You can look at many accounts from the mid 2010s but the one I can recall the most clearly was FB updated to the algorithm and everything was fine. They then began actively suppressed people who were posting YouTube links a few months later. They told at least Phillip Defranco that the reason was they should advertise. They then came back months later and instead said why not post your videos here. This failed policy years later re-emerged as the video push for news organizations where FB intentionally deceived them into pushing into video to on the platform only for them to later update to honest video view tracking and make all of the media companies realize there was much less viewership than they were initially told was there.

The mafia metaphor seems pretty on the nose to me. If you have a page, its posts will not regularly appear in followers' feeds — that is, the feeds of people who've explicitly signaled that they want to see your content — unless you give Facebook their vig.

Most people probably subscribe to more pages (and therefore more posts) than they can actually consume the content of. It seems pragmatic that something should help the user surface more meaningful content. Suppressing commercial pages for friends content seems reasonable, and business v business is a decision where there will always be a loser.

Just a quick fyi - On the nose means something different.

If I have a page for my business and people explicitly follow my page to get updates, Facebook will still not surface content from my page as frequently to my followers without paying them.

At some point they decided to basically stop showing updates to your own followers. Affected pages reported a drop of 90%+ in feed views, and the only way to reach your audience again was to boost your own posts, which is a paid service.

I run a business. Our reach per post , on FB, is 30-40% of our followers.

The reason for this is we don’t just post 24-7 about how amazing we are.

We post 1-2x a week, and our followers genuinely like us and are fans of the business.

So… the changes on FB haven’t impacted all businesses in such a negative way.