[HN Gopher] Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of ...
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Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
Author : msh
Score : 103 points
Date : 2021-02-10 05:47 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shaneosullivan.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (shaneosullivan.wordpress.com)
| [deleted]
| Hnshadowbansvd wrote:
| But.. They end up to be same censuring machine as twitter and
| Facebook
| closetnerd wrote:
| Quick note: it's an unfortunate fact of life that some engineers
| make a career of exaggerating things.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| This is not that, though.
|
| I heard this story from people involved at the time, and it's
| not exaggerated in any way, shape or form.
| hoten wrote:
| But isn't it? I can believe people inside Facebook really
| thought it was a critical problem, but I don't see how it
| could have become any more than an inconvenience.
|
| - There's a websql polyfill. I don't have experience with it,
| but it looks like a drop in replacement. This is such a
| strong counterpoint, the rest almost doesn't matter.
|
| - Features tend to be disabled in Chrome with some advanced
| warning. Not overnight.
|
| - websql is still enabled in chrome today
|
| - if the api were disabled, ad customers could be directed to
| flip the feature switch in Chrome. If money is on the line,
| seems like an easy enough task.
| yyyk wrote:
| - Safari supported websql until safari 13 (september 2019),
| long after this issue stopped being relevant. How many
| people in an organization need to use PE? Probably only a
| few in marketing. Surely these few people could have just
| bought a macbook. A few macbooks must be a very small
| expense compared to facebook advertising.
|
| - Or IT could have arranged a VM with an old version of
| Chrome.
| exolymph wrote:
| If Google could have killed Facebook, it would have.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Google+ was very poorly designed.
| jorams wrote:
| I've heard, and keep hearing, so many stories about frustrations
| with Facebook's tools for advertisers that the situation
| described doesn't surprise me at all. Somehow this massive
| organization with >50 000 employees and billions of users can't
| seem to produce quality software that allows people to pay them
| for access to those users.
|
| Small tasks turn into multi-day endeavors just because the tools
| keep crashing over and over again, losing all state. Managed
| advertising accounts just vanish from interfaces. Random buttons
| turn into "try again" roulette.
|
| It's a good thing their ads are (apparently) effective.
| elcomet wrote:
| Very interesting story!
|
| The title (Google being able to kill facebook) seems a bit
| exagerated though. If this app was so important (25 to 50% of all
| facebook revenues), and so important to customers (most powerful
| editor to manage ads), I'm sure if Google had disabled websql,
| they would have forked some older chrome / electron with websql
| support and bundle it with the app.
| mcv wrote:
| A hit of 25-50% of revenue would certainly have hurt, but
| probably not killed Facebook.
|
| That people will find a workaround is absolutely true. I once
| worked on a system to order mobile phone subscription from a
| website that only worked on IE6. So we had a website that
| accepted orders from customers, created jobs that would be sent
| to one of 10 VMs that ran IE6, where a watir script would steer
| IE6 to enter the order into the old website.
|
| It's the most horrible hack I ever worked on, but it worked.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| When BBSes started telling me to call back when I could
| connect faster than 300 baud, I discovered they would let me
| in at 110 baud.
| Pelic4n wrote:
| Absolute cringe, thanks you for this.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I used to have to manage mailing list subscriptions based on
| data in a SQL database. The mailing list software only had a
| web UI. So I worked out what GET and POST commands and data I
| needed, and scripted it in bash using curl commands to
| interact with the list software. Ugly, fragile, but it
| worked.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| that would have made builds massive, unless you're referring to
| just the desktop experience...
| elcomet wrote:
| I'm saying they would have find a way to deliver the app to
| customers, whether in desktop or web form. And customers
| would have downloaded the app if needed, as it seems to be
| the only powerful way to manage ads.
| aequitas wrote:
| Indeed, people will always find a way, especially if money is
| involved. And running outdated browsers for legacy support,
| while being a huge security risk, is not uncommon for a lot of
| use cases, especially back then.
| supermatt wrote:
| TLDR: Facebook built the app responsible for their entire ad
| platform on a chrome-only tech (WebSQL), and when it was
| deprecated, instead of dropping in a widely-used polyfill, they
| decided to do a major 3yr rewrite risking 25% of their revenue in
| the process.
|
| I guess this is the stupid shit that being "too big to fail"
| permits.
| asplake wrote:
| I didn't know that such a polyfill existed but even so, that
| was pretty much my reaction. Facebook would be quite capable of
| developing one, and potentially a route there to something more
| service-based once the panic is dealt with.
| ai_ja_nai wrote:
| Ehehe nice story.
|
| I remember when we were to be shut down by AWS because the bill
| was 2 months due and the administrative contact was a inbox
| nobody looked at. We discovered it by chance, doing a nightly
| maintenance: services started to disappear one after another
| (including the Redis that powered the login, we weren't able to
| login into the product for half an hour!). We immediately phoned
| AWS support and asked, no, begged them to turn them up again.
| They did and we paid everything the morning after.
|
| Hadn't we been in front of the PCs doing the maintenance and
| witnessed as it was happening, we might have woken up the day
| after without an online bank (yes) because the production
| environment would have ceased to exist...
| mutatio wrote:
| It raises interesting questions of whether Google (advertising
| company) should be the guardian of the web's primary browser;
| strategically it could deprecate features direct competitors
| depend on (let's assume FB is now also a ad company). The fact
| that web's primary ad platform also owns the web's primary
| browser sure is "interesting". The inverse of that is that it
| might not have incentive to deprecate features - which Google the
| company / partners depend on or might not be able to deprecate
| due to legal consequences of doing so (shutting down 25% of FB's
| revenue might raise eyebrows in the gov).
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| iirc it was Mozilla who put the nail in the coffin of WebSQL
| and if you read this post, it actually mentions that Chrome was
| the last browser to even still support the feature after it had
| been abandoned by Firefox and Opera already. What does this
| have to do with Google owning Chrome?
|
| Of course, the question itself is valid but I don't see how it
| relates to the topic.
| acd10j wrote:
| Facebook's real moat is it's massive user base not it's ad
| revenue, even losing 25% of it's revenue would not have effected
| or killed Facebook, Only building better viral social network
| could have killed it. Ad revenue is just a side effect of this
| massive moat. Just like Google can survive a temporary year or 2
| of 25% drop in revenue if their search dominance continues or
| increases but not opposite.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Couldn't they have compiled sqlite to javascript using emscripten
| as a websql replacement?
|
| sql.js seems to have been started in 2012, and even if it might
| not have been production ready at the time, I'd expect facebook
| to be able to pull off such a project by themselves.
| yholio wrote:
| Today it's called Business Manager and it remains a user hostile
| pile of JavaScript with dubious design and riddled with bugs.
|
| The only reason anybody puts up with it is because there's no
| other way to access powerful targeting tools, and we are forced
| to depend on Facebook.
|
| More to the point of the original story, no, Google couldn't have
| killed Facebook by flipping that switch. The Power Editor users
| would have done whatever it takes to access the interface,
| installed an insecure older browser, ran commands in the console,
| build a relay computer in their back yard, and so on. They will
| do whatever it takes because they are not choosing that platform
| for its features, they are professionals doing a job, and that
| job is reaching the user base of Facebook with their ads. If they
| can't do that they will lose their jobs and clients.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| That so many smart and talented people choose to work on AdTech
| or systems that support AdTech is such a shame. That being said,
| I love these little anecdotes, they are super fun to read.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| There are so many aspects of adtech that are ethically neutral.
| Just as advertising itself - there are even ads created by
| great creators that are works of modern art. It's only when
| it's abused adtech becomes evil.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Wow, I bet I'll miss out on so much important culture by not
| getting visual pollution all over the place unless its
| regulated out of existence.
|
| No thanks, I'll continue to block it everywhere that I can,
| and even going further and inspecting elements to get rid of
| obnoxious paywalls as well! Wow, am I a hypocrite? Maybe
| develop real, sustainable revenue models that aren't
| dependent on clickbait and being a lobbyist for corporations
| in the form of selling eyeballs to the highest bidder. Just
| yuck. I'll be inclined to buy into $WHATEVER if you just let
| me use it for a bit, if I find it of my own means. I promise
| you I'm not going to buy a Swatch because of your fucking
| banner ad. Seriously, I promise. If I just bought a book I
| promise you I'm not going to buy it again if I see it appear
| in my side banner. 100%.
|
| Or maybe I'll just grow less dependent on external services
| every time I have to consider another subscription... wow!
| We'll see!
| croes wrote:
| Have you checked the art vs bullshit ratio?
| arthurcolle wrote:
| That probably costs extra
| beefield wrote:
| It may be "many" but it does not mean that the defining
| nature of advertising is ethically neutral. I think I just
| quote Banksy/Tejaratchi:
|
| "People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt
| into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear.
| They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small.
| They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not
| sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else.
| They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They
| have access to the most sophisticated technology the world
| has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The
| Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
|
| You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks,
| intellectual property rights and copyright law mean
| advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with
| total impunity.
|
| Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no
| choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to
| take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like
| with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock
| someone just threw at your head.
|
| You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you
| especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They
| have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you.
| They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking
| for theirs."
|
| Edit: Credits also to Tejaratchi
| Teever wrote:
| One time I saw a fascinating article about how scientists
| were working to grow skin complete with natural looking
| hair from stem cells for burn victims and such. I thought
| the article was really neat and I was in a hurry so I
| emailed a the link to myself.
|
| The next time I logged into my gmail to read it I happened
| to be at a machine without adblock and I saw that google
| was serving me ads for garbage treatments for male pattern
| baldness.
|
| Fuck you Google and your shitty advertising. There's
| nothing wrong with going bald and I don't need you to try
| and make me feel insecure about my hairline when I'm trying
| to read about scientists helping burn victims.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| The ad probably promoted a product that could regrow hair
| for bald people. You just took that Banksy Sean
| Tejaratchi quote and applied it to them. You chose to be
| offended by it. Sure baldness isn't wrong. But a lot of
| people like hair better and therefore a market exists for
| this type of product. Nothing wrong about that.
| Teever wrote:
| Repeated viewing of these kinds of ads is precisely what
| introduces the insecurity in people that makes them seek
| out the kinds of products being advertised. It's the same
| thing with skinny models and anorexia in girls.
|
| Advertising is the cause of the 'problem' that they can
| conveniently solve. Besides some of these 'cures' for
| baldness have alarming side effects and there should be
| regulations around advertisement for these products.
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-merck-propecia-
| suicide-ex...
| lupire wrote:
| Why are burn survivors unacceptably ugly to you, but
| baldness survivors are acceptable looking?
| Teever wrote:
| I used to deliver food to a burn unit in a hospital. I'm
| not going to deign this question with a response.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| This is such a great quote. I've checked out a couple books
| on Banksy but haven't ever run into it before. Thanks so
| much for sharing!
| hiq wrote:
| > I think I just quote Banksy
|
| Banksy is not the original author, Sean Tejaratchi is:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Tejaratchi#Crap_Hound
| https://i.imgur.com/D0pTs.jpg
| beefield wrote:
| Thanks, I edited my post to include credits to
| Tejaratchi. Not sure how this should be done properly, as
| that specific quote is from Banksy, so I just left
| credits for both.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Please note that all these examples from the quote refer to
| a certain genre of ads targeted at the general public. Many
| teach ads I see are completely different. I often click on
| ads for microcontrollers for example, and I have't yet seen
| one I would find offensive in any way. They don't make me
| feel small and unworthy, on the opposite: the make me feel
| empwered. So it's really about the content of the ad, not
| advertising itself.
|
| Advertising is crucial for everyone. When you have a
| product or service, you need to advertise it. Even if you
| choose not to buy ads, you need to find another way,
| organic or not, to make your project known. If you don't
| have a products/service yourself, you work for a company
| who has, and there are very few lucky enough not to need
| any advertising (because e.g. they secured long-term
| goverment contracts already etc.). We should focus on how
| to make advertising human again rather than destroying it
| completely.
| beefield wrote:
| Note that the quote originates from the 90's, way before
| ad tech as it is currently known. Advertising is a bit
| like finance. There exists an important, tiny core that
| is surrounded by a massive amount of activity whose
| societal benefit is doubtful at best.
| lupire wrote:
| That's not just ads or finance, that's all of capitalism.
| (If I'm good at programming I have to convince a farmer
| its in his interest to give me food, even if he doesn't
| need my software.) And communism has its own problems.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| > so many
|
| Please name 5
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| OK. Let's separate the ad industry from ad technology for
| now. So as for the latter, have a look at the Revive ad
| server [0]. It allows you to deliver ads with intricate
| rules as to when they should be served, on which websites
| and so on. It allows you to be less dependent on Google/FB
| duopoly. You can host the ads either on your own websites
| or contact the owners of other popular websites and arrange
| an ad deal that doesn't involve user tracking. Yes, this is
| the opposite of what modern ad networks are doing.
|
| In any case, advertising without user tracking is, in my
| opinion, one of the most ethically neutral forms of making
| your product/service known, in contrast to morally dubious
| methods such as advertising with user tracking, product
| placement, advertorials, advertising disguised as
| articles/videos etc.
|
| [0] https://www.revive-adserver.com/features/
| llarsson wrote:
| There is a difference between the medium (ads) and the
| targeting and distribution technology (adtech).
|
| A great ad evokes some kind of feeling, can live with you for
| a long time, and even bring back memories that you cherish.
| Yes, I agree with you, it can be a form of art in that
| regard.
|
| Adtech, however, is an intentionally invasive technology that
| exploits any means necessary and technologically feasible to
| more narrowly target potential consumers.
|
| You can have ads without adtech. But you can't have
| (commercially successful) adtech without invasion of privacy.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > But you can't have (commercially successful) adtech
| without invasion of privacy.
|
| I think we (as a society, not just tech people)
| specifically need to take care of this point. Removing
| tracking will make it less effective, so what. We've had
| advertising without tracking since 19th century.
| [deleted]
| Osiris wrote:
| If the product was responsible for 25% of the company revenue,
| why was only half of one engineer assigned to it? And after the
| vulnerability was discovered, they still only had 5 people
| assigned to it while it increased in importance to 50% of
| revenue?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I hope those 13 engineers got paid millions. So much weight and
| responsibility on their shoulders! They were responsible for
| nearly $2 billion in 2013 (25% of $7.87bn), and nearly $14bn in
| 2016 when the work was finished (50% of $27.63bn)
| simonh wrote:
| I see this sort of comment occasionally. If those engineers
| hadn't been assigned to work on the project, somebody else
| would have. It doesn't look like they did that fantastic a
| job of it either. Also this was a front-end to managing the
| ad system, not the ad system itself, or the infrastructure it
| ran on, or the features of facebook that drew in the audience
| in the first place, etc, etc.
|
| Yes some engineers genuinely do make contributions that have
| unique value, but frankly most of us are guns for hire and if
| we're lucky enough to get on a fun, interesting and valuable
| project that's great, but frankly one out of three is the
| best we usually get.
| komali2 wrote:
| Smacks of maybe survivorship bias. If OP hadn't noticed
| this chrome dependency, how are we to speculate on the
| likelihood of someone else noticing it? They even said
| nobody else wanted to work on it.
| lupire wrote:
| Well OP is tooting their own horn
| simonh wrote:
| I've seen this sort of thing happen many times. What usually
| happens is the original team that built it leave the company or
| move on to other teams, and the one engineer left actually has
| a different job as well now but is stuck supporting it part
| time as a favour. It's not that you couldn't assign other
| engineers to help support it, but they wouldn't have any idea
| how to do so because there's probably no documentation and only
| that half an engineer around to show them how it works.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| It was because Facebook practiced open allocation for
| engineers at the time.
|
| Essentially, you had a choice of teams and the manager would
| need to convince the engineer to work on the project.
|
| At the time, ads was not a high status part of FB
| engineering, and as such, it was very difficult to get people
| to work on ads products.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Hard to imagine that anything responsible for 25% of
| revenue (billions of dollars, at FB scale) would not be
| seen as "high status" if not by the engineers, then by
| management.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| It's funny that people want to work at Facebook or Google
| but don't want to work on ads.
|
| In other companies, everyone wants to work near the profit
| center and avoid cost centers.
| rvba wrote:
| Because those projects are hard.
|
| It is much easier to make a greenfield project that will
| get 70% done and cancelled before anyone even asks to fix
| bugs.
| username90 wrote:
| Can't have been that hard if half an engineer was enough
| to do the job.
| simonh wrote:
| The half an engineer was just the last team member
| around, only doing essential maintenance to keep it
| working.
| username90 wrote:
| So why allocate more engineers to the project when it was
| doing fine with half a head?
| kelnos wrote:
| The article states that they needed to rebuild most of it
| because the entire thing depended on a deprecated Chrome
| feature that could be removed at any time.
| rconti wrote:
| Because the collections agent for that technical debt
| hadn't called _yet_
| [deleted]
| spankalee wrote:
| That is not how Chrome removes features. It's based on usage.
| WebSQL is still supported today, in fact:
| https://caniuse.com/sql-storage
| baybal2 wrote:
| Google actually had a successful social network project, Orkut,
| they just continuously marginalised it for it to be too NIH for
| US headquarters.
| chaz6 wrote:
| As far as I can tell, Orkut was the original incarnation of a
| modern social network, but they failed to capitalize on it.
| lupire wrote:
| Orkut was a clone of The social network created by the
| namesake's previous company.
|
| It was launched about the same time as Facebook and after
| Friendster.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I don't know how they are doing it but Google manage to fail at
| anything social. By that I mean communication platforms, social
| networks and instant messengers. They have promising starts but
| they fuck it up later. Their only successes I'd say are GMail
| and YouTube.
|
| I'd say for GMail, it is just an email client they started out
| excellent, thanks in part to its huge storage space and good
| search features. And they didn't break it enough to make it
| unusable.
|
| As for YouTube, it is great for hosting video, but its social
| features are terrible. There are communities tied to popular
| channels, but it stays in a producer to consumer model, with no
| interaction between community members. The comment section is
| made in such a way that dialogue is almost impossible.
|
| Maybe they should hire a few people who understand human
| beings, because right now, it looks like the company is run by
| robots.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| Wasn't it very popular in Brazil for some time?
| nojokes wrote:
| Yes it was. Source - old Orkut user but not from Brazil.
| hrishi wrote:
| I'm guessing India - it's where I grew up and it was the
| network of choice for teens until we moved to Facebook
| bemmu wrote:
| Also tried to band everyone (MySpace among them) together with
| OpenSocial, but too late.
| neodymiumphish wrote:
| > This became a closely held secret in Facebook Ads leadership.
| We didn't want to take any chance that word our this
| vulnerability could get back to Google.
|
| Considering the tracking Google does with Chrome, I suspect they
| recognized the traffic still occurring over WebSQL and left it
| active for exactly this reason. It's highly unlikely that nobody
| at Google was able to recognize this. Alternatively, maybe Google
| didn't know about Facebook's reliance on it, but was aware of
| other services/corporations that still relied on it for some
| time, and waited until they had an alternative.
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