If you are on Facebook, you may have noticed ‘activity’ updates showing up on you NewsFeed. These are auto-shared posts triggered by some action you take on Facebook or on other sites and apps such as pinterest, Instagram spotify among others. Facebook is also discouraging developers from adding the auto post feature on their apps altogether. This apps and websites will still allow you to share your activity manually if you would like.
Since apps and websites started automatically sharing their activities on Facebook, most users started complaining as it looked more of spamming than sharing. To put it into perspective, take a look at the image below showing the activity of one user, this is very spammy as you can see and in some instances it can share something you may be comfortable with.
Facebook probably saw these complaints and decide to give its users what they want. This move does not means that apps will never post your activities on Facebook but rather they would post not as much as they currently do. Facebook even said in an update that it is prioritizing explicitly shared stories over automated posts. This means that the stories or activities you choose to share will be prioritized over automated posts.
This move by Facebook is welcomed by users but does not settle well with most developers given that most of them have relied on such activities to grow and drive traffic to their websites or apps.
Facebook tried to explain this in a blog post saying, “In general, we’ve found that people engage more with stories that are shared explicitly rather than implicitly, and often feel surprised or confused by stories that are shared implicitly or automatically.”
