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The notifications used to just be stuff directly applicable to you (X tagged you in a photo etc). Then the demographic that advertisers really care about — aff
by muglug 4y ago
The notifications used to just be stuff directly applicable to you (X tagged you in a photo etc).
Then the demographic that advertisers really care about — affluent Americans in the 25-49 age bracket — stopped using Facebook.com every waking minute, and product managers panicked.
Their solution was to add more content to one of the most-clicked areas of the UI (I bet at least one product manager got a nice stock bump based on that change).
Short-term gains are great and all, but the change smelled of desperation, and had utterly predictable long-term effects.
And now we get a blog post telling us what should have been obvious to begin with.
- baby 4y agoI agree except that I don’t think it was desperation that triggered this. They optimize for the wrong metric, and started seeing huge growth number and thought this was great. What happened is that they used the huge user base they had built to convert their app into an addictive tiktok-like app. Of course it was going to work in terms of growth. But it’s a different app. They should have spinned that off as a different app. Not as the biggest part of the social networking tool that was super useful to people. It’s really a shame because I don’t think we’ll see many opportunities in history for an app that everyone has and that can be used to connect people.