Getting Away With Things
Step by step, Facebook has cut the news from its feeds. Yesterday, they confirmed that they will focus on content from friends and family while de-emphasizing news. How come? Here is the take of someone that has been designing and consulting news sites for the last 10 years.
As an early startup, we were giving our best building up both our Facebook and Twitter community. Things were going well for startups that were willing to share know-how in return for attention. At times, we had over 100’000 unique users per day on our site reading about web design and typography — through Twitter and Facebook. Then Facebook decided that we needed to pay to reach our hard earned friends and followers.
Facebook’s first big “bait-and-switch” happened in slow motion. It was a creepingly slow turning point for the so-called Web 2.0 where the Web turned from social to capital, from distributed to centralized, and from open and shared to agent Smith’s simple vision of the world.
“This is my world, my world.” Agent Smith
That slow-motion bate and switch didn’t get much attention. Little startups like ours lost their free advertisement ticket, bit by bit. So what? News organizations weren’t hit right away. Their content was free fuel for Facebook’s “newsfeed”. On the user side, hardly anyone realized what had happened.
Through the magic of some tech Jedi mind trick, it wasn’t Facebook that cut us off from our followers. It was “the algorithm”. The algorithm was both the genius and the bogeyman. “The algorithm”, helped them get away with a lot of things. And they didn’t just “get away”. They robbed the bank and went to the moon.
Facebook will not completely “eliminate” news (that would be simply impossible) but they will show “less”. Will hurt the business of news organizations? You bet. But who cares… Will it hurt Facebook’s business? Probably, at least a bit. So why do they go this way?
To make the world a better place? To be a better father? To take responsibility? To avoid bad PR? To please China? To save cost? Fear of regulation and anti trust?
Read our answer on iA.net/topics/news-from-facebook/
