Facebook Hacked Their Own Platform
Us app developers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to “hack” the platform. By hack I mean make our apps spread better without violating the sort of rules that get you banned from the platform. One of the most notable and successful hacks is allowing users to send gifts to other active users via requests.
This works because Facebook limits the number of requests users can send based on a few factors. The key one seems to be blocks, the number of times a user blocks your app based on invites. The lower the blocks, the more invites per day you get. The second (but apparently much less relevant) factor is the acceptance ratio.
So when you have one user give another user something free in the game every day, it dramatically lowers your blocks rate and increases your acceptance rate. Unfortunately this sort of hack is easily discovered just by playing the top apps and incorporated into every actively-developed app on the platform in a matter of weeks. I’ve mentioned before that this has virtually no effect on reducing spam, but instead just makes your app’s spread based solely on the value of gifting in the app, which is idiotic (and probably not what Facebook intended at all, though it took them a full year to do anything about it) and will probably be fixed by the new platform changes.
But recently Facebook hacked their own platform for us. Somewhere around 1 to 2 months ago, they had a bug in the platform that made users unable to block apps. You would click the link to block the app that you got a request for and get an error.
It took them a week or two to fix that bug, and over that time us developers saw our invite quotas spike as our blocks rate dropped to 0. And interestingly even after Facebook fixed the bug that had disabled blocks they seemed to have yet another bug that didn’t track when the blocks happened. Despite the fact that users were undoubtedly blocking apps just as they had before the bug, every app’s Insights stats showd 0% blocks. Within a couple weeks every app on the platform had the full 60 requests per day.
Inside Social Games posted yesterday asking why app traffic was dropping, and whether it was due to the holidays or something more. While the holidays don’t help, it was mainly due to apps dropping from 60 invites per day to 8. This was also compounded by the new Facebook rules that app developers cannot gate content based on the number of friends a user invites, but I suspect those had significantly less effect than the invite limit.
