Facebook vows to double staff with new cadre of Net Police

Facebook has promised to double its global headcount from a year ago, with the new employees being devoted to Cleaning Up The Web. The pledge comes ahead of a Congressional grilling of America's two giant internet platforms (and Twitter) today. All three face scrutiny not just for their click-driven advertising models, but …

[djstardust]

Facebook is finished

I have seen less and less feeds from friends lately. Seems many are walking away. Facebook now generally consists of:

Football memes

Cat videos

What the neighbour had for breakfast, or lunch, or dinner.

People with a political point to prove

Click and win competitions with no prize

Who will be your celebrity lover and other assorted fake crap

People with insecurity or an attention seeking disorder.

Remember Bebo, Myspace, Friends Reunited?

Facebook will be next. Being big doesn't make you immune from failure. Watch Ryanair slowly go down the pan as well.

[Joe Harrison]

Re: Facebook is finished

Definitely agree. It was great at first as simple tool for keeping track of friends and local events but creeping-featurism kept adding on daft bits until it finally developed an incurable 100% fatal problem - it is now Too Much Trouble and nothing can survive that

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Facebook is finished

That's why they're accepting any revenue streams, no matter what the currency is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Facebook is finished

I'm going to disagree - unfortunately, getting hard data on session statistics and bandwidth usage to back this up is hard. The best I have is the following (I don't know where the data is sourced from so it may be questionable) but it shows all of the key social metrics (number of users, time spent per session, number of sessions) increasing:

https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/

As long as Facebook provides a way of sharing content with friends, particularly content that is normally "paid for" such as sporting events or music where the value is very time dependent, they will have a platform for selling advertising and consumer profiling along with it.

I thought Snapchat may have been taking this market from Facebook amongst younger users, but even Snapchat have realised that the limited lifetime of content results in losing things people may want to view again in the future. And the young are continuing to use Facebook because of this.

[m0rt]

@DJstardust Re: Facebook is finished

"Cat videos"

Well I expect these to be on facebook - I mean this is what the internet was invented for. Everything else is just an added bonus.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe its finished

But there has to be somewhere for the people leaving to go. After getting used to being able to connect with their friends in this way, most people aren't simply going to give it up.

They obviously aren't going to Twitter, they are already in decline and the stock price is showing it. Ditto for Snapchat. I see some friends whose only "posts" on Facebook are sharing photos via Instagram, so maybe people are going there?

Maybe it isn't just one place, and there are people going to a number of different places, but if anything is subject to network effects it is social networking, so a diaspora across a half dozen different platforms seems unlikely - if Facebook experiences a downturn people will end up going somewhere else in similar numbers, eventually.

One thing I have noticed is that my business page gets less and less "organic reach" as time goes on. They want people to pay and are reducing the reach deliberately, no doubt. As businesses see it is no longer useful to be on Facebook unless they pay ever escalating fees to get the same reach they once got for free, they'll find alternatives as well.

Some may retrench on the web, some may have a custom app developed (you can get branded "custom" apps for a given class of business like restaurant, retail, etc. pretty cheaply) and encourage your customers to download the app by making discounts or promotions available through without having Facebook act as a toll collecting middleman.

[Chemical Bob]

Re: Maybe its finished

"But there has to be somewhere for the people leaving to go."

Outside (?)

[Phukov Andigh]

Re: Facebook is finished

if what you listed was just all that Facebook hosted, I would actually be more inclined to keep it going.

when its used to manipulate public opinion, spread hate, lies, and politics (redundant I know) and sell product, thats where more and more users WANT it to fail

[annodomini2]

So...

The same person with 20,000 different job titles?

[Mark M.]

Re: So...

More like 20,000 unpaid interns tasked to review the dodgy postings.

[Daedalus]

Welcome news for Albania

Who better to detect Russian propaganda than unemployed Albanians?

[anonymous boring coward]

The problem is that out of those 20'000, about 19'990 are busy calling me saying they are "calling from Talk Talk" and that I "have a problem with Internet". So not much time to check Facebook.

[Howard Hanek]

We NEED More GOONS!

The goon squard, found totally inadequate to the task of suppressing opposition were augmented by numbers and larger clubs in order to create a 'safe' environment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: We NEED More GOONS!

will they start with beer in the cafeteria and get matching brown shirts too?

[Version 1.0]

Remember how this got started?

This happened after Facebook removed the human moderators from the News feed and replaced them with automation at the behest of the Alt-Right in the US ... who were then able to manipulate the news feed with help from Cambridge Analytics and other malevolent actors.

Bring back the human moderators and start taking responsibility for the corporate stance.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Remember how this got started?

Unless you're willing to present some evidence, I'm not sure I believe you. As I understand it Facebook removed the moderators under the influence of Facebook. Because they could sack 20,000 people and make more profits.

And hey! We're Silicon Valley! Algorithms man! They're Great! They don't need paying, and we can just blame them every time we fuck up, or steal someone's intellectual property.

Algorithms mean never having to say you're sorry.

[Version 1.0]

Re: Remember how this got started?

The removal of the editors was fairly widely reported at the time .. here's a link to a story in The Grauniad

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Remember how this got started?

Version 1.0,

I'm not disputing that Facebook replaced humans with algorithms. The article says that and so does my reply to you.

What I was disputing was that they did it to please the alt right, rather than to save money. Replacing people with algorithms seems to be what Silicon Valley is all about. Well that and selling adverts...

[Florida1920]

Social Media or Social Disease?

Version 1.0 mentioned how the Alt-Right are benefiting from FB and Twitter. So, too, are other evil "social" forces with violent intentions. More and more it seems these implementations are doing more to destroy society than improve it. But the founders and investors are making money, so it's all good. Having lived through the early days of Usenet, I see the ability to monetize hate is all that's changed. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the Internet is to hold up a mirror so we can see what a savage mob of degenerate apes humans can be when let off the leash.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: Social Media or Social Disease?

we can see what a savage mob of degenerate apes humans can be

Indeed. Anyone operating on the theory of the intrinsic goodness of the human species is in for an awful disappointment..

[2Nick3]

What should we expect?

Really, what should we be expecting from a site/company that was founded to help find the hot chick you met at that killer party last night?

[Bob Dole (tm)]

Moar Robots...

Some bots filter the news. Others comment on them. All that's left is for us to just let the bots read the news and us meat sacks can happily go back to our day to day.

[7teven 4ect]

I'm using Fluff Busting (FB) Purity. It lets me control things. If I want to see only friends I can. All that crap on the right is switched off. I just have my feeds and my chats.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow...

...people still use Facebook?