Company A changes Company A's product to support Company A is not a conflict of interest. I know people feel very strongly about Facebook and how it should act, but they are a company and a good one at that imo. People begrudging them for the individuals promoted posts is one thing that I can understand, but begrudging them charging brands for whom they've provided a platform FULL of amazing, free services?
Did you read my comment? I explicitly said I am not begrudging them the opportunity to make money however they want. If you want to quibble over the denotation of "conflict of interests" fine, let me put it this way:
It's not sustainable for Facebook to degrade the usefulness of their service in this way for a short-term cash gain. 15-20% throughput to fans is so low as to confound expectations, and I'm saying this will bite them ass.
Sure they had to scale it back, but the conflict of interests is real. People don't necessarily want to see only posts from those who are willing to pay. It's not that I begrudge them the opportunity to make money, but I think this clearly weakens Facebook's usefulness to users.
It's one thing if Facebook is filtering to show me the posts with the most organic engagement in order to decrease noise in my feed. It's completely different if some of the pages I follow have very little chance of reaching me based solely on their inability or unwillingness to pay for access. OA hyperbole notwithstanding, I think Facebook are overreaching here.