In January 2018, Mark Zuckerberg posted something along these lines: people are spending too much time on Facebook, and much of that time is spent on meaningless content. Going forward, the algorithm would prioritize content from friends and family, and organic reach for commercial fan pages would drop significantly.

My marketing friends almost collectively lost it.

“It’s over, the fan page we’ve built for three years is worthless.” “Reach was already terrible, 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 else: Facebook had finally acknowledged a fact it had always known but was unwilling to face.

The Suicide of Stickiness

What was that fact?

For years, Facebook’s core metrics were “time spent” and “engagement rate.” The algorithm was designed to do one thing: keep you on the platform as long as possible. What content could make you stay longest? That’s what the algorithm would push.

What was the result? Emotional content, sensational headlines, low-quality but easily “likeable” posts dominated your news feed. Commercial fan pages discovered that as long as content was sensational enough, inflammatory enough, easy enough to like, it could get reach. So everyone sank together.

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

This isn’t my speculation—Facebook’s own internal research found this too. Passively browsing large amounts of low-quality content decreased user well-being.

A platform that makes users increasingly unhappy is committing suicide in the long run. Users won’t leave today, but they’ll gradually, unconsciously reduce their usage. As I discussed in “Digital Footprints and the Invisible Web”: slow-boiling decline is the hardest to detect and most fatal.

Zuckerberg’s post essentially acknowledged this. His decision was: better to sacrifice short-term usage time and ad revenue than to pull the platform back to “meaningful social interaction.”

This wasn’t charity. This was business judgment. And extremely farsighted business judgment.

Consumers Are People First

When the marketing world discussed this issue, almost everyone looked at it from the “brand perspective”: What about my reach? What about my ROI?

But few people considered a more fundamental question from the “user perspective”: Consumers are people first.

In a person’s time allocation, “consumption” only takes up a small part. You do buy things, but the time you spend “thinking about what to buy” might be less than 5% of your day. The rest of the time, you’re chatting with friends, caring about family, thinking about work, binge-watching shows, spacing out, worrying about the mortgage.

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

If every time you open your news feed, all you see are commercial promotions, sponsored posts, clickbait from fan pages—what will you do? You’ll start skipping. Then reduce how often you open it. Then one day you’ll realize you haven’t opened Facebook in a long time.

Facebook’s algorithm adjustment was essentially responding to this reality: If you don’t treat users as “people,” users will eventually leave.

Brand Personification’s Survival Battle

So what should brands do?

The answer is actually quite harsh: if your brand was only living off “reach” and “traffic” before the algorithm adjustment, then you should indeed be worried. Because that means your brand has no value worth “actively seeking.” Users saw your content not because they wanted to, but because the algorithm forced it on them.

When algorithms stop forcing it, you disappear.

But if your brand is engaging in “valuable conversation”—sharing genuinely useful knowledge, expressing opinionated viewpoints, creating content that sparks discussion—then the algorithm adjustment is actually positive. Because “meaningful interaction” is exactly what the new algorithm rewards.

In managing my own content, I realized early on: One honest opinion generates far more engagement than a hundred carefully designed sales pitches. People don’t want to talk to a “brand,” but they’re willing to talk to “a person with opinions.”

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

Brands that can’t do this will find advertising costs increasingly expensive but effectiveness increasingly poor after algorithm adjustments. Because users have been trained to automatically ignore those “words that don’t sound human.”

Extension into the AI Era

When I wrote these observations in 2018, AI wasn’t yet a mainstream topic. Looking back eight years later, the logic of algorithms shifting from “maximizing stickiness” to “maximizing meaningful interaction” has become even clearer in the AI era.

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

This means: low-quality content will be more precisely identified and downgraded. Pure traffic manipulation will become increasingly difficult. And truly valuable content—that sparks thinking, promotes dialogue, makes users feel “this time was well spent”—will be more efficiently delivered to the right people by AI.

As I discussed in “The Pain of Opening Five Fingers: Why Digital Transformation Always Ends in Failure?,” the biggest challenge in digital transformation isn’t technology but mindset. Brand social media management is the same—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 conversation?

Products Are Limited, Value Is Infinite

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

Products are limited. You have those few products, those few services, that much room for discounts. If your brand only knows how to promote products, then your ceiling is your product line.

But value exchange is infinite. You can share your understanding of the industry, your views on problems, lessons learned from failures, your judgment about the future. These things don’t run out, and become more valuable the more you share—because they build trust, and trust is the foundation of all business relationships.

Facebook’s algorithm adjustment was essentially telling brands: Stop treating users as traffic. Start treating them as people.

Eight years later, this message hasn’t become outdated—in an AI-accelerated era, it’s become more urgent than ever. Brands still chasing reach and clicks are like people still using horse-and-buggy thinking to build cars.

And brands that truly understand “people” don’t need to worry about any algorithm adjustments. Because algorithms will change, but people’s desire for authentic connection won’t.