[HN Gopher] Facebook increased satisfaction and usage by sending...
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook increased satisfaction and usage by sending fewer
notifications
Author : aleyan
Score : 156 points
Date : 2022-12-26 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| civilized wrote:
| For years there has been a big red notification dot stuck on the
| FB video tab reminding me that I have some large number of shitty
| videos to watch. I have no idea how FB decides precisely how many
| shitty videos it is very important that I watch. It used to be in
| the 40s, now it's 15. I never clicked the tab once.
|
| I actually tried to figure out how to get rid of this at some
| point, but it definitely wasn't a priority for FB to give me
| control over this.
|
| I'll never forget the open contempt Meta has shown for me as a
| user of their products.
| jorvi wrote:
| Meta refuses to give me access to- or delete my Instagram
| account.
|
| A few years back I changed the e-mail to a fake e-mail. I
| accidentally typo'd my mobile phone number due to which it now
| resolves with a Philippines prefix. This prevents me from
| verifying their 'looks like you're trying to do a suspicious
| log-in'
|
| They won't give access or delete my account despite:
|
| - me knowing the current password
|
| - providing old passwords
|
| - indicating to them the old e-mail address to my account
|
| - verifying that I have access to that e-mail account
|
| - verifying that I own the 'old' phone number to the account
| with a phone bill (!)
|
| - indicating I am willing to provide a scanned ID
|
| - indicating two friend on my 'following' list that would be
| willing to verify its me trying to access the account
|
| At this point I have pretty much done 5-factor authentication
| and they still won't accede.
|
| Thankfully I am an EU citizen and the data commissions are
| currently extremely trigger happy with GDPR fines, so my hope
| is this forced them to resolve it, or make it cost them tens to
| hundreds of millions for not doing so.
|
| Fuck you and your scummy illegal practices, Meta :)
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > I'll never forget the open contempt Meta has shown for me as
| a user of their products.
|
| Even better was when messenger split off from fb proper into
| its own app, but still showed a notification bubble with red
| exclamation marks (or some such, it's been a while) that you
| couldn't dismiss. clicking opened the page to install the
| messenger app.
|
| I deleted my account.
| wincy wrote:
| I uninstalled the other day when I started getting
| notifications when someone's story is on my feed. On
| messenger. That's not a message and there is no way I found
| in twenty minutes of digging to turn it off. Screw that.
| yojo wrote:
| Agreed, this is incredibly user-hostile. As a pro-tip, you
| can get past it on web by telling your device to request the
| desktop website. They have a responsive design, so it's
| actually quite usable. Just emphasizes how slimy the push to
| the app is, though.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Worse still is that right now my web version is telling me
| I have 4 messages, but my desktop one is saying I have
| none.
|
| So not only hostile but incompetent.
| Lammy wrote:
| Fun fact: the internal (bullshit) justification was that the
| Messenger install upsell counted as a message, and that's
| what the fake notification was for even though the same
| message wouldn't appear in the inbox on web.
| baby wrote:
| This and the newsfeed not being chronological, or the option to
| have it chronological being hidden from the user (that's one of
| the most recurring question and feature request that internal
| employees ask, how crazy is that). IMO facebook could really
| change by creating a subscription and ensuring that people who
| subscribe are happy enough with the product to keep paying. I
| think that recenters the incentives towards building something
| for the user.
|
| Another meta problem is that there seem to be no authoritative
| product person that can force his/her vision on the product so
| you get hundreds of visions colliding and fighting for changes.
| IMO it's much more valuable to have a coherent vision being
| enforced for the product, otherwise you get this frankenstein-
| like collection of apps.
|
| Finally, the fact that HN is such a hater of facebook means
| that most fb engineers have deserted HN and they're not reading
| the excellent ideas and feedback that this community sometimes
| provide. It's a shame, because I still completely believe in
| Facebook as a good product for the world.
| glitchcrab wrote:
| There is less than a snowball's chance in hell of me paying
| Meta for the privilege of using a less fucked version of
| their product. I just actively avoid using it instead and I
| would wager that my life is better off for it.
| eastbound wrote:
| So Twitter has at least the power to charge users, whereas
| Facebook is inherently so bad that willing users wouldn't
| even let Facebook have their CC details...
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| If both come up with a way to be paid anonymously, and I
| get to be full owner of my data, then I will consider
| rejoining and paying.
| Raed667 wrote:
| The assumption is that chronological feed makes for less
| engagement, and if your business model is to sell eyeballs,
| that creates an intensive to hide it and make your KPIs
| better.
| sweettea wrote:
| There is a 'Most Recent' option for several years which
| provides chronological newsfeed:
| https://m.facebook.com/help/218728138156311/how-do-i-see-
| the... . It isn't well known, for sure.
| Lammy wrote:
| "You can sort your Feed to see recent posts, but Feed will
| eventually return to its default setting."
| college_physics wrote:
| > I still completely believe in Facebook as a good product
| for the world.
|
| Well, people believe the craziest things so you are in good
| company.
|
| But on the important point on whether facebook is salvageable
| with a user subscription model: extremely dubious. In some
| sense adtech has ruined the concept of users paying for a
| good product and there is poetic justice in that. The magic
| wand that turns users into product wont turn product into
| client.
|
| What _might_ work is "social as public or semi-public
| infrastructure", namely getting cities, companies, states or
| even countries paying for user accounts of residents,
| employees etc. as a sort of benefit.
|
| But even in the unlikely scenario facebook would relinquish
| its residual adtech earnings in favor of a new and less
| lucrative business model it would likely face stiff
| competition from newcomers with less historical baggage
| mokash wrote:
| consider that the goal of facebook is not to build a 'good
| product for the world'. facebook exists to 1) keep your
| attention 2) extract as much data as it can 3) make
| inferences where necessary/possible 4) sell targeted ads.
|
| facebook is an ad business. to that end, they do try to
| improve the user experience wherever necessary to advance the
| goals stated above, but that's it.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| 5) psychological studies 6) modify your behaviour 7) train
| AI
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/faceboo
| k...
| lordnacho wrote:
| Strangely I just closed my FB tab, and then I landed on this
| HN story.
|
| I was looking through it, and it started scrolling on its
| own. Dozens and dozens of stories flashed before me.
|
| Something is really odd, FB has lost a fair bit of my online
| time recently.
|
| I think you may be right. Just let me pay a few bucks and
| just show me my friends.
| firecall wrote:
| I worked out that it doesn't show me my Friends posts as my
| Friends don't post anything anymore!
|
| Scrolling through Facebook is like walking through an
| Outlet Mall in a foreign country.
| anf0 wrote:
| You used to be able to hide the red notification with uBlock
| Origin. I don't know if it still works though.
| guerrilla wrote:
| FB Purity. Warning, it's slow as dirt but it does all the
| tricks.
|
| https://www.fbpurity.com/
| deanc wrote:
| There have been numerous cases of fb purity users having
| their Facebook accounts banned. Use at your own risk as
| Facebook is quite clear about extensions that alter the
| experience being against TOS.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Do you have a source for that other than the developer
| being banned[1] in 2012?
|
| 1. https://www.fbpurity.com/news/important-news-facebooks-
| legal...
| firecall wrote:
| I dont _use_ Instagram, but occasionally I 'll take a look to
| see if friends have posted anything.
|
| Then seemingly at random it starts showing me short-form sort-
| core porn videos.
|
| Instagram used to be about fun and creativity, now it's a
| trashy tabloid that's entirely made of Page 3 content.
| liendolucas wrote:
| > I'll never forget the open contempt Meta has shown for me as
| a user of their products.
|
| You can always return the contempt by extracting all our data
| out (provided that's important to you) and permanently shutting
| down you account. I believe that's the most efficient thing you
| can do to tell FB to go to hell.
|
| Edit: I honestly believe that any FB user this is the most
| harmful thing you can do to them.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| I have actually tried extracting my data from google and
| facebook, and neither methods worked. I tried multiple times,
| and the process breaks inevitably at some point.
| Raed667 wrote:
| I'm hostage to Meta, my grandmother uses only Messenger to
| call and would/can not learn any other interface. The rest of
| the family only chat through Whatsapp.
|
| Quitting Meta means not getting to be in those circles
| anymore.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Yes, many people suffer from this problem as well. I guess
| I can say what I said because I cancelled my account many
| many years ago (if not mistaken more than a decade ago).
| jamiek88 wrote:
| I quit fb but WhatsApp is impossible to quit. I tried and I
| became socially isolated.
| Raed667 wrote:
| I can relate. But it seems Facebook becomes more
| necessary if your kid's football team only shares
| schedules in a group, or after-school clubs, etc..
|
| Basically you're subject to the lowest common
| denominator.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| > I'll never forget the open contempt Meta has shown for me as
| a user of their products.
|
| And as a revenue-generating set of eyeballs they can monetize
| and sell to said video content creators.
| nanidin wrote:
| I have disabled all forms of video notifications on Facebook,
| but over the last few weeks I have been getting video
| notifications for pages I follow sporadically throughout the
| day. It felt very much like periodic attempts to get me back
| into the app, despite my direct indication that I do not want
| those types of notifications.
|
| I reported the spurious notifications, then eventually gave up
| and disabled notifications for the entire app at the OS level.
| [deleted]
| Yorch wrote:
| I don't have a bad opinion about Facebook because I don't use it.
| baby wrote:
| There's different kinds of haters.
|
| The ones that don't use the app yet find it outrageous that
| other people find utility in it.
|
| The ones that use the app and notice the move away from a
| useful tool to a Frankenstein app with no coherence.
| kbos87 wrote:
| It sure took a long time and a lot of words to state the obvious.
| What I'd actually find interesting is an exploration of the
| conditions that led Facebook to its current state of notification
| hell, unable to see the obvious errors of its own ways for so
| long.
| johnny22 wrote:
| I'm no expert, but it doesn't hard to come up with a reason for
| that. I'm sure every team thinks that their notifications are
| the most important, and they are all trying to prove the worth
| of their own section. Put all that together and you end up with
| a lot.
|
| At that point it takes someone with both vision and decision
| making authority to say say.. nope.. They have to be specific
| about which ones are too much.
| baby wrote:
| This ^. Every team wants to grow their sub app and thinks
| they deserve a place in the notification bar.
|
| Now imagine that this is true as well to get access to
| whatsapp or instagram user base. I think whatsapp has really
| done a good job of not bloating the app and rejecting all
| these requests.
| epolanski wrote:
| Imagine needing a data team to find out people only want
| notifications for the most relevant information and not be
| spammed for every idiocy.
|
| Imagine needing to spend tens or hundreds of millions to have an
| answer every single user could give you for free.
|
| You got to love the age of information and social media, gives so
| many people jobs.
| charcircuit wrote:
| They already knew that and they were already not sending low
| quality notifications. What they didn't know is how relevant
| should a notification be for it to be sent.
| TwiceCubed wrote:
| [dead]
| dmitriid wrote:
| > What they didn't know is how relevant should a notification
| be for it to be sent.
|
| Oh, they know. They definitely know. What they didn't know is
| the ratio "(engagement + monetisation)/useful notifications"
| wl wrote:
| My personal experience is that I was getting notifications
| for a unread posts in a group or a friend posting a video.
| Stuff that should have been in the news feed, not a
| notification. Not interactions with my interactions, which
| was my expectation. In other words, false positives. At the
| same time, they changed it at some point so someone replying
| to a post or comment you've made doesn't create a
| notification unless you've been tagged. False negatives.
|
| No, the notifications they were sending were low quality.
| jjulius wrote:
| Forgive my possible ignorance here, but to my mind, an
| irrelevant notification is a low-quality notification. Which,
| IMO, would indicate that they " _were_ already ... sending
| low quality notifications ".
| charcircuit wrote:
| The confusion is coming from both potential notifications
| and actual notifications both being called notifications.
|
| Think of YouTube. Usually a comment on a video sends you a
| notification. This may make sense for small creators, but
| if a creator is getting thousands of comments they may not
| want to actually be notified of each one. YouTube has to
| decided if the notification for a comment on a creator's
| video is relevant enough for them to be sent an actual
| notification for it.
| epolanski wrote:
| And in the end they found out that it had to be only the very
| most relevant like being tagged in a picture or receiving a
| friendship request.
| [deleted]
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Facebook looks like a trusted resource against Twitters madness.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| More notifications increased satisfaction by a small amount as
| well - when dissatisfied users like me deleted our accounts
| because of them. Technically, overall satisfaction increased by
| removing us from the survey population.
| burnte wrote:
| Yeah, I gigve very few apps notification rights, and zero
| websites in my browsers. I truly do not see why browser
| notifications were ever allowed, they're 99% abuse.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I think they're useful for some PWAs. I give gchat
| notification perms on my desktop which is a nice feature.
| ttt3ts wrote:
| My web based email client has notifications allowed.
|
| I am pretty happy browsers added support for this. It is
| disabled by default and easy to say no forever if a site is
| annoying about it.
| emkoemko wrote:
| i find this funny, some how facebook has my phone number and
| keeps texting me notifications... or maybe this is an account
| from who ever had this phone number before?
| chestervonwinch wrote:
| The feed used to be a simple chronological timeline. Then it
| evolved into whatever stochastic mess it is now in an attempt to
| maximize user engagement and ad views. So they've turned the
| notifications into essentially a mini version of the old news
| feed which (big surprise) is damn noisy.
| unixlikeposting wrote:
| I feel strongly that infinite scroll needs to be either
| illegalized or heavily regulated.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| The infinite scroll isn't really the issue here (though I
| wouldn't mind a law mandating a toggle).
| kristopolous wrote:
| What?! Spamming people with low quality garbage isn't a
| sustainable high yield strategy for long term engagement?!
| Stunning, just stunning!
| [deleted]
| charcircuit wrote:
| They were already not sending notifications that were predicted
| to be rated below 4 out of 5.
|
| The question of if removing notifications that were predicted
| to be rated 4 out of 5 is not so obvious.
| darzu wrote:
| Citation? I got a lot of crap notifications for years and
| years and have completely abandoned FB at this point b/c of
| the low signal to noise.
| kbos87 wrote:
| Same. Years ago I found that thanks to the gymnastics
| Facebook had done in notification settings, I could no
| longer stop many of the notifications I didn't care about -
| so I shut them all off, FB Messenger and all. Since then I
| open Facebook maybe once a month.
| charcircuit wrote:
| From the article
|
| >rather than our usual operating model of sending all
| relevant notifications (either rated 4 or 5 on a scale of
| 1-5)
| some_furry wrote:
| Relevance isn't a sufficient metric.
|
| Just because something is "relevant" to me doesn't mean I
| want to be notified. Usually I don't.
|
| I go out of my way to have zero unread notifications in
| any software I actively use, even if it means making
| liberal use of Mark All As Read. This lets me visually
| scan for where activity is without visual noise.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Just because something is "relevant" to me doesn't mean
| I want to be notified.
|
| By definition a relevant notification is something you
| want to get a notification for.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't really use Facebook so for me Spotify is the worst for
| notifications. I've gone through settings and turned off all of
| the notification categories (and there are a _lot_ of them).
|
| They still send me notifications, including notifications that I
| have notifications disabled.
| sejje wrote:
| Can you not just disable them at the OS-level? I do this to
| plenty of apps.
|
| I don't think I ever get spotify notifications currently. I
| probably did the above. (Android)
| criddell wrote:
| They are in the app.
| chazeon wrote:
| For a user's satisfactory, I really think any notification should
| be opt-in instead of opt-out for anything other than direct
| message.
|
| Facebook's blue app is one of the first apps I had to turned off
| the notification entirely. If I really care about some one who
| just upload a photo I will go into your app to take a look. These
| notifications are now just baits for the ads.
| jabart wrote:
| Our datacenter's network maintenance notifications were opt-in.
| Guess who called in because a BGP session was down and didn't
| know, this user. They switched all new account owners to opt-
| out for future notifications.
| tayo42 wrote:
| It's so bad I think this needs to be done with legislation. I
| wish I could write laws.
| kaashif wrote:
| What exactly needs to be done with legislation? There should
| be a law to ensure you turn off the notifications on
| Facebook?
| tayo42 wrote:
| Ensure that we don't get pointless notifications that exist
| only to increase engagement and have these on by default.
| Take advantage of feelings of fomo. You ever actually go
| turn off notifications? They have obscure names and there's
| tons of them in some apps. I don't want to waste time and
| energy fighting back apps constantly. Healthy defaults to
| start with
| chazeon wrote:
| The best bet you can get is something like App Store
| guideline rather than law, I think.
| jakear wrote:
| Eh. If the EU can make a law requiring every website to
| make me click through a popup regarding the types of
| strings my browser will put in the `Cookie` header, I
| think the US can make a law requiring every app to let me
| choose what types of notifications it sends me.
| darzu wrote:
| Why? It's our government (in theory), no reason we
| shouldn't make laws to the benefit of the people.
|
| When the private sector consistently refuses to self
| regulate bad behavior, the law can and should step in.
| smolder wrote:
| It should, but doesn't, when the private sector has
| bought the public sector.
| xattt wrote:
| Legislation that defers to regulations?
| thinking4real wrote:
| [flagged]
| darzu wrote:
| Ads via notifications should be regulated.
|
| For example, I have notifications enabled for Amazon
| because I need to know when a delivery is coming but
| they'll use that channel to spam me about "deals". There's
| no reasonable way to disable all these ad-via-
| notifications.
| julianlam wrote:
| Are you sure? I just checked my device, and while all
| notifications are toggled under a catch-all
| "notifications" category, I am able to customize this
| from within the app, and shipment notifications are their
| own category.
| darzu wrote:
| "Reasonable" is doing some heavy lifting, but i just
| spent another 10 minutes hunting through all the in-app
| settings menus I could find and I haven't found a way to
| disable these alerts.
|
| They certainly don't want you to disable deal
| notifications and make it very difficult to do so.
|
| It's like the old quote about fire extinguishers: if you
| don't know where one is, it doesn't exist. If a
| reasonable effort cannot find the setting, it doesn't
| exist.
| muglug wrote:
| The notifications used to just be stuff directly applicable to
| you (X tagged you in a photo etc).
|
| Then the demographic that advertisers really care about --
| affluent Americans in the 25-49 age bracket -- stopped using
| Facebook.com every waking minute, and product managers panicked.
|
| Their solution was to add more content to one of the most-clicked
| areas of the UI (I bet at least one product manager got a nice
| stock bump based on that change).
|
| Short-term gains are great and all, but the change smelled of
| desperation, and had utterly predictable long-term effects.
|
| And now we get a blog post telling us what should have been
| obvious to begin with.
| baby wrote:
| I agree except that I don't think it was desperation that
| triggered this. They optimize for the wrong metric, and started
| seeing huge growth number and thought this was great. What
| happened is that they used the huge user base they had built to
| convert their app into an addictive tiktok-like app. Of course
| it was going to work in terms of growth. But it's a different
| app. They should have spinned that off as a different app. Not
| as the biggest part of the social networking tool that was
| super useful to people.
|
| It's really a shame because I don't think we'll see many
| opportunities in history for an app that everyone has and that
| can be used to connect people.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| If I get an ad through a notification, that app loses it's
| notification privileges forever.
| WhiteBlueSkies wrote:
| MZ: They trust me, dumb fucks.
| willhinsa wrote:
| "... Surprising no one without an active ad revenue addiction"
| bburnett44 wrote:
| The fact that they're acting like this is a shocking insight
| cracks me up. They pay this group industry leading salaries to
| learn what anybody on the street could tell them
| some_furry wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
| salary depends upon his not understanding it" strikes again.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| First thing I do to all OSs I'm using. Disable all notifications
| for everything except DM from family and friends.
|
| If I want to know about a new email, group message or some other
| random thing I'll open the app or site and take a look.
|
| Otherwise leave me the ** alone.
| foepys wrote:
| The noise has become ridiculous, even for expected things.
| Luckily smartphone OSes have good notification handling
| nowadays.
|
| I for one stopped using email push ony smartphone when my
| hosting provider started sending out invoices at 1am. Who
| thinks that this is a good idea?
| glitchcrab wrote:
| Why do you have your phone configured in a way which
| notifications can wake you at night? The only time I see
| notifications between 2100-0700 is if I actively look at my
| phone.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| LinkedIn should take note. For a while it felt like they invented
| a new notification, opt-out of course, every few days. It was
| infuriating.
| cj wrote:
| One very notable difference between Facebook circa 2010 and
| Facebook circa 2020 is notifications circa 2010 had a very good
| signal to noise ratio. Basically 100% of notifications were ones
| I wanted to see.
|
| That also meant on many days I'd have no notifications at all. A
| week could go by with 0 notifications. Since the quality of
| notifications used to be so high, I used to treat FB
| notifications the same as I treat my email inbox (no email goes
| unseen).
|
| Over time, they started jamming in "fake" notifications like
| "Your friend posted a new video!" whereas in the past, I'd simply
| have 0 notifications for the day. After that, it became
| impractical to keep up with the never ending notifications.
|
| They need to be looking at the quality of their notifications
| rather than their frequency.
| pflenker wrote:
| For me, the decline in notification quality started with the
| rise of FarmVille.
| dlivingston wrote:
| The implications of this being what?
| baby wrote:
| IMO they really messed up by tracking and using time spent on
| page per day (or something like this) as a metric. That's
| something that makes sense if you're building a side-app, or an
| app focused on addictive content like tik tok. But if you're
| trying to build a useful tool for people then you're going to
| move away further and further from that vision. Which is what
| happened imo: the useful tool was transformed into a content-
| consuming app due to tracking the wrong metrics.
|
| The best thing that any PM with enough clout at fb could do
| right now is force the org to track a different metric, and
| move the content consuming side to a different app (because
| there's still a lot of growth value in communities, watch,
| etc.)
| mgraczyk wrote:
| I haven't been at facebook in a while, but seeing that chart at
| the top which shows the goal metric increase and become
| statistically significantly higher still makes me subconsciously
| very happy.
|
| One thing a lot of people outside the company probably don't
| realize is that every team at Facebook is different and the
| culture of experimentation varies greatly from team to team. When
| I was there, the people who worked on stories ranking were very
| serious about user satisfaction and thought deeply about whether
| changes were good for the user even beyond what could be measured
| via metrics. I worked a tiny bit on notifications experiments at
| Instagram (wasn't on a team but monitored and changed some
| ongoing experiments to improve metrics). At the time, I believe
| the notifications team was less thoughtful about this. I think
| this has changed in the years since I left though, based on this
| blog post and what I've seen in the app.
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