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.
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.
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.
>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.
That's because there is no FB-level money to be made in "microtransactions in exchange for content", especially news content, and nobody cares for those firms, including Medium which has posted its second "We've failed to make any revenue, but pivoting to some vague BS" post by now.
Of course these firms are struggling -- (did I word this confusingly?) The point is, it's a market that never took off, and Facebook could change that very quickly, due to their sheer scale, their market penetration, their homescreen presence on millions of devices, and the value of the audience they already command.
They don't even need it to be a significant amount of their income. But they could show that some people are in fact willing to pay, which may be enough to entice big publishers to supply content to Facebook again, closing the loop on the original idea of "outsourcing [news] distribution".
No one (practically speaking) accepts micropayments because there's no unified system with good UX, and no one can build a unified system with a good UX because no one is accepting micropayments. Facebook could change all that in the same way that MS can push a feature to Windows and instantly make a new market. Barrier to entry looks different when you're a de facto monopoly.
The problem with micro transactions is that you're paying "real money" for information.
With so much "free stuff" on the internet, it's almost impossible to convince that your content is worth more than an infinite increase in value (1¢/free =infinite ). The "big guys" like the WSJ or IEEE can, simply by being close to canonical.
> Instead they let themselves caught up in the 'fake news' fiasco (a factor absent from the article),
I don't think it is as simple as that. It is a fiasco at face value. Only if we think those smart people running Facebook and Google really thought Lizard People and Chemtrails believers have turned around the election and now they are on a noble mission to rescue us from such horrors, because you know, they are pure and noble, and not evil. At least that is how they framed it.
But I think it was a about something else. It was a signal to powerful advertisement buyers that traditional media (TV news channels, newspapers etc) have failed at manufacturing consent, and they shouldn't waste their money on them anymore. That market vacuum can now be filled Google and Facebook - "Don't let fake news ruin your next campaign. Come to us. We'll make sure only true news gets out".
It's amazing how obvious it seems in hindsight, but it's a signal that if you change the underlying network architecture of how people consume content then the characteristics of popular content change.
Newspapers -> broadcast TV -> site based web -> network based web
I'd argue that network based web looks a lot more like the wild west days of hyper newspaper competition than broadcast TV. Fake news is essentially peer sourced yellow journalism. And I'm amazed publishers didn't see that coming -- there's historical precedent!
> 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.
This was nice while it lasted, but it was facing a lot of flak for it. Several news outlets were talking about how facebook was censoring news and only allowing
'democrat/liberal' news and blocking news from more conservative news outlets (which tend to be terrible, but oh well)
So they had to shut it down, and set up algorithmic news aggregator, which lead to the fake news problem.
This micro transaction model is the one chosen by steemit, using blockchain and cryptocurrency. It use its own cryptocurrency steem and reward curator and creator and others who in turn can use it to interact with the website.
It's too early to know if this particular website will be successful but this is the idea of how to get curated quality content with self sustained micro transactions. This might be a better incentive than fake internet points.
What would the microtransaction flow look like within the limited mobile screen real estate? Read the headline and the teaser paragraph, decide on whether to part with hard-earned 2c next?
This will resurface the sensationalist headline-grabbing click-optimized shenanigans of ViralNova and UpWorthy of the past, and you won't believe what happened next.
My Facebook feed is nothing but ads, low effort clickbait, and liberal anti-Trump news pieces. I'm pretty liberal myself but I just find the incredible level of groupthink to be completely insufferable.
Content from friends and family is rare to nonexistent these days.
For finding clickbait, memes, etc., reddit is pretty much strictly superior to FB.
If I want to follow the news, my FB feed is one of the most biased sources on the internet.
In short, FB has almost no purpose for me anymore.
> If I want to follow the news, my FB feed is one of the most biased sources on the internet.
A couple years ago I made a concerted effort to make better use of Twitter. I aggressively added any account that seemed to be producing interesting and informative tweets, and then pruned the ones that turned out to be bad.
Today my #1 source of news is Twitter. My feed is full of reporters, producers, experts, and commentators who are providing up to date info and analysis--and other points of view. I log into FB far more rarely than I used to.
Agree 100%. I source almost all my news via Twitter - I haven't found a product that streams relevant information / news quite as well. I don't really get all the backlash toward Twitter, other than surfacing more news / influencers.
As someone with lots of people on FB for many of whom my FB has become the only way of contacting me - is there any way I can keep my FB account where I only get notified about personal messages and nothing else? What annoys me most is this constant E-mail harassment to try to get my screentime back.
You would probably be better off by migrating away from facebook altogether. These kind of hacks may exist but are short lived as facebook changes so those would stop working.
>My Facebook feed is nothing but ads, low effort clickbait, and liberal anti-Trump news pieces.
Hah, thanks to my cousin I get the conservative clickbait pages. It's just weird how people just share that sort of junk. I prefer sharing the Babylon 5 memes and jokes (that mostly no one gets) which I have to wonder if I'm confusing her and the rest of the family yet (No one remembers Zathras...).
Facebook shows you stuff that you have shown interest in or has been shared by your friends. If you want to expand the range of opinions you see in your feed follow some less liberal people.
No they show you stuff that you and people they think are like you have shown interest in or has been shared by your friends*. Friends being people you added because you felt obligated to not people you have mutual interests or hobbies with
I'm not on FB, but I did recently join LinkedIn for work reasons and holy god it's awful - only thing on my TL is posts from recruiters and LI asking me to celebrate somebody spending a year at 'looking for new opportunities'. After I get my next contract i'm off there.
Only thing with any value to me is Twitter, and that's only reactively when i'm looking if there's an outage.
I find the latest update to LinkedIn unfortunate, given it's authoring UI is complete crap, UX-wise. I really can't see anything of use to me anymore over there, so my visits are becoming less frequent. I used to have good conversations with connections. Now all I get is recruiter invites and companies looking to do "business" with me, mostly out of Eastern Europe.
Twitter, on the other hand, is somewhat entertaining, given I have a decent amount of followers who may or may not be listening to my random rants. A minor ego boost, at best, but still probably a very large illusion on my part. It's fun to pretend though! ;)
Honestly, I have to say this place, HN, feels the closest to home. Or playing Rust, depending.
LinkedIn is also a case study on dark pattern UI. I honestly do not understand how a company can fuck up their product to such a degree and still have such traction. Blows my mind.
When I interviewed there a few years ago I got the impression that their product is LFDD: Lord of the Flies Driven Development. Pick an idea implemented on another site, pick whatever language you like, then push it out.
I think you missed a step where they figure out a shady way to get as many users opted into the new feature as possible, regardless of if they actually want it or not. But yeah, that sounds about what I'd expect.
LinkedIn comprises a cargo-culted feature mix implemented with little consistency by those least qualified (or maybe just least-empowered) to judge the can/should question.
> I did recently join LinkedIn for work reasons and holy god it's awful
I have an account I opened a while ago and I just enter from time to time, or when someone asks to add me as a contact. Every single post is just mindless corporate self-help.
LinkedIn is quite similar to facebook in the techniques and tricks they use. The difference is that LinkedIn comes directly from the paypal mafia while facebook was funded by the paypal mafia. And LinkedIn has a professional spin onto it.
Maybe you just need to mute/unfriend more people. Most of my handful of FB "friends" are actual friends, who tend to post a manageable volume of personal stuff, and very few cheap memes or other crap. If someone is frequently posting more than 1 thing per day, they're doing it wrong in my opinion.
Same was true for me. Nothing but cheesy fake nuz. I didn't even get everything posted by my relatives. I deleted my fb account last fall. Life has improved.
I know quite a few teenagers; they say FB is for "old people" like me.
It's been true since the days of suck.com: if you don't pay for the product you are the product. I'm sick of being product.
I found myself mindlessly scrolling through my newsfeed so often and seeing nothing but the clickbait meme crap. I finally got rid of the app on my phone and it's been great since.
Faced the same. Then I un-liked all the pages (some chrome add-on), un-followed few groups and the feed is much better. Finally I can see humans and not just news/meme
Do you think a 100% family and friends-focused social network could supplant Facebook (for accomplishing its original intent)? Pared down, modulo the memes and spam. Simply a directory of contacts, calendar, and photos.
I don't see the difference. My family posts the memes. My grandfather sends me news from questionable sources via email. If you give my family my contact info by any means, I will be seeing more of the same.
A significant portion of the memes and spam comes from uneducated family and friends so there's that.
But facebook has already been replaced by other websites for a variety of thing, the most known examples are those built around neighborhood community with extra privacy.
Yeah, and so I did spring cleaning recently and significantly cut my liked pages etc. Result? The damn thing got even worse! Now it's instead prominently showing posts my friends have commented on, liked, etc. Things that are missing my interests even more than the superfluous pages I followed before, only to keep my feed "active" so I'll want to come back. It sucks I have to keep wading through this crap and surfaced "may interest you..." only because "everyone is there".
If you aggressively use the "Hide all from" button you can eliminate the vast majority of crap that your friends share. That way you only see their original content.
Wasn't it obvious from the get go that this would happen ?
I mean you get a third party that want to be a MitM for all your exchange with friends and family while making the biggest profit possible out of investor story time.
Then you get the worst possible internet users massively flocking to the site through antipatterns and use of all tricks in the black book.
I wonder what else you were expecting. Situation was way better when blogs + rss were the craze and could be federated.
I'm trying out a side project social network that's ad-free and text-only: https://postbelt.com
I built it in response to the same frustrations you describe. The only catch is that it's paid :-) I want to explore if a noise-free social network can be built, and the only way I think it's sustainable is with a small subscription fee.
I barely use Facebook and honestly I can't imagine how anyone uses it. At this point, I think the only social network I use is Twitter and mostly because I follow quite a few synthwave artists and just content creators in general. The news side of Twitter isn't much better than what Facebook offers IMO, it's 99% opinion dressed up as news.
Messenger, personally. Too much of my social circle uses it as the group chat provider-of-choice for closing my account to be a viable option. I almost never interact with Facebook proper.
People like me who have friends all over the country would have a very hard time keeping up to date and in contact with a lot of people we really, really like.
Seriously if your social circle expands to more than 40 miles in every direction, Facebook is useful as hell. Even with the clickbait bullshit and invasive ads.
I have a social circle that extent 1000 miles in every direction, I had enough common sense to never register on facebook and I'm still in contact with everybody in the circle the same way we did before facebook or web 2.0 was a thing: email and instant messaging (IRC fell out of favor after main networks got permanently wiretapped).
Of course I don't keep up on a daily basis, which is in line with the AFK way of interacting with people in my local circle. We catch up once in a while through interpersonal conversation intended for the other person.
Why would someone want a constant reminder of what happens in the daily life of every people they know in 40 miles radius is beyond comprehension to me. Do you even have anything to talk about when you actually see each other ? Do you even meet or talk to each other ?
Facebook seems to be only useful because it is a walled prison, where prisoners are forbidden from interacting with the outside, so prisoners find it useful that they can at least communicate with each other in filtered, censored and filled with advertisement way.
To me the usefulness of facebook is that it keeps much of the eternal september crap contained inside itself, though it has a tendency to leak and spill in the rest of the web when the prisoners get the occasional interaction with the outside world and not understand that what is acceptable in a prison environment is not in the normal world.
All of my friends are over 40 miles away except my new friends after moving. They all use facebook heavily. I don't have any issues keeping in contact with them.
> 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."
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.
> 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.
Well, Buzzfeed (which grew to its size mainly due to FB) for example doesn't just produce clickbait crxp, but also high quality journalism these days.
Yes, Buzzfeed has a well staffed news operation that has covered some huge stories.
In fact, Buzzfeed seems like one of the few news operations with a business plan: clickbait and "sponsored content" successfully subsidising actual news output. The problem comes either when a news story conflicts with an advertiser's promoted content, or when shareholders start insisting on better returns and look at the news operation as a liability.
No. buzzfeed has actually broken out a few real investigate journalism stories and news coverage. I don't know what the business model is, I suppose they use some of the money they make from the crap they do to pay third parties for good content that has a high potential of buzzing the feed.
But this is buzzfeed so I won't go there ever for any reason, and certainly not for the handful of stories that may interest me.
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.
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 noticeably worse for me as a single user.
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.
Maybe a decentralized web isn't such a bad thing.
[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.
I deleted both of them at the same time at the beginning of the year (and I was a heavy Twitter user since around 2008, with 6k followers). I don't miss them at all. Sometimes I even find myself involved in thoughts that span several minutes and grasp sending long e-mails to friends that result in proper, meaningful conversations.
You should invest in a phone line, those are great way to stay in touch with your family. Direct interaction works way better that going through a middle man.
Maybe this didn't occur to you, but I also want to share photos and video. I mean, I can describe my daughter's piano recital, but they seem to enjoy seeing and hearing it as well.
> Direct interaction works way better that going through a middle man.
Who has time to lay all that copper and build their own telephone exchange? I'm happy to pay for middle men to help me out.
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.
I think this is good as well. I hope news organizations realize that what Facebook and Google (with AMP) gave readers was a page that loaded quickly. News orgs don't need AMP or instant articles, they just need a little self-restraint.
Facebook is not a social network, it's middle man that derives value from its inbetween position and used provided content. (It seems to me people registered on facebook are useds and not users)
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.
Images, gifs and short videos seems like a logical step forward for mass consumption. Can't really blame facebook for heading in that direction.
> Images, gifs and short videos seems like a logical step forward for mass consumption.
Yup, their first order of business is to optimize for the widest swath of users. That being said, as feeds become more customized, I'm sure you'll start seeing more rich articles if that's what you desire.
Twitter delivers desirable information because the user curates it strongly (it's normal to follow/unfollow users over time), but Facebook will likely replace that effort with algorithms.
> Yup, their first order of business is to optimize for the widest swath of users. That being said, as feeds become more customized, I'm sure you'll start seeing more rich articles if that's what you desire.
You're pretty optimistic. I wish I could share the optimism. They've had over a decade to get there, and as far as I can tell, they're moving the opposite direction they'd need to do what you claim they will.
They're doing their best to become irrelevant and die. But their users keep clawing them back to life. Eventually either FB or the users will figure their shit out, and part ways.
Who knows, in my extended circle, Facebook is increasingly being viewed as: "for old people". So we may not get to the direction they are heading towards.
Facebook has been for old people for a solid 5 years now if not more. Most young people dislike facebook and stay there as a chore because family and grandma.
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.
The resulting feed has no post and displays "no more posts to show".
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 them 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?
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.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375917