> There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down. The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore.
Is that really the only problem? How many taps/clicks do you need to get there? Can you make it the default? And how obvious is it that it actually exists?
People in UX research told us constantly they wanted the feed to be about friends, and chronological.
Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of people to try exactly this. Every time all the usage metrics tanked. Not just virality and doomscroll metrics, but how many likes, messages, comments, re-shares, and app-opens. We never even measured ad-related things on that team.
So people say they want this, like they say they want McDonalds to offer salads.
Nobody orders salads at McDonalds.
I really appreciate the reply, thanks for sharing that.
> Every time all the usage metrics tanked.
What if that's exactly what people want? Less usage of Facebook (horrifying, I know -- it can't be true, right?), with a focus on friends etc. when they do use it? I know you'll dislike the analogy, but isn't all that different from smoking. You think usage metrics tanking implies the outcome is bad... why exactly? Is it that unthinkable that less quantity and more quality is better for people, and what they actually want?
> So people say they want this, like they say they want McDonalds to offer salads. Nobody orders salads at McDonalds.
You seem to be missing that the people who have the means to eat out wherever they want don't eat at McDonald's every few hours. They go in moderation. They actively want to avoid McDonald's most of the time. Once in a while they get a craving, or get super hungry and don't see other options, etc. and they cave in and go there. Of course the get the tasty unhealthy option when they go, but it's foolish to think they prefer to eat McDonald's all the time. (Do you seriously believe that??)
I don't dislike the analogy. I eventually reached a point where I couldn't stomach the TikTok-ification of the product that Zuck forced us to keep marching towards, so I left.
Personally I agree with your point, less social media is better. I personally never go to Facebook anymore and set up app limits on my phone for my health. I won't let my kids use it at all.
But I worked at a company and drew a considerable salary, so I did what I was expected to do to make the product make money.
This seems like such a bizarre thing to put your finger on in the middle of an otherwise seemingly sincere post. Of all the hatred people have had toward Facebook the past > decade, I don't think "it's too much like TikTok" was the cause that has kept them up at night. If anything there are a ton of people who would much rather TikTok could be replaced by Facebook, so that at least the national security implications would be less dire in their eyes.
But yeah:
> But I worked at a company and drew a considerable salary
nice to admit what everybody knew. With the kind of compensation Facebook gave, I doubt many would've behaved differently.
Just take the win. It seems like such a bizarre thing to nitpick like this with a prior employee that has voluntarily opened up to you and agreed with many of your points.
I really wanted to, but that bit wasn't some minor detail. It felt pretty darn central to the whole thing, as it undermined what seemed like the central point.
Imagine this from a tobacco-company ex-salesman: "I don't let my kids smoke, I don't think it's healthy. I eventually left Camel because I couldn't stomach the Marlboro-ification of our product." So what we're being told is... after so many years of people complaining tobacco is harmful, they're saying they knew that all along and would've been totally cool with it while the money was coming in, but the straw that actually broke their (pardon the pun) Camel's back was that... their product suddenly started resembling their competitor's?? Or perhaps they're saying they don't believe it was harmful until the product stopped differentiating itself from their competitor's (but then the salary aspect would've been moot before that point)? And, either way... so we are reading all this after the rest of the world has been (pardon the second pun) fuming for much longer over much more concerning reasons?
It seems pretty darn important to understand what the regret is -- and I don't even mean this for judgment purposes (although it would inevitably impact that); I mean this for the larger purpose of understanding the thought process itself, for dealing with it in the future. i.e. if the reality we're facing is that product differentiation is what keeps people in such positions, rather than a disregard or misunderstanding of the societal or public-health impact, that's... news to me. And so (to me, anyway) this seems like an absolutely crucial detail to unpack, not an unimportant detail to gloss over.
But, yes, I very much appreciate that they shared this, and I'm sure it wasn't easy to in any case.
>Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of people to try exactly this. Every time all the usage metrics tanked. Not just virality and doomscroll metrics, but how many likes, messages, comments, re-shares, and app-opens. We never even measured ad-related things on that team.
Well, yeah, but this has an implicit "engagement === good" assumption. Exactly the same thing that incentivizes unhealthy McDonald's food: they make more money when they sell food that still leaves you hungry. So, yeah, people probably did want this, and when they got it they started using Facebook in a healthy manner (no point opening it at every available moment to just scroll through 'new' trash), which tanked your metrics. If you're actually worrying about your users you should also consider that them using your product more might not actually be what they want or need.
Ironically enough, I think the same mistake (or rather, it's more of a mistake because there's not quite such a naked financial incentive to make this worse for the affected users) has happened with the youtube analytics dashboard: multiple youtubers have said that it's actively addicting and really bad for their mental health, but any change that feeds that probably looks really good in their metrics because, hey, creators are using it more, that must mean it's good, right?
Trust me, I came in there full of motivation for "do what is good for the actual humans", and most of the rank of file were the same. FB's employees are not evil or exploitative, though I won't say its unfair to describe the leadership in such terms.
Many times in product design meetings I would interject with "but this hurts people!" etc.
We hated that our personal careers were directly tied to increasing the junk-food factor. It didn't feel good at all. But the choice, as crafted by HR and senior directors was clear: Junk food this thing, or lose your jobs.
the problem isn't introducing junk foods into menu, but focusing on the junk foods performance and killing other food categories as the result. I know that companies need revenue to survive and improve, but they're currently focusing too much on revenue and profit that they kill everything else.
it's like introducing unskippable ads and page-wide pop up ads makes user use adblock and killing other simpler banner ads.
I'm sure there's more that could be shared about how "wants" were determined, which would counter my off-the-cusp thought here, but anyways:
Yes... my ideal would be for facebook feed to be a once-a-week addiction (maybe a bit more) where I go, see what's new, and clearly hit an end point where I know I'm seeing things I've seen before. But I'm also part of the "problem" in that I post myself maybe twice/year now.
I'd suspect the current doomscroll-y feed like we have now/you were working on reduces my likelihood of "interacting" with friends' posts. "Do I make the effort of commenting, or lazily keep scrolling to the next-often-good 3rd party content?"
A year or two ago, I copied some greasemonkey type script off reddit, and that nuked all the non-friend content off my feed, but that stopped working a couple months later and I haven't been strongly enough motivated to find an updated approach. I have little enough friend activity that I'd easily notice when I hit old content.
The current doomscrolling feed of algo content sure does manage to hook me, so that's a nice indicator of the current team being successful :P
There's an old saying: you can never get enough of what doesn't fill your need.
For example, when you need sleep, you can't eat enough to make you not tired, but you may well pound a lot of caffeine and sugar.
If true, this would accomodate the simultaneous truths that:
(a) users accurately report their preference chronological friend connection when they come to a social feed
(b) users spend more time engaging with a social feed when the need they come to fill has irregularly payoffs
That you can get more engagement by not giving them what they want/need (or giving them what they need irregularly) wouldn't mean that they are lying to you, it would simply mean that engagement and social payoff curves aren't the same, and the incentives to drive one might not optimize the other.
I still see other content, even there, but it's still somehow manageable. I run out of updates very quickly though whereas I'd like to just start seeing older posts from friends that I've seen already.
Facebook commonly runs A/B testing on their UI. It is almost weekly for me and one of my friends to ask each other “hey do you have the <x> tab at the bottom” for Meta apps. Marketplace, Dating, “All Chats” in messenger which was just the same as the slide out menu I bet people didn’t use much. I also think they change per-user depending on what they use.
edit: I decided to check real quick and I do have the friends tab. Here’s a crop of it, note I edited out the last “Menu” tab for privacy.
Not only was that Friends tab not there for me by default, but it also does not do the aforementioned when I customize the top(? not bottom) tab bar to I include it. What it does is to show me a list: of pending friends, and friend requests. No space to show any posts to begin with. To see my friends' posts, I have to click the hamburger, then Feeds, then Friends, then (sometimes) manually pull down to refresh, because it usually just lies to me that I've already caught up. This is designed to be actively user-hostile, as if they were forced to implement this against their will.
You might be interested in FreeFollow.org [full disclosure, I'm one of the engineers working on it].
It combines the economic model of web hosting (users pay to host spaces, reading is free, and writing in someone else's space is also free), the simple UI of social media (you have a profile and write posts), and the E2EE security model of 1Password (we actually implemented their published security model). It's also a non-profit so there's no pressure from owners to exploit users.
It's aimed primarily at parents of young kids who are annoyed at constantly sharing via text groups, but non-parents are also surprisingly into it.
Independent social media run in a cost-effective way and actually helping their community is the future. I really hope non-American devs learn this because most American devs are too busy trying to get rich.
Thanks for letting us know. Unfortunately we haven't been able to reproduce that with the current version of Firefox, but if you'd like to email us at hello@freefollow.org we'll add you to the list manually.
> There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down.
I remember when this was called "Lists", and I carefully gathered acquaintances into lists. When I wanted to check in with particular list, I clicked on the list.
Then the lists sidebar disappeared (but you could still get the functionality if you knew the URL / argument structure).
Then the functionality disappeared.
I'm sure some product/UX staff did career making things on a metric somewhere.
> The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. The "flywheel" is broken.
Why post when there's no guarantee who/anyone will see it amongst a firehose of bait-y and often angry stuff?
This is part of the anti-flywheel which draws towards doomscroll.
> group chats
Group chats have the baseline virtue of knowing who your audience is.
They're missing other virtues, but that's probably another conversation.
I think they recently made a big deal about this even? The fact that they would “promote” something that likely reduces time spent scrolling and viewing of ads means that no one is going to use it as an alternative to doom scrolling. They know they got you hooked on the good stuff and are just pretending to not be the bad guys
Discord too. Most of my friends are on Discord, we have group chats and private servers. Many communities use Discord as their primary online hub too.
It is concerning. Discord has been slowly enshittifying for the last couple of years: ads (ex: "quests"), app bugs, etc... There is no export option and even public servers are not accessible to search engines and archives.
The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. The "flywheel" is broken.
Social Media hasn't died - it just moved to group chats. Everything I care about gets posted there.
Honestly, I would love a running Feed of my group chats. Scan my inbox, predict what's most engaging, and give me a way to respond directly.