Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Meta's social media platform Facebook now faces many challenges, but the biggest competition seems to come from TikTok, a popular short video app. Although it took Facebook years to build a social circle about friends and family, it turned out to be less interesting than the short videos TikTok recommended to users. Tom Tom Alison, head of Facebook and vice president of software engineering, recently talked about how the company is reshaping its social platforms to make Facebook and Instagram content more like TikTok and win back young users.

Q: can you tell me something about Facebook's newly launched Feed function bar and how it evolved from News Feed?

Allison: the Feed function bar allows users to view all dynamic messages from friends, groups, pages and favorites in chronological order. It's like going back to traditional Facebook, because a lot of people visit Facebook with the idea of, "I want to see how my friends are doing."

We have also redefined the Facebook home page tag so that users can see not only acquaintances but also system recommendations, and the artificial intelligence behind it will filter out what users may be interested in on the platform.

Facebook is a tool that allows users to express themselves and connect with others. We are reinventing Facebook based on this core idea, and all the work we have done is an extension of this core idea.

Nowadays it is easier for people to express themselves. Mobile devices and networks that support higher bandwidth allow users to express themselves through multimedia and video, and more complex artificial intelligence allows users to view billions of pieces of content on the Facebook platform and get recommendations they are interested in. In the new wave of technological innovation, people-oriented will still be the core of our work.

Q: TikTok is a consumer product that shows you how this model works. Besides, is there any other reason for you to do this? Why go this way now?

Allison: more than a year ago, Zuckerberg said on an earnings call, "We will start to focus on the needs of young people and give priority to the needs of young people."

Before I was in charge of Facebook applications, I mainly worked with teams to study young users. We found that there are great intergenerational differences in how people use social media. Now that Facebook itself is 18 years old, we focus on how the generation that has grown up with social media will use or want social media.

We have found that the way users expect to share and contact with friends has changed a lot. The new generation of young users are very curious, and they are more likely to find and discover their own way of life. Recommendations about where they want to go, who they want to be, and what they want to discuss with friends are a more important part of their social media user experience than early users like me think.

The market performance of TikTok is undoubtedly enlightening. We found that short video is a powerful content format, and we also see how people use it to express themselves. This form allows people to talk directly to people and connects users to content creators in a very personalized way, and I think TikTok does a good job of that.

Integrating different content formats into Facebook user experience and integrating self-expression tools to help people share and discuss all kinds of content has always been the core of the development of Facebook services. It makes sense for us to integrate short videos and recommend content on a larger scale.

We started making content recommendations long before TikTok. There are always recommendations in the Feed function bar, recommended videos in the "watched" tab, and group recommendations in the "groups" tab. But TikTok eventually made us realize that we actually made the distinction between recommendations from acquaintances and other recommendations.

The new generation of users focus not only on who communicates with them, but also on how to communicate with them. This finally made me realize that as long as the recommended content is attractive, users don't care if they have ever intersected with the content creator.

Q: you must have the question, "are we destroying our core service? in terms of social circles and dynamic news, we have been doing this for 18 years." Will anyone say, "We can't be subject to trends yet."

Allison: think back 14 years ago, "Facebook was just for Harvard students," and then "Ivy League," and then "virtually every university has it," and then "Facebook is only for students, you can't open it to anyone other than students, and eventually" virtually everyone can use it. "

Tools are used to connect people together, but there are always some resistance points. There was a lot of talk about "We are losing our legacy" within the company, but what I told the team was, "eventually, Facebook will be deeply rooted in social connections." This is the value we offer. There is a saying in the Feed team that it is connected through content. What users discuss and what they may share can be the beginning of contact with others. In other words, content recommendations can also achieve social contact.

The way that a new generation of users eventually want to connect with others is to find content of common interest, share ideas, launch and deepen dialogue on topics of common interest.

Q: most people see TikTok as an entertainment platform, not a typical social app. Although instant messaging is available on TikTok, it is not commonly used. Facebook, by contrast, "wants users to have close contact in Feed, comment, share, and send messages to each other, and hope that Feed will become a platform for people to communicate with their friends." The themes of the two seem to contradict each other. So do you think imitating TikTok deviates from Facebook's theme of meaningful social interaction (MSI)?

Allison: I don't think it's a departure. MSI is essentially a way to sort the content displayed in dynamic messages, starting from which content will bring users closer to their acquaintances.

Before the launch of MSI in 2017, we focused more on how much time users spend on a particular content, believing that the more time users spend on Facebook, the more value they bring. But taking the time to sort the content in Feed is easy to miss the content posted by acquaintances, and in the end, MSI tends to put ahead of those that trigger a conversation and help connect with friends, which is meaningful social interaction content.

Q: does this actually mean that the content in Feed is weighted according to the comments of different friends?

Allison: it's just a matter of weight. In order to give priority to how to bring more social interaction, we ended up significantly reducing video viewing time. The way young users engage in meaningful social interactions is changing, so we need to adapt the product to this.

Q: in the past, Facebook ranked content based on friends and pages they followed. How do you decide what users can see now? How to determine the quality of content?

Allison: there are a lot of factors that will be taken into account when sorting content in Feed. We'll check your interaction history with your friends, and we'll check how often you comment on their posts, how often you send them messages, how often you like them, and how often you share them. At the same time, it will also focus on the quality of the content itself, such as the integrity of the content and community standards.

This is actually similar to content recommendation to some extent. When recommending, the system will also regularly ask users, "do you want to see more or less of this content?"help us, tell us what you like?"

It is also our vision that the best and brightest artificial intelligence engineers in the company study how to use their knowledge of content, their understanding of users, and their proactive responses to improve the quality of recommended content.

Q: what is the goal of MSI? Did it work? What are you concerned about?

Allison: MSI is a compound indicator, and the core is to see if there is an increase in the number of social activities such as posts and comments. Different teams check how many comments users share with each other and how many messages are sent back and forth.

I am particularly concerned about four aspects. The first is the frequency of users visiting Facebook, the second is whether it can bring profits, the third is the quality and reliability of user experience, and the fourth is the popularity of Facebook than before.

Q: how has Facebook changed from the Internet era to the mobile era and then to the video era?

Allison: the shift from the Internet to the mobile era is huge. When getting used to designing web pages, it's important to figure out how to design a good mobile product. The core information flow of Facebook has not changed much, but the transition during IPO has been under great pressure.

Today, Facebook has been integrating different content formats. Both TikTok and YouTube are trying to do this. Over the next few years, the Feed function bar will continue to evolve, integrating a variety of new content formats.

The development of Facebook is a story about content format innovation, in which people find new ways to express themselves. The future power of artificial intelligence is an exciting new technology. TikTok is also using artificial intelligence to recommend content and combine it with traditional social networks. Many people think that Facebook is chasing TikTok, and in some ways, TikTok is also chasing Facebook. For example, Facebook has a "people you might know" group, and the corresponding function appears on TikTok.

All companies are trying to combine artificial intelligence recommendation algorithms with social interaction recommendation algorithms. That's why I think Facebook can succeed. We have experience in integrating different formats in the past, and we are good at artificial intelligence and social networking. How to put all these things together in the next year or two will determine how many people want to continue to use Facebook. I am optimistic about this now.

Q: when there are more and more recommendations from strangers, how to ensure the quality of the content received by users?

Allison: one is to include more signals that reflect what users want or don't want, in addition to pageviews. The second is to give more incentives to original content, so that creators who work hard to create original content can really feel that they have been rewarded by the communication and monetization work we have done.

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