Facebook effects over content visibility
Facebook pages and promoting content through them is becoming more and more evident these days. And if the sharing is done maliciously – there will be consequences.
How users use their facebook pages and why?
Imagine you have created or you manage a facebook page called “I am here to rock this world, baby!”. 300 000 people like your page. They liked it because of various reasons – the name, they saw a friend who liked a post, etc. You are posting a plethora of funny and oh, so jolly nonsense – lolcats, videos, pics, games. Now you have other profiles, on other sites too. And one day you decide to use your fb page to boost the content you are posting on this other site.
Almost every site has a way of selecting top content and posting it up front. More content equals difficult sorting. So eventually the site end up with some kind of algorithm that sorts the content, check every XX minutes whats new, sort again, and so on. When you post your pic/video on your facebook page, it is almost immediately seen by all it’s fans. You receive a massive impact, your content skyrockets and is usually there to stay. Because 90% of the users on the host check primarily top content. Too lazy to bother with stuff like searching.
If you promoted something really stupid – it will whither down after all your fb fans see it, it won’t get support at the host. If you promoted something bad – the host will delete it or you will be banned. Everything is great – you have your pics/videos on top, the host gets all those visits for free, thank you very much.
Except for those that don’t possess fb pages. They are doomed.
Eventually they get the game. They create fb pages too, or try to enter in a agreement with other fb page owners, alliances are being made, pages are being stolen from their owners after false promises. At the end – fast forward 3 months – everyone now has a fb page. You are still promoting your content, you try different tricks to get extra clicks, but it just doesn’t work like it used to anymore. And you want it to. You want your pic/video on front page. You want your name in top 100 users for the day. So one day you decide to share your link with false information. It works like magic.
This is where things get interesting. Let the evil commence.
The first 4-5 times no one gets what the hell is going on. Then they see you in action. And copy you. Everyone starts sharing with false information. When someone is on your way – you share his/her content on your page and ask for downvotes. You steal other people pages and you delete them. You refuse to stop the madness because “everyone else is doing it!”.
At first your fb fans are confused. Then they become frustrated. But they usually liked about a 500 pages so they have no idea anymore who are you and what is that doing on my dashboard, and I want it out of here, because it’s a lie – so click X to my right, click “spam” – there you have it.
The negative impact is suddenly over the host.
2 more months later – we are facebook banned for “spammy and abusive content”.
This whole scenario is just my suggestion why we were banned. It is happening, this way, all the time. But I am not sure that this was the main reason behind the ban. (I hope it’s not) I believe that we probably just exceeded some sort of domain quota or it was because of their mass spam Justin Bieber porn problem. (we were banned the day after.) Or it was evil competitors marking our content as abusive. No idea, since facebook did not answer none of our mails. (so not cool facebook.)
We initiated a campaign and were unblocked few hours later. But I don’t think this is a sustainable method to resolve the problem.
Few major points:
It’s facebook fault because:
- they let users edit everything, when they share a link, except the link itself. So I can post any youtube video for example and name it anyway I want.
- they do not offer easy way for flagging a page. They do not offer (on purpose) easy way to unlike a page.
- they do not provide any sensible information for the ban – neither to the user, nor to the content provider.
It’s our fault because:
- we created community way too competitive – competition must be watered down before users kill each other
- we have holes in the the “sorting hat” algorithm – must be fixed
I think this problem is going to gradually become more visible. A lot of businesses rely already heavily on facebook. We were quick to fix it and the loss would be really small if we were actually permanently banned – only 5% of our visits were coming through them (mostly hit and run – 1-2 impressions per user), but what if we were a small developing start-up and our competitors decided to play it dirty? And how can one put his money into something and when there is a problem fb won’t even answer your mails? (if google can, so can you, eh? again – so not cool.)
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Additional reads:
Nerd talk: The tale of the life of a link on reddit, told in graph porn
