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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 crafoo on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:23AM (2 children)

    by crafoo (6639) on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:23AM (#623412)

    Facebook is all about data mining interactions between real humans. It's why it exists. It's what makes it valuable to the agencies. Unfortunately facebook is mostly used passively by people now, reading news, looking through local even announcements and so forth. People are much less often giving up valuable personal information through direct interactions with other humans on the convenient NSA/CIA-moderated communication medium. They would very much like to reverse this trend.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:37AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:37AM (#623537)

    Yes and no. They sure love data, any data. And your "social graph" is really what they're after, not what you say to cousin jim. Your every interaction is recorded for all infinity and analyzed to death. And it's the most mundane little things that will expose everything you ever wished to hide when they get a lot of those little bits. It's downright scary.

    So whether you post or post personal details it fairly irrelevant. The amount you spend on Failbook and consequently any interaction is the oil these guys are after. Who, when, how long, how you moved your pointer, how you moved your phone, what the mic picked up during, literally anything at all. Here the only winning move is to not play.

    This is just about making the biggest spenders more visible. Oligopoly. Additionally they are getting scared people are starting to dislike their service, they have to tune down the current level of user abuse. You know, you never know where the limits are until you cross them. Proprietary software is all about finding the balance of how much abuse people will tolerate while still keep using the product. And sadly it's an incredible amount.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:56PM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:56PM (#623582) Journal

      That's why it's important to project a persona, not your reality, on social media. It does a couple things for you. First, it preserves your privacy. Second, it spares you further scrutiny because absences are as suspicious as presences. Third, it serves as a canary in a coal mine that can help you discern who are your real friends and those who are trying to manipulate you; the ones who are trying to manipulate you will refer to things they know about the persona.

      In the three letter agencies it's called a "cover." Creating a cover is something we may all come to learn to preserve our privacy and freedom.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.