The difference between stopping poachers and sustainable harvesting

Facebook's announcement of a change to the newsfeed selection algorithm in favour of personal-network posts at the expense of posts from businesses was greeted with hysterical headlines such as “RIP Facebook News Feed for Publishers”.

Business/brand activity on Facebook will show up less, not be eliminated entirely. It will certainly not RIP; Facebook has jealous shareholders now and is not becoming noncommercial. Currently businesses are enjoying a free marketing ride on Facebook, and in so doing they reduce Facebook's utility to the owners of the very eyeballs they're after: a contemporary version of slash-and-burn agriculture that destroys the ecosystem it uses. The algorithm changes will reduce the extent of such poaching. And some portion of businesses' activity will probably be redirected into paid advertising. This could meaningfully enhance revenues even if only a small portion of current business activity becomes paid.
What we haven't seen so far is an acknowledgment of the negative effects of the current complex wall/newsfeed content selection algorithm. Since its introduction, the newsfeed has become unpredictable: reload and you'll see a largely different selection of posts, so you can never be sure you're fully caught up on those from even the sources most interesting to you. The feed sequence is frequently interrupted by repetitive promotional messages from Facebook itself. And there's no escape: changing the few available configuration parameters has little effect.

Users’ lack of control also harms the utility of Facebook and the common weal by downranking news organisations, which post extensively to social media in efforts to keep themselves vital and relevant, and in so doing keep us supplied with information despite, for many newspapers in the US, negative margins. They may post news free of charge to readers to promote themselves, drive subscriptions and keep their heads above water, but they’re not able to spend to push news stories as paid advertising; that’s a nonstarter, and a dangerous one for the country at that. If I cannot instruct the Facebook algorithm to maintain the prominence of, say, The Washington Post and Science Alert in my newsfeed, the feed loses much of its utility to me, and this perforce looks like someone has decided that he knows what I want better than I do. That, perhaps unintentionally, propels us right past the point of evil (as in Google’s “don’t be evil”) and into ideological totalitarianism. The end result is likely to be the decline of the social network in favour of another, as has happened many times before (to Compuserve, Delphi, AOL, MySpace).