Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: facebook

  • Facebook to Automation: Nuts

    Facebook to Automation: Nuts

    Massive hat tip to Amanda Rush for pointing this out to me.

    Facebook is dropping support for apps to publish. I quote their recent post on policy updates:

    The publish_actions permission will be deprecated. This permission granted apps access to publish posts to Facebook as the logged in user. Apps created from today onwards will not have access to this permission. Apps created before today that have been previously approved to request publish_actions can continue to do so until August 1, 2018. No further apps will be approved to use publish_actions via app review. Developers currently utilizing publish_actions are encouraged to switch to Facebook’s Share dialogs for web, iOS and Android.

    What is a Publish Action?

    Facebook uses actions to do ‘things’ within Facebook itself. A publish action is, logically, an action that triggers a publish of a post. When you create a Facebook app, you grant it special permissions to do specific actions, in order to prevent people from posting to your Facebook feed when they shouldn’t. If you’ve ever seen one of those popups like this, Facebook is asking you to confirm permissions:

    Screen asking to connect an app to your facebook account

    Most common are things that read content, like your posts and your friends, and so on. A publish_action would be like having your WordPress site automatically make a post on Facebook when you publish a post on your blog.

    Why Are They Doing This?

    The argument is that Facebook is maturing and “taking user privacy seriously” because the majority of people never read what permissions they’re granting, or who they’re going to be spamming with the cross posts. The reality? They’re locking down Facebook so if you want to get traffic from Facebook and your articles, you have to manually post them.

    Now. I hate artificial (and real) monopolies as much as the next nerd, and I do think this is a really cretinous move. But at the same time, by preventing auto-posting, they actually now have a way to combat fake news.

    If you watch The Good Fight, then you may have seen an episode where a bot script auto-generated posts, purporting to be someone, using fake news sites that people spun up. In season one, that was used to discredit Maia on Twitter. In season two, they took it to Facebook and demonstrated how the fake news sites could be used to target jurors and ensure they got the news.

    Seriously everyone needs to watch The Good Fight. They’re brilliant.

    But the point is this, by restricting people from auto-posting, then someone has to log in and make connections and it’s much easier to track behaviour. Facebook can block a VPN, but they can’t block Amazon AWS servers, after all. And those auto-posts are going to show as coming from your server, not your personal account.

    Do I Need to Care?

    Do you use Jetpack’s Publicize to post to your personal account? Then yes. Maybe. I don’t actually know what Jetpack’s going to do about this. My contact (i.e. my friend) just said they were on it, but I imagine there’s a lot of cursing in the background.

    Now, notice how I said personal account? And maybe?

    I noticed that Buffer, an app that auto-posts tweets and Facebook posts, said they’d be fine. On the other hand, Bridgely said they’re killing off their Facebook publish because of this. And on Facebook’s documentation for the APIs, the post to personal timelines information is gone, but the post to pages is still there.

    Which means I have no idea how horrible this will be. An incomplete block means spammers and fake reporters will move to posting to pages, which many users can post to. I can’t see how that will move the needle very far at all.

    Overall, I hate this and I think it’s a good thing.

  • Mailbag: Facebook Page Notifications

    Mailbag: Facebook Page Notifications

    A family member, after teasing me for not knowing someone was married because the only place they announced was on Facebook (and Shredder? You’re not off the hook either), finally asked:

    Why do you still hate facebook?

    Because the interface is inconsistent and sucks. Let me explain by showing you about my Page Notifications.

    I still use Facebook under duress and happily go weeks without noticing I have alerts waiting. When I do remember to check in, this is usually my first clue I have that there are unread notifications:

    Sidebar alert - a VERY subtle count

    If I click on the group, the toolbar at the top of the page gives me a much better idea of what’s going on:

    Page Navigation bar lists how many unread I have

    So I logically click and I get this:

    The notification page has the number on the left and a non-distinct way to see what's unread on the right

    I don’t like that I have to click three times just to see my notifications. Yes, I can click on that teeny-tiny number to go to the page properly and wipe them, but what if I don’t want to? Also have you noticed how small the number is? It’s hard to hit if you’re not ‘great’ with your mouse. Guess what I’m not? Great with my mouse. I like larger icons because they’re easier for me to tap. I’m not the only one.

    The next problem is the text color. It’s not really all that distinct. It changes to a useful red/orange on other pages, but the subtle grey on blue grey, combined with the size, makes it weird. Compare it to the alerts you get for unread posts in your timestream, or personal notifications:

    The top bar says I have 1 new friend request and 13 posts that I should read

    Clearly their goal is to keep me on that front page (which is obviously why they swap my ‘recent posts’ to ‘top posts’ every chance they get). But even then, once you click on the item, the number goes away but the items are not marked as read. You still have the mark-as-read buttons, which are not very noticeable or distinct. In the case of a page, the number count on the sidebar goes away, but not the one on your toolbar or the notifications page. Welcome aboard the inconsistency train, thy name is Facebook.

    Interestingly, this day when I clicked on the “Mark as Read” link, the number dropped from 20 to 1. But there was nothing else to mark as read. All the backgrounds went from pale blue to white, and there was no other indication as to how I might find what was unread.

    Eventually I saw the sidebar:

    Sidebar lists ONE unread notification

    There it was. I hovered over it, clicked ‘Mark As Read’ and that number went away. I had to refresh the page to make the orange alert go away, because apparently that level of Ajax is hard.

    My conclusion is pretty simple. Facebook wants me on the main page of their site, my timeline, all the time, and that’s fine for a user. But in doing so, they’ve made administration of their pages and groups overly complex and inconsistent with the rest of the flow of their site. They want me to add in content, but they’re going to decide how I, and others, consume it, which means my ability to easily input and manage is secondary (or even tertiary) to their consumer design.

    The pages and groups are a nice idea, but still ill planned for a ‘MySpace’ replacement. The only reason that even worked was because MySpace blew up on itself.

  • Why I Hate Facebook

    Why I Hate Facebook

    I do, you know. I hate it for a couple reasons, but the primary one is the user interface sucks. It’s just horrible. And since I’ve apparently turned Friday into my free, shortform, random topic day, let me explain to you why.

    Ignores My Settings

    I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gone to my timeline and seen garbage from last week. “What the hell?” I would shout, and look to see that my timeline is ordered by something called “Top Stories.” Interesting, because I know for a 100% fact that I set it to “Most Recent.” But no, no, Facebook changed it. So I change it back:

    Sort Order

    And don’t ask me how many times I’ve had to turn chat OFF.

    Click Don’t Matter

    This is worse on iOS where I have to click twice on every single link, but it’s bad on the sort order, which is not a link but a drop down. Only since it’s right above the post in my timeline, I have to wiggle my mouse around until I magically click the right place for it to work. Using Facebook on my iPhone means I have to use their app, which behaves radically differently from the normal app, so thanks. Now I have to learn everything twice.

    Unfollow Does not Mean What You Think It Means

    If I comment in a thread, I follow it. Okay. I can see why you do that, and while I’d like an option to default that to off, I’m not going to argue. But when I make a comment, sometimes I click ‘Unfollow’ right away, because I just wanted to say one thing, or post “Congratulations on your baby!” and move on. That’s the end of it, right?

    Nope. Every time someone ‘likes’ my comment, I get a notification. Every. Smegging. Time. I’m witty. Lots of people like my comments, or find them helpful, or whatever. That means I get a lot of BS notifications I don’t give a horse’s patootie about.

    Wrong location For VERY important information

    Do you know how to ‘tell’ if a post can be shared? Some can, some can’t you see. Let me help. This post is public and can be shared:

    Public Share OK

    This post is friends only and cannot be shared:

    Only Friends

    Different icons, different meanings. Where are these icons? At the bottom of the post. Why is that a problem, you may ask? After all, the share button is down there too! Not everyone shares with share buttons. A lot of people will copy what someone says on FB to a blog. If they don’t happen to scroll down (which, let’s face it, a lot of us don’t), and don’t happen to know magically that a globe is public and a group of little people is a friends-only thing, they’ll copy the post content, paste it to their website, and share with the world.

    I’m not so naive to think anything I put online is ever fully ‘private.’ But I’m intelligent, experienced, and I work in IT. I understand the world around me, and how the digital world shares data. If it’s online, someone will see it, share it, and make it public. Not everyone gets that, and they get upset.

    How could Facebook fix this? Put at the top of the post “Friends Only!” or “Public Post” so it’s clear right away.

    Bad Colors

    Did you know you can embed Facebook posts in WordPress?

    https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151997270514795&set=a.10150154582169795.302445.251152514794&type=1

    That’s my high school celebrating soccer season. The link for embedding FB? Grey. Pale grey. In the image below, I’m hovering over it. It’s still grey. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was plain text!

    Embed Link

    There should be a color change when you hover over a link, a noticable color change.

    But wait, there’s more!

    I’m sure there is, but at over 600 words, lets call this a day. What annoys you about Facebook’s user interface?

  • Facebook: Scam Artist

    Facebook: Scam Artist

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

    “Gain 500 likes! Just use our service!” or maybe “Click here to read how to get 1000 followers!

    If you’re like me, you hear that, laugh at the silly scammers, delete/block as spam, and move on.

    But … what about when you get this in your notifications:

    likes

    That’s not spam, it’s not a scam*, and it’s terrifying to consider. Facebook is sending me, as a ‘page’ owner, a suggestion that the only way to increase my likes (i.e. my presence on Facebook), is to pay them.

    Greed is Good

    I need to stop and tell you that I have absolutely no problem paying for things. Facebook provides a free service, and if they want me to pay them to promote my wares above and beyond the word-of-mouth business I’m doing, that’s awesome! Same with Twitter. These are business, and I’m totally copacetic, no, I’m totally in favor of paying them for above-and-beyond. Do I, as a user, like those ads? Generally no. But do I, as a business, appreciate them? Hell yes!

    And there in is the line between the goals. As a user, my goal is to do what I want without a hassle. As a business, my goal is to get users to interact with me to convert them into users on my site, and thus profit like an Underpants Gnome. The reality is, of course, not that simple, but as we like to say, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. The dichotomy of social media is never more apparent then when I want to put on my business hat and try and evaluate the usefulness of any marketing campaign.

    Blackmail is Bad

    There is, however, a major difference between being “greedy” (asking people to pay extra for extra things) and what Facebook is actually doing. You see, Facebook intentionally throttles you. Facebook stops a large percentage of your traffic from reaching the people you follow. I wrote that a year ago, and guess what? It’s still true. So what they’ve done is create a false economy. This is not like virtual gold farming, where I pay someone to mine for junk on a game, and turn around and sell it at a higher price. That actually makes a certain amount of sense in an open economy. Instead, Facebook is creating a situation where your hard work is absolutely meaningless, and the only way to get what you want is to pay.

    At least with Gold Farming, if I wanted to put in the time and effort, I could see the same results.

    Director of Product Marketing for Facebook, Brian Boland, told TechCrunch back in 2012 that their behavior of only letting 12% of people who follow your business see your post isn’t bad, because “… there are pieces of content you create that are interesting, and there’s some that are not.” (Your Average Facebook Post Only Reaches 12% Of Your Friends – TechCrunch, Feb 29, 2012.) I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t make me happy. Someone else is deciding if something I said was interesting or not?

    Viral is Voted On

    facebook-adsThe way we expect social media to work is like this: I make a post, people who follow me like it and repost it via likes or retweets, so people who follow them see it, read it, and the circle continues. So to many of us, it’s outright galling to hear that Facebook has always decided what is and isn’t ‘interesting’ and promoted your crap accordingly. Essentially they’re using Edgerank to decide if your content is worth sharing. The catch-22 of course is there is a practical limit to how organically you can increase your Edgerank score. That means to get higher, you have to pay, and now we’re back to blackmail.

    Now I, as a user, can change my feed to sort by ‘recent posts’ and not ‘most popular.’ And I, as a business, can write ‘more engaging’ posts and get my engagement (this is a technical FB term) up. I can get a pretty high engagement by posting at the right target audiences, and using catchy titles/content (which I do anyway). But it’s unclear, to say the least, that these things are happening! Had I not read the first article about the 12%, I wouldn’t have known to look for the others and see this was always the case and how to ‘fix it.’

    By the way, I don’t think requiring a user to make a change is a fix, I think that’s a cop out. Also that change resets every time you log in, or reopen your browser. Just like the chat setting I turn off every other week. Clearly Facebook ‘knows best.’

    Expectations are Engineered

    This reminds me of a story my friend Yesenia Sotelo (of SmartCause Digital told me: Why Charity Engine Quit Facebook. When I read that article, I was amazed that they had ever treated Facebook like an email list. You see, what they used to do was send a message directly their followers about news and services, using Facebook messages as their page. After all, people opt in to liking your page, so only people who wanted to communicate with you would do that, right? Nope!

    We want you to connect with your fans in the most effective way possible. That’s why as of September 30 you’ll no longer be able to send updates to fans using Facebook Messages. The best way to make sure your content is seen is to post it on your Wall so people see your updates in their news feed.

    Interesting how that’s not ‘effective’ isn’t it? That’s right up there next to Facebook telling me they know what content of mine is interesting before any human gets to interact. I don’t believe their AI is that smart. Popularity is not just math, it’s got to do with the pulse of reality as well as the flavor of the day. Release your product on the same day as a natural disaster? Poor timing, and you probably won’t be as ‘interesting’ as the time you release your new Dodgers themed product the day they clinch a playoff berth. Those aren’t things you can bank on, of course.

    Truth is Terrible

    The truth is this: Trust no one.

    Facebook’s bottom line is not yours. Neither is Google’s or Twitter’s. If, for now, your goals align with theirs, then great. But remember you’re not their audience, you’re their prospective customer, and you get what you pay for with them.