Sponsored Clutter: Coming Soon to a Newsfeed Near You

Or, Sponsored Stories are Bad News for Facebook Users

Photo credit to tqhh

Recently, my Facebook reach has been rather down.  What, I’m I suddenly not as interesting?  Are my pictures not as good?  My posts not as funny?  Although Facebook doesn’t provide individual users with stats about their posts’ engagement and reach, I can tell you what my graph would look like – like a plane crashing from 30,000 feet.

For a while, I was thinking that this was a personal problem – that I’d been so fussed on school and work that I’d let my social media presence slip.  I didn’t even want to think about my Klout score.  Then friends started mentioning that they were experiencing lower engagement, as well.  I started seeing, “Hello, can anyone see this?” posts.  Then I noticed that the same problem was happening on the pages that I admin.

Would you pay $5.55 to own your Facebook?

Or, how do you put a value on love, I mean, Facebook?

Photo credit to Thomas Hawks

I’ve been following (and participating in) the discussions of the Facebook changes announced at f8 (for more on that, see my previous post), and have been feeling that the Facebook changes are more directed at supporting further funding sources for Facebook than they are about improving user experiences.  (Facebook seems to take the bread and circuses approach to keeping people happy – the pretty new timeline/cover aesthetic is the newest circus.)

The Guardian’s article “Why Facebook’s new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass” was the first piece that I’ve seen that really took the issues that I’ve been grappling with and fleshed them out.