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Comment by voyou | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. Eat24 is mad that Facebook won't carry their ads for free, and I can't say that that's a position I have much sympathy for.

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Or Eat24 is mad that Facebook are demanding money to carry Eat24 contents for free.

If spotify started to demand money for artists rather than pay them, artists would start to get angry.

Facebook isn't "demanding money to carry Eat24 contents for free". It's suggesting that if they want to bombard large numbers of people with pictures of food to convince them to order takeaway, they probably shouldn't rely on the free feed delivery mechanisms to do so.

Let's not pretend Eat24 was doing Facebook a favour here, or that anyone signed up to Facebook to look at pictures of pizza. Facebook was doing Eat24 a favour, and Eat24 were earning so nicely from it they were willing to experiment with shelling out money to continue distributing the same content.

I'm not sure I understand the difference between "<company> ads" and "<company>'s content". Facebook is a promotional platform. Content posted there by companies are advertisements, nearly by definition.

People like/follow accounts of companies on social networks in order to consume the content those accounts post. Certainly this includes marketing material, but a key distinction between this and ordinary ads is that people have made a deliberate decision, "I wish to see content from this company".

That content becomes part of the reason people spend time on the platform, adding more opportunities for Facebook to sell actual ads (including to competitors, I might add). The network effect applies to companies, too!

Facebook is now denying that content to users who have said they want it, and destroying most of the value to the companies of creating that content. This is a reversal of their prior policies (thus a bait-and-switch), dishonest (if they don't want companies participating in their social network, they should just ban them and make them run ordinary ads), and just plain ol' stupid (because they're deliberately damaging their network and their image).

I think, what you are saying is, "It's not an ad if somebody signed up to see it". It takes a lot of imagination to distinguish between "company content" and "ads" on a platform whose purpose is PR and promotion.

It takes no imagination to distinguish between "things users go to Facebook to see" and "things users do not go to Facebook to see".

I agree that people will want to see some ads and they will not want to see other ads. They're all still ads.

In your opinion, not in mine. If Facebook agrees with you, then Facebook should be honest and ban commercial entities from having accounts, instead requiring them to use only the ordinary advertising mechanisms.

But doesn't it change things slightly if you are subscribing to these advertisements?

The new Facebook algorithm is kind of like signing up (liking) to a newsletter and then only receiving it every 10th edition.

Liking your ad/page does not mean I want a constant stream of your ads. Under what circumstances would you believe that just because I said that I liked something you posted once or twice you now have some claim on my attention in the future and under what circumstances would that claim end?

They are mad because Facebook did a bait-and-switch.

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