Facebook is sitting on the largest audience of real-world identities and hasn't entered the market of microtransactions in exchange for content (like news) yet [1], even though they could single-handedly wipe out the half a dozen or so other firms -- the likes of Flattr, Brave, Webpass, the rebooted Medium, the half-thought-out never-advertised-then-mysteriously-vanished Google Contributor --
the ones who had to build their audience while trying to make this model work for years. This is just bizarre.<p>Instead they let themselves caught up in the 'fake news' fiasco (a factor absent from the article), re-prioritized personal posts, and deprecated their previous actually-kinda-nice attempts to give a proper home to professionally-written journalistic content, such that it's not jarringly intermingled with memes, baby photos, and humblebrags.<p>Part of their problem, perhaps, is the insistence on using the Facebook brand for their homegrown stuff, which is ironic considering they run parallel services under different names. No doubt a lot of it comes from having to harness the idle time of massive numbers of Facebook users sitting in their flagship website or app, but if they started a news portal with micropayments, cross-pollinated with their network of apps and backed with their identities, they would still do more volume within a month than any of their competitors managed to do so in years.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375917" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375917</a>
> One former employee familiar with the matter said media companies' business models had initially been all but an afterthought. "The idea that these products could meaningfully impact the revenue of the news industry just didn’t really come up," the former employee said. "I don’t know that anyone [at Facebook] took that piece all that seriously."<p>Whoops! Almost accidentally destroyed the business model of a free press! Good thing we encouraged all those bullshit clickbait meme Facebook pages to grow on our platform. They'll do the hard, non-profitable accountability journalism.
It isn't a popular opinion, but my feeling is that publishers' power in the marketplace is severely underestimated. For those of us on HN who do use Facebook, the content experience is pretty similar: a few juicy friend updates per [day? week?]. One or two good articles. Then a morass of terrible, spammy content.<p>It's clear that actual users don't put enough into the FB ecosystem to make FB interesting for people each day, despite FB's best efforts. Content owners therefore have quite a bit of power. Because if FB suddenly stopped surfacing one or two great The Atlantic pieces per day, FB gets <i>noticeably worse</i> for me as a single user.<p>The old economics of journalism are: publications get 100% of ad revenue. The Google economics (2001 - 2012) are that publishers get ~65% of revenue and Google gets ~35%. That is self-evidently failing. [1] And Facebook built instant articles on those now-failing economics. The price system is working. Which is why IAs are getting less popular.<p>Maybe a decentralized web isn't such a bad thing.<p>[1] I'm self-interested: I cofounded a software company in this space, premised on empowering content producers.
I recently deleted my Twitter account. Probably in the next few weeks, I'll log onto Facebook, request email addresses, and delete my account there too. Facebook has taken on too much of this "take over the world" corporate attitude.
Good, I don't go to Facebook for news, or really any shared article or video. It's a social network, I want to keep up with my social circle, not get pulled into political fights between family and friends.
If people on facebook enjoyed reading long, information rich articles and commenting on the content in an enriching way, i'd probably never have left that platform. But here I am.<p>Images, gifs and short videos seems like a logical step forward for mass consumption. Can't really blame facebook for heading in that direction.
I solve the quality issues of my facebook feed by "unfollowing" all of my friends. There is a section in facebook settings where you can do this all at once.<p>The resulting feed has no post and displays "no more posts to show".<p>It is still possible to use messenger and to browse profiles. But this empty feed has been a massive time saver!
If your friends are the sort who post, and like to read, actual textual comments, FB is happy to show that to you. I have some friends who posted mostly photos and/or videos but by unfollowing only <i>them</i> my feed became interesting.
Why do so many of the complaints I see about Facebook in almost all forums seem to instead be about the complaintant's friends and family and the things they share? Why you would be Facebook friends with someone who shares stupid or uninteresting things? And if you feel obligated to maintain that friendship, why would you complain about it? How is it Facebook's fault that your friends and family share stupid content?