Facebook Wants You to Post More About Yourself
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Then, over time, Facebook added new kinds of content to the News Feed, and added one-click re-sharing. People eventually found it easier to just click mouse buttons than make their own statements.
Next, they started curating people's News Feeds, selecting the content Facebook thought was important, instead of showing a raw stream of their friends' updates. Personal updates were squelched; linkbait and social gaming (Zynga, anyone?) were promoted.
To make matters worse, they stopped allowing subscribers to control their own News Feeds' content. Sure, you could hide updates from certain posters, or express a vague preference to "hide content like this" (whatever that means), but you could only do that one item at a time. There was never a way to control the News Feed to filter out everything but personal content. As a consequence of these maneuvers, Facebook expressed a clear business preference to keep people engaged through low-quality, quick-dopamine-hit content.
And those who continued to try to use Facebook as they'd done before noticed these changes. Their "Like" counts went down. People stopped commenting. In fact it became clear that perhaps what they were posting -- even party invitations -- were never being seen by their friends at all.
So, it's natural that people stopped posting personal updates. For many, if Facebook isn't going to guarantee that your friends see them, taking the time to write starts to seem like wasted effort. And that's exactly what it felt like for me.
So, now Facebook wants us to post more about ourselves. But they created this problem. If they want to solve it, they already know how, because the site made it a great place to do so 10 years ago. But I doubt that they will, because it conflicts too strongly with their profit motive.
Edit: At the same time, boosted posts for business pages targeting friends of friends seem to actually work well now. For a $20 investment, the phone actually rings, and it generates real sales.
It's a trap they built for themselves out of short-term thinking in the past, and even if they manage to change their own behavior (unlikely) it'll be a slow process replenishing the base of "users who care".
IIRC they went to the freeform timeline posts in order to imitate twitter's "share whatever at whoever" market, lest users who wanted to post other content go somewhere else with it.
Facebook needs to realize that they can't have it both ways. Facebook is either a site for people or a site for advertisers, not both.
What do you mean? You can ban links on a domain level.
Looking back, I sort of understand why. I've clicked on "hide all from person X" for a lot of the obnoxious/repeated offenders on my friends list. The ones left are probably the ones that don't post very often anyways. My facebook feed these days is almost exclusively filled with posts from groups/pages I follow due to their theme/topic.
Initially, when facebook was still young, they let you pick movies/hobbies/quotes/people you liked. It was then added to your page as if to "describe" you. At some point, those items became "pages" that were run by individuals that posted things. That was the end of Facebook, I think. So, I picked "Einstein" as a favourite celebrity/author at some point, therefore Facebook had someone create an Einstein group and spam me with semi-related articles? No thanks. That was when I promptly went ahead and removed all of those likes/groups/pages.
That brings me to another gripe with Facebook. A lot of Facebook pages/groups, and the admins running them, seem to view their group of "likes/followers" as a resource. They then go ahead and use Facebook as their own personal platform to espouse whatever thing they believe, regardless if it is related to the topic of the page at all. So, people stopped using their own personalities/profiles as platforms to spread their personal ideas and instead went behind "pages".
The mobile interface is also ridiculous. My friend’s phone was hot and he complained about his battery not lasting…he wanted to upgrade his iPhone 6 because of it! What was the real problem? The Facebook app, ALONE, consuming upwards of 30% of his battery!!!
Then there is the automatic distrust I feel these days whenever I see “log in with Facebook” or similar things. I just assume that this can’t be a good idea, kind of like receiving a scam E-mail. That kind of pattern is going to tarnish Facebook’s prospects long-term.
And why is Facebook chat supposed to be so great? What is new about this? I am so tired of technology falling into “pits”, where just because a company has your data you are supposed to suffer through whatever software stack they create. Microsoft did this with documents, now I am supposed to use a Facebook app just to reach anybody? No.
We used to know how to create standalone clients and open protocols...let’s get back there again and let Facebook die.
2. I've noticed that personal pictures get a flood of likes, no matter how trite. Widespread distribution by the algorithm + people like them.
3. Making my own post with multiple links as sources = basically invisible, compared to "sharing" similar content which is already going around Facebook.
Sometimes, of course, it's hard to discriminate between "what the algorithm doesn't like," and "what people just aren't interested in."
Aside from the anonymity, there are many aspects of current facebook design that makes it near impossible for ordinary folks to posts more personal stuff.
They're trying to have their cake and eat it.
I think Facebook has realized this problem a long time ago, and that is why they provide these algorithm curated timelines to their users, just so people won't be overwhelmed? And I guess then, in the end, it is about what the algorithm does, and ultimately what Facebook wants it to do, in extension what they want to be. Right now they have chosen to be a 50/50 mix of ads/status updates, so in order to penetrate the ads that are attention grabbing by design, it is easiest to do so with memes and easily digestible jokes, things like that, things also attention grabbing by design.
A lot of things have changed meaning (liking a band, now mean following them) and I think this has helped changed the Facebook experience for many of us, but mostly it has been pushes to show users posts from outside their social circles and show posts from public figures.
If I'm no longer reading my news feed, why would I start typing into it, hoping they are reading theirs?