Facebook is Paying Me to Post

November 14th, 2023
tech
In mid-September Facebook asked me if I wanted to start getting paid for posting things:

This seems to be the performance bonus program. I think they offered it to me because my Facebook profile is in professional mode and I post a lot? It's all very unclear, including what effect saying yes would have: how would they decide how much to pay me? Would this affect how the algorithm prioritizes my writing? Would they attempt to exert editorial control? One way to find out!

I decided to try joining, and started 2023-09-13.

On 2023-10-23 I received a payment of $16.31 for September. There are no details on how they decided what to pay me, which is too bad: I was at least hoping for some information about rates.

FB does give data on "reach" and "engagement" so it does look like I can see if this was having any effect. The data is in the form of awkward charts, not CSVs I can export, but still there's something:

.

That "reach" spike right around when I signed up is very interesting! Did Facebook start showing my posts to more people in response to me signing up, and then give up when peopld didn't engage? While it's hard to read the chart, however, squinting at the timing I think the spike is actually on 2023-09-12 or 2023-09-11. So this went the other way around: I had a post ("Apple Cider Baklava") that was unusually popular among strangers and in response FB decided to offer to offer me money.

Overall this seems a bit silly: while I don't mind taking a few tens of dollars to keep doing what I was going to do anyway, a deal where they don't say how you'll be compensated or how they've figured your payments is pretty suspect.

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

The odds are good and the goods are great

I stole the title and thesis of this post from the great etirabys and arguably I should just link her post.

via Thing of Things August 31, 2026

Bug blindness

I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work, but most people I talk to don't see anything like this. For a long time, I thought this had something to …

via Posts on August 30, 2026

Microfictions 2

A few more microfictions, still no LLMs.

via Evan Fields August 7, 2026

more     (via openring)