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Does anyone actually like seeing publisher content on their Facebook feed? It'd be great if Facebook could just go back to showing me posts by my friends. Not t

• goatherders 6y ago
  Serious question: how much would you pay each year for that? I believe that if FB asked users to pay even a dollar a year more than half of the users would disappear.
  • staticassertion 6y ago
    Leaving them with hundreds of millions of dollars a year?
  • dig6x 6y ago
    Yeh 100%. The entire premise is that the social offering of FB is free (for the most part, of course users pay in data). I read an interesting article yday on why the 'free' offering of tech companies like FB allows them to thrive versus say an Uber-like tech company that has an explicit cost associated to it even though that is the delivery of a more tangible product i.e. getting from point a to b.
    • dig6x 6y ago
      Interesting article on social capital as currency and why social platforms delay monetisation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708585
  • batiudrami 6y ago
    I absolutely would pay for it as Messenger and Events are both great products, but like you I know most people wouldn't and that they succeed because everyone uses them. But I don't actually have a problem with the ads. Ads targeted at me on Facebook are pretty good - they're often things I actually want to know about (like upcoming gigs in my area). I don't mind them and don't have a problem with their inclusion in my feed - it's the algorithmic content tangentially related to my friends which I detest.
    • pmontra 6y ago
      Here in Europe messaging systems took off around year 2000 because they were free alternatives to SMSes. Network effects were small and people switched a lot. Those effects are huge now but I believe that if we had to start paying for Messenger or WhatsApp we would switch to something else, probably Telegram. WhatsApp used to require a small payment many years ago but would extend the free trial period if one did not pay. Maybe they were A/B testing the willingness of people to pay. They even blocked the app for a few days sometimes, then invariably unblocked it after a few days. Somebody paid, almost everybody didn't. About Events, I didn't even know they have an app for that. I looked for it on Google Play and didn't find it. Is it part of the Facebook app? I saw people using Eventbrite when showing up at events. No in person events yet after the end of the lockdown.
      • batiudrami 6y ago
        They have a standalone app called Local but I was talking about events within the main app. Being able to easily see what my friends are doing each weekend and what else is on in my city is great (especially as we no longer have weekly street press).
  • sudosysgen 6y ago
    How much do you think would it cost? Much less than you could get out of simple banner ads, actually.
  • shash7 6y ago
    I would happily pay(for Insta, Whatsapp, etc but not for fb) around $3-$5 per month for this.
  • IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
    The idea of replacing ads with direct payments isn't entirely new, and the reason for it failing far more often than not is that nobody is willing to spend what they represent in ad-value themselves. If you just divide FB's revenue by users you'll get, say $20/year (no idea, someone look it up). But if FB were to offer an ad-free experience for $20, the users willing to pay will be the most valuable. If you're willing to pay $20, you are probably worth $40 in advertising. Maybe you'd be willing to pay $40? Turns out those people are worth $80.
    • alpha_squared 6y ago
      And that's sort of the problem with chasing as much revenue as possible and is why capitalism has been in the crosshairs for conversations on equity as of late. I think the idea has merit, a paid social media platform that fosters engagement with people you care about rather than driving "engagement" with the goal of more ad revenue.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • BbzzbB 6y ago
      You oughta open a FB quarterly presentation some day, it is quite eye opening how off the charts they are in terms of user monetization. $20 yearly wouldn't cut it at all, in North America the average revenue per user (ARPU, trailing 12-months) is about $145 (yes, $145 * 253M monthly active users). It's not even enough to match the worldwide ARPU (about $29, for 2.6B users). The value FB extracts from it's users, particularly in NA, is simply astonishing, I'll leave you to Googling the ARPU of other web platforms to get an idea. https://investor.fb.com/financials/?section=quarterlyearnings https://investor.fb.com/financials/?section=quarterlyearning...
      • IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
        I actually feel quite accomplished to be less than <50% off without ever having the slightest interest in reading their financial reports.
  • jmpman 6y ago
    I’d pay $1/year to block my uncle’s right wing conspiracy drivel without blocking his posts of my cousin’s kids.
    • cvs268 6y ago
      But, what about when he posts pics of the cousin's kids wearing T-shirts he bought them containing propaganda slogans? :-)
    • tosser0001 6y ago
      This is the thing that bugs me the most about the feed. They seem to be very good at categorizing things. After all, it's the foundation of their entire business model: placing people into a giant ontology of subjects and then selling access to that ontology to advertisers. It's hard for me to believe that they can't notice that I basically hide every single political post no matter the subject that appears on my timeline. You'd think it would be easy for them to de-prioritize these and it would make the whole experience more appealing.
    • mic47 6y ago
      Yes. I imagine, we would have hashtags, and algorithmic hashtags (in case your uncle stops using #rightWingConsiracy hashtab because everybody is filtering it?) and ability to filter by hashtags (with ability to selectively pick whether you block algorithmic hashtags, or normal hashtags). The problem I see is that your uncle might get offended that FB is marking his posts #rightWingConspiracy).
  • Barrin92 6y ago
    interestingly enough the average facebook user spends 60 minutes per day on the site. That's about two full weeks per year. If having to pay one dollar for the service isn't even worth it, that tells you something about how much people actually value their usage of facebook. One of the simpler ways to fix social ills and misallocated resources is to utilize the price mechanism.
  • CaptainZapp 6y ago
    Zero Because I believe that Facebook is such an utterly untrustworthy company that they would still sell me out to the highest bidder. Note that I ditched my FB account in 2014 and never used any of their other properties, including WhatsApp.
• dig6x 6y ago
  I believe this was a response to people interacting less with the feed and posting less about their own life.. its almost morphed into a reddit cross social feed now. And they're only expanding the bounds more and more, Facebook news if it takes off will also change this significantly once people start sharing more of that content.
  • jackcosgrove 6y ago
    The term used to describe the drop-off in organic content was "content collapse". I do remember it.
  • lokedhs 6y ago
    I have a Facebook account, but rarely log in (maybe once every few months or so). I just logged in to check, and I don't see any news in the feed. The only thing I see are posts from old classmates and similar who still use Facebook. I even logged in using incognito mode, using both Firefox and Chromium without any adblocker and I still didn't see anything except for posts by friends (and a few ads of course). Perhaps I'm not getting anything else because I rarely log in, so they are hoping to get me back in by showing me stuff that I'm more likely to want?
    • im3w1l 6y ago
      > I even logged in using incognito mode This doesn't do what you think it does. When you go to facebook.com incognito means you wont give them any of your normal cookies so facebook will be all like "Who is this guy???" But then you log in, so facebook goes "oh I see it's lokedhs! welcome back!" Incognito mode is designed to be undetectable. So from Facebook's point of view it looks like you signed in just like normal, and they will give you content just like normal.
      • lokedhs 6y ago
        I did it because when I activate incognito mode it disabled my extensions. The main reason for me doing that was that I wanted to make sure that it wasn't my adblocker that filtered it out. Sorry for not being clear about that.
• smt88 6y ago
  > It'd be great if Facebook could just go back to showing me posts by my friends. I was able to do this by aggressively curating my feed. It worked, but it was already too late. ~50% of my friends had already ditched Facebook, and the rest rarely posted. The news articles really killed the social aspect of Facebook, and the social parts that were left are just infuriating and upsetting. You end up "socializing" more with strangers who hate you than with your friends. Facebook could've been a fantastic business (though still a cancer on privacy) by being the "identity layer" of the web. Instead it decided to become the worst news aggregator combined with the comments sections of old YouTube videos. Truly some of the worst product decisions ever made.
  • batiudrami 6y ago
    I tried doing this but it seemed to just make the algorithm look harder and harder for new things to show me, so the quality of content actually reduced.
    • smt88 6y ago
      Yeah, the news articles and non-friend interactions killed the friend-to-friend interactions. It went from being an amazing, private social network to being the shittiest newsreader. Maybe group chat was always destined to kill the better side of FB, I don't know. I just know that FB uses extreme negative emotion to engage, and that's not a sustainable strategy. I think Instagram still often has the feeling of being mostly posts from people you follow, but they could easily ruin that if they're not careful. Instagram comment sections are pretty gross.
  • bredren 6y ago
    > You end up "socializing" more with strangers who hate you than with your friends. There is a lot to read into this as I think many service’s social element is some form of fostering conflict.
    • sjtindell 6y ago
      I like that observation. The times when I was the most invested in YouTube and Reddit were both when I was having lots of arguments on the platform. Great food for thought.
• totetsu 6y ago
  Facebook (presumably in a dark pattern to make me install the app) has stopped showing me anything at all in my m.facebook feed. It's quite the relief actually, now I might actually be able to quit. Before this they told me I would have to install the app to send and receive messages. After a month of using mbasic.facebook.com the m. messaging functionality returned.
  • sleavey 6y ago
    Ah the message functionality in the mobile site has returned? All the removal did was successfully stop me from using Facebook on my phone at all (thanks, Facebook!). I will not be starting again.
• ogre_codes 6y ago
  > I've taken the rather drastic step of unfollowing everyone just to get the utter garbage that is the feed out of my life. I just quit FB. I realized that it ceased adding value to my life some time ago. Turns out you can get a feed of what's interesting in people's lives just by texting them and sharing with them via text and email.
  • batiudrami 6y ago
    Events is something I can't give up, unfortunately. With the death of street press it's easily the best (and often only) way to find out about gigs and raves, and my friends organise events on facebook too. Australia's IM is dominated by Messenger too.
    • ogre_codes 6y ago
      This is a really good point. Events are really one of the bigger things I miss too. A fair number of my friends use Messenger because it's essentially the only thing other than SMS most everyone has. I use SMS and iMessage for a fairly decent sized group of friends.
• basch 6y ago
  I'll bite. Yes, almost exclusively. To the point where I made a list of my favorite two hundred publishers as an interest list and used that as my FB link in my browser toolbar. It makes a great link aggregator. I also had separate topic lists, one just for recipes (17 follows), one just for tech news (60 follows), science (33 follows), entertainment (29 follows), art (24 follows), business (26 follows), and world news (58 follows). For some reason none of those lists work anymore, they all had to be recreated after a certain date, as a "custom list" instead of an "interest list". The basic workaround is, follow a page, add it to your list, unfollow it. Conversely, I can have a list of just close friends, same thing applies, I only see their posts, not anything else. The thing about lists is I could have multiple feeds instead of one news feed, and I can pick the feed I want. FB is killing the list feature over time, I'm surprised it works in any capacity. It's not in the new redesign, and it's not in mobile.
  • 0-O-0 6y ago
    It looks like you could improve your experience by switching from Facebook to any RSS reader.
    • raziel2p 6y ago
      Assuming that publishers have functional RSS feeds, which is rarely the case. For small venues/companies/organizations I more and more often have to go to their Facebook page rather than their website to get up-to-date and correct information.
    • basch 6y ago
      Quite the opposite. The benefit is getting Facebook's algorithm, instead of a reverse chronology. I never found any of the million apps that tried to accomplish this to actually mix the news better than fb. I liked the idea of prismatic, but it surfaced mostly clickbait. Feedlys popular didn't feel as dynamic. Have you tried using Fb this way, or are you just telling me I should use something else? Why do you think I would find rss to be an improvement (I migrated from rss to Fb lists.)
      • 6y ago
• mindfulplay 6y ago
  This seems like the largest misconception of what FB is about. Your feed doesn't matter. We can all pretend to mass #deletefb, but you have already given enough data that they can carry it through all these "properties" without much loss. They have pretty much every app, website, device manufacturer in their pocket. It's sick what VC funded diarrhea can accomplish. The fake liberal crap that these companies put out is at odds with their business model that eat away at the societal fabric in a meaningless manner.
  • ogre_codes 6y ago
    > This seems like the largest misconception of what FB is about. Your feed doesn't matter. We can all pretend to mass #deletefb, but you have already given enough data that they can carry it through all these "properties" without much loss. The Facebook feed is their largest advertising and revenue stream. They do advertise elsewhere, but the stream is where a huge chunk of their money comes from. > but you have already given enough data that they can carry it through all these "properties" without much loss. The value of fresh users is much higher than stale years old data. This is why google has agreed to start dumping people's data after 18 months by default. Also, if you cut ties cleanly enough, they can't monetize the information they have on you regardless because they can't tie your account to your browsing. (That last bit is arguably the toughest part).
• ComodoHacker 6y ago
  >Does anyone actually like seeing publisher content on their Facebook feed? I bet yes. People like seeing more content. >just what they've posted I bet your feed would be nearly empty. Not much people like to put effort in creating content. But everyone like to consume content.
• cm2187 6y ago
  Or perhaps your friends all deserted facebook like everyone I know...
• mathattack 6y ago
  Very few of my friends post anymore. For a while I thought it was the algorithm but I realized that most folks have just given up. It surprises me that their revenue keeps going up, but I’ve assumed it was just people outside my bubble.
  • scarface74 6y ago
    https://www.oberlo.com/blog/facebook-statistics https://www.oberlo.com/blog/facebook-statistics
    • mathattack 6y ago
      Interesting. I’m curious about the nature of the interaction. (Posting versus viewing, and friends versus news)
• ssss11 6y ago
  This. Just give us a chronological feed of our friends updates. No ads, no manipulation. Id pay for it.
• choi2b 6y ago
  I think it's too late. My friends already only use FB for groups, messenger and marketplace. Hardly any of them post anything.
• IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
  Why does no one mention FBP (facebook purity) ff / chrome / opera extension ?
• Kiro 6y ago
  I use Facebook to follow music artists and game development groups. I couldn't care less about my cousin's 10 pictures of her kid a day.
• d0m 6y ago
  My friends and family are using Messenger rather than Facebook for that exact purpose.