I had hoped this article was going to be able how to convince your friends to communicate with a medium other than Facebook.
Then there was a Newsfeed. Then it showed more than just wall posts. Then there were TOO MANY things on it, so they scaled it back. The Newsfeed was an experiment, and it worked, but it needed tweaking. That's why this happened.
That they now allow you to pay to promote is secondary to the original origin of why the Newsfeed works like it works. I'm glad to have the option to pay to promote and I'm glad larger fan bases need to pay more. Now, when I have something legitimate to announce, I can pay to do it. When I just want to engage, I better engage well or else I'll get buried. GOOD!
Sure they had to scale it back, but the conflict of interests is real. People don't necessarily want to see only posts from those who are willing to pay. It's not that I begrudge them the opportunity to make money, but I think this clearly weakens Facebook's usefulness to users.
It's one thing if Facebook is filtering to show me the posts with the most organic engagement in order to decrease noise in my feed. It's completely different if some of the pages I follow have very little chance of reaching me based solely on their inability or unwillingness to pay for access. OA hyperbole notwithstanding, I think Facebook are overreaching here.
It's not sustainable for Facebook to degrade the usefulness of their service in this way for a short-term cash gain. 15-20% throughput to fans is so low as to confound expectations, and I'm saying this will bite them ass.
My understanding was that this doesn't work so well anymore. I think paid promotion should be a way of boosting the visibility of content, but definitely not at the expense of content that would have spread virally if it wasn't artificially limited.