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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:35AM (#623453)
    Not necessarily. Currently too many people might be getting ads and "featured posts" from businesses that they won't be buying from anyway. And might not even be interested in seeing at all, not even once.

    And those businesses paid for those ads.

    While businesses paying for unprofitable ads is good for Facebook in the short term it's not necessarily good in the long term - since more businesses may just give up on paying Facebook for anything. Or worse more people would start building and using stuff to block such Facebook ads.

    There are people who actually buy after seeing some ads, or might correctly inform friends who would be interested. With some work Facebook probably can figure out who and what ads.

    If I was advertising and Facebook gave me more $$$ for the ad money I spend, I wouldn't care if I reached fewer people especially if it meant not "spamming" people who don't want to hear about my stuff (I would like to pay less for ads too but I doubt Facebook will want to significantly reduce their total income ;) ). I know some idiots actually think all 7 billion people in the world would want to buy their product or should at least hear about it, but all that does it make more people try to block such ads.

    Even Google is making moves to block some ads with their browser. They've realized that "less is more".
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