TV/Netflix/YouTube, which is upwards of 4 hours per day. This is why Facebook had a huge push into video—they wanted a slice of that pie. They haven't made much headway there.
- sytelus 7y agoI would argue that human attention slice dedicated to entertainment is overall unchanged but transfer has been from traditional TV to online streaming. For the news domain transfer has been from news media to FB.
- chillacy 7y agoBefore it was cool to hate on fb it was cool to hate on reading the news: attention grabbing amygdala stimulating headlines keep you coming back for more.
- rock_hard 7y agoSpot on analysis! "Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics." To me, facebook is this amazing place where I get to stay in touch with all my friends and family, get to plan events with them, laugh about cat gifs and live through the highs and lows of life together. So much good has happened to me through facebook...friends, jobs, love (I met my wife on FB). And the fact that every day there is millions more joining facebook means more people get to have these super powers of hyper connectedness I got to have for over 10 years already!
- kerng 7y agoCurious, do you work for Facebook?
- blub 7y agoSure, no one's upset that you met your wife on Facebook. We're upset about the malicious psychological experiments, spying on teens, them enabling discrimination, election manipulation and genocide, shadow profiles, etc. You've either not been paying attention the last 10 years, or the answer to the question in the other reply must be "hell yes and proud of it".
- traek 7y ago> spying on teens Worth noting that "the app was targeted to users ages 13 to 35 (5 percent of whom were teenagers)." [0] Google had a similar app. I don't think that makes Facebook's app better, but it's interesting how the media reports on the Facebook app and not the Google one. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-offered-gift-cards-for-root-level-access-to-ios-users-data/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
- blub 7y agoYou offer no proof, citations, anything at all to back it up. But let's assume it's true, in the end it remains a mildly interesting but utterly irrelevant analysis. Who cares why news organisations attack Facebook as long as the criticism is correct? Facebook has done so many wicked things, the articles basically write themselves.