In Facebook's perfect world, your News Feed might look something like this:
There's a post from a family member or close friend, ideally a tagged photo that is thoughtful and important to them but also to the people around them. The post causes a lot of people click on Facebook's various reaction buttons and contribute reasoned comments that spur genuine discussion, in turn connecting people around common ideas and causes that they might not have otherwise found. This then keeps them on Facebook more and contributing stuff that makes other people stay on Facebook more. Eventually, that's your entire feed.
I'm not sure I've ever seen that post, nor is that the kind of post that made Facebook into the mega-giant global superpower that it is today. But they're trying.
On Monday, Facebook took another baby step toward that utopian world. The company announced that it will begin downgrading posts that beg for engagement. No more "tag a friend" or "comment if you love this."
It's yet another step in Facebook's ongoing effort to clean up the kind of posts users see in their News Feed. Similar to crackdowns on clickbait headlines, it's another negative indicator.
But what about a positive indicator? What does Facebook want to see? What, in Facebook's estimation is the ideal post?
Josh Elman helped build Twitter and Facebook, so it's safe to say he understands these platforms like few other people alive. And he hasn't been terribly optimistic about what they've valued.
He recently referenced Twitter cofounder Ev Williams in a tweet that has stuck with me:
Tweet may have been deleted
What this reflects about Facebook and Twitter, and what it reflects about individuals, is the same thing. The things we wish people would engage with and value are not the things they tend to engage with or value at least in an absolute basis. Part of human nature is not great, and that part turns out to be low hanging fruit for platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
This has become an undeniably bad thing. Look no further than the use of Facebook and Twitter by Russia as a means to spread propaganda and misinformation. These companies weaponized attention, and then Russia weaponized the platforms.
But there's some good news here. Facebook and Twitter have both appeared to turn a corner, albeit more like a giant ocean liner than a speedboat. Twitter has finally started to crack down on the Nazis that have turned swaths of its community into a toxic wasteland. Facebook has continued to crackdown on low quality content, with Monday's move just the latest in broader efforts to scuttle stuff that would generally be considered digital garbage.
Facebook's efforts are good from the outside, but still represent a problem for the social network. For a few years, the algorithms that power Facebook's News Feed loved posts that linked out to websites. The result of this was an explosion of media companies that fed Facebook users plenty of stuff — including the digital equivalent of car accidents.
Around that time, Facebook started to suffer from a decline in how much people shared with their network. The only thing that now seems to share, as Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journalwrote, is the "outrageous and contagious," which just so happened to be great for Russia's U.S. election campaign. A recent Pew Research Center report found this to be worringly accurate even when it comes to elected officials.
And it's important to note these links sent people away from Facebook, which isn't exactly a great thing when you're trying to occupy as much of people's time as possible.
Credit: Pew Research ReportMeanwhile, the rise of Snapchat has had an undeniable effect on Facebook, a notion that is as plain as the copying of stories into both Facebook and Instagram. Snapchat succeeded because it remained focused on creating a place and products that make people want to share with their friends and family while adding on an entirely separate media experience.
Facebook, by comparison, kept it all in the news feed, though even that is now slowly starting to change. The "Explore" feed is live and slowly becoming a bigger part of the puzzle. Facebook has even tested a format where the News Feed is entirely friends and family while Explore is all pages from publishers. This would create an experience similar to Snapchat, which also recently simplified to a similar system.
In this world, asking about Facebook's ideal post is a trick question in that the answer is unsustainable. Facebook could become Facebook thanks to car accidents, but it couldn't remain Facebook that way.
Now, with Facebook's split feeds, the ideal post is actually two posts. One is from your family or friends or a community you care about that helps you connect. The other is from a publisher who is producing something high quality and, ideally monetizable (oh hello, Facebook Watch). It is sharing or consumption, not sharing and consumption.
This is good news and bad news for publishers, who have already seen Facebook traffic dip sharply. The platform just isn't going to shove links in front of people, but it's also continuing to push out the garbage that turned Facebook into a place to gawk at car accidents and fake news. If we're to believe "the medium is the message," publishers should relish getting out of the news feed and into a high-quality environment that still has the upside of Facebook's two billion people.
Facebook became Facebook on virality, which is great at making something big, but not necessarily great at making a healthy network in the long term. Now, it's working to figure out how it can take full advantage of the giant network it built by making sure its users find value — what CEO Mark Zuckerberg terms as "community."
Now, please, share this post (sorry, Facebook).
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