I don’t understand how to use Facebook’s Sponsored Posts | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand how to use Facebook’s Sponsored Posts

edjiang.com

10 pointsEdJiang13 comments

Major props for diplomacy. "We can't seem to use them effectively" is an extremely tactful way to avoid saying the obvious: Facebook appears to be scamming you.

It's too bad we don't have a culture/ecosystem of instrumenting our browser to perform mass surveillance on company behavior. It would be interesting to collect data like this across many advertisers and do a proper study. Seems to me that the hub-and-spokes information sharing model that companies have with their customers creates a form of obfuscation of business practice that works to the company's advantage.

Woah. When I went to comment on this post it was on the front page. When I submitted my comment it was nowhere to be found.

There should be a required comment when YC folks bury a story. Otherwise it's pretty sketchy.

Agreed. Really weird; I have no idea why it would have gotten nerfed.

It's really frustrating that a few single people have the power to remove anything they don't like without any comment. A lot of people here are against the editorial control on cable news, so how is this any different than how cable news operates?

I have experienced the same with our page. Likes from parts of the world we don't engage in and this seems sketchy. Knowing that there are schemes exist to purchase likes for very cheap from certain parts of the world, one can't help but wonder if there is such a thing going on with these promoted posts. You wouldn't think so but our engagement is at an all time low now, even the promoted posts attract few likes but no comments or spam comments now.

Facebook says you should get 15% organic views if you don't promote a post. We have around 10,000 likes on our page and without promoting a post it gets around 125-150 views now. You do the math.

I stand with Mark Cuban and George Takei on this. Facebook should stop this craziness and just show everybody the full feed instead of trying to adjust it in all weird ways.

Even on my personal account it's pretty obvious that certain people don't see some of my posts unless there's some threshold of likes/comments. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing, because my news feed would be an uncontrollable firehose if I saw everything.

If I post something, it seems that friends within the network of the place I currently live are the first to see or respond (despite the time I post it) and once it has enough "likes" or comments, I start seeing feedback from college friends or hometown friends.

Re: your second paragraph, when you think about it, the FB mission of keeping you connected to your friends doesn't work because your distant friends remain distant and only closer friends show up in your feed. In my personal feed I keep seeing updates from the same 20 people over and over. I have no clue what the other 450 are up to unless I go to their pages.

If all I wanted from FB was a relationship with my closer friends, then Path is much nicer.

Our buddy Mark Cuban was at it again yesterday re: this. http://www.wired.com/business/2012/11/mark-cuban-facebook-ti...

That's an excellent point. For a while I thought "Man, my new friends in this city sure do use Facebook a lot more than my other friends", but a quick glance at a distant friend's timeline shows that isn't the case.

The problem is we'll never really know for sure. We don't know if our friends are just ignoring us or if they've even seen our posts. Edgerank is a good idea, when our friends/likes/subscribes get high, but if implemented incorrectly, you can end up missing a lot of updates that are relevant to you.

It's a really hard problem to solve. I wish Facebook would let me choose certain people and say "Put everything this person/band/page posts into my newsfeed".

User with non-English name and language settings as English-US is very common.

Gotchya. I can understand that fact.

However, our page's followers are mostly students in the Seattle area, and I personally know as we've had slow and steady growth in likes in the last year.

There's no reason promoted posts should be reaching such untargeted users -- and I'm trying to figure out what's going on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com