I'm curious how much of it was people trying to figure out what was going on with Facebook.

It's framed on such a way as to imply that people are more informed without Facebook, and maybe that is true, but that isn't all that is going on there.

>Implying you become more informed by visiting a news site

To me, it’s more an indication that news sites are a another dopamine-fulled entertainment business, people are addicted to “checking something online”, and shows the news have lost their standing. In a parallel world, people watch the news to make good decisions, not to satisfy their dopamine receptors.

Maybe in that parallel world, news sites don’t monetise by ads exclusively, thus not building a product intended to satisfy dopamine receptors?

You might find this actually surprising:

- The increases far exceeded what was lost. The dip in the social line was offset three-fold when you add up external, search and direct. They're not to be averaged.

- Unmentioned, but reflected in graph: people using facebook tend to share articles far more than they read them. As in social share count > pageview count. Sometimes by a factor of 100.

Yeah, I think a takeaway is some evidence that people mainly share not news stories, but headlines.

Which now also explains why the biggest news sites are so rabidly working on attacking Facebook at every chance they have - every FB loss is their immediate financial win.

Would you prefer that they don't report on Facebook actively harming society?

I'd prefer them to do honest reporting and not just be another fake news spreading engine which will keep doing the same kind of harm just with different money pockets.

After all, what does facebook really do except just repost news from low quality article factories?

What reporting about FB has been dishonest?

PBS News Hour (who has Zuckerberg up their ass) treatment has been very professional despite all the donations. They ran full pieces reporting on the outage and the testimony in the Senate. They stopped short of being judgemental though...unlike some of the other reporting where it is safe for them to do so. I was satisfied but not terribly impressed. They should be exploring the issue deeper but they do not. For obvious reasons. Nonetheless, they fulfilled their doctrinal duty.

What do you mean? Public trust in the media is at an all time low. News companies almost died at the advent of the internet but came back fighting by drive engagement with emotions. Even documentaries like “The Social Dilemma” are guilty of using the tactics they blame FB for using. Trump made his presidency off of “fake news” and distrust of the media. The game is all about starting with a narrative that follows your audience’s wants and then cherry-picking facts to confirm that bias. All sides are guilty of this. FB’s PR department is guilty of this as well, if we are to be honest.

So no examples, then?

I am also not surprised, though I'm not sure I would have guessed the increase in traffic to other sites would be this large (38%). It's always nice, though, to see data that confirms your intuition.

The non-tech public wouldn't know where to go to look, so the newsies seems logical.

Its "why is Facebook down" questions and looking it up on newssites.

That is an assumption.

It could also just be looking for their content fix.

Well ... maybe that's a small proof. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=facebook,facebook...

Seems like a plausible idea. I can think of some others. Why is this one more likely?

This might be somewhat surprising to some people because a lot of the traffic to news sites comes from facebook.

In this case a majority of the traffic certainly came from Google. If all social media and search engines vanished (including the suggested site feature on safari) for a few hours, we’d definitely see traffic to news sites go down.

I guess that says something about the difficulty of discoverability on the internet.

Most people are probably aware of the names of several major news organisations in their country or city, but it's less obvious what the domain name should be - what is written in full? what is abbreviated?

If you prohibit the use of a lookup system (that's what you did, effectively), some people will be able remember the domain name (it's easier than a telephone number), but it's not hard to guess people will find the system much less useful.

It's a little like saying "if everyone had to use a CLI to start the programs they want to use on their phone, more people would watch TV".

>> when one of the top 3 most-visited-domains in the world goes down

Which is in itself a major news story. Before talking about facebook v. other new sites we mush take account of the greater number of people looking for news content regardless of platform. The increase might more people looking for news rather than people having to go elsewhere than facebook.

I agree, HN itself slowed to a crawl and eventually went down temporarily for me but I’d bet one of my toes that it’s because half the devs, sysadmins etc of the world were trying to find out what was going on rather than people no longer distracted by Facebook looking for something else to do.

It does bring up a different question though.

There's now an obvious conflict of interest with regard to news sites reporting on Facebook. Their generalized antagonism towards Facebook, and the tech industry has a pretty clear root: they're getting outcompeted, thus the calls for regulation.

Facebook is "outcompeting" other news sites in the very narrow sense of "bigger number better" - they have more users, more pageviews, and so on. But they absolutely play dirty when it comes to how they get those numbers. They control the algorithm and the user interface by which people discover news - so they can pick and choose who wins and loses on their platform. The reason why people want Facebook regulated is because Facebook is already, in a sense, regulating the rest of the web.

Furthermore, many of the original landmark copyright decisions regarding, say, Google; were specifically decided to be fair use... partially on the basis that things Google did were sending monetizable traffic back to web publishers. Facebook's actions take the form of these fair uses, but they use their control over their platform to reclaim the value they would ordinarily be creating for publishers. This puts those exceptions to copyright in jeopardy - and that's exactly what we're seeing in, say, the EU.

There's no competition because Facebook is a monopoly.

Also remember that media companies tried collaborating with Facebook. Remember Pivot to video? Only to discover that Facebook inflated their stats on video views.

Of course, Facebook was sorry.