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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

That's enough angry Facebooking for you [theverge.com]:

Late on Thursday, Facebook announced a plan to emphasize more "meaningful" interactions on the platform [theverge.com]. 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 [theverge.com] — 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 [facebook.com], 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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