Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/11/in-major-facebook-overhaul-zu.html
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Facebook is about to undergo a dramatic overhaul, company-wide, to prioritize "“meaningful interactions” between friends and family, starting with the news feed.
Racist uncles everywhere rejoice at their increased power as Facebook influencers.
The only overhaul that would be effective would be to remove the news feed functionality entirely because (news flash!) getting your news from Facebook is a terrible idea.
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Maybe I’m weird, but this sounds positive to me, and a much needed turn back to the roots of what gave Facebook a niche. A book of faces of people you know. The internet of news shouldn’t be flowing through facebook. Getting news from a friend adds a special piece of metadata. “oh yeah, this is ‘Todd News’ - ignore” Weren’t we just decrying that Facebook wanted to be the whole internet?
but yeah, generally speaking fuck them, I’m sure they’re up to something…
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sounds like more tracking/progamming/ profiling/sectioning design to assist “the unwashed masses” with their ongoing searches for truth, justice and the merkin way…don;t you want life to be easier? huh?
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They’re just shifting the focus of Facebook’s broken-ness, as John Battelle discusses here:
There are some useful short-term patch solutions described toward the end of this article by Roger McNamee but they’re unlikely to be implemented and won’t address the core problem of the ad-driven business model and the algorithms that enable it.
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Let em be first to bust out my tiny violin for a round of Boo Hoo, Xeni, after Boing Boing posts like 22 posts a week about how Facebook AIs gave us Trump and depression and inequality and Peter Thiel and cancerAIDS and now I’m supposed to give a shit that their fix for this also impacts them somehow as if they aren’t also in their way part of the echo chamber media economy.
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
Edit: of course fuck Zuckerberg and his smarmy ad drenched idealism. But trying to wrangle sympathy out of this reeks of hypocrisy and cravenness.
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This is a whole lot of words to say “We’re pissed off that Boing Boing will lose some money going forward.”
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One of the legion of sucky things about Facebook is that if you have a corporate or personal brand in America in 2018 you have to have an account there for marketing purposes, like it or not. I hate FB, don’t have an account there myself, but I wouldn’t advise my clients to pull their Facebook or other social media accounts.
If we’re going to talk about independent publishers not trusting anyone, it should be their not trusting FB (admittedly the worst of the lot), Twitter (the most hapless), Google, Apple, or really any news distribution/aggregation platform with a large user base besides RSS newsreaders.
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Artists are people, too. Not much Facebook does these days really helps us.
Unless we give them money. But even there, what we can afford to spend on FB nets us essentially nothing.
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For legitimate publishers, I can understand the frustration.
For me, as a Facebook user, because I have friends with differing opinions, I’m constantly bombarded by fake news, and news from unreputable sources. I’m sorry that part of your audience may be limited, I generally think the best of boingboing; however, if Facebook is about connecting with friends and family, this to me is nothing but a good change.
An option for Facebook would seem to have a journalistic verification, but that opens the doors to a ton of problems in itself. There is no easy answer I can think of.
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Hi!
I know it’s a difficult concept, but running a successful blog requires both 1) getting your content into the hands of those who would be interested in reading it, and 2) some form of remuneration from those reading said content.
Facebook represents a very large part of BOTH items 1 and 2. Not just for us, for every site out there that relies on either people visiting, or ads (and in many cases, both).
It affects BB. Presuming you read other sites, it probably affects them, too. There are many sites that either by choice or by chance, happen to get proportionately more of their traffic from FB than we do. It affects them even more.
So should some words be shared when a major source of revenue decides to unilaterally alter the deal under which these organizations exist? I believe so.
I’m sorry if this is a disappointment to you. I assure you, no one is more disappointed in the revenue model independent blogs are subjected to than the independent blogs themselves.
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There’s already a system for this. It doesn’t work.
Some of us don’t even care about a portion of our nuclear family already. Thanks for giving them a bigger window into my life.
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Mulder. Am I dead?
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This is what I came here to say. I’m okay if Facebook is just about booking face, and isn’t also a dystopian content delivery platform.
I am sorry that BoingBoing is getting caught up in the dragnet. Hopefully BB’s Facebook users will make the jump to the site the same way I do every few hours: do a Google search for “what is the address for the bong bong weblog”, then click the first result, then go to file and click print.
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I appreciate all of that. But as anyone who’s read Boing Boing for any amount of time should know, one of the things we should be considering when we hear complaints about wholesale changes in a system is cui bono? In a post all about criticizing Facebook’s recentering to deemphasize third-party publishers and emphasize people a user (supposedly) knows, we get critical tweets from:
- Mike Isaac, who works for the NYT
- Judd Legum, who works for ThinkProgress
- Brian Stelter, who works fro CNN
- Steven Perlberg, who works for BuzzFeed
And we of course get critical coverage from Xeni, who works for BB. (Kurt Wagner’s tweet appears neutral.) But in all this, the closest we get to an admission of self-interest from anyone in the media in Xeni noting that BB will be harder to see if you primarily view it through Facebook. If this were a change to FCC regulations harming Comcast and Comcast complaining about it, we’d see thousands of words spilled on Comcast benefiting from the status quo. But now? Not so much.
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So in your world, Facebook is now a government regulatory agency?
Or are you just one of those people who believe that anyone with a stake in anything couldn’t
possibly be impartial enough to write about it?
Hey, you want to bang the drum about how Facebook’s change is wonderful and us little guys are tilting at windmills and being overly concerned about this being a potential existential crisis, have at at. Just remember that when you wonder why the big media companies of the world are the only ones left showing you vetted and approved unicorn gifs.
I, on the other hand, will be here, in the trenches, trying to keep independent media alive. Even if it means supporting articles that Authors may be (gasp) directly influenced by the outcome of.
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