In January 2018, Mark Zuckerberg published a post whose gist was: people spend too much time on Facebook, and a lot of that time is spent on meaningless content. Going forward, the algorithm would prioritize content from friends and family, and the organic reach of commercial pages would drop significantly.

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My marketing friends almost collectively melted down.

“We’re done—the page we’ve spent three years building is going to be useless.” “Reach was already bad enough, and now they’re cutting it further?” “This is basically forcing everyone to buy ads.”

I understood their anxiety. But what I was thinking at the time was something different: Facebook had finally admitted a truth it had always known but been unwilling to face.

The Suicide of Stickiness

What was that truth?

For the past several years, Facebook’s core metrics had been “time spent” and “engagement rate.” The algorithm was designed to do one thing: keep you on the platform as long as possible. Whatever content kept you there longest was what the algorithm pushed.

And what was the result? Emotional content, sensational headlines, low-quality but easily “like”-able posts came to dominate your feed. Commercial pages discovered that as long as something was sensational enough, provocative enough, easy enough to like, it would earn reach. So everyone sank lower together.

Users did indeed spend more time on the platform. But how did they feel after scrolling through it all? Empty. Irritable. Like they’d wasted their time.

This isn’t my speculation—Facebook’s own internal research found the same thing. Passively browsing large amounts of low-quality content lowers users’ sense of well-being.

A platform that makes users less happy the more they use it is, in the long run, committing suicide. Users won’t leave today, but they will slowly, imperceptibly use it less. As I discussed in “Digital Footprints and the Invisible Web”: the boiling-frog style of decline is the hardest to detect and the most deadly.

Zuckerberg’s post amounted to an acknowledgment of this. His decision was: rather than sacrifice meaningful social interaction, he would sacrifice usage time and ad revenue in the short term, and pull the platform back toward “meaningful social interaction.”

This wasn’t an act of charity—it was a highly farsighted business judgment.

A Consumer Is First of All a Person

When the marketing world discussed this, almost everyone viewed it from the “brand side”: What happens to my reach? What happens to my ROI?

But very few people considered a more fundamental question from the “user side”: A consumer is, first of all, a person.

In how a person allocates their time, “consumption” occupies only a very small portion. You do buy things, but the time you spend each day thinking about “what to buy” is probably less than 5%. The rest of the time, you’re chatting with friends, caring about family, thinking about work, binge-watching shows, daydreaming, fretting over your mortgage.

When you open Facebook, your need is not “show me more ads.” Your need is: to see how your friends are doing lately, whether anything interesting has happened, whether there’s any content worth spending mental energy on.

If every time you opened your feed, all you saw was commercial pitches, sponsored posts, and clickbait from pages—what would you do? You’d start scrolling past them. Then you’d open the app less often. And then one day you’d realize you hadn’t opened Facebook in a long time.

Facebook’s algorithm change was, in essence, a response to this reality: if you don’t treat users as “people,” users will eventually leave.

The Survival Battle of Brand Personification

So what should brands do?

The answer is actually quite brutal: if your brand survived solely on “reach” and “traffic” before the algorithm change, then you really should be worried. Because that means your brand has no value worth “actively seeking out.” Users saw your content not because they wanted to, but because the algorithm forced it on them.

When the algorithm stops forcing it, you disappear.

But if what your brand does is “valuable conversation”—sharing genuinely useful knowledge, expressing opinions with a clear stance, creating content that sparks discussion—then the algorithm change is actually good news. Because “meaningful interaction” is exactly what the new algorithm rewards.

In managing my own content, I learned something early on: the engagement generated by one honest opinion far surpasses that of a hundred meticulously designed sales pitches. People don’t want to converse with a “brand,” but they’re willing to converse with “a person with a point of view.”

This is the core logic of “brand personification.” It’s not adding a mascot next to your logo. It’s giving the brand a viewpoint, a stance, warmth—speaking like a person.

Brands that fail to do this will, after the algorithm change, find their advertising costs rising ever higher while their results grow ever worse. Because users have already been trained to automatically ignore words that “don’t sound like a person speaking.”

Extension into the AI Era

When I wrote these observations in 2018, AI was not yet a mainstream topic. Looking back eight years later, the logic of the algorithm shifting from “maximizing stickiness” to “maximizing meaningful interaction” has become even clearer in the age of AI.

Today’s AI recommendation systems are far more sophisticated than the algorithms of 2018. They don’t just know what you clicked—they can infer why you clicked, how you felt afterward, and what long-term effect that content has on your behavior.

This means: low-quality content will be more precisely identified and downranked. Pure traffic manipulation will become harder and harder. And content with genuine value—content that sparks thought, fosters conversation, and makes users feel “that time was well spent”—will be pushed by AI more efficiently to the right people.

In “The Pain of Opening Five Fingers: Why Does Digital Transformation Always End in Failure?”, I discussed how the greatest challenge of digital transformation is not technology but mindset. The same is true for a brand’s social media management—technology changes, algorithms change, platforms change, but what doesn’t change is that most fundamental question: Are you treating the other party as a person in the conversation?

Products Are Finite, Value Is Infinite

Looking back at Zuckerberg’s 2018 decision, it actually revealed a deeper business logic.

Products are finite. You have only so many product models, only so many services, only so much room to discount. If your brand only knows how to pitch products, then your ceiling is your product line.

But the exchange of value is infinite. You can share your understanding of the industry, your views on problems, the lessons you’ve learned from failure, your judgments about the future. These things never run out, and the more you share them, the more valuable they become—because they build trust, and trust is the foundation of all business relationships.

Facebook’s algorithm change was, in essence, telling brands: stop treating users as traffic. Start treating them as people.

Today, eight years later, this message has not only failed to grow outdated—in an age where AI accelerates everything, it has become more urgent than ever. Brands still chasing reach and click counts are like people building automobiles with a horse-carriage mindset.

And brands that truly understand “people” need not worry about any algorithm change. Because algorithms will change, but the human longing for genuine connection will not.