How About We Don't Delete Newsfeeds

esthertabois

Despite all the glitches and many bugs I sticked with MFP. I made some wonderful friends who became very important for me. All the joy comes from the newsfeed. And I think MFP is making a huge mistake by changing it to community. I really hope you're listening to your members. Something you should have done before! For now I cancelled my premium. It has no extra value anymore without the newsfeed. I can log food everywhere and probably better too but the friendfeed is your golden Ticket MFP. So please reconsider and let us be great together.

Machka9

Just FYI, let me introduce you to the organisation who owns MyFitnessPal and 168 other companies. Check out the list!
https://www.franciscopartners.com/investments


Then, "in 2021, MyFitnessPal partnered with Sprouts Farmers Market. Through this partnership, users were introduced to new healthy recipe ideas, food and health-related articles and other content."
https://www.sprouts.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyFitnessPal


"The past five years have seen steady revenue and usage growth for MyFitnessPal, although not much has changed from the original app vision. Under Armour struggled to build out its connected fitness segment, scaling back on its hardware ambitions in the past few years after multiple failures.

In 2020, Under Armour decided it was time to shift focus, with a new CEO, Patrik Frisk, focused more on apparel and less on the technology side. It sold MyFitnessPal for $345 million to investment firm Francisco Partners, $130 million lower than the price it had acquired it for in 2015.

The fact that no major tech company jumped for MyFitnessPal when it was for sale may be indicative of how the industry views MyFitnessPal’s rather unrefined advertising platform and its low conversion rate of its everyday users to its premium subscription service.

Since the acquisition, there hasn’t been much change on the app. The subscription service is pushed a bit more heavily, but for the most part, everyday usage is the same as it was with Under Armour. Francisco Partners have not said what its plans are with the app long-term."
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/myfitnesspal-statistics/

ByeByeToDiabetes

I am saddened. The newsfeed was what attracted me to MFP. I am rather new, have 'only' lost 15 lbs. I am fighting my diabetes diagnosis (type 2) and so far it looks like I am succeeding. My morning glucose is now already in the normal range.

The newsfeed was my own little space here. I could fill them with friends to my liking (and vice versa) participate or take time off after we lost our beloved dog. My friends were there. Some motivated me and inspired me, others just started and our baby steps brought us together.

I suppose there is no money to be made with the newsfeed. Forcing everybody to participate on a discussion board will not be the same -not even close.

People like me will stay away and participate only once in a while. In the end, I fear there will be lots of advertisements. The more readers, the higher you can sell the ad space. Isn't that how it works?

Or will the newsfeed be a part of the premium membership now?

To me and many others, it won't matter. We might fall off the wagon and just stay off, or we will succeed quietly alone -somewhere.

I feel sorry for all the members who have built friendships with a lot of people during the year. Many are role models and I suspect they need it to stay focused. Maybe I start a blog somewhere or I participate on Instagram? Not sure, but I need interaction with others. It keeps me going.

mkksemail

...

So, how is the Activity Feed supposed to work?

I thought, from reading the article in News & Announcements, that the Activity Feed would show up posts from your friends (it shows in the example that "Username and 109 other users were promoted to Premium).

But, no friend posts are showing up in my Activity Feed, and in turn, my friends can't see the post I made in their Activity Feed, either.

So, what's the deal? How is it supposed to actually work? Just a place for you to talk to yourself, publicly, and folks can comment, if they feel moved to visit your Profile Page, and read your Activity Feed?

noogie98

RIP MFP.. I shall miss you. I have been here since February 26, 2011, and am coming up on my 5,000th day of logging in. I love the newsfeed feature, and usually check in on the site before even logging on to Facebook or any other social media site.

My friends here have gotten me thru some really tough times, most recently a 63 day hospital stay with 2 ICU visits, being intubated, having a trach and feeding tube, and diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis. Most mornings, I don't have the energy to get out of bed, but I always check in here. Seeing what everyone on my friend list is up to has helped me get thru some of my darkest hours, and lately, most of them are not too bright.

Taking the newsfeed away is a terrible plan, and one that should be reconsidered before MFP is just another used to be place for people to connect, like MySpace. I predict in a year, people will be saying, "MFP, I used to use that site. Whatever happened to it?" 😔

claireychn074

clarity8796 wrote: »

Machka9 wrote: »

(And no, I don't work for MFP. But do have education and experience in cost accounting.)

You also clearly have an agenda. You’ve stated multiple times in lengthy posts that you do not use the newsfeed and that no one uses it.

Yet you feel compelled to make post after post telling people why they shouldn’t care about something that they do care about and that THEY use. We don’t need you to explain to us that businesses exist to make money.

Um I think you’ll find it was me that specifically stated that. So go ahead and have a go at me if it makes you happy! I’m ducking out now.

NormInv

**S A V E O U R N E W S F E E D** REPOST Tomorrow Monday, May 27 we will boycott by not logging into the site. If enough people don’t log in, that may show MFP what it would look like once the newsfeed is gone. Post this on your feed and ask all your friends to post this too. To protest MFP removing the newsfeed. **S A V E O U R N E W S F E E D**

Pennyandlu

Joining the boycott as are most of my friends who are still here! It seems some have already jumped ship...............

JamieS74

I'm not liking the community feel AT ALL so far. There's too much drama, no easy way to navigate it on the app and I can't find things I've posted on previously, then when I do I have to scroll through all the new comments. This is more of a pain in the *kitten*! Just let us keep our newsfeeds!

Abbey2Lynn

I’ve been with MFP for years and the Newsfeed is the only thing that keeps me here. There are way better apps for fitness and diet tracking. This app has been a glitchy mess since this group bought it. Why on earth would I want to share all of my info with a totally public group? There are people who join MFP for reasons that have nothing to do with health and fitness. I weed those people out of my friends’ list. If you take away my ability to do that, MFP will no longer be a good place to be. No Newsfeed = No App

SafariGalNYC

The camaraderie of the personal newsfeed has kept many, including myself - coming back for years. Without it.. how is it different than other fitness apps?

It will be interesting to see — in the light of so many user requests to keep the feature if the developers and corporate side see a value in it for the user experience.

AnnPT77

Zinka61 wrote: »

OK, here's an issue with moving toward "private groups". They don't seem to be so private. I joined a friend's new *private* group that she made due to losing the news feed. In it, she asked if anyone knew another member. No one did, so I did a search on MFP of the member's user name. My search yielded a number of threads the member participated in or was mentioned in...and the "private" chat thread in the supposedly "private" group was one of them. This is exactly why I don't use Community. I've searched my user name and found my posts from Community on the internet. I don't want that. I want private discussions with people I've decided are safe to associate with. The newsfeed offered that, but I can't see that anything else this site offers provides that kind of privacy.

Private group activity only shows up in notifications or search results if we belong to the private group. Yes, general Community posts can show up in web searches, but I don't believe private group posts do.

For clarity: I don't much use the news feed, don't really like it, but I think MFP is making a huuuge mistake in eliminating it without a good replacement. Many people use it and value it, in my experience (even though I don't happen to be one of them).

NormInv

The funny part is that newsfeed is an essential component of every fitness app....FitBit, Garmin etc. So for MFP to devalue it, it just doesnt make sense.

BCLadybug888

@Betty - current situation is my 'friends' see my Newsfeed...their 'friends' see their Newsfeed...they see their friends Newsfeeds, but I do not - we do not have identical friend lists, so private groups DON'T WORK! We would each in theory need to create our own curated group, plus join the group of every one of our friends (because their group is different than mine) and then what, repeat post to every one of these myriad of groups?? And hope they all do the same???
UNWORKABLE.

NormInv

**S A V E O U R N E W S F E E D** REPOST Tomorrow Monday, May 27 we will boycott by not logging into the site. If enough people don’t log in, that may show MFP what it would look like once the newsfeed is gone. Post this on your feed and ask all your friends to post this too. To protest MFP removing the newsfeed. **S A V E O U R N E W S F E E D**

SherriDennison941

I don't have many friends on here but I love the stories they tell. The groups are hard to get to. I would like the newsfeeds to stay. You are going to lose a lot of people if you stop the newsfeed .

1ns1d3_0u7

Betty wrote: »

Hi y’all, 

Wanted to first acknowledge that saying good bye to any feature is hard, and I too am sad to see the Newsfeed ride off into the sunset. I do feel strongly that social interaction is important for a lot of folks on what can often be a lonely and difficult journey and having friends cheering you on can make a difference. 

I’ll be transparent that the Newsfeed was one of our oldest features that had many flaws and was no longer sustainable to support. While it was not used by many we understand that it’s a real loss for those who used it.
While it is not perfect, due to some limitations like no friend or follow features in the Community, our team enabled the Community Activity Feed on profiles within the community as it was an existing feature available from our forum providers. Some of you may even remember seeing it briefly back in 2021 when we updated the Community.
The community profiles only have two options Public or Private, and the Private option makes the Activity Feed unviewable by others. The next best alternative to utilizing the Activity Feed would be to create a Private Group to invite your friends to and interact with them there.
I know these options don’t “replace” the Newsfeed by any means, but we hope they help give some members some options to interact with others outside of topic driven discussions.

It's a great way of updating your friends about your progress, thoughts, pictures, exercises, and so on. Then the passiveness regarding streaks, workouts, weight losses - it a primary motivator for a lot of people and makes SUPPORTING friends easy (which I believe is ESSENTIAL for many peoples' journeys). I don't comment on everyone's posts, but I try to be active. I'm not going to hunt the community forums every-time I log on for posts/comments from people on my friend's list. Honestly with how often the app (and website) glitches or crashes, the newsfeed is the only saving grace that keeps a lot of people on here.

NoMoreTwizzlers

esthertabois wrote: »

Despite all the glitches and many bugs I sticked with MFP. I made some wonderful friends who became very important for me. All the joy comes from the newsfeed. And I think MFP is making a huge mistake by changing it to community. I really hope you're listening to your members. Something you should have done before! For now I cancelled my premium. It has no extra value anymore without the newsfeed. I can log food everywhere and probably better too but the friendfeed is your golden Ticket MFP. So please reconsider and let us be great together.

Found you on IG! Keep killing it, Esther‼️

SafariGalNYC

Machka9 wrote: »

Just FYI, let me introduce you to the organisation who owns MyFitnessPal and 168 other companies. Check out the list!
https://www.franciscopartners.com/investments


Then, "in 2021, MyFitnessPal partnered with Sprouts Farmers Market. Through this partnership, users were introduced to new healthy recipe ideas, food and health-related articles and other content."
https://www.sprouts.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyFitnessPal


"The past five years have seen steady revenue and usage growth for MyFitnessPal, although not much has changed from the original app vision. Under Armour struggled to build out its connected fitness segment, scaling back on its hardware ambitions in the past few years after multiple failures.

In 2020, Under Armour decided it was time to shift focus, with a new CEO, Patrik Frisk, focused more on apparel and less on the technology side. It sold MyFitnessPal for $345 million to investment firm Francisco Partners, $130 million lower than the price it had acquired it for in 2015.

The fact that no major tech company jumped for MyFitnessPal when it was for sale may be indicative of how the industry views MyFitnessPal’s rather unrefined advertising platform and its low conversion rate of its everyday users to its premium subscription service.

Since the acquisition, there hasn’t been much change on the app. The subscription service is pushed a bit more heavily, but for the most part, everyday usage is the same as it was with Under Armour. Francisco Partners have not said what its plans are with the app long-term."
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/myfitnesspal-statistics/

@Machka9

Ok and? What’s your objective in posting that?

So Francisco owns multiple companies… and? They are a private equity firm, of course they have a diverse portfolio.

It stands to be seen how they are calculating the growth of MFP or what the vision is, MFP has been getting low marks for transparency. They just hired a new CEO and Chief of Product Experience. I hope they are reading the community boards.

With the impending change of the newsfeeds, they are miscalculating the importance of user experience.

Companies focused on greater user-focused experience benefit from greater customer loyalty, increased revenue, a higher market valuation, and better-performing stock.
- From WSJ and Forbes about valuation of UX. (User eXperience)

The value of user experience is the prime factor that ensures a site sustains a visitor's engagement beyond a catchy headline or sharp graphic. It's also the quality of a site's UX design that determines whether they will return. Focus on usability and accessibility to keep users happy and engaged.
From - dowjones.com

But hey… if they don’t want the paid users (me) who have had premium subscriptions or the free ones that up ⬆️ the value of their advertisements.. they leave an open market for someone else to fill.

In my 10+ years on MFP - I have never seen this many people passionate about a change in the platform … the same users who have only stayed through the years of technical mishaps and meager development because of their personal network on their very active newsfeeds.

Adventurista

SafariGalNYC wrote: »

snip prior quotes

… In my 10+ years on MFP - I have never seen this many people passionate about a change in the platform … the same users who have only stayed through the years of technical mishaps and meager development because of their personal network on their very active newsfeeds.

I have seen such passionate expressions elsewhere, not too long after, the sites were sold off or completely changed direction or outright closed.

I did a cursory search for another site with free tools and a robust community that includes friends, groups, forum discussions and privacy features.... did not find anything.

At one time, these types of communities seemed to have higher levels of robust active community participation. I am not sure why the decline, perhaps the rise of other conversation/video platforms that have subjects/content beyond weight management and health.

Personally, the uproar speaks loudly of a real need for the 'friend & privacy' feature combined with health tools and public discussions.

Would hope that the owners/devs can restore this resource and continue to grow this site as a full featured resource. I continue to believe there remains a profound need for these tools and services.