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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Here's what LittleThings had to say about being dependent on Facebook in June 2016:

>“I think we need each other. We need them for the traffic; they need us for the content,” Mr. Speiser said on this week’s WSJ Media Mix podcast. “I think [Facebook] cares very much. I think without the content all these media companies are providing there’d be that much less reason to go on to the news feed.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-loves-publishers-says-...

Turns out no, I like my newsfeed better without all that content. The content I want to see on facebook is things that my friends post.

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“I think we need each other."

This is the epitome of cognitive dissonance. Deluding oneself into thinking Facebook "needs" them, when in actuality it's Facebook with 1000 times the power. Did anyone seriously believe this?

1000? More like 1000 times that!

As noted by Daring Fireball:

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/02/28/littlethings

> As noted by Daring Fireball

> Any publisher that is dependent on Facebook, or that trusts Facebook, is out of their goddamn mind.

I think it is okay to bootstrap this way, but you must have an exit strategy.

Yeah. This isn't the first time we've seen Facebook pull the rug out on something. Used to be that my news feed was absolutely full of posts from the Facebook apps/games platform spamming your whole friends list to join into Mafia Wars or FarmVille.

Eventually Facebook caught on that this was annoying and not a good use of the news feed, but if your business was dependent on it I imagine the effects were similar.

Having seen that happen before, building a company based on what Facebook decides to put in the news feed sounds insane.

What would that even look like? I think it would be very hard to transition a Facebook-only audience to some other platform.

Collect everyone's email address along the way? Then you might as well be an email newsletter business.

Give users reasons to engage with the website directly rather than always gated through someone else's experience?

That doesn't necessarily mean "email newsletter business", it could be any of the number of ways businesses have tried to convert first impressions into continued engagement. The referral platform shouldn't particularly matter, really. Today's complaints about Facebook-driven traffic drying up are last century's complaints about Yellow Pages-driven phone calls drying up. How are you handling people after they arrived/called? What other avenues for referrals have you explored? There's a lot of business advice that I don't think has largely changed there anywhere near as much as the technology medium has.

It's really hard to convince people to regularly "pull" content from you versus agreeing to have it "pushed" to them somehow. You need one heckuva brand.

I like email because it's one of the only "push" media that's both widely deployed and decentralized. (I once thought RSS would become that for the web, but it hasn't worked out that way.)

In any event, if you've been relying on Facebook to supply 75% of the traffic that goes in the top of the funnel, you're going to be having a bad day when that disappears. Even if the funnel is great.

Just because it is hard doesn't mean the companies get a pass for not doing it. If you don't have a brand that users want to "pull" from you, what are you even doing as a publisher? That's almost Publishing 101. It's easy to blame Facebook for the hard work that they should have done all along, is all I'm saying here. ;)

As an RSS fan (and still an active user), I do agree that one of the prime failings here was that publishers in general too strongly backed the Facebook horse instead of, say, training users about the advantages of RSS. But yeah, why do the hard work today when you can wait for the rug to pulled out from under you by a third party and then do the hard work anyway?

>they need us for the content

Wow, that's adorable

Wait you didn't enjoy having "7 Things In Your Home That Could Kill Your Cat Right Now" shared on feed?

What's wrong with you? Do you just not give a fuck about cats??

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