Facebook discovers cost of factory-farming users

NEW YORK — Mark Zuckerberg is discovering the cost of factory-farming Facebook’s users. The $550 billion social network’s success harvesting advertising dollars through mass-appeal content has made it very profitable. The snag is that users are increasingly unhappy. The founder and chief executive’s return to focusing more on their welfare may limit short-run earnings but should improve sustainability.

The Facebook farm has become increasingly unwholesome. The company is at the center of a storm over the promotion of false news stories, some potentially placed with the intention of interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Time spent per user on the core site has been falling, albeit from a high base, according to Pivotal Research. Zuckerberg’s stated goals for 2018 are fixing the site, cleaning up abuse, limiting interference by nation states, and “making sure time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”

Now Facebook is changing its algorithms, according to a post on Thursday, to prioritize news-feed items that users’ friends share and interact with and reduce the amount of third-party non-advertising content.

Multiple studies link time spent on social networks with unhappiness, and watching mass-produced videos and reading clickbait articles on a screen surely don’t help. Facebook hopes higher-quality feeds will work better. “We feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being,” Zuckerberg wrote.

This along with possible changes like favoring reputable news sources over more sensational ones, as Facebook is considering according to the Wall Street Journal, will probably hurt the company financially over the short run. Time spent on the site by users will probably fall, and that means advertising will grow more slowly.

That helps explain the 4 percent decline in the company’s shares by early afternoon on Friday. It’s worth it over the long term, however, if it keeps users sufficiently content to remain on the Facebook farm.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook tests splitting its News Feed into two

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc said on Monday it was testing the idea of dividing its News Feed in two, separating commercial posts from personal news in a move that could lead some businesses to increase advertising.

The Facebook News Feed, the centerpiece of the world’s largest social network service, is a streaming series of posts such as photos from friends, updates from family members, advertisements and material from celebrities or other pages that a user has liked.

The test, which is occurring in six smaller countries, now offers two user feeds, according to a statement from the company: one feed focused on friends and family and a second dedicated to the pages that the customer has liked.

The change could force those who run pages, everyone from news outlets to musicians to sports teams, to pay to run advertisements if they want to be seen in the feed that is for friends and family.

The test is taking place in Bolivia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Serbia, Slovakia and Sri Lanka, and it will likely go on for months, Adam Mosseri, the Facebook executive in charge of the News Feed, said in a blog post.

Mosseri said the company has no plans for a global test of the two separate feeds for its 2 billion users.

Facebook also does not currently plan to force commercial pages “to pay for all their distribution,” he said.

Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, frequently tests changes big and small as it tries to maximize the time people spend scrolling and browsing the network. Sometimes it makes changes permanent, and other times not.

Depending on how people respond, two news feeds could mean that they see fewer links to news stories. News has proved to be a tricky area for Facebook, as hoaxes and false news stories have sometimes spread easily on the network.

The test has already affected website traffic for smaller media outlets in recent days, Slovakian journalist Filip Struhárik wrote over the weekend in a post on Medium.

Publishers might need to buy more Facebook ads to be seen, he wrote: “If you want your Facebook page posts to be seen in old newsfeed, you have to pay.”

source: interaksyon.com