Facebook is investing in features that are bound to reduce “engagement” as it was measured the old way. The old metric was “time spent”. Now the new metric is time spent “with intention, being inspired and feeling positive.”
Short-term investors saw this and decided that it’s a bad thing – as engagement goes down, so will revenue. And FB stock took a hit. But if we take the long view, we can see how this strategy is like to pay off.
(FB’s revenue model was similarly questioned several years ago when users were moving from Desktop to Mobile. The fear then was that they couldn’t show as many ads on mobile as they could on desktop. But what actually happened is that as the number of ads went down the price of ads went up as there was limited space to show them on mobile.)
Color me skeptical – if they wanted to mute push notifications or reduce engagement to “healthy” levels couldn’t they just do that on the backend? I mean really… not hard to do something like “we’ve notified this guy 20 times today, maybe back off until tomorrow”.
The fact that these settings aren’t a default is a tell – if you care, why not make them the default vs. needing to go through settings?