After a comment exchange on a post by 
In the morning, I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled - Nothing.
It took me several minutes of scrolling before I found shared content, a local news article. A few minutes later, a lame meme.
While I haven't used Facebook in the last two years (for some strange reason), I have 700+ friends, acquaintances and a few strangers there that not too long ago were sharing content that they found quite heavily, with silly clips, articles and random positivity quotes and the like. Now it was nearly all personal content, personal updates for photos and albums, personal events, personal check-ins - interspersed with sponsored ads.
Do you know how they create a hit song on the radio?
What they do is place a new song between two songs that have already proven themselves popular to create a positive priming effect to lead into the new unfamiliar song, and then a positive chaser to complete he experience. The new song leverages the positive associations of its popular neighbors to make it feel more familiar and more liked.
While I have no data on Facebook and I am pretty sure Zuckerberg and Sandberg aren't going to release their process to me, it feels as if they are doing the same thing. While they have been creating algorithm echo chambers for a long time that can be leveraged by marketer and political campaign alike, now it seems that they are taking it a step further.
By limiting the shared content, it is less likely that a user is going to come up against something untoward, something they disagree with, something that makes them question the experience at all. Confrontation causes thought and negative reactions don't make people want to consume advertising and make purchases.
Squeezing the advertising between positively associated images and updates from our friends list means that we are going to have a smoother ride through the scroll and therefore be more susceptible to advertising messaging and likely, scroll longer. Time on Site (TOS) is a metric used to sell advertising and the longer a platform cn make one scroll and the more they can expose users to advertising instances, the more an advertiser is willing to pay.
But, there might be more to it than this also.
Because, shares takes people away to sites, shares take people away from Facebook and shares do not pay advertising revenue to Facebook, so why would they bother showing them in the feed? At any point, Facebook could show millions of content points but that feed algorithm narrows it immensely and they will choose what we see - based on what they want us to see.
Another reason could be that in the future they may have to pay for the links shared on Facebook, even if they do not have a deal with the source at all. This means that they won't want links shared that not only aren't paying them, but they must pay for. Funny isn't it? A company that for the last 15 odd years has leveraged other people's content freely to make trillions doesn't want to pay for content.
Do you see a use for blockchain watermarking on original content and micropay yet?
So, with a cursory glance through Facebook today on my phone and then tonight on my PC, I am pretty sure that the amount of directly shared links is much fewer than it was the last time I was there. This means that just like the TV adverts that people would suffer before Netflix so as to watch the feature movie, our own mundane and familiar lives are the vehicles that carry the paid advertising.
It isn't "sponsored" - it is paid advertising - don't confuse the terms.
What this means however is that Facebook are further limiting organically shared and perhaps personally created content that doesn't pay for distribution. Not just from other sites, but from their own users. Does this mean the content creator, the article writer, the blogger are dead? Perhaps on Facebook.
Facebook is not run by idiots, it is run by some of the most calculating and manipulative minds on the internet and driven by billions of dollars. There is no care for their user base other than whatever satisfies them long enough to drain them of their attention.
Attention is valuable and a scarce resource and the more they can convince people to scroll their feeds, the better their TOS, the more data they collect, the more precise their digital profiles and the more leveragable their user base to manipulate into all kinds of actions from buying a crappy product to social engineering an election result.
I think that one of the things Facebook have successfully been able to do is make people focus on what they see, not question what is missing from their feeds. This means that all sorts of content can be censored without a question from the audience because it doesn't disappear from the feed, it was never presented in the first place and with so many other things to focus on, no one misses it.
Did you see that thing I shared on Facebook?
No. You should have "sponsored" it if you wanted someone to see it.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
