Facebook pushing Sponsored Stories down your News feed

If you’re one of those individuals that complains about Facebook changes all the time (as I am), then you’ll definitely won’t like this (no pun intended). Remember last January, when the social network decided to include Sponsored Stories within its platform? Those not-so-disguised ads recycled business-related mentions, statuses and likes into friendly recommendations for your contacts, which served more purposes for advertisers than for users.

Think about it: if a friend of yours just like a brand page, that story gets lost in the welter of absurdities with which users fill your Facebook feed. So, the platform decided to take such stories, put them a fancy name and relocated them in the right column of your feed, so neither you nor anybody else could miss them. It seemed as the way to go (for the advertisers, at least) but now Facebook is going for more by relocating once again such Sponsored Stories.

A “recommendation” system

The new relocation puts Sponsored Stories right in your News feed. That’s right, next to your friends updates and videos, images and links from your contacts you’ll now be finding ads disguised as statuses.

Such statuses will appear on your feed depending on “whether or not a friend of yours has connected with a business that would like to promote stories”. So, Facebook is treating Sponsored Stories as if your friends were recommending you something, a brand, a service, a site, a business, a whatever. But that’s just a fallacy, as your contacts aren’t suggesting you anything but showing their support for something.

There’s a big difference between both. I don’t care if my friends on Facebook show their support for, say, a restaurant but that doesn’t mean that they are suggesting me to go there – especially because I wasn’t asking. That’s the problem with these Sponsored Stories: the social network says that them will encourage interaction between friends but I believe that this will be the rare exception.

No way to opt out

But that isn’t what bother me the most. The main reason I’m against this change is that there’s no possible way to opt out from it. You don’t want Sponsored Stories in your News feed? Too bad, mate, you’ll have to deal with them or hide them one at the time. It’s like having an "unfriendable" friend that post one stupid thing after the other.

Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson, said recently regarding this matter that they “want to be really thoughtful about this, so we'll have a lot of rate limits in place.” With that, Ta is implying that your News feed won’t be flooded with such stories.

That idea appears to be confirmed when taking into account that they “hope to show people no more than one Sponsored Story in their News Feeds per day” and that “they'll also be of the same size and treatment as other stories in News Feed."

But number isn’t the issue. Or if it is, the issue is, then, that the number of ads in my News feed has to be equal to “zero”. Remember when YouTube began rolling out their ads in-video? Yeah, you might argue that we got accustomed to them but it’s more a quiet resignation rather than a happy consent. A similar situation might be rising here.

It’ll be interesting to see how long does it take for Facebook to rise the number from one Sponsored Story a day to two, three and such. With a legally questionable system, Facebook is going to annoy you and all of its members earlier next year.