Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the New York Times that the social network will revamp its news feed to emphasize “meaningful interaction” between friends and family. As a result, the news feed will significantly decrease the number of posts you’ll see from news outlets such as Motherboard.
Good.
This move has been long-rumored, and has been looked at by many in the industry as an incoming algorithmic apocalypse that will have far-reaching impacts on the bottom lines and ultimate survival of outlets whose readers find them through Facebook.
Which wouldn’t have been the case if they had FUCKING LISTENED to everybody saying this was temporary, this was crap, but no. We all had to drop everything and pray to the Great Zuckerberg and master his optimizations and study his algorithm and tailor our work to suit his platform, so that he could just yank it out from under us which is what HAPPENS when you rely on something that isn’t yours.
I mean Jesus H. Blue Ribbon Christ. Some third party company whose only interest is making money is not ever gonna save you. They might pay you for a little while, and not much, but they’re interested in their own thing, not yours. They were never gonna do your jobs for you. They were never gonna act out of the goodness of their hearts and be what you needed which was a goddamn reason to exist.
The only thing that has ever worked for journalism is journalism. That’s it.
A GOOD question to ask as a result of all this would be why people preferred to read news on a platform that wasn’t yours. Maybe it was because Facebook for a long time didn’t have a hundred pop-up ads EVEN IF YOU SUBSCRIBED or auto-play video or a funnel to feed your content into and extrude it all over what should be the calm experience of reading the news about a world that is on fire. It would be a good thing to find out what your customers wanted out of Facebook that you didn’t give them.
That’s if you were actually concerned about them, though. Maybe you could pivot to that.
A.
If they actually cared about their users in any way besides income generation, they’d have got rid of Ross Douthat and David Brooks long ago.
I had a mini-rant at the SF Chronicle’s EIC to that effect. It’s like when it comes to the Internet, newspapers are incapable of saying “hard pass, thanks.” https://twitter.com/Fejes/status/952525519211331584
Reblogged this on Commander Cookie Wolf and commented:
EXACTLY!