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."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @11:30PM
"...
So now you've made the big shrink
Meanwhile we'll keep acting big
We well-bred beautiful people
Who says we have to go too?
Cops and Mason businessmen
Were exempted from the ovens
As if you weren't already.
The rest of you are all our termites now "
People are there to be mined and spied on not to be heard
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Justin Case on Tuesday January 16 2018, @11:34PM (12 children)
This shrinkage is insufficient. I want facebook gone from the planet.
Of course some asshat would promptly replace it with something worse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @11:49PM (1 child)
Agree, Fakebook needs to die. Why is it every time I hear that website mentioned in conversation, it's some fake drama or insignificant interpersonal bullshit? I know precisely why; Fakebook is "the internet" for narcissistic imbeciles who appear unaware that most of their bullshit is legally actionable. If said legal action (defamation, stalking, harassment) were to start happening, the platform would die. Not a moment too soon!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:24AM
Maybe because you're hanging with the wrong crowd? Why not join a nice Facebook group and discover what you've been missing. Facebook, because resistance is futile.
(Score: 1) by Apparition on Tuesday January 16 2018, @11:52PM (3 children)
Hopefully it would take Twitter down with it.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:54AM (2 children)
Twitter wasn't that bad, never had an account but did read a handful of accounts for the news. Recently, they just lost the plot - neoliberals trying to buy or censor their way to "absolute truth" to support a dead and bankrupt ideology.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:28AM
Damn liberals always getting in the way of good people trying to spread their hate. One of these days one of our kind will create a social media platform the helps push hate to the next level so we won't be so dependent on these idiotic private companies with their own rules and terms of service.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:38PM
"Neoliberals" does not mean liberals the way you think it does. It describes a school of thought in economics where markets are self-correcting and should be allowed to do that without government intervention.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:36AM (1 child)
And since those are the only people PAYING for facebook, you can tell immediately none of this is going to happen.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:35AM
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".
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:21AM (2 children)
He can't figure out how to use email
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:55AM
Chuck rocks at chuck? That's communication of some form.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:43PM
Talk to Chuck's mother, Aunt Molly. Or get his address from his sister Jan.
That's how we did it in the old days, and it still works.
Facebook is a parasite on our natural human interpersonal networks. It does not create them, as much as they'd like to. It was briefly interesting to find out what a couple classmates are up to now, but after those twenty seconds had elapsed I realised they were different people and had different lives and good for them, but I'm gonna go to work now.
People remain people, with our instincts hard-wired, and we can go out and create new interpersonal networks through shared experience, any time we like.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:28PM
This.
Of course, Facebook itself is the something worse that some asshat replaced AOL with.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:22AM (1 child)
Now when someone speaks of the lies, deceit, crimes committed by the treasonous jews, it gives them a feeling of being useful and generally positive. Fb being a creation of spy agencies has been exposed of destroying society in a systematic way "people get a high when someone 'likes' their comment".
There is no use hating fb. It is your open enemy and you must destroy it, not hate it. Expose it and use alternatives when needed.
And by the way, people should enter someone's life and then leave at some point, not continue in the same place forever. It is OK to stop meeting or being in touch with people.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:11AM
Facebook doesn't want to die: it wants to know more about real people to exploit and monetize the shit out of their personal data, and stop hosting sterile business content for free that doesn't generate any revenue.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:53AM (10 children)
It was sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow
It required commitment and thought, selsfies..Not possible, pictures of you food/family/outhouse...you better be serious about it, but it did allow actual methods of communication, SMS, IRC, USENET, Chat of various flavours, Email all totally possible @56K, sometimes back tracking and seeing where you went wrong is the only way forward
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:03AM (1 child)
Speed has nothing to do with it. Normies and casuals ruin everything and there's no going back.
Enjoy your memories of the golden age of the internet.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:06AM
Your wrong speed has everything to do with it, when it take an hour or two just to get the subject lines from usenet or several 15 or 20 mins to get a high res porn pic those people stop and do not use it, they will use irc, chat etc but a lot of the bullshit that is the current internet is not possible @56K, facefuck, instagram, JAVASCRIPT
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:22AM (7 children)
For the entire campus to share. We were all happy with it
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 17 2018, @02:51AM (6 children)
I need 1 Gbps. Maybe 56 Gbps.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:08AM (5 children)
Seek help IRL not online, or you know just kill yourself
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:12AM (4 children)
Internet too slow; can't find IRL friends on Facebook VR.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:15AM (2 children)
Well I think you know what to do
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:19AM (1 child)
Yeah. Piss on your grave under the bridge.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:27AM
Look just because I'm living under a bridge doesn't mean I'm wrong, things have gone far afield and is harming people, it's not necessarily a bad idea to call for an INTERNET INTERVENTION junkies and sick people don't necessarily know what they are doing and in this case we need to take all of silicon valley into a room and do some deprogramming from the cult they have been indoctrinated into
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:20AM
Banks of 56k modems should be easily available from the remnant of AOL these days, BBS and I don't mean rule 34
(Score: 5, Insightful) by idiot_king on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:26AM (6 children)
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.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:55AM (5 children)
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)
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
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
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
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
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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crafoo on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:23AM (2 children)
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @11:37AM (1 child)
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
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:59AM
Facebook? Shrink? Laughing SO hard, I think I ruptured something. Oh ouch! Sh^*&^t that hurts! Posts and dials emergency number...