Facebook’s Video Player Isn’t Designed for You
The social network prioritizes “engagement” over enjoyment in video — hurting publishers and users alike
From the outside, it’s hard to know what, exactly, Facebook wants from its video platform. For years, the company told publishers that video was the future, even as it allegedly goosed statistics behind the scenes to make the format look more important than it was. In 2017, the social network rolled out a major update to its video player that added a kind of picture-in-picture mode to the News Feed, among other changes, in an effort to make “watching video on Facebook richer, more engaging and more flexible,” according to the company. Then last year, Mark Zuckerberg announced the company would de-prioritize video from brands in favor of content that “encourage[s] meaningful interactions.”
The message seemed clear: Time spent watching video doesn’t matter to Facebook if people don’t also like, comment, and share those videos. In that statement, Zuckerberg referenced “connecting” or “interacting” with people nine times while disparaging what he called “passive” viewing twice. His model offers a curious contrast to most video platforms, which have been passive by nature since the Lumière brothers put on the first public screening of motion pictures in 1895. When you go…
