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 One That I Want Another Sister

I want a baby sister or brother. Because I want to play with another kid, and I don't want to play with Josie because she is in preschool and I won't play with her very often. So I want to play with someone very often who is not just two people. …

via Nora Wise's Blog Posts September 5, 2026

Linkpost for September

On September 19 and 20, Sparrow Infrastructure is putting on The Overhang, a conference in Washington D.C.

via Thing of Things September 4, 2026

Ed Zitron's AI prediction track record

I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress posi…

via Posts on September 1, 2026

more     (via openring)