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Decline happened when FB started suppressing messages from apps on the feed and started prioritising news links and later images and videos. It also coincided w

Decline happened when FB started suppressing messages from apps on the feed and started prioritising news links and later images and videos. It also coincided with decline of flash, so a lot of apps like Farmville were re-built in HTML5 or as a native mobile app. These apps then used FB as an auth mechanism. The changes in FB APIs didn't help either.

bambataa 5y ago
> started prioritising news links It probably helped their short term metrics but it really seems like this decision was terrible in the long term. I and a lot of people I know began to disengage when Facebook mostly became people I didn’t know so well posting political crap.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  > I and a lot of people I know began to disengage when Facebook mostly became people I didn’t know so well posting political crap. True. But would more FarmVille spam in the feed have been any better? I deactivated my account months ago, and would like to see Facebook just disappear. Facebook should not have a place in our future imo.
wodenokoto 5y ago
Twitter envy was the cause of a lot of bad business decisions for Facebook. They were really jealous of twitter being the source of “trending” topics on news broadcasts and wanted that role, so they boosted links and news articles rather than updates from friends, they even experimented with making all posts public. It’s like they don’t know that their strength was that you could connect with people you know and care about, but they wanted to be another “shouting in the wind” platform.
- chupchap 5y ago
  So true! A lot of folks in India shifted to FB from Orkut because it was private by deault compared to other networks at the time. They destroyed that base assumption in two years.
- urthor 5y ago
  If I know these guys I imagine a very clever statistician ran the numbers on this call. My guess is that Facebook realized that being a "shouting in the wind" platform is an excellent way to retain what I'd call the "low engagement" tail end of the distribution. i.e. the explicit goal was to provide content for those without all that many actual friends on Facebook. I look at Facebook now and it seems like the connect with friends part of it is very much secondary to just driving groups, marketplace, and all the parasocial paraphernalia of the modern internet. Which is of course a very profitable thing to do if you're in the eyeball minutes business. All those features are after all, there for users 24/7. And don't rely on the vagaries of end user content creation.

bambataa 5y ago

> started prioritising news links It probably helped their short term metrics but it really seems like this decision was terrible in the long term. I and a lot of people I know began to disengage when Facebook mostly became people I didn’t know so well posting political crap.

codetrotter 5y ago
> I and a lot of people I know began to disengage when Facebook mostly became people I didn’t know so well posting political crap. True. But would more FarmVille spam in the feed have been any better? I deactivated my account months ago, and would like to see Facebook just disappear. Facebook should not have a place in our future imo.

wodenokoto 5y ago

Twitter envy was the cause of a lot of bad business decisions for Facebook. They were really jealous of twitter being the source of “trending” topics on news broadcasts and wanted that role, so they boosted links and news articles rather than updates from friends, they even experimented with making all posts public. It’s like they don’t know that their strength was that you could connect with people you know and care about, but they wanted to be another “shouting in the wind” platform.

chupchap 5y ago
So true! A lot of folks in India shifted to FB from Orkut because it was private by deault compared to other networks at the time. They destroyed that base assumption in two years.
urthor 5y ago
If I know these guys I imagine a very clever statistician ran the numbers on this call. My guess is that Facebook realized that being a "shouting in the wind" platform is an excellent way to retain what I'd call the "low engagement" tail end of the distribution. i.e. the explicit goal was to provide content for those without all that many actual friends on Facebook. I look at Facebook now and it seems like the connect with friends part of it is very much secondary to just driving groups, marketplace, and all the parasocial paraphernalia of the modern internet. Which is of course a very profitable thing to do if you're in the eyeball minutes business. All those features are after all, there for users 24/7. And don't rely on the vagaries of end user content creation.