A few folks have commented and messaged with questions about how FB’s engagement bonus program works. Here’s what little is known to me about how it works:
- Comments with fewer than six words don’t seem to do anything
- copy-paste comments are a complete waste of time, and certain phrases have become obviously abused in an attempt by sleazy shortcutters and game-riggers to screw the system. We’ve all seen those posts full of “COUNT ME IN” and “LET’S GO” comments. Not only a huge waste of time, but a huge message to FB that you’re gonna try to cheat the bonus program. I’ve seen pages that aren’t working to prevent/remove/discourage that kind of behavior, get dropped from the program. Pages and accounts leaving those comments tend to get algo-suppressed and eventually banned as well, but the people doing it are a) stupid and b) have nine thousand other sockpuppets and bots running anyway so they don’t care.
- Quality, original content is the order of the day.
– Regular repost content like the Wednesday “post your gig” autopost I’ve had running the last few weeks doesn’t get bonuses (but that’s fine, it’s a useful thing to do for working creative performers and builds the community) and tends to get suppressed by the algo as clickbait.
– Not sure how other repost content like the articles I have rotating in the autoposter on a cycle anywhere from around 30 to 90 days is handled. As far as I can tell, substantive content that is reposted on a longer cycle, say 45 days or more, probably does better than stuff that’s reposted weekly or biweekly.
- clickbaiting tactics in general aren’t going to get far. “<3 for a, 🙂 for b” posts, for example, are seen as low-quality content fishing for traffic, and FB doesn’t want that so they don’t pay for it.
- their favorite content is about what you’d expect – original memes and status messages short enough to use a graphic background. They choke the hell out of anything that links offsite, but they do pay on it if it’s otherwise quality content e.g. a link to my latest Medium or JHUS article.
- Reels and stories aren’t part of the current bonus program. That’s NOT to say don’t bother engaging; it’s still extremely beneficial to propagation and audience growth. It just doesn’t pay through the bonus program.
- “follow for follow” and “like for like” circlejerks are bad juju. As convoluted as it may sound, FB really does believe they’re pushing for legitimate, “organic” engagement. L4L/F4F falls under what FB refers to as “coordinated inauthentic activity,” and enough of it won’t just get you demonetized, it’ll get you deleted eventually.
- The very best thing you can do is SHARING, and that also has caveats. Just sharing without saying anything about it, or a “me too” or similar short and basically empty added commentary does far less than sharing with a “substantive” comment – over six words and adds meaning or substance of SOME kind. So if you just share this post and don’t say anything, maybe a couple hundred of those will amount to a couple of cents if anything. If you share it and just add a “100” emoji or “TRUTH!” or like that, it won’t do much better if at all. If you share it and add something like “this is really good information, you should check it out,” or “this makes a lot of sense to me and it’s well worth reading” or even a few paragraphs of (again using this post as an example) “these are my experiences with the bonus program that appear to validate or contradict this information” does MUCH more, both for the bonus and the algo.
- fundraising and mutual aid posts are penalized by the algo, HARD, and it’s getting worse as more and more desperate people are forced to try to survive on crowdfunding. The only way to overcome that is to share it like you just discovered a new book of the Bible hand-lettered and signed by Jesus. This is not entirely FB’s fault; over the last couple of years every talentless half-wit with no marketable skills and their mom has decided they’re an “influencer” or “activist” and goes out trolling for cash (which as a sidebar has really killed income for those of us who are out here doing meaningful and substantive work and trying to survive), and FB actively works to identify and avoid rewarding/encouraging those bad actors (note that I don’t claim they do this WELL, but it’s what they’re trying to do).
- obviously stuff that would be problematic anyway like hate speech, disinformation, etc. is not rewarded by the bonus program and if you do much of it they’ll demonetize
The big picture is basically this: over the years a trillion get-rich-quick schemers and grifters have turned social media into a largely automated and mostly useless pile of crap begging for cheap, easy attention – like all these clowns you see slapping their t-shirt designs on a picture of Keanu Reeves or Morgan Freeman or some other super-popular celebrity with a high level of public trust (the pretendian grifters are the WORST with this). They’ve built up this industrial strength imitation of human engagement, and FB can’t sell advertising based on the number of ‘bots and sockpuppets that will see it. So they want “real human beings acting like real human beings.” Unfortunately this puts us real human beings in a position of basically being forced to become unpaid (or paid, even, given this bonus program) Facebook employees whose job it is to keep the platform supplied with a steady stream of quality original content followed by a good solid engagement cycle of real human beings earnestly recommending, reacting to, and sharing that content.
Also, although this shouldn’t even need saying out loud, cheap tricks like trying to rig the system by running *your own* bot army and sockpuppet farm and just incestuously circulating your own content will get you nowhere.
A sidebar: the ballad of the honest man
In my specific case, I’m also working against a dozen years of every half-assed clickbaiting grifting astroturf thief on the planet trying to screw me in the algo with coordinated mass complaints and reporting. I’ve known for years this was a problem, but I’ve recently been presented with an idea of just how big a problem it is: Pharmacide is a guy/band I started following a couple of months ago when I plugged in to the music community here on FB. They just hit 10K followers. They’re seeing 14 million views a month. Good content, for sure, but – and no shade intended – not necessarily anything that’s spectacularly different from your average page like this one, just music, funny memes, a little gaming, etc. and plenty of it shared and recycled from other sources just like this one.
My monthly views when I’m not riding a viral pop are around 10K.
His are around 14 million.
That’s because his page is only a couple of months old and doesn’t have a decade and a half of malicious and deliberate sabotage hanging off his digital identity in the algo. Add that up, per month, for the last ten or twelve years and you will start getting some idea of just how much these malicious bastards have hurt my work, my life, and my income.
The reason this happens is not that I’m a horrible evil person or doing it wrong. It’s because there’s been an ongoing coordinated campaign to stop people from sharing my content, aided and abetted by various leeches, users, and hangers-on who have passed through my life and, after years and in some cases decades of trying unsuccessfully to guide them to a less self-destructive path, burned their last bridge with me and then decided they were gonna “get revenge” by coordinating lies with the rest of the harassment team.
Before the male half of the admin team at Everlasting GOPStoppers pressured the female half (known to me only as “Veruca Salt”) into capitulating to this bullshit, she told me flat out that when they shared my content, the folks behind giant pages like being liberal and occupy dems and the other 98 told them flat out if they shared my content on their page, their own content would not be shared on those giant pages. Not just told, showed. That’s one of the reasons I know there’s a whole lot of back-channel coordination focused on stifling yours truly.
(Yes, it’s possible I’ve still got those messages in an archive somewhere, but this was like ten years ago and I’m not digging for it. If you think so little of me you believe I’d make all this up, you can piss off all the way to the other side of the planet, when you get there you can piss off all the way back so I can spit on you, and then you can piss off to the outer edges of the universe forever, I don’t want or need you here at. all.)
Like I said, Veruca dug my work, and was super kind and friendly, and her inclination was to refuse to play along with that game and rightly so because frankly in any other context that behavior would constitute a criminal conspiracy besides which there’s no excuse for it – the only problem ANY of those pages have with me is that I do not flinch when calling out bullshit, and their entire business model is being the worlds biggest pile of bullshit. When people read the stuff I write about media literacy, seeing through marketing and compliance-gaining tactics, and so forth, outfits like Occupy Dems and TheOther98 lose their power and their audience.
Her partner (think his name was James) chose the dark side, and ultimately she went along. I suspect ugly dynamics in play there that go well beyond the scope of this article and are inappropriate to speculate on, but in the end it doesn’t matter; the results are the same: I get screwed. YOU get screwed because instead of seeing high-quality information literacy content to help you protect yourself against the grift, you only get to see the grifters. The world gets screwed because now millions of people are following these pages thinking they’re some kind of left-liberal standard bearers when in reality they’re just the same old bullshit money-grubbing capitalist assholes they’re claiming to stand against, and the whole time they’re really just feeding you into the meatgrinder and laughing at how easy it is to manipulate you the whole time they do it, in between cashing the checks you’re writing to them every time you engage with them.
They – the grifters – don’t want you to even think in that direction, and that’s why it’s so important to them to do so much to suppress my content. That’s why I have almost as many harassment pages targeting me on this platform as I do people following the page – literally thousands of them. That’s why tragically self-destructive people I’ve tried to help in the past jump on the bandwagon when they want more money for heroin and I refuse to give it to them.
That’s why a local band can start a page and have 10K followers and 14 million monthly views in 60 days and I’m sitting here at 5k following and 10K monthly views after a dozen years.
That’s what the “good guys” are working against, and in spite of my deep loathing for the company and their owners, in the end Facebook knows that their best interests are served in working against it too. All of these unwritten rules and secret combinations and such are a reflection of their efforts in that direction. It’s not that they care about the ideological integrity, they just know that when it’s obvious half the content on the platform is ‘bots, advertisers will choose other platforms with real human beings on them because bots don’t buy things.
ALL of this (and petabytes more) is why I push so hard on engagement, because the only way any of this will be overcome is by high-volume legitimate engagement by human beings teaching FB’s algorithm that no my content isn’t disinformation or abuse and yes you definitely do want to see it and think other people should too…and being the “good guys” we’re not allowed to automate and artificially coordinate attack campaigns back-channel and otherwise engage in “dirty tricks.” We have to “do business the right way,” and that means overcoming automated and coordinated terabytes of activity doing everything it can to redefine “the right way” as “the way they do it,” which is by lying, cheating, pimping ideology they don’t believe in for profit, and sabotaging the underlying movements who do believe in it from my pissant little page here all the way up to propagandizing the Sanders campaign into defeat and co-opting the entire occupy movement to turn it into a MMF scheme.
In the constant chaos of anxiety and existential threat, making it clear that sharing my work isn’t about making me rich and famous sometimes gets lost in the mix. Sure, I do plenty of lightweight content and goofy memes and stuff too – less than I’d like to, believe it or not I pretty much hate being involved in politics at all anymore and would far rather spend my time on gaming, making music, watching movies, and relying on entertainment-type content as my real income base – but there’s also a rock-solid wealth of information, strategy, tactics, and education in my work to help you understand these insanity-inducing complexities and recursive onion-layers of absolute shit human beings who have been directing the softer 80% of the “left” in this country for the last decade-plus.
The reason we can’t have nice things isn’t the GOP; they’re nearly impotent now anyway. No, the reason is these grifters and leeches and scumbags and terrorists and stalkers are sucking up to the center-right plutocrat power core of the DNC – the part of the party that really isn’t substantially different from the GOP, especially the GOP of say 40 or 50 years ago – and doing it under the pretense of being leftists and progressives, thereby sucking all of the funding, attention, and energy away from legitimate activists, creators, and leaders of integrity and honor. They’re the ones that pushed against Sanders and propped up the blatant lie that he didn’t have the public support to win in the general. They’re the ones that pushed the “let’s not be hasty with this robust social program” stuff. They’re the ones that pushed the candidate who told you universal publicly funded higher education was a “pipe dream” and was so arrogant as to not even bother campaigning in key battleground states in the days leading up to the election in ’16.
They’re the reason we ended up with “President Trump,” and I told them it would happen a year and a half before it did, and I told them exactly how and why it would be their fault, and they did it anyway because they don’t care about you, or progress, or this country: they care about their egos and their wallets, and that. is. ALL.
I’m far from the only one who’s been bullied and harassed by these people. I’m just the one stupid enough and with a big enough mouth to paint a target on my forehead by refusing to stop talking about it because a) frankly I’d rather starve to death than become one of those pig-humping coprophagic rectal polyps and b) I understand clearly and without qualification that if we lose this country to fascism these people, these fake-left astroturf grifters, will be the reason why.
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Mark 8:36
Working against FB’s algorithm to be seen is hard enough. Working against that plus a couple of dozen well-funded (Occupy Dems and a couple of dozen other “grassroots” outfits have been getting paid by the DNC for years for their work, and taking their marching orders from their paymasters; Omar Rivero’s been trying to asskiss his way into the state legislature by brown-nosing the power core of the DNC for years) and unambiguously evil thieves, liars, and grifters who are working with the full knowledge, funding, and blessings of the Democratic Party. To be clear, it’s certain the other side of the aisle is even worse in this regard, but that’s what you expect from that side of the fence. We’re supposed to be the good guys and above that.
A few of us actually are, and we’re paying for it with our lives.
The only way we’re gonna defeat that is if that tiny minority contingent calling itself the left that actually is leftist and progressive works ten thousand times harder to reward and propagate good information than the thieves and grifters and aspirant oligarchs pretending to be left and progressive do, just to stay in the game.
It’s not about “John Henry,” and it never was. It’s about keeping you distracted, seduced, and conned by bullshit until it’s too late to do anything to stop our decline into plutocracy. I just get targeted because I’m standing in the way of that like the unnamed protester in Tiananmen Square standing in front of a line of oncoming tanks.
