THAT RAW FEELING IN YOUR BUNGHOLE IS FACEBOOK WORKING ON YOU AGAIN WITHOUT THE LUBE

Yes, I’m afraid it’s time for another rant about Facebook. The pressure was building, and I needed to vent for fear that otherwise I’d have an attack of explosive diarrhea.

The last time I had to resort to this kind of diarrhea remedy was in June, when the subject was an exploration of the algorithms that Facebook uses to determine who gets to see Page posts and the rollout of Facebook’s Promoted Posts feature. In a nutshell, if you’re the admin of a Facebook Page and you add a Page post, Facebook doesn’t deliver your post to the news feeds of all your Page fans. At one point, Facebook reported that on average only 16% of your fans will see any given post.

Facebook does give you the option of paying them to expand the distribution of your posts. That’s the Promoted Posts feature. We’ve used that feature only for certain posts at the NCS FB Page — when we want to spread the word about a song premiere or new album stream here at the site — and, unsurprisingly, it definitely does work. The stats we get from FB show that our posts reach a much larger percentage of our FB fans, as well as FB Friends of our fans, though the reach is still not 100%.

But we’re not a business, we get no revenue from anyone for running NCS, and so there’s a limit to how much money we’re willing to spend to spread our content around the FB community. Impecunious metal bands aren’t any more likely to fatten up Facebook’s bank account in order to reach more of their fans either.

But it turns out that with Promoted Posts, Facebook was only getting warmed up. On Wednesday of this week Facebook rolled out a new “test” in the U.S. (they’ve been doing it longer than that in other countries). Now, even individuals get the awesome opportunity to pay FB in order to increase the visibility of shit like your wedding photos, pics of your newborn brat, where your band is playing next weekend, and big news like what you ate for breakfast. Wheeeeeee!!!

Here’s part of the text from FB’s October 3 announcement:

As part of a test starting today, people in the U.S. can promote personal posts to their friends on Facebook.

The test started first in New Zealand in May and gradually rolled out to people in more than 20 countries. It will now appear to people in the U.S.

Every day, news feed delivers your posts to your friends. Sometimes a particular friend might not notice your post, especially if a lot of their friends have been posting recently and your story isn’t near the top of their feed.

When you promote a post – whether it’s wedding photos, a garage sale, or big news – you bump it higher in news feed so your friends and subscribers are more likely to notice it.

Now, one way to consider this is that FB isn’t really making things worse — it turns out your personal FB status updates haven’t been reaching all your Friends for some time anyway —  it’s just giving you a way to make things better, for a price.

I doubt that very many people are going to pay $7 to promote their personal shit to their Friends, but here’s one thing I’m pretty sure I do know: The more people who use this feature, the less likely that status updates by people who don’t use the feature will reach their Friends. Why? Because promoted posts will get shoved higher into the news feed of the user’s Friends and non-promoted posts will get shoved lower. That’s the way the algorithms work, and besides, who would ever use the Promoted Posts feature if the algorithms didn’t work that way?

According to this article, “Facebook says that promoting posts doesn’t change the audience that will see a post but it will appear higher in News Feed with a note that it is sponsored.”

Let’s be real: When FB says it won’t change the audience that will see a post, bear in mind that the audience who currently sees your FB statuses when you don’t pay is far less than 100% of your Friends to begin with. When Promoted Posts are forced higher into your news feed, that inevitably increases the odds that updates of other Friends won’t be seen if they’re not paying.

Here’s another irony. According to this story which appeared three days ago, Facebook rolled out an algorithm a year ago that was intended to help ensure that important personal announcements didn’t get buried in the news feeds of Friends. By using “natural language processing”, the algorithm adjustment was designed to make sure that significant personal announcements stuck around in the news feeds of Friends until they logged on, when they would then be seen.

Now it seems that you’ll need to pay FB to make sure that happens. Thank you sir, may I have another?

By the way, FB czar Mark Zuckerberg made this little announcement yesterday:

This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month.

If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you.

Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.

I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.

Kinda makes you feel all gooey inside, don’t it? Forgive me for being a curmudgeon, but I’m not totally sold on the idea that Zuckerberg is feeling humbled and honored. I know I’m not feeling humbled or honored by being told that I need to pay FB if I want my Friends to see the priceless shit I post on my personal FB page.

What I do feel from this announcement is that no matter how frustrating it is to witness FB’s continuing efforts to monetize its business since going public, it will take a massive upheaval in space-time for an adequate alternative to FB to surface. One billion users is an astonishingly large “installed base”, and the network effects of having a mass of users that large will make it extraordinarily difficult for any competitor to dislodge FB.

It’s much more likely that FB will shoot itself in the head before any rival succeeds in delivering its own kill shot.

One final note, while I’m on this depressing subject: Over about the last month I’ve noticed a significant decline in the reach of FB posts added to the NCS FB Page. Even after FB rolled out Promoted Posts for Pages, the stats indicated that our FB posts were reaching about 25% of our fans. Now it’s more like 15% or less. I have trouble believing this is just random chance, but I haven’t yet seen any published reports that would explain it.

One of our other writers suggested to me that there could be a correlation between our use of the Promoted Posts feature and a decline in the reach of our non-Promoted Posts. You know, kind of like negative reinforcement. This wouldn’t surprise me in the least.