Noticed how sometimes you don’t get notified of someone’s update, an event or a post in your interest lists/groups? Missed that party for your friends’ birthdays? Here’s why…
So many of you will have seen posts similar to the following:
Facebook is now pushing administrators to pay to promote every post/update from their page. In an attempt to make page administrators and users pay for “promoted posts,” Facebook will now only notify 7% of you receive each update posted. Meaning that now, in order to receive all messages/posts from things you have ‘liked’, you must do the following:
1) Go to the the page (eg: http://www.facebook.com/mhix.org for ‘Shells Shots’).
2) Hover your mouse over where it says “LIKED” and click on “ADD TO INTERESTS LISTS”
For users/friends:
1) Goto their timeline, or hover over their name in one of their posts in your newsfeed.
2) Hover the mouse over the ‘Friends’ Button.
3) Click ‘Settings’
4) Click ‘All updates’
By doing this, you will be able to see all posts for pages and friends alike in your news feed. Please “share” this post with your friends.
Note: They also set the ‘Sort’ on the newsfeed to only put the top posts (those that have paid to be at the top) at the top, change it to ‘most recent’ to see what people are posting when they post..
Please share this post/information with everyone so all can know what Facebook are doing…!
Thank you!!
So what does it mean?
Well simply it’s the response to Facebook‘s latest attempt to get money for its investors. Facebook’s stock is falling, people are loosing money, the company is failing… Privacy is required by many people, and laws have mandated it so they can’t sell your data to others as they once did, advertising is failing particularly as mobile devices don’t see most of it… They need to make money…
So as most users of Facebook (the reported billions of users) are not actually real users (eg my Ex Katie Crothers has/had three “Officially her” accounts, plus at least 30 fake accounts in various alias names (eg Leon Mconnell etc) that she created to attack my account with, then later stalk me to try and to ‘collect evidence’ for my former employer to take me to court for breach of a non-disclosure agreement and right waiver that prevents me from taking them to court over the sexual harassment and discrimination I suffered whilst employed.) Then we have those like me, where I have 3 accounts, one for me publicly, one for my closest only friends, and one that I use to investigate people with (as part of my job, and for evidential evidence against the stalking and harassment.) Finally, I know many other people that have at least 2 accounts, one for employers, one for friends etc… So based on knowing many people with 2 legitimate accounts, I would suspect that Facebook’s user Total of 1.01 billion is actually around half that, despite their pathetic attempts to weed out fake accounts.
So back to the original question… what does it mean?
Well simply, they need to make money, and make money fast, so as they cannot get money from the fake accounts, and they can’t get people to pay for the newsfeeds they are relying on companies to pay for their ‘page’ posts to ensure that all their users get the updates. The problem with this is they are targeting the vast majority of pages by asking for payment to those pages that have less than 5000 ‘likes’, ie all the less known ones. The ones where people want to get themselves up on the limits so they don’t have to pay…
Here’s the problem though… it didn’t work, the little people won’t pay when the big ones get it free, and they worked out that if they have a second phone number and access to a limitless number of email addresses (like me) they can create ‘fake’ accounts, in this case the ‘fake’ is because they don’t represent a real person, they are the company, someone that can post adverts when they are your friend and you get them in your newsfeed as ‘Pages’ used to do…
To combat this, Facebook has been changing your ‘Newsfeed’, first they changed the ‘Sort Order’, it used to display the latest posts at the top, now by default it only displays ‘Top Stories’ – these ‘stories’ are those that go viral, ones that get shared, ones that get ‘liked’ ones that get lots of comments. So when this happened, I amongst many others told people how to change it back..
Go to the ‘News Feed’ and hover your mouse over ‘Sort’ and select ‘Recent Updates’ instead of ‘Top Stories’ (Note that ‘Top Stories’ only shows ‘Sort’, where after it’s changed it says, ‘Sort: Recent Updates’ – quite deliberate so you as a user don’t realize.)
Problem is everyone changed it back when they saw the posts alerting them to the change, so they change it back every so often, because they want you to always see ‘Top Stories’ first…
So their next attempts (and the current issue) is to make everyone suffer the ‘promoted posts’ issue… As a user, only 7% of your friends will only see any post you make, if you get a lot of people ‘Like’ing or ‘Comment’ing on your post it goes up the ‘Top Stories’ list and more of your friends *may* see the post…
Sooner or later Facebook is going to have to bite the bullet and start charging people for access. The problem they have with that is the user base will fall dramatically, their number of active users will probably be just a small percentage of their current total.. Why is fairly obvious, fake accounts will vanish, people will only have access if they have access to a credit card, and of course some will refuse to pay as there are free alternatives out there…
So here’s a list of the Advantages I see with a ‘pay for’ Facebook (and I’m only talking about paying $5 per year as this would if they insist that majority of their 1.01b users are real, $5.05b in revenue):
- Fraud and Fake accounts will be stamped out (one account per credit card number.)
- Revenue is generated.
- People will not abandon stolen accounts so readily.
- They can better ensure that children (under 18s) are not allowed access without their parents knowledge.
- Abuse by stalkers and harassers will be greatly reduced (it won’t stop it though, stalkers are psychotic and determined.)
- Spam and other abuse will be reduced (though it is unlikely to stop it.)
Disadvantages:
- Many people will just stop using it in favour of ‘free’ services.
- The real figure of Facebook users can be accurately calculated, audited and reported (and if it is significantly lower will decimate the Stock Price.)
- “Stolen accounts” trade will increase on the black market.
- Facebook ‘Phishing’ attempts will greatly increase as abusers will attempt to steal other people’s accounts.
- Facebook will have a contract with end-users so their legal obligations will significantly increase (terminating an account someone has paid for will require due cause/process and is auditable by a court – this would have significantly helped me in my received abuse and harassment by my ex.. Facebook would not want to get involved in such cases, but they would have no ability to get away from it.)