I keep bumping into this reference to facebook acknowledging only 15% of "fans" will see a given post, but I've never found an official mention of this. Where i

I keep bumping into this reference to facebook acknowledging only 15% of "fans" will see a given post, but I've never found an official mention of this. Where is this information coming from and what was the context in which it was mentioned? What follows is speculation, but it's easy to imagine that out of a total fanbase, only a certain percentage "catch" your post while it's fresh, before it's buried behind newer stuff coming in from the ever-increasing number of pages people like. While it may have been the case that back in the day the response one got from posting something on a facebook page was much better than it is now, it's also true that facebook was never as popular as it is today and that users' newsfeeds were never as busy as they are now. And as people subscribe to multiple publishers and their attention gets diluted, you can't expect their engagement with all of these pages to remain at pre-growth levels (or grow). There's another twist to this. Too many posts from pages thumping activity from friends may alienate users. How do you balance these two types of information? Someone's going to get less airtime, and since (I assume) the bulk of posts comes from pages, they get silenced based on whether or not you interacted with them recently and whatever other criteria facebook can come up with. Same for friends you don't care much for. Whether or not facebook can be more transparent with regards to how it determines which posts to show and which to hide is another issue. Does the average Joe care? Will he mess things up if given controls that are too advanced? Note that Facebook doesn't censor information, it merely filters what you see by default. You can still go to individual pages or profiles and see their full activity. There also seems to be a backlash against any commercial endeavour facebook may have. "Facebook is selling your information!" - is it? where can I buy this information? is it really selling in the sense that most people would understand? No. But that's the term that is being used. "Facebook is making people pay for airtime!" well, kinda. Personally I think that should be "Facebook is making people pay for ADDITIONAL airtime" for all the reasons stated above. Maybe they got into this mess due to poor communication but I don't buy the "broken on purpose" argument. That's against facebook's interest in the long term. I don't mean to defend facebook, just bring into discussion the potential complexities behind developments which people tend to imply are malicious.