As a former active user on Facebook, this sort of change may succeed in bringing people like me back to the site. The minimal effort required in hitting that "share" button means that every page that organically reached my friends would end up polluting my news feed as well with crap that I wasn't interested in and got in the way of what I had originally joined FB for. If my friends aren't seeing these posts, they won't be clicking "share" on them either.<p>I've had my account on Facebook since 2004 when it first became available at my university. Since the very beginning it's first usefulness was as a Rolodex, basically. I recently stopped using the site (without deactivating my account, because it still serves that digital Rolodex function) because >75% of the posts on my newsfeed were either "organic" ads or propaganda.
Most of the offending posts were things that had been "shared" by my friends and not necessarily even posted by pages I had "liked" or "followed"<p>A principle I've been using recently to help me understand the world around me is that I am not special or unique, and when I do something, a lot of other people who are broadly similar to me are doing the same thing.
So, I assume that there are others like me who have recently been deleting the FB app and avoiding the website, if not deleting their accounts entirely. Facebook is almost certainly aware of it, and while publishers are always going to see stuff like this as a money grab, it may be necessary for the health of the platform for FB to clamp down on publisher patterns that are driving users away.
Facebook pulling a bait and switch for newspapers that forces them to pay to reach an audience they used to reach for free (organic reach)? This has only happened repeatedly in the history of facebook.<p>Facebook is like a game where the difficulty rises after you've had a taste of success. And by difficulty I mean you have to pay to reach your previous levels of success.<p>Facebook did this for those first games (e.g. Farmville), then for pages (remember the idea of advertizing for likes to raise the visibility of your page in the news feed? <a href="https://www.matthewbarby.com/facebook-likes-dont-matter/" rel="nofollow">https://www.matthewbarby.com/facebook-likes-dont-matter/</a>), now for newspapers. All in the service of "keeping the news feed clean/relevant for users", but really it is just effective monetization of the attention of Facebook's users.<p>Never become dependent on Facebook's feebies in any way, because you will soon be paying for them. But I figure everyone already knew this strategy of Zuck's Facebook -- it is nothing new, it is "The Strategy" over there.
The best part about Twitter is the simple timeline. Twitter doesn’t care about what the account represents, so all accounts have the same priority.<p>Yes, Twitter has started to mess with its timeline, but that’s besides the point.<p>Facebook’s noise problem is one that they themselves created. Countless of times I found myself subscribed to some page only because I liked one of their posts. Which is bullshit, because in my vocabulary Follow != Like.<p>Then they tried fixing this by prioritizing posts based on a bullshit ranking system only they understand. That didn’t work either.<p>Oh well, maybe we’ll go back full circle after all.
The annoying thing here, as a Facebook user, is that if I've liked the "Cute Puppies" page it's because I want to see their cute puppies.<p>To then strip them entirely out of my Facebook feed unless they hand Facebook some cash feels like a step back in my usage of Facebook.
I think this is a great turning point for Facebook and might even bring Facebook back on the map SOCIAL media wise. Since almost all people I know barely use Facebook anymore for communication, because you just don’t see any posts by your friends no more.
> <i>In main newsfeed are now just friend and sponsored posts.</i><p>Haven't seen many posts by my friends this year, only people commenting or liking stuff on various pages. Not sure if it is because my friends (including me) have stopped posting, or if it just drowns in everything else.
This is wishful thinking, but maybe this move will push content creators back to providing RSS feeds so their audience can follow them without needing to use Facebook.
While this is a good move for Facebook's users, who will get a less cluttered feed, it's a disaster for publishers who use Facebook for content distribution. For example, over the past year my company has been supplying news to a network of two million MMA fans on Facebook. With this change it's very difficult to make enough revenue to continue: less reach = less clickthrough to our site = less revenue. The silver lining is that if publishers write off Facebook as a distribution method then perhaps they can work more on other distribution methods, generating some innovation.<p><insert reply about platform dependency here>
If you are a small business owner and want to do paid promotion.Please not spend on likes, and boosting posts also doesn't help much. Create ads with very specific targeting and take users to your landing page and try to catch them again with retargeting. This will help you reach better audience and let you calculate definitive ROIs.
Big difference between what the article says:<p><i>"The idea behind the Explore Feed is to help Facebook users discover more content across the social network, beyond posts from friends and Pages you already follow. Instead, this feed surfaces recommended content it thinks you might find interesting."</i><p>And what the author of the Medium post says:
<i>"All posts by pages are moved from News Feed to Explore Feed. In main News Feed are now just friend and sponsored posts."</i><p>If the first is true, then eh. Another useless tab I won't ever use. If the latter is true, then this is a gamechanger. Facebook has turned into the literal feed of news for many people for many years at this point.<p>If it's reduced back down into what it was in 2010, it's going to outrage a lot of older people who use it for more than a friend feed.
Frankly the only stuff that is not completely brain-melting on Facebook can be found in groups, which mostly doesn't do a lot of moving posts around based on what the system thinks you'll engage with. I only use Facebook to advertise to people, having long grown disgusted and bored by the main timeline as a user.
What are even facebook "pages you follow"? Is it anything that isn't a personal fb account in the friend list?<p>Do groups count in this category, or are groups a third category?<p>I don't think I follow any "pages" such as those created by companies or artists (apart from personal accounts).<p>If "pages" were basically fb's equivalent of corporate accounts, why would you want to follow them? Isn't that like signing up for commercials in your feed?
If I see how many companies don't create a homepage but rely on Facebook entirely. Or have a very stale homepage while they keep posting news on Facebook and Instagram. And I don't get it, if you use a free Wordpress setup with a few simple plug-ins you can already post all of your content immediately to all social media channels together with an update on your homepage.
To an outside observer (I do not have a FB account), this looks like a good plan from the FB side. Kind of like GMail inbox categories/tabs. All about reducing the signal (friends) to noise (something you may have liked 3 years ago) ratio. You will still see as many ads, but the content between those will be more relevant.<p>Too bad FB does not offer ad-free account as an option.
It is their platform, right? I’d assume they are within their rights to determine how Information flows within it. Obviously they’d want it to be in a way that positively impacts their bottom line. If the ability to reach people on their platform through pages is valuable, then i should not be surprised if they want those who use it to pay for it.
Looked at this "Explore feed" today. Only "viral videos", "funny animals" videos, listicles about casual topics. Recently I started to see the same content in Instagram Explore tab too. This is how their super-targeted AI trained on terabytes of behavioral data works? The same quality of targeting as on TV. Why they gather data on users at all?