How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose(betabeat.com)

101 points by longarm 13 years ago | 75 comments

snprbob86 13 years ago |

Personally, I think Facebook would be broken if every message every person or group I'm connected to made it directly into my feed. The feed has been algorithmic for a very long time and paid placement is neither a surprising nor nefarious input to that algorithm. Paid posts are clearly labeled and, even if paid, don't guarantee distribution volume, but do provide analytics. If you don't like the results you're getting, then don't pay for them.

If you think that you can complain "But they are my fans! They belong to me! I deserve the right to be in their feeds" then be happy that Facebook is smarter than you: All those lovely fans would be gone in a heartbeat if Facebook didn't protect the advertisers from themselves. If you and all your advertising friends had it your way, you'd spam users until there were no users left to spam.

guelo 13 years ago | |

That is not what users expect. It is called a timeline for a reason. Twitter works that way and nobody thinks it's broken. If someone spams your timeline it's really easy to unfollow and solve the problem.

tobyjsullivan 13 years ago | | |

> That is not what users expect. It is called a timeline for a reason.

Timeline and Newsfeed are two very different things. The feature in question is the newsfeed.

If you go to somebody's timeline (previously "wall") you will see every post they've made in roughly chronological order.

snprbob86 13 years ago | | |

> That is not what users expect. It is called a timeline for a reason.

Is that reason because things are roughly sorted by time?

It's a timeline of interesting events in the recent history of your friends and interests. Being a "timeline" doesn't mean that it has to include everything. Should a timeline of the history of the USA include every event in the history of China? Not if you actually want to succeed in communicating any subset of the information on the timeline effectively...

People expect to sign in and see stuff about their friends. They don't expect to have to hand manage every single connection they ever make to decide who is or isn't worth paying attention to.

> Twitter works that way and nobody thinks it's broken.

1) Twitter has extremely different use cases.

2) I think Twitter is horribly broken. I rely on non-broken external clients to sort and filter tweets; most high volume users do.

> If someone spams your timeline it's really easy to unfollow and solve the problem.

Again, Twitter is a totally different use case. I might not want to unfriend my Aunt, who loves me very much, but I sure as hell don't want to see her every little post. I don't interact with her messages, so Facebook stops showing them to me. That problem seems solved to me...

tomasien 13 years ago | | |

That's because nobody who uses Twitter meaningfully follows 1150 people. Or at least it's not the norm.

ryguytilidie 13 years ago | |

You're kind of just arguing that one scenario is better than another. Why not a third scenario?

obviouslygreen 13 years ago | | |

They've made a distinction between 'friends' and 'fan' etc. pages. It seems logical that providing a full/friends-only/fan-page-only set of feeds would be a good way to manage spam, with the existing ability to unsubscribe from fan/friend pages. With all the resources and experience at their disposal, you're right, it's a bit ridiculous to suggest there's no way to avoid killing usability/usefulness without satisfying both users and companies.

nilkn 13 years ago | |

In an ideal product, this would just be left up to the user to decide. You should have control over your own news feed.

robryan 13 years ago | | |

Ideal for a small percentage of users, horrible in general. Facebook already has to many ever changing options related to privacy that people don't get. It already has things like lists and close friends people can use to control their feed further but don't get.

tomasien 13 years ago | | |

And it is. You can set all sorts of defaults. Facebook has just chosen the default default that tends to maximize engagement, THEN built a monetization platform on top of it.

anonymoushn 13 years ago | |

Is there a button available to users that will cause stories posted by pages and friends to actually show up in the news feed? It seems like there is no solution available on the receiving end.

bradleyjg 13 years ago | | |

If you make a friends group that includes all your friends it will post everything in chronological order with no in feed ads or crap from pages you've liked. It's far superior to the news feed IMO.

scopendo 13 years ago | | |

Not the simplest UI but: goto the friend's timeline. There should be a Friend button with a tick next to it. Hover over the button. On the pop-up menu the "Show in News Feed" option is probably already ticked. Once it is, choose Settings and then choose "All Updates" or whatever as appropriate.

ajross 13 years ago | | |

AFAICT there is no solution on the receiving end. Your feed is going to be filtered or delayed by the Facebook gremlins and there's nothing you can do about it.

The internal heuristics generally seem to get it right eventually: I see true friend and family posts with essentially random delays of sometimes up to 2-3 days, but I don't actually miss any (I don't think).

I don't even bother trying to follow stuff I'm interested in on Facebook anymore. G+ does that sort of thing better anyway, at least for all of my interests.

snprbob86 13 years ago | | |

"Sort By: Most Recent" ?

criley 13 years ago | | |

You can control the level of access a friend or page has. You can set it from None - Some - Most - All of their posts.

ChrisCinelli 13 years ago | |

Sure, but I would like to be able to set if I want by default see New feeds or Most recent post.Currently if I change to "SORT BY: MOST RECENT", it goes back to TOP STORIES after a day or so.

cocoflunchy 13 years ago | | |

Yeah this is really annoying, but fortunately there's a Chrome extension that takes care of it.

manaskarekar 13 years ago |

OT:

One observation I have made is how facebook launches big changes in staggered roll-outs.

Among all the other obvious benefits, I feel a big one is that all people never get to complain at once. So even the most drastic of changes will be met with pockets of protests/backlash, giving enough time between different pockets for the uproar to cool off.

dasil003 13 years ago |

Facebook is betting this will all blow over and everyone will accept it as the new status quo just like 80% of the previous evil changes they implemented. They are continually pushing the envelope to see what they can get away with, and I think in this case they will probably pull it off like they usually do.

The article describes it as "as plain and malignant a case of conflict of interest can get", but I don't see it; Facebook's interest is to make money, not to guarantee equality of Facebook's posting. Even if you grant that their primary interest is to assure the highest quality feed, this doesn't go directly against that either since a paid post is not inherently worse than free one even if it skews that way.

What people are really objecting to here is the blurring of the lines between ads and organic content. Certainly it smells bad, but it's not the same as an investment bank shorting the very securities they're selling to clients, after all, you can still get something for free. All they've done is just is turned a formerly free service into a freemium service without removing any functionality. Sure they can ratchet up the cost arbitrarily, but you have no excuse to be screwed by that because you can dip your toe in any time to figure out if the ROI makes sense. If they didn't offer you the opportunity to pay for placement you would have been drowned out by the noise anyway. I think the business justification is precisely that: the stream is so noisy for most people that paid placement can be done without significantly degrading its quality. They may be wrong about this, but I don't see why they aren't justified to try.

greggman 13 years ago | |

You seem to have missed the entire point of the article. That point is there is a conflict of interest between Facebook and its advertisers. Something that's not true of most Internet advertising systems according to the author. That is the specific problem. Not that it used to be free and now is pay.

Evbn 13 years ago | | |

Google, the largest ad business on the planet, derives much of its revenue from a product that is directly antagonistic to advertisers: organic search.

spinchange 13 years ago |

Regrettably, I think a lot of journalists are also spoon-fed PR and don't dig deeper or ask more questions.

Just last week I saw two stories, one on MIT Technology Review [0] and another on Fast Company [1] about Facebook's up-and-coming "Entity Graph." Ostensibly aimed at bolstering their search and informational relevance, neither article reported that many of these pages are scraped/imported content from Wikipedia and have been there since 2010, then called "Community Pages." Fast Company goes as far as to compare Facebook's efforts in this area to Wikipedia's, but doesn't mention that millions of pages are taken directly from Wikipedia. I did some digging on my own and found that at the time this was started, Wikipedia's director of business development was quoted as saying this was a positive development and viewed favorably by the foundation [2], but neither piece of reporting mentions anything about it. Both position Facebook's effort as being grassroots and not something seeded/bootstrapped off of Commons and a not-for-profit site.

[0] http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511591/facebook-nudges-...

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/3006389/where-are-they-now/entity...

[2] http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21721

dm8 13 years ago |

I don't understand the hoopla behind edgerank. Personally, I really like it. My feed is much cleaner. I get all status updates from the most important people in my life. And from other friends I get the most important updates.

As far as sponsored stories go, I prefer to those ugly banner ads. Much better UX and lot of times sponsored stories are relevant to me.

Semaphor 13 years ago | |

Fully agree, I really like edgerank. I sometimes need to optimize it by removing a specific person from the feed, but besides that its great. Can't agree on the sponsored stories though, so far I haven't seen a single one relevant to me or my interests.

And as someone with a lot of people in my friendlist that often post in languages I can't understand, I wish they allowed me to filter non-image posts by language (so I'd only see German and English posts).

brazzy 13 years ago | |

The hoopla is not from normal users. They don't understand it, and generally like it if they do.

It's advertisers that are frothing at the mouth. Personally, I think it's a very good thing Facebook puts the interests of users above those of advertisers, at least up to some point.

tomasien 13 years ago |

If users wanted Twitter-like, see 100% of posts as the default, Facebook would have done it. They maximize for engagement 1st and then they monetize that engagement.

For example, if people were most engaged seeing every post (which they wouldn't be, because of the nature of Facebook where you're mostly friends with people you don't care about), they could have far more Timeline "Suggested" of "Featured" posts than they have now.

Facebook with Edgerank is a far better experience than pre-edgerank. And if you don't like edgerank, you can make your default to see all posts from most recent to least recent.

RougeFemme 13 years ago | |

I think most users do want Twitter-like 100% visibility. And, at least when they first signed up (for those who signed up more than a year ago), they thought they were getting that. I think that the typical user has just given up on trying to keep up with and compensate the every-changing features and have settled for what they get and/or moved on to something else.

cbr 13 years ago | | |

    Twitter-like 100% visibility

When facebook added this as a secondary stream in the right-hand column, users were really unhappy.

glhaynes 13 years ago | | |

Perhaps most users, if asked "would you like Facebook to show you everything or should it filter some stuff out for you automatically?", would pick the former. But it's not necessarily the case that they'd actually prefer that in practice.

brazzy 13 years ago | | |

> I think most users do want Twitter-like 100% visibility.

Well, you're wrong.

danso 13 years ago |

So this variation on advertising is just a consequence of Facebook using an algorithm to fill your "top stories" feed as opposed to a chronological feed. The NYT article that the OP refers to:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/disruptions-when-sh...

-- implies that Twitter has a better model because you still see the same tweets in the same order even with a sponsored tweet up top, because tweets always come in a chronological order.

Maybe that works for Twitter, but I know I don't check my own tweetstream as often as I do my Facebook newsfeed. If FB showed me everything my friends and acquaintances did by default, including everytime they did something in Farmville2, I'd be less inclined to check FB.

And it's not a fair comparison because the FB newsfeed shows a variety of actions, from wall posts, to a posted picture, to entirely new photo albums...Twitter shows, for the most part, one kind of content: tweets.

I'm not saying that the OP isn't right here, that FB's model at its core could be problematic. I'm just pointing out that it's an advertising system that is a consequence of "weighting" the importance of each feed item.

EGreg 13 years ago |

This is what Overture was doing for advertisers back in the day - relevance based on payment

then Google came along and made pagerank -- so relevance was actually based on relevance and not just ads

but then it acquired overture's patents and made the adwords, which is back to paying if you want to be on top

So I see the same game playing out all over again. Facebook can be the overture and we will be the google :)

gojomo 13 years ago |

I think this is a hint to the real opportunity for App.net.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter have pioneered the 'feed'... but they're also abusing it. To mix some metaphors, they're polluting the feed with inserts and glitz, or strip-mining their audience's attention. Some necessary innovation in how feeds could be sorted/filtered, strictly for the user's benefit, has been foreclosed by their business models.

Perhaps it's a little like the first generation of search engines and portals: a haste to monetize has caused them to overlook how deep and universal a user-centric feed-service could be. They are locking up their proprietary 'sources' of events well, and thus slowing the emergence of alternatives. But at some point a 10X-plus-better uncorrupted competitor could emerge, first among geeky early adopters, making people look back at Facebook and Twitter like they were Yahoo/Hotbot/Altavista.

mehrzad 13 years ago | |

I hope App.net does well, but I (and I think others) would prefer a more open solution. Tent is doing OK so far, but we need something like IRC (which is still doing great).

liotier 13 years ago |

This is what sharecroppers get for promoting the use of Facebook in lieu of proper feed aggregators. Serves them well !

namenotrequired 13 years ago |

It's not broken, it's working exactly how it's told to work. It's just not how you'd personally prefer it.

I'm personally happy to put up with advertisements and whatever they think they need to do to optimise their earnings on this so long as they don't screw up so badly that there's no longer any value for me in using the site. That said I'd happily get a paid membership for a couple of bucks a month, to browse it free of ads (and sponsored stories etc) and perhaps get to beta test changes. I don't believe any such thing exists but I think that would be cool :)

adjwilli 13 years ago |

Facebook has every right to promote paid posts, and Google has every right to promote paid links despite not exercising it. And we as users have every right to decide whether we find the Facebook feed and Google search results relevant and useful based on that. When Facebook's policy starts effecting the quality of their services for users and companies, people will stop using it, just as if Google's search results lowered in quality people would switch to something else.

ElissaShevinsky 13 years ago | |

This is a very useful insight.

If brands can't rely on Facebook to reliably deliver messaging to a significant number of their fans, then these brands will spend less resources (both effort and money) on cultivating fan bases on Facebook. Instead they'll focus on Twitter, Instagram or just reduce the scope of their social media campaigns in favor of something with more optimized results.

pagekicker 13 years ago |

The reason that tech journalists are often repeating stories that were broken earlier is that they are able to sell the stories to editors. As far as many editors are concerned "if it didn't appear in my publication, it hasn't happened yet." This phenomenon is not just limited to news media -- I'm often boggled by consultancies like McKinsey who are still coming out with timely reports on "how CEOS can use social media."

andkon 13 years ago |

Y'know, Google has been doing this for a long time with AdWords: if your site doesn't have a high PageRank for the keywords you're targeting, you have to pay more.

I think the real problem here is the PR problem of charging for something that once was free. It wasn't a great idea, and the Tumblr example serves to illustrate how it could've been done differently.

tomkarlo 13 years ago | |

I'm not sure that's comparable; that's rewarding ads for being more relevant to the original search (or penalizing ads for being less relevant.) CPC services get paid for clicks but have views for inventory, so it makes sense they'd favor showing an add where the chance of a click is higher, raising the CPM.

On FB, you're getting charged just to show the post, so it's more of a CPM model.

greghinch 13 years ago |

This just in: Facebook is a business and wants to make a profit.

Seriously, how is this surprising? You want to use Facebook to increase your own business, you pay them. If anything, being able to reach a fraction of your followers for free is an evolution of freemium.

andrewflnr 13 years ago |

All Facebook gets from me in all this is that I spend less and less time on Facebook, because all I do is look at the news feed, and if there's only five new items from yesterday, then I leave. I wish I could say I was sticking it to them for being jerks, but I know they don't really care about me or need me. And it's not like all my friends are going to go to Google+, or heaven forbid Diaspora. Excuse me while I go post this story on my wall.

brazzy 13 years ago | |

I suspect that the opposite is actually the case; If every time you looked at the newsfeed you saw 50 new items of which 45 are uninteresting, you'd leave and not come back the next day.

csense 13 years ago |

I ditched Facebook years ago, and I've never been happier.

b1daly 13 years ago | |

Correlation does not equal causation:) But good for you! (on the happiness part)

whiddershins 13 years ago |

hmm, I think some different, unrelated issues are getting conflated here.

- Your feed is determined by edgeRank, just like your google results are (let's say for the sake of simplicity) determined by pageRank

- You can switch your feed to 'most recent' which ignores edgeRank, and simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, like FB used to, like tumblr does, twitter did (not sure about twitter right now), etc.

- Yes, facebook defaults to the former setting, but that probably makes sense, right?

- That "reach 15% of fans" number, I believe, is a result of edgeRank functioning correctly. Obviously even if everyone got reverse chronological feeds, your update would STILL only be seen by a small percentage of users because it would be pushed down by more recent posts, right? So whether the user saw it would be based on whether you posted it right before the user checks their feed, and would just incent everyone to spam facebook updates like crazy,(which is how tumblr is right now) ... am I missing something here about that stat?

- Yeah, I guess maybe in both Google's and Facebook's case there are conflicting goals but I am not sure it is a conflict of interest. It is their business to make that newsfeeed (or Google's search results) as relevant as possible so you use their service.

- The dubious thing about Facebook's method is the promoted posts are not as clearly delineated from the feed as Google's adword results are. That, in my opinion, is the controversial thing here. Not making a clear distinction between advertising content and "normal" content.

- Ryan Holiday is a marketing genius whose primary tactic to to try to generate controversy, so, I think this article should be evaluated within that context.

Semaphor 13 years ago | |

> - You can switch your feed to 'most recent' which ignores edgeRank, and simply displays posts in reverse chronological order, like FB used to, like tumblr does, twitter did (not sure about twitter right now), etc.

That's not true. I use most recent and while it's probably filtering less, it still filters.

ryanmolden 13 years ago | | |

It also resets itself to Top Stories say, every day or so. I would say I am surprised that with all the engineering talent Facebook has they can't manage to remember this one setting I have made about 20 times, but I am not that naive.

porterhaney 13 years ago |

It's interesting to me that Facebook is getting called out on this when Twitter does the exact same thing. I know a few folks with +1M Twitter followers that have stopped using the service because they were upset that Twitter was not delivering their Tweets to every one of their followers.

garretruh 13 years ago | |

Source? I haven't heard anything about this.

robryan 13 years ago | |

Source? I wasn't aware that was happening.

RandallBrown 13 years ago |

I remember when this first was news. I also remember that facebook made it possible for a user to subscribe to ALL posts from a page that they "like."

A facebook like is not the same as a follower on twitter and I'm not sure why people expect it to be.

stcredzero 13 years ago |

I think this is an important but sad milestone: The day when "saying no" actually becomes a smokescreen for being broken on purpose. (Question: Has Apple already passed it?)

prostoalex 13 years ago |

So if I have no friends who paid to promote their posts and no pages who bought promoted ads for my demographic profile, my news feed will be blank, the story implies.

adjwilli 13 years ago | |

The algorithm probably works by showing paid posts to the people most likely to click on them, so people who don't click much don't get many promote posts or the non-promoted ones.

bcoates 13 years ago |

I thought this was going to be about the bug(?) where they spam you with notifications from yourself, and how they don't fix it because it hurts MAU.

zipop 13 years ago |

This is what happens when you build a business on top of free users then attempt to make money later - not that there is anything wrong with that.

ElissaShevinsky 13 years ago | |

It's a good business model ;) The issues with it are exacerbated by the promise they made to always be free (which makes it problematic to offer a tier of paid services even if users would be interested.)

They're getting around this by offering paid services that are outside their basic offering (services for business, messaging users outside your friend group, etc.)

See their post about always being free: https://www.facebook.com/facebook/posts/10150420085741729

ChrisCinelli 13 years ago |

What is really broken with my feeds is that I click for more feed and it shows me the same feed I read in the same identical order.

OGinparadise 13 years ago |

Facebook posts are seen by only a woeful fraction of a company’s total fans or subscribers (often less than 15 percent). And conveniently, that percentage is controlled by Facebook, while the site simultaneously offers an expensive “service” that allows companies to pay to reach its own fans. This throttling quickly became a source of millions of dollars of revenue for the social network.

It’s about as plain and malignant a case of conflict of interest can get. One that only Facebook would dare to try.

It's less malignant than Google, Google also claims that they are impartial.

Google updates the algorithm or adds another 5-6 ads a page, you lose traffic; you have to advertise; they make money. They have a conflict of interests in wanting to have sites advertise and judging by Google's earnings it's working, for them

spinchange 13 years ago | |

There is a world of difference between Google changing their search algorithm and Facebook holding friends & followers an entity has already reached, connected with, and/or "acquired," hostage for money.

OGinparadise 13 years ago | | |

changing their search algorithm

Changing it but what's the real reason of the algorithmic changes, not the stated one? Google controls both search and advertising.

Facebook cannot afford to let every business spam every person that has a "like," it would replace email spam in a short time. Of course Facebook would go out of business soon