Facebook Fraud

[Aristotle]

This guy absolutely destroys Facebook and their whole advertising scam. The #1 reason Facebook sucks hugely for business is the fact that users can't get 100% of the updates from pages they like.

Paying Facebook extra for that makes no sense. That's not how platforms are supposed to work. It creates a scenario where Facebook profits enormously from doing a bad job as a social network.

[indi]

The option that they do have is to subscribe to updates from pages that you like. That way you can get a notification from pages that you enjoy. The scam does suck a lot.

[Aristotle]

The option that they do have is to subscribe to updates from pages that you like. That way you can get a notification from pages that you enjoy.

Except even if you do that, you'll get maybe 5-10% of the updates. Or more importantly, of the people who subscribe, only ~10% will actually receive the update.

That's the problem. There is no way for people to get ALL the updates, or for ALL the people who are fans to get sent the updates. This can only be done by paying an insane amount of money to promote every post.

That's a broken social network, because it is not actually providing social networking.

[indi]

My goodness, you're right. I just checked my subscription, and it doesn't send me all the posts. That really sucks.

[Rosuav]

Except even if you do that, you'll get maybe 5-10% of the updates. Or more importantly, of the people who subscribe, only ~10% will actually receive the update.

That's the problem. There is no way for people to get ALL the updates, or for ALL the people who are fans to get sent the updates. This can only be done by paying an insane amount of money to promote every post.

Or by completely switching medium. Maybe it's time for a resurgence of usenet? There's a reason that most serious tech discussion happens on either newsgroups or email mailing lists, not on G+, Facebook, or other aggregators. (Forums like this one are a reasonable option technologically, but news and mail are better established.) https://mail.python.org/ alone has 194 separate mailing lists, and if you subscribe to one of them, you can be confident of getting everything (modulo obvious spam) that's sent to it - or, looking the other way, a post sent to one of them can be confidently expected to get to everyone who's subscribed. Sure, you don't get the option to just quickly hit "Like" on a post and move on... but maybe that's a small price to pay for the guarantee of seeing everything that you asked to see.

Plus, email's decentralized. It's not just switching out Facebook's control for someone else's; it's truly uncontrolled. If Frogdice wants to create its own mailing list, Frogdice can run that and be the sole controller of what goes through - again, just like this web forum. What do people gain by tying everything to some corporate social network?

[Rosuav]

What do people gain by tying everything to some corporate social network?

To clarify, I'm not asking "why is Frogdice posting things on Facebook". The answer to that is obvious: That's where the people are. My question is: Why are the people there? What's the benefit of seeing a random part of your news feed, with weight given to the people who've paid more money to make it more likely you'll see their posts?

[Aristotle]

My goodness, you're right. I just checked my subscription, and it doesn't send me all the posts. That really sucks.

Yeah. I hate it. It sucks for people on both sides of the equation. Fans don't get the updates they want. And the businesses/pages aren't reaching their fans.

Facebook's designed obsolescence there that you have to buy your way out of is incredibly lame and the wrong place to monetize. I would understand paying to have your posts appear it *NEW* people's feeds who don't already like your page. But paying to reach your own fans who deliberately liked your page? That's asinine.

[Aristotle]

To clarify, I'm not asking "why is Frogdice posting things on Facebook". The answer to that is obvious: That's where the people are. My question is: Why are the people there? What's the benefit of seeing a random part of your news feed, with weight given to the people who've paid more money to make it more likely you'll see their posts?

Same answer, unfortunately. The people are there because everyone else is there. It has a tremendous social inertia that makes it nearly impossible to unseat.

Sometimes people compare Facebook to AOL or MySpace when arguing that Facebook could get surpassed or go away. But neither of those had anywhere near the scope and breadth of Facebook's market penetration.

Think about how weird it is when you every now and then know someone who isn't on Facebook. It is almost unsettling. I've had this experience a few times:

"WTF? How come this person isn't on Facebook? I want to tag/share something with them and that would be the easiest way."

That's the nature and the extent of Facebook's reach. It would take something truly spectacular to come in and wrest control away from Facebook unfortunately.

[Rosuav]

Same answer, unfortunately. The people are there because everyone else is there. It has a tremendous social inertia that makes it nearly impossible to unseat.

And yet everyone's on email, but mailing lists haven't automatically swept the board. It's sad.

Facebook will eventually be tipped out, I think. The more of this sort of thing they do, the more people will get dissatisfied, and some day there'll be an alternative that suddenly sweeps them away. Google Plus maybe was just a little too soon.

[Speedster]

Think about how weird it is when you every now and then know someone who isn't on Facebook. It is almost unsettling. I've had this experience a few times:

"WTF? How come this person isn't on Facebook? I want to tag/share something with them and that would be the easiest way."

That's the nature and the extent of Facebook's reach. It would take something truly spectacular to come in and wrest control away from Facebook unfortunately.

Wonder if I did that to you! Facebook is too corrupt and propogates too many bad attitudes for me to stomach creating an account there!

One of my most hated sayings is "if you can't beat them, join them"... much prefer "don't be a part of the problem" so I'm not creating a Facebook account unlelss they reform (ha!) or it becomes a legal requirement