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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday January 16 2018, @11:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the less-time-suck dept.

That's enough angry Facebooking for you:

Late on Thursday, Facebook announced a plan to emphasize more "meaningful" interactions on the platform. Posts are considered meaningful when they generate lots of comments, likes, and shares. Facebook's researchers have found that when people are actively commenting on posts, they tend to feel better about using social networks — and feel better about themselves in general.

The change may sound relatively small, but it's likely to have significant consequences for the broad subset of Facebook users that aren't individual people: media companies, small businesses, big brands, and everyone else who has come to see Facebook's News Feed as an essential way to reach audiences and customers. In a post yesterday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the pages managed by those businesses are likely to reach far fewer people in 2018.

"As we roll this out, you'll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media," he wrote. "And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard -- it should encourage meaningful interactions between people."

He added: "Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too."


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by idiot_king on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:26AM (6 children)

    by idiot_king (6587) on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:26AM (#623387)

    Don't worry about those bombs going off outside, tell me how you feel about this picture of a kitten riding a tortoise.
    It makes you feel happy doesn't it? Very happy.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:55AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:55AM (#623390)

    I think for once I agree with you. There is something very strange going on with all the narratives that have been pushed lately in the media. Now net neutrality goes away. The nuclear clock approaches midnight. And now Facebook is backing out of the news aggregator business?

    Something has me very weirded out.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:46AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:46AM (#623400)

      I see what they did there. Advertising in feeds had gotten obnoxious on Facebook, to the point of making messages from other users get drowned out, so they pulled back the "advertising." With it, they pulled back the ability of different working-class interests to connect. Expect the internet to tend towards a walled garden now. Welcome back to AOL. People will have to rely more on face-to-face contact, perhaps outside of those who visit what they'll call "darknets." No idea if they'll actually be darknets (remember changing a number in a URL is "hacking"). Probably places like this site.

      In other news, the chocolate rations have been increased!

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:58AM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:58AM (#623404) Journal

        Their research indicated that people want to see more stuff from their friends (the original killer feature of Facebook was that "everyone" you know is on there) and less stuff they could find by going to news.google.com or the individual Facebook pages of the news outlets.

        They also had PR problems all year. Not just Russia-related stuff, but the fake news phenomenon on general, which thrived on the platform (a problem you don't see as much on Google News because it is a whitelist of news sites). Reducing the amount of news that can spontaneously appear is an easy way of reducing the size of the problem to something more manageable.

        Don't stop at describing a "walled garden". If Facebook's aggressive push into VR pays off, look foward to a "walled reality".

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:15AM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:15AM (#623409) Journal

        The last thing Facebook wants is the kind of protests that have hit companies like Uber. Or the user malaise on Twitter.

        Given the scale of Facebook and the censorship demanded by various parties (corporations, regressives on both the left and the right, many governments, law enforcement), there is no way for them to satisfy everybody. But they might be able to avoid people being able to point to one specific turd of a story in the sea of the crap and use it as a rallying cry for a Faceboycott.

        Facebook's growth could be plateauing soon. It seems to be doing quite well for the moment [techcrunch.com]. But eventually it will run out of people to connect in the third world and will become tied to global population growth (if it's lucky enough not to alienate and shed users).

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:36AM

        by anubi (2828) on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:36AM (#623445) Journal

        I guess I see Facebook/Twitter kinda like a hangout place in the mall. Lotsa people seem to like it. But there is nothing much there for me.

        I'd rather hang out here. You guys and me at least share some experiences in common. There, well, do I really give a damn what some girl wore to a prom? Or who is going with who? The kind of stuff that goes on over there is not my cup of tea. Everyone spilling their personal life all over the internet, and expect me to as well? I just don't think that way. That stuff bores the shit out of me, and I really don't wanna bore others with such insignificant trivia either.

        I have nothing against them, Facebook or Twitter. But any visit is short lived. I have not registered for either, so I am quite restricted.

        I can definitely see why "social" people like it. For the same reason every woman I have ever known was addicted to the telephone.

        --
        "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:50PM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:50PM (#623579) Journal

        The Internet had walled gardens at the beginning, too. They were called portals then. AOL was one. Yahoo was another. There were a handful of others whose names aren't springing to mind now. Microsoft arrived late to the game and tried to set up theirs, too, but people had begun to move on by then. Social networks aren't new, either. The basic idea was already established in the BBS days, and has only evolved slightly since then. After BBS there was GeoCities, then Yahoo Groups, then Friendster, MySpace, Meetup, and many others.

        We survived all those, too, and we will survive Facebook and Twitter.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.