Facebook Tests Removing Publishers From News Feed -- Unless They Pay (mashable.com) 88
According to a report via Mashable, Facebook is removing posts from Pages in the original News Feed and relegating them to another feed, forcing users to "pay to play" in order to have their content back in the News Feed. The setting is only available in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Cambodia for now, but it could be rolled out to other countries later. From the report: The social network last week officially launched its secondary news feed called Explore. The feed generally features posts from Facebook Pages users don't follow. News Feed, meanwhile, hosts posts from friends and Pages users do follow. But that's not true for everyone. In six markets, Facebook has removed posts from Pages in the original News Feed and relegated them to another feed, Filip Struharik, editor and social media manager at Dennik N, wrote. That means Facebook's main feed is no longer a free playing field for publishers. Instead, it's a battlefield of "pay to play," where publishers have to pony up the dough to get back into the News Feed. It's a stark change from how media outlets have grown with Facebook. Publishers like BuzzFeed's Tasty and NowThis grew via distributing viral posts and videos on News Feed, as Ziad Ramley, former social lead at Al Jazeera English, wrote. While companies had to employ social media managers, they could generally rely on them sharing content without paying to boost it.
I nominate this article (Score:5, Insightful)
I nominate this article for the most confusing wording of any Slashdot article this month.
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I don't understand it either. I assumed the news feeds were curated anyway; the buzzfeed crap was all in the "I'm bored" section ("13 stupid ways facebook is getting worse, read now!").
I don't see anything wrong with paying to get into the "this is real news!" section. I'd rather see headlines from AP than from some startup wannabe media site. So what's the story? That Facebook wants to be more sane, or that there are people who think that lots of clicks on click-bait is what should make a story newsworth
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So what's the story? That Facebook wants to be more sane,
Not at all, it's that FB has found a new way to squeeze cash out of what it was offering as a product.
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I stopped using stupid facebook for anything and now my neighbor's dog is cured of cancer.
Re:I nominate this article (Score:5, Informative)
Blame Facebook. It's their terminology that's confusing things.
The News Feed is just the feed of posts from people you've friended and pages you've followed. Your sister's cat pictures are 'news' in this sense.
A publisher is just a non-personal page that posts articles. It could be a page run by a news publisher or a charity or a community organization. I follow half a dozen small bands who keep in touch with their fans through Facebook.
Some time ago, Facebook decided that following a page from a publisher is no longer enough for you to see all of the posts from that publisher. An algorithm decides who gets to see which posts you get to see what which ones you don't. At the same time, they added the ability for publishers to pay to promote their posts, which prevents the algorithm filtering them out of the feeds of their followers.
That apparently didn't make enough money, so now they're testing the idea of forcing all publishers' articles into a different feed. If you live in one of the countries where they're testing it, you won't see any of the posts on pages you've followed in your news feed unless the publishers pay to get them there.
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So, evil then. Instead of a news distribution system to attract groups you can follow, evil.
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Greedy is probably more accurate than evil, but greed does usually lead to evil results so ... close enough.
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They are basically charging facebook members to interact with other facebook members, they are just deciding upon a greed driven whim, who is targeted and censored and has to pay and who is not. Well beyond publishers, they will extend it out to the typical for profit youtuber as a example. The only publisher of content facebook will accept is facebook and the only acceptable propaganda is facebooks or the propaganda that pays facebook for access. Facebook users real, will just be treated like mushrooms, ke
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Yep. It sucks. The bands I follow on there have tiny followings and can't afford to pay up like bigger companies. Some of them have trouble making their rent on a monthly basis, but Facebook still wants to extort money from them to show their posts to their followers.
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Yep. It sucks. The bands I follow on there have tiny followings and can't afford to pay up like bigger companies. Some of them have trouble making their rent on a monthly basis, but Facebook still wants to extort money from them to show their posts to their followers.
That Facebook is "free" is the illusion here. The mantra "you are the product" we hear recited so often on /. requires SOMEONE to be on the non-product side of the table, right?
The band is the "buyer" in this case. Why shouldn't it pay for the privilege of having the product all nice and rounded up? It's not just pure ad companies being required to pay anymore, that is all.
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"Some time ago, Facebook decided that following a page from a publisher is no longer enough for you to see all of the posts from that publisher. An algorithm decides who gets to see which posts you get to see what which ones you don't. At the same time, they added the ability for publishers to pay to promote their posts, which prevents the algorithm filtering them out of the feeds of their followers."
The word you're looking for is 'extortion'.
Not shocking (Score:2, Insightful)
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Another advantage (Score:2, Interesting)
This has the added bonus of censoring non-mainstream media companies, who won't be able to afford to pay.
I don't care (Score:5, Insightful)
I care (Score:2)
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Re:I care (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to keep politics to yourself then
a) Don't play the nation's anthem before the game. It is INHERENTLY POLITICAL to play the national anthem.
b) Don't force the players to be on the field when the anthem plays. This wasn't even an issue until 2009- before that players were in the locker room at that time.
c) Don't force the players to pay homage to a nation that's killing their 7 and 12 year old children, denying them credit, and giving them grossly unequal and unfair police and judicial treatment (most recently shooting an innocent black man with mental issues for running when they stopped him for failing to have a red rear reflector on his bike).
but hey.. I don't watch the NFL to begin with. When Bud Adams fired Bum Phillips, I lost all interest in the game.. over 25 years ago.
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While I agree we shouldn't be forcing the players to do anything, I hardly consider playing the anthem to be an inherently political action.
Its only political now because a famous guy did something unusual on a public broadcast of an extremely popular event -- and then the president went on a rant about it to really make sure it was widely covered.
And really, its not about the anthem or whether he stands or kneels or does cartwheels. If Kaepernick said he'd knelt to show solidarity with say, a friend suffe
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Anyway point of my ramble is that its not the anthem that's political
The anthem is always political, because it represents patriotism/nationalism/etc. I don't know what's more political at heart than that especially in these times where those things are wielded as weapons.
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Really? Is the anthem a republican or a democrat? What's its stance on health care, climate change or bailouts for the wealthy?
Its a symbol. And certainly symbols can be adopted and used exclusively by one side of any particular issue to the point that the symbol itself does indeed become political, but the national anthem, the flag, the bald eagle and so forth are not such. For all of the political differences in the US, especially this past year, its just assumed that (well, almost) everyone loves the
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Stop being reasonable. I was looking for an argument!
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Lol. Really? Playing a song that celebrates nationalism isn't political?
I suggest you consider that a little deeper.
Only in an authoritarian nation are you *required* to respect a random old drinking song in any case.
Our nation is supposed to be about freedom and free speech.
But you have a point, really they just want black people to shut up and not raise a stink.
As a texan, that irritates me a lot. It goes against fair play and decency and everything that texas stands for.
A person should be given the sa
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Who said they're not being respectful? Was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. being disrespectful when he and others protested against racial injustices in this country? It could be argued that it's being disrespectful to not stand up (or in this case kneel) when you believe there are systematic transgressions being perpetrated against American people by public entities.
I mean, just because you're not personally impacted by said transgressions doesn't mean they don't exist. I think it shows a significant lack of
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They are protesting in a very respectful way.
Are they lowering their pants?
Are they flipping off or expressing some of the disgust they probably feel? Nope.
They are respectfully making a silent gesture to call attention to the fact that even as multi-millionaires this nation is hurting them and people they know simply for looking a certain way.
It's shameful, it's unchristian, it's disgusting the way this nation treats black people.
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The NFL has simply trashed its brand with a large fraction of its paying customers.
I already didn't care about football.
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I don't care about football, but I do care about the way racism is ruining minority people's lives.
Besides empathy, fairness, and justice- treating minorities fairly would also substantially reduce my tax bill.
We incarcerate and criminalize more citizens than any other country in the world. Once you are incarcerated and criminalized, your odds of producing a good income are much lower. Your odds of literally costing $31,000 per year to house and feed are much higher. It is much more expensive to impriso
Okay (Score:4, Interesting)
nobody escapes (Score:1)
I told Zuck to go suck a big fat one and deleted my account. Thank you Zuck for 3 wasted years of my life. Boy did it feel good to ditch Facebook .... Fear Of Missing Out is vastly overrated.
nobody ever escapes from the borg, you are an experiment
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They're about as legit as any other media these days. They slant heavily left and they make no secret about it, but they're not generally making shit up like a lot of the (actually fake) "news" that apparently was coming through the FB feeds (and other social media) that ended up getting traced to sweatshops in various cheap labor countries (probably paid for by Russia but I don't think that part was ever conclusively proven.)
That said, they're not investigative reporters. They mostly just collect reports
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"What you've seen" is obviously not much then. They're continually advertising (not just arguing for but actively advertising) their progressive democrat PAC and whatnot. I mean its not like they start every episode by disclaiming their political views but they definitely don't put on any airs of being unbiased.
That said, their bias isn't just "democrat" though, its "progressive democrat." So they like to call out Hillary Clinton and Tom Perez and others even in the democratic party that they perceive as
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Re: Incorrect (Score:1)
How is this any different? (Score:3)
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It's not so much different as it is an expansion. Now, instead of still showing posts to a percentage of followers, Facebook won't show posts from non-personal pages to any of the people following the page unless you pay up.
Re:How is this any different? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a tiny shift really. Facebook already reduced the number of organic views that you'd get for posts to professional pages by at least an order of magnitude a long time ago.
If you use Facebook as a channel to reach your customers/fans/whatever, the game has been pay-to-play for a long time, and the only thing that matters is still whether or not you get a good return on your investment, just like any other advertising. Watch your numbers, and if Facebook isn't giving you good enough exposure, pull your funding and spend it somewhere else, whether that's Google ads for your business or posters for your local church fair to up in local stores.
It already was pay-to-play (Score:2, Interesting)
It was already pay-to-play. When I would post on my business page, it basically wouldn't show the post to people (even if it was an informational post instead of an ad) unless I paid to "boost this post." It pretty much seemed to treat content and ads as the same thing when posted on a business page. If I did give in and pay to "boost" a post, it would show the post to a bunch of click-happy people who click "like" on everything that shows up on their feeds, presumably in an attempt by FB to make it seem th
FACESPEAK! (Score:3)
"Who controls the past controls the future..."
“War is peace..."
As we know.... (Score:3)
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LOL.. $100K which was spitting in the ocean of the total spending by all the campaigns didn't help Facebook's bottom line any, now did it..
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Well directed spit still hits you in the eye.....
Or, you are spitting into the wind yourself and get what you deserve when it lands back on you?
Nobody knows, but I'm hearing a LOT of theories that Muller is now looking into malfeasance by the other side. It explains why we've gone from daily wall to wall "The Russians did it! Impeachment is coming!" coverage to radio silence after 9 months. Why did they suddenly get off this hobby horse? Perhaps we are all tired of this and the news media finally realized they were beating a dead horse? OR Perhaps the
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Which had more influence on American politics: $100k of facebook ads, half of which occurred after Election Day, or Bill Clinton accepting $500k from Russia, which caught the FBI's attention. Clinton gave a 90-minute speech to Renaissance Capital, a Kremlin connected bank that was promoting the Uranium One Deal's stock.
You know who the bagman was who took samples of the uranium to the Russians for inspection? Robert Mueller. Yes, THAT Mueller, the one who's investigating Trump and the one who wrote the
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What, did you think the editorial page printed every single letter they received from readers? No, they filtered out the obvious garbage and tin foil hattery, not to mention the ones eith [sic] poor spelling and grammar. There was never a "golden age" of lofty free discussion in for-profit papers -- there has always been editorial control.
Was this an ideal system? No, particularly if you had an editor (or an owner (*coug
The first decade (Score:2)
The Net will reroute around damage (Score:2)
Information always wants to be free.
The more you squeeze the worlds of information, the more they will slip from your tentacles, Emperor Zuckerberg, and everyone will use some other source.
They are Just Asking for an Antitrust Lawsuit (Score:1)
If FB gets away with this Verizon and Comcast will be demanding pay for play, or they block your website.
SubjectIsSubject (Score:3)
Couldn't give a f**k (Score:4, Informative)
To be honest I do wonder why Facebook is still called a social network as the social aspect really seems to be secondary to the commercial aspects of it.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Everyone is going to have their hand out wanting money for you to do anything. The old days of free content on the Internet are dead. It is 100% commercial content only, to the highest bidder. Sad day for the world.
FTFY.
Facebook? (Score:1)
People still use that thing?
Have not- will not--- use facebook. (Score:1)
It's just a bad scene and you know they are going to screw you over- you just don't know how.
interesting (Score:2)
I cannot possibly predict user reaction to this