This needs to be pinned at the top of this forum (Facebook)

This needs to be pinned at the top of this forum (Facebook).

It's funny, for decades most forums across a diverse set of hobbies and interests have pinned articles and rules to minimize the rehashing of dead horses and false crap.

For example most sailing and boating forums ban the discussion of guns aboard.

But for Facebook, it would be terrible for business if we shared only new stuff and only truthful stuff.

I have no access to the numbers, but at least on the order of 10% of all pageviews would be considered noise, or trash comments on a well moderated forum. Perhaps as much as 50%.

So the question becomes, if you cleaned up the 10 to 50% of "bad" posts today, what would tomorrow's pageviews be? Undoubtedly less.

Now many would say they would like a cleaned up Facebook. But that is just what they say. They certainly wouldn't subscribe to Facebook on the order of $19 a month for the hosting and connections to their friends.

So Facebook is not going to take any action that lowers engagement today, and tomorrow and the next day.

Back in 2008-2010 when I worked at Zynga and we made the games that we're very viral (even spammy) At one point Zynga represented an existentially large fraction of Facebook's revenues. Facebook could have turned off those features instantly. They didn't. Why not?

Well for one, the revenue loss would not have been acceptable. Not just missing money, but it would have slammed the door on Facebooks own R&D and create unclear outcomes.

Instead Facebook incrementally supported other games and other publishers to first diversify their income.

Slowly they reduced the viral channels, and slowly the games became better/more clever for a while.

Until Facebook grew large enough and created the install ads for games.

Once they started to charge for installs, FB became a mature game market and it was pay to play.

But all the while the games were the backbone of engagement to keep their users.

But from 2012- current it has transitioned the engagement backbone to politics.

Politics create many more posts, likes and comments.

Posts, likes and comments are how FB measures engagement. How many games a day played is a weak form of engagement for FB. People do shift to new platforms to play games. So it makes sense to move away from depending on games for engagement, and it makes sense to charge for the installs.

But the question is, what is the long term engagement costs of politics.

All of you know that I am happy enough to debate politics, but I know of at least 50 other people who have quit FB over it.

I don't see what is next for FB. They need some sort of positive engagement structure that is not politics, and at the same time they need to wean themselves off of the politics.

Like games on FB today, folks will always be able to post and chat politics.

But like games, their algorithms need to change from being viral positive for politics to viral negative for politics.

But what will replace it?

That is where I am currently lost for an idea.

If I was was helping on Product for the feed in a post politics world, I would be sweating my numbers.

I would guess that I would have to convince FB to measure something else. Like re-engagement of the long lost friends.

I don't know. This is a really hard problem.

Super amazing and smart people work everywhere in Facebook. If there was an easy replacement for politics as an engagement driver they would do it instantly.

I hope we are not simply in a biological-cortizonal cul-de-sac.

Originally posted on Facebook on January 02, 2019.