[HN Gopher] Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B
___________________________________________________________________
Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B
Author : robteix
Score : 410 points
Date : 2022-02-04 10:03 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| sjs382 wrote:
| Alternatively, "How Apple Closed the Privacy Hole that Facebook
| Was Exploiting to the Tune of $10bn"
| samwillis wrote:
| As a rough datapoint, I run a consumer targeted e-commerce site.
| We ran a campaign before Christmas were we were selling a new
| product that was only marketed on Facebook, we are certain that
| (almost) all customers found it though that Facebook campaign.
| Facebook was only able to _attribute about 50% of the sales_ to
| the ads, it should have been close to 100%. This then meant that
| Facebooks estimated CPA was effectively double what it actually
| was.
|
| Important to note about 60% of our customers are on an iOS
| device, which is a little higher than the global average but
| matches the market segment we are in in the UK.
|
| The situation improved after about 4 weeks, I believe Facebook
| now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS, but it's
| somewhat difficult to be sure as by then we had other campaigns
| running.
|
| So, this will definitely be effecting marketers decision making
| process of where to allocate spend. It certainly made us more
| courteous about spending on Facebook.
| DaveExeter wrote:
| >So, this will definitely be effecting marketers decision
| making process
|
| Affecting, not effecting.
|
| >It certainly made us more courteous about spending on
| Facebook.
|
| We assume you meant "cautious" and not "courteous".
| azalemeth wrote:
| What is the shop? I partly live in the UK, don't run iOS, don't
| use Facebook and block ads about a billion different ways at
| once. There's a chance I might be interested in your products.
| paulcole wrote:
| If you used Facebook and didn't block ads about a billion
| different ways, you might already know what their product is!
| jackjeff wrote:
| But then again. If it was an interesting product, Facebook
| would be the last place on earth where it's advertised.
| Don't know what it is but I'm predicting it sucks.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why can't you just make the ad point to a
| custom URL (on which you can then set a cookie if you wanted)
| and do attribution that way?
| samwillis wrote:
| That is almost exactly what UTM url parameters are [0]. We
| use these and via them our other tracking collaborates our
| theory on Facebooks tracking.
|
| There is actually a real problem with tracking via cookies on
| Facebook ads when the destination is a website. The ad click
| will open in a Facebook "In App Browser", any cookie that you
| (or any analytical service) sets will be within that IAB. If
| the user then uses the "open in Safari/Chrome" option that
| tracking can be broken as there is no cookie. Ideally you
| want your visitor to either complete their transaction within
| the IAB or to use the "open in Safari" option _immediately_
| so that any tracking parameters are copied to the other
| browser allowing the cookie to be set.
|
| In our case the majority of our customers will have a better
| experience outside of the IAB and so we have a popup that
| prompts them to use "open in Safari" before navigating away
| from the first page view. We actually implemented this after
| noticing a _very high_ drop out rate for iOS Facebook IAB
| users during our checkout. What was happening is address
| /payment card autocomplete isn't available within the
| Facebook IAB and people were clicking "open in Safari" during
| the checkout in order to use it, they would then find
| themselves with an empty shopping cart, hence the drop out.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTM_parameters
| danudey wrote:
| So not only is the Facebook/Instagram "try to lock users
| into our own browser to track them" thing user-hostile, but
| it actually harms companies that are using ads by having
| them drop in the middle of the funnel?
| iamadiggo wrote:
| Dyac wrote:
| That's really interesting, I'm going to check our analytics
| to see if the same thing is happening.
|
| Another way you could potentially get around it is to
| fingerprint the user and store the basket contents server
| side and present them to that fingerprint.
| samwillis wrote:
| We considered doing something like this but it would be
| very hard to ensure no false matches which could result
| in security compromises.
|
| We also considered placing the session id in the url for
| the checkout, but again decided against due to security
| concerns.
| nsp wrote:
| It's fairly hard to uniquely fingerprint iOS devices,
| there aren't that many configuration options, most people
| use the stock browser etc.
|
| Actually I suppose this may have changed since the
| introduction of safari extensions on ios? I haven't
| looked into this since that released
| z3rgl1ng wrote:
| nonameiguess wrote:
| You attribute 0% of purchases to repeat loyal customers who
| just check in on what you're selling every now and again
| without needing to be reminded by a marketing campaign?
| samwillis wrote:
| Sensible question, we took this into account in our
| assessment. I stand by it.
| Irishsteve wrote:
| If this holds true the headline should really be companies /
| brands double marketing roi due to apple privacy changes
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| Agreed. For advertisers with larger budgets, marketing mix
| models are still the only way to understand the relative
| performance of FB, Google, TV etc. - each of which is a "walled
| garden" that doesn't exchange data with others.
|
| FB marketing is effective, question is at what price. If those
| prices drop, ad dollars will flow back. It will take a few
| quarterly modeling cycles to reflect this though.
|
| The contra-contrarian view is this: FB, Google have an unusual
| mix of large, medium and small advertisers all bidding for the
| same inventory. That's what makes FB and Google somewhat immune
| to large advertiser pricing pressures (and issue of the day
| spend bans). However, only the larger advertisers have budgets
| for complicated cross-publisher modeling. If organic FB tools
| show higher CPAs, it will drive the smaller marketers to other
| platforms causing some interesting feedback loops.
| propogandist wrote:
| FB attracts big ad dollars as they will continue to claim to
| have huge audience reach
|
| >if a user does not have their Facebook and Instagram
| accounts linked in the company's Account Center, those
| accounts will be considered as two separate people for ad
| planning and measurement.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211031105427/https://adage.com.
| ..
| samwillis wrote:
| Exactly, as a small business we are completely dependent on
| the ad platforms internal attribution tools, if they don't
| work or can't be trusted we won't use them.
|
| It's unfortunate that the incredably invasive tracking and
| profile building has become conflated with ad attribution.
| For us attribution is essential and we have little interest
| or use for invasive tracking. We just want to know from which
| ad a customer converted.
|
| Personally we avoid the more invasive remarking tools as I
| hate it myself when you are chased across the web by a
| product you have looked at once.
| yuliyp wrote:
| What do you mean by conflated? The tracking and profile
| building is how they correlate results with ad impressions.
| That this data is then also used for training the models
| and identifying the user coefficients is just a different
| use of the same correlation data (a website visit is just
| another type of ad conversion, after all).
| laurent92 wrote:
| We shouldn't identify the user. We should identify the
| content. "I want to be shown next to car pictures,
| because maybe the guy is missing carpets for his car"
| instead of "We want to be shown to guys 24-30 with
| interest in cars." First is tracking the content, second
| is tracking the user.
| morelisp wrote:
| I work in adtech and hear "We don't want to track people,
| we just want to know what events led to conversion" all the
| damn time. (Or conversely, from the sell side, "we don't
| want to track people, we just want to learn/verify our
| audience's composition.).
|
| Sorry to break it to you, but that's what tracking is.
|
| You're saying you don't want remarking, but - you want to
| know something that requires marking. "Remarking" is just
| persistent marking. What you don't want is "retargeting",
| which is when the user gets to learn someone is building a
| profile of them. But that's just whether the "marked"
| profile is used to also "target" - the profile gets built
| either way.
| ksec wrote:
| I cant upvote you enough. This single comment contains many of
| the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real
| world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against
| ads, where All Ads are evil.
| [deleted]
| travisporter wrote:
| Well no one's arguing that targeted ads are not effective.
| This is just an example of how well it works, so upvoting it
| may not be the best way to bolster your side of the fight.
| ksec wrote:
| >Well no one's arguing that targeted ads are not effective.
|
| Oh they sure were. All ads are useless. Targeted ads are
| evil. And Ads should not be targeted were the HN's view,
| which later became there shouldn't even be any ads, it
| should all be subscription. That is 2018/19. By 20/21 HN
| were even targeting those who were working inside the
| online Ad industry. And this is seen across the tens of
| thousands of comments. ( Say 50 Thread of 200 comments )
|
| It became such a problem that people working inside Ad
| industry were even afraid to post their views on HN. And
| they have to be upvoted to make sure there are still sanity
| inside the HN community.
| ratww wrote:
| Arguing that "ads are evil" is different from calling
| them ineffective. Most people dislike targeted ads them
| because of privacy/resource usage issues. Other people
| dislike ads in general. Some of those want ads to stop
| existing exactly because of how effective they are.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| > All ads are useless
|
| I don't think I've ever seen someone say this. People
| hate that they make the internet impossible to use. I
| have a family friend that runs a small business and all
| of the revenue comes from ads on the websites they run. I
| hate using their website because of the ads.
|
| Pop-up that takes up the whole screen asking to
| subscribe, auto-play video ad, content moving as ads get
| loaded slowly. It's all just awful to use. The ads are
| absolutely effective though.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Freakonomics had an episode with some econ professors who
| claimed their research with eBay showed targeted ads are
| not worth the cost.
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-
| actually-w...
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Ublock origin and pihole make the internet a more
| pleasant experience for me. It has been suggested that I
| should feel some nagging voice causing guilt that I do
| not support the sites and apps I use that depend on ad
| revenue. Perhaps there should be, but there is not.
| Apple's position on this is just responding to demand.
| When wifi access points start offering built in enabled
| pihole by default those access points will sell well.
| Throw in a vpn to pipe your phone through it from
| wherever that is easy to use/automatic and "ads are
| useless" may become truth.
|
| Edit: it would likely just cause a shift to self hosted
| ads, which is a dramatic improvement imo.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Self-hosted ads COULD be a dramatic improvement, if the
| companies start vetting these ads in some way
|
| My guess is it'll result in backend web modules that make
| it easy to automatically dynamically re-host the same
| virus- and tracker-infested malware ads we all hate
| HWR_14 wrote:
| First, it's not "all ads are evil". It's the spying and
| tracking of ads that most people oppose.
|
| Second, how is this a "balanced ideological fight"
| counterargumnet. Let's say I oppose Facebook ads as invasion
| of privacy (and I do). A person on the internet used Facebook
| ads to make money. Those are contrary why? It's not like I'm
| sitting here and was like "oh, now that someone _made money_
| on the ads, I 'm totally in favor of them."
| scarface74 wrote:
| I have no problem with targeted ads based on what I
| specifically told Facebook. It's when I'm shopping on Amazon
| and see the same products advertised on FB that there is a
| problem.
| danudey wrote:
| For the longest time I was getting Amazon ads on Instagram
| that were for products I had recently viewed - even viewed
| less than an hour before in some cases. Moreover, the
| Amazon account we use is my wife's, which we pay for Prime
| on. I would look at something on my phone, which is logged
| into her account, and then see the ad show up in my
| Instagram feed that day or a few days later.
|
| Now, I get 90% ads for car parts and car accessories. I
| don't have a car, I don't drive, I don't have a license,
| and I don't even like to be in a car, but for whatever
| reason Amazon (or Instagram?) ads are assuming that what I
| really want are car parts and car accessories that I don't
| recognize, can't use, or don't understand.
|
| It feels very stupid to me that those are the "default" ads
| I'm getting, even though I never tap on them for obvious
| reasons, but it's reassuring to know that they went from
| knowing exactly who I am and specifically what I had been
| looking at to having no clue whatsoever anything about me,
| or who I am or what I like.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| Ads are evil. To work, they play upon human insecurity. In
| many cases, they create desires or perceived needs that
| weren't there before, making them wasteful in addition to
| scammy/conniving. Because they're successfully evil - the
| tricks work - they often leave a residue on people: beyond
| just never being able to forget a jingle from a cereal ad you
| heard when you were 8, a lifetime of very frequent exposure
| to advertising trains us to suspend our criticality, or
| hinders us from developing it in the first place. So it
| leaves people dumber, too, more pliable and dependent.
| Hilarious in a country like the US, whose national mythos is
| so obsessive about personal liberty and rugged self-reliance.
|
| We have a family friend, retired now, who had a successful
| career in marketing and strategy in multi-billion dollar
| transnational companies. I once asked (probably naively) why
| [maker of extremely popular product at the time] ran so
| little advertising. The friend told me "they have a good
| product. They don't need to spend money haranguing people
| into buying it or spreading the word about because it's
| actually good. Word of mouth is free".
| thorncorona wrote:
| I'm sorry "they often leave a residue on people"?
|
| At least half of your polemic needs citations.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| Oh dang sorry, I'll get right on that
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| The real world story is that marketing in one channel is a
| little worse now... I don't feel like that justifies the
| existence of data-mining to show ads.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| While there are plenty of people annoyed by any ads at all or
| who believe any form of marketing is inherently evil, that is
| not at all a majority view. Yet almost everyone hates the way
| Facebook does it except sellers. The problem isn't the ads.
| It's the level of surveillance required to make them as
| effectively targeted as they are. People don't want
| everything they ever do to be recorded, catalogued, and
| studied to build a psychological profile of their global
| purchasing habits.
| user_7832 wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| The problem was never about the ads.
|
| It was about the fact that ads were forced, privacy-invasive
| (due to customization) and generally were terrible overall
| (think malware/crypto mining risks, terrible UX - think
| annoyingly flashy gifs, or those gigantic banners in the
| middle of a scenic drive), not to mention poorly regulated,
| leading to lots of "double your money/phallus in 3 days!"
| type of scams.
|
| There are a few "fair" advertising companies (the name slips
| me) that I am perfectly happy with. A static, discreet ad
| need not be bad. Several ads are absolute works of art and
| passion. The vast majority are not.
|
| What we have is (techy) folks wanting to not have a shitty
| experience, and the average privacy-conscious user not
| wanting tracking. Companies do not respect (or care enough)
| for these which is why you have an anti-ad point of view. (I
| should probably write about this.)
| mercutio2 wrote:
| Oh, anti advertising maximalists certainly exist! I'm
| certainly not in the majority, but if I could live in a
| world where:
|
| A) Advertising was considered so extremely gauche that no
| one did it B) No revenue from advertising existed C) Ad-
| supported services went away
|
| I would be a very happy man.
| kmlx wrote:
| > and the average privacy-conscious user not wanting
| tracking.
|
| zero traction in the real world for this. people will click
| on whatever you show them.
| FabHK wrote:
| Exactly. In the old world, ads were attached to matching
| content, which gave an incentive to produce insightful
| pertinent content (and develop a reputation in a certain
| content subject area). Those ads were not much of a
| problem.
|
| Today, the ad industry tracks the user, and ads are
| attached to matching user interest, which gives an
| incentive to produce arbitrary, but addictive content, with
| most of the benefit accruing to the ad oligopolies instead
| of the content producers.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| also, while ads were certainly dispersed through
| magazines and the like, a huge chunk of them were really
| just in the back and not with the main stuff.
| ksec wrote:
| >I disagree.
|
| I dont think we disagree.
|
| Like I wrote in another post, most on HN couldn't
| understand the difference between placement ad on Google
| Search Engine and Google Ads Network. And suggested we
| should ban all "tracking ads". And later all ads. I
| explicitly ask them and suggest what you just wrote. That
| there could be good ads, and they, by majority disagree.
| This isn't just on HN, it is pretty much across the whole
| tech industry. Benedict Evans wrote a lot about this [1]
| and on Twitter. We even went to ask people offline to make
| sure we are not in an online bubble. But so far the results
| suggest otherwise. Especially with Tracking [2].
|
| [1] https://www.ben-
| evans.com/benedictevans/2021/5/13/apples-ads...
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/13874146504431
| 41120...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > This single comment contains many of the contrarian
| view against HN. It is nice we have these real world
| stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against
| ads, where All Ads are evil.
|
| I still don't understand your point. The only reason
| Facebook's ability to properly attribute went down
| drastically is _specifically_ because of the iOS privacy
| changes that require user opt in to track _across
| different sites_.
|
| Fine, I don't doubt there were other HN commenters who
| were arguing different meanings of "tracking", but that's
| all a moot point. In this instance, we know _exactly_ why
| Facebook 's ad effectiveness went down - it went down
| because they could no longer track all your interactions
| across the majority of the web. Tough shit.
| oconnore wrote:
| Why does ability to attribute an ad depend on the ability
| to track individuals?
|
| IIUC, you can do attribution with a very basic ad: <a
| href="website.com/ad-34" ping="fb.com/my-
| product/ad-34/ping"><img src="fb.com/my-
| product/ad-34/img.jpeg" /> Come buy my product, you'll
| love it!</a>
|
| Then you sum up all the "/ad-34" hits, and figure out how
| many of those user sessions (which are now on your own
| site -- single domain, but perhaps leveraging a script
| supplied by the ad network) went and actually bought
| something. The ad network can correlate those sessions
| with the "ping" it receives to determine clicks vs.
| conversions.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| You do not understand correctly.
|
| Facebook (and other ad networks) want credit if someone
| clicks on your ad, spends time on your site, but then
| doesn't actually buy anything until a couple days when
| they enter the URL directly (i.e. not clicking on an ad).
| This is the problem generally referred to as attribution.
| Facebook (and others) do this by tracking everyone all
| around the web. They track the ad click and then they
| track you going back to the website the next day, and
| they know it's the same person.
|
| Ad attribution directly depends on pervasive tracking.
| oconnore wrote:
| You can do that with first-party cookies though.
|
| Allow some facebook supplied javascript to set a first
| party cookie when the user hits website.com/ad-34, and
| then reference that 1st party cookie the next day when
| the user returns. Phone home when they buy something.
| Facebook can now correlate (1) the ping they received to
| begin with, (2) the user session cookie they initiated on
| the first visit, and (3) the user session they observed
| when a purchase was made.
|
| I'm sure things get easier with 3rd party tracking, but
| fundamentally you can do it without cross-site tracking.
| jfim wrote:
| Out of curiosity, does attribution also work if the ad is
| not clicked?
|
| For example, I bought a product the other day after
| seeing a Facebook ad, but I didn't click on the ad itself
| and rather went searching for it on DuckDuckGo, then
| after reading a bit about it online, bought the product.
|
| I'm curious as to whether that got attributed to the ad
| impression or not.
| yuliyp wrote:
| Not all purchases come immediately after clicking through
| an ad. They may come days later, even. Knowing that "this
| user who purchased this product saw this version of the
| ad" and "this user saw the other version" is what
| attribution is.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Ads synthesize desire and cause people to be unhappy when the
| ads work. They encourage expending money that could have been
| saved, or taking on debt. They also create a funding
| situation where media producers are beholden to corporations.
|
| The implementation of ads is also wildly invasive, creepy,
| and propagandistic. However, focusing on implementation
| allows ad salesmen to lessen the sharpness of the criticism
| by supposing there is some "nice" way this could be done.
| bryan_w wrote:
| Ads aren't inherently trying to make people unhappy (at
| least the good ones). Ads in the best case, are just
| informing a person about the existence of a thing. There
| have been many ads that I've found useful, not because of
| some evil mind games, but rather because i didn't know of a
| company providing such a service.
|
| I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with
| expending money for things that are valuable. That kinda
| seems like the whole point of money.
| chrischen wrote:
| Ads are a corruption of organic discovery though. Yes it
| _could_ help you but say person A hocks product 1 because
| they are paid, even though product 2 is actually superior
| for you. Ads corrupt their incentives. Even if product 1
| is good for you, product 2 is better. Product 1 ends up
| succeeding because they decide to play the game of
| corrupted promotion.
| tehjoker wrote:
| The idea of an ad is that it says you don't have this
| thing. Your life will be so much better if only you had
| this thing. In some cases, that makes sense, but mostly
| it serves to reset people's expectations and become
| dissatisfied with what they have.
|
| I think in many cases we should be aiming to do that for
| social fundamentals that would make all of us live richer
| and happier lives like healthcare and education, but it
| has a lot of negative consequences in consumer products
| which are more individualistic, competitive, and status
| oriented.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales
| to the ads, it should have been close to 100%._
|
| Word-of-mouth exists. It's possible Facebook wasn't making it
| up. Did you use a Facebook-specific link in the ads?
| Ntrails wrote:
| > Did you use a Facebook-specific link in the ads?
|
| I do sometimes find it odd that such a thing is insufficient
| for tracking sources of traffic in and of itself. No doubt
| there is a complexity that I have missed
| samwillis wrote:
| > Word-of-mouth exists
|
| True. However in this case we are confident, based on our own
| internal tracking and metrics, that this is correct.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >True. However in this case we are confident, based on our
| own internal tracking and metrics, that this is correct.
|
| I'm _really_ curious what you sell now. Can you tell us?
|
| If not, can the rest of HN create fun speculations?
| danudey wrote:
| Maybe they had a drop-down saying "How did you hear about
| us?" with just "Facebook Ads" and "Not Facebook Ads",
| that's my theory.
| SllX wrote:
| > If not, can the rest of HN create fun speculations?
|
| Human armpit-scented cat toys.
| bduerst wrote:
| Mechanical keyboard keys that are 10" tall for standing
| desks.
| Guest42 wrote:
| Subscription beach towel service printed with top 5 memes
| by volume
| jbay808 wrote:
| Is it possible that some fans spread the word organically after
| they initially found your product through FB?
| samwillis wrote:
| Yes, maybe a tiny proportion, but to nowhere near the extent
| of what we saw. We are 100% confident in our assessment.
| bigyellow wrote:
| What's Meta? You mean Facecrook, the spying and surveillance
| network?
| skizm wrote:
| Facebook's revenue up 35% year over year: -26% (P/E ~16)
|
| Amazon's revenue up 15% year over year: +12% (P/E 60+)
|
| I don't get the stock market. Facebook can simply turn on
| billions in revenue whenever they want still with WhatsApp, which
| has north of 2 billion MAU, and has not been monetized at all
| yet. Facebook is a reverse meme stock.
| babypuncher wrote:
| It's not just about how well they are doing, it's about how
| well they are doing compared to how well they were _expected_
| to be doing. If a bunch of people bought Facebook stock last
| year based on expectations that revenue would go up 45% year
| over year, then they probably over-valued the stock.
| pessimizer wrote:
| WhatsApp has competitors that in Telegram/Signal etc. that are
| financially stable, offer more features and security, and with
| the mood of the government right now they would absolutely be
| prevented from purchasing. They would destroy WhatsApp in weeks
| if they did that.
|
| Amazon is fine and doesn't need to grow. Facebook is in danger
| and growth was already priced in. Now it's not.
| kazen44 wrote:
| heck, soms European politicians are calling for a split of
| WhatsApp from Facebook because Facebook did not honor their
| end of the deal when they bought WhatsApp.
|
| fb hilariously claims that this would be impossible, which is
| kind of proving they didn't hold up their end of the bargain.
| coldpie wrote:
| > I don't get the stock market.
|
| There's nothing to get, it's just gambling for rich people.
| altdataseller wrote:
| This. The market is just a bunch of random ppl and robots who
| are have different motivations and opinions. Some are long
| term oriented, some just wanna make a quick buck. It's just a
| chaotic casino.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Facebook's guidance was shit. Amazon's was not.
| akashshah87 wrote:
| The current stock price of the company is theoretically the
| present value of future cashflows. For example, if you had
| project this revenue growth a year ago, you should have bought
| Facebook stock and not Amazon and you would have bet correctly.
| Facebook stock is up 21% from 2/1/2021 to 2/1/2022 whereas
| Amazon stock is down 9.54% during that same time period.
| intrasight wrote:
| FB is one of the most developer hostile platforms that I've
| worked with. For example, their API tokens expire in 60 days, so
| users of automated reporting tools are constantly having to re-
| grant. Why? No good reason. And the documentation is garbage. FB
| can't blame Apple or anyone else for those failings. They should
| fix the things that are under their own control.
| worik wrote:
| > FB is one of the most developer hostile platforms that I've
| worked with
|
| Have you done development on Apple platforms? That might push
| FB into second place....
| mojuba wrote:
| https://archive.fo/ZasjX
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| I remember when Facebook Platform came out. The super early
| version where you could embed your app on Facebook and engage
| with the social graph.
|
| I thought dang, this is smart. They'll basically own the next
| level up the stack from the browser: they'll own the "social
| chrome" of every application on the web.
|
| Although it devolved into spam, Facebook was a hot spot of weird
| social games for a while there. And every web dev was learning
| how to build Facebook apps. We wondered if we'd even really need
| a domain for much more than a landing page, if 99% of our
| engagement was going to come through Facebooks.
|
| And then they killed it because they wanted to own the entire
| experience inside Facebook. It became not a walled garden, but a
| walled flower pot.
|
| It always seemed short sighted to me. Yes, they lost control
| allowing third party apps in their frame. But didn't they want to
| be a Microsoft and not a WordPerfect?
|
| Looking back, I wonder if it was a missed opportunity. They have
| to go try to be the metaverse because social never became a
| platform.
| danudey wrote:
| I kind of miss those awful games, honestly. There was one my
| girlfriend at the time was playing, and I thought it was
| interesting but kind of tedious, the UI reacted too slow, etc.
|
| So I opened up my editor and wrote a Python client to automate
| the game; go to forest, attack until your inventory is full, go
| to town, sell inventory, repeat. I left it run overnight and
| completely blew past her in progression.
|
| Now everything is an app, and every app uses HTTPS, and every
| HTTPS connection uses certificate pinning, and I just can't be
| bothered to do the work anymore to cheat at useless games I
| don't like.
| DanHulton wrote:
| I'm still playing one, actually:
| https://www.mousehuntgame.com. They transitioned to just
| being a web game that runs in a FB frame for users that still
| wanted to play it there, but I haven't had an FB account for
| years now, and I can still play right at the URL.
|
| "Interesting but kind of tedious" is absolutely a great
| descriptor, though. It's basically an incremental game that
| grows at the slowest possible rate you can imagine.
| scarface74 wrote:
| They killed it because it didn't work on mobile.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Maybe their desktop traffic wouldn't have tanked so much if
| they'd kept it a richer experience, and continue to enrich
| it. Instead they abandoned it completely once traffic
| patterns tipped towards mobile.
| scarface74 wrote:
| How many people really use desktops that much in 2021 for
| personal use? Facebook is already seen as being "for old
| people".
| ineedasername wrote:
| 78% of homes have a computer in them. [0] I don't know
| anyone who does not use a PC for personal use, and my
| non-work social circles are not at all techie dominated.
|
| Also I'm not talking about 2021: I'm talking about years
| ago when Facebook moved away from prioritizing the PC
| platform. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered, I don't know,
| but when FB became a primary entry point to the internet
| for many people, and FB then mostly ignored desktop
| experience, it certainly accelerated any decline already
| in place. But had they enriched that experience, maybe
| there'd still be a much stronger following there.
|
| [0]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-
| releases/2021/computer...
| scarface74 wrote:
| 55% of all web traffic worldwide comes from mobile.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-
| website-...
|
| And considering that most people spend 8 hours a day at
| work, how much personal usage on the web comes from the
| desktop? How many younger people are using computers for
| personal use - especially if it a shared family computer.
|
| Heck I am a software developer and my personal computer
| is just sitting in a corner as a Plex server. I haven't
| used it for anything productive in a year and a half and
| that was for updating my resume.
|
| Besides that, Facebook got more popular because of mobile
| when everyone had a camera in their pocket with GPS when
| they csn post the highlights of their life. Not to
| mention WhatsApp is all about communicating real time and
| Instagram is about sharing pictures.
| zuminator wrote:
| Worldwide contains a lot of places without personal
| computer friendly economics. The corresponding stat in
| the USA is about 47% by way of comparison.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/683082/share-of-
| website-...
| ipaddr wrote:
| So you do no personal development on a desktop? Do you
| use your work's equipment? Are you using your phone?
|
| I have three desktops on the go all day. Three keyboards
| in front of me and three mice. I run Windows 7, 10 and
| ubuntu and another ubuntu under windows 10. Trading that
| in for my mobile is very limiting.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| Anecdata, but I'm teaching a coding class for 10-12 year
| olds and most of them don't know their way around a
| laptop. Most of their work has been done on tablets or
| maybe phones.
|
| It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that huge chunks
| of demographics don't really use desktops or laptops all
| that much.
| cheriot wrote:
| Then they lacked the imagination. The Facebook app would have
| become a web browser where Facebook controls user auth,
| contacts and then payments. Big $$$
| bryan_w wrote:
| >would have become a web browser
|
| Not on iOS where that sort of thing is prohibited. Sure
| they could put a skin over safari, but apple would have
| banned the entire FB app as soon as they found a
| developer's app they didn't like.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Apple would have lost the mainstream user back then. Now
| they have power over facebook
| deckard1 wrote:
| I always wondered: why is Apple allowing WeChat to exist?
| Their mini apps seem in direct competition with the app
| store. Is this a China political thing? Are they worried
| about losing all access to the market there? It seems
| clear Apple is not applying their own rules consistently.
| If that's the case, wouldn't there also be anti-trust
| implications here?
| Thorentis wrote:
| > Is this a China political thing?
|
| Yes.
| scarface74 wrote:
| By 2009, Apple and Amazon already had more credit cards on
| file than any other company in the US if not the world. In
| Apple's case because of iTunes, before the App Store and
| Amazon because Amazon. Why would you use FB for payments
| when you were probably either shopping on Amazon, Apple or
| EBay using PayPal?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| In 2009 neither Apple nor Amazon allowed P2P payments.
| cheriot wrote:
| In this path, people would be interacting with
| games/content in Facebook "apps" that are effectively
| mobile web pages. Facebook would have control inside
| their garden.
|
| As soon as any Facebook app convinced a user to pay, all
| other facebook apps would have a seamless checkout.
|
| Getting user financials isn't _easy_ but we 've seen the
| rise of Venmo, Robinhood, and Neobanks since then so it's
| doable.
| scarface74 wrote:
| By 2009, mobile was clearly the future. But the phones
| were underpowered and didn't run web pages well. Even
| today, most of the world is browsing the internet on low
| end phones where the web provides a sub par experience.
|
| Desktop penetration is lower outside of the US. Aren't
| Internet cafes still a thing in much of the world because
| people don't have computers at home?
| cheriot wrote:
| I think internet cafe's are pretty old school everywhere
| now. Anecdotally, much of the developing world
| leapfrogged the US on mobile/fintech. People had low end
| smart phones and banked with their phone carriers 5+
| years ago in East Africa.
|
| Latest anecdote (this week) is not seeing internet cafe's
| in Belize and government PSA's say to contact them on
| whatsapp.
|
| That said, Facebook makes their money in rich countries.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I'm an ignorant American, you mean what I see on 90 Day
| Fiance is not representative of the rest of the world?
| freewizard wrote:
| "Social Chrome" is a base of moving sand, just like Google AMP,
| it works for a brief while via platform's power but will phase
| out; web game died out naturally with devices becomes cheaper,
| and consumers going mobile (and consoles).
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Apple probably has the power to kill the advertising industry.
| Wish it would use its gatekeeper position to do good for once.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Apple has the power to extort massive amounts from the
| advertisement industry. Case in point: Google.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I think FB is understating the cost (the drop in revenue
| growth is more and Google's revenue growth hints on what it
| could have been); maybe because they are negotiating a deal
| with Apple.
| friedturkey wrote:
| I doubt it. Even with universal ad blocking on their platforms,
| iPhones are the minority worldwide and Macs even more so.
|
| Websites would just make sites painful to use for Apple users
| and force them into exceptionally expensive subscriptions
| (which most people won't pay for) or onto cheap devices that
| allow endless ads.
| smileysteve wrote:
| > make sites painful to use for ... users and force them into
| exceptionally expensive subscriptions
|
| I think you just described AdBlock, YouTube, Netflix,
| Washington Post, NyTimes, Spotify, and Amazon services, with
| of paid apps on the side.
| dodgerdan wrote:
| Users of iPhones are many many times more valuable to
| advertisers than Android users.
| ecdouvhr wrote:
| Average iPhone users may be more valuable to the average
| advertiser when compared to the average Andoid user, but
| there are plenty of markets where I'd say there are plenty
| of advertisers who'd benefit from targetting the lower end
| of the income spectrum.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Only if they see the ads.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| iPhone users spend much more money on Apps per user - but
| the vast majority of advertising is not for apps. It's to
| buy real things.
|
| Android Users spend similar amounts as iOS users on
| everything besides apps.
|
| Even in-app purchases for games isn't "many many times
| more" - it's close to 2x.
| scarface74 wrote:
| How is this possibly true when the average household
| income of iOS users is higher in every country that has
| any significant iPhone presents
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It's not "many many times" higher...
|
| It's ~40% more: https://www.comscore.com/ita/Public-
| Relations/Infographics/i....
| scarface74 wrote:
| That 40% gives you a lot more discretionary spending
| ability ...
| mrweasel wrote:
| Don't confuse advertising with tracking. I believe that the
| true advertising business and the people who really understand
| marketing is going to have a lot of success in the coming
| years.
|
| The business that will hurt are those who only know how to
| click around in Google AdWords or Facebooks Ads. Those business
| but all their eggs in a rather small basket. Facebook isn't
| going away anytime soon, but it will fail more quickly that
| some expect. If 50% or more of your business is coming from
| Facebook, start making plans for the future now.
| YmiYugy wrote:
| They could obviously forbid apps to show ads and implement a
| powerful, default-enabled adblocker into Safari. But why would
| they? The outfall would likely see many important developers
| pull their apps at least temporarily. Of the Top 10 Downloaded
| Apps of 2021 (https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/02/apple-most-
| downloaded-a...) only a single one doesn't have ads. This could
| be Pyrrhic victory for Apple. It would most likely also seal
| the deal on sideloading regulation.
| viktorcode wrote:
| I think you are under impression that ad industry depends on
| tracking of individuals. That's incorrect. It just a tad less
| efficient without tracking.
| scim-knox-twox wrote:
| ~4% less effective
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-
| little-...
| mcv wrote:
| I'm totally fine with ads being 4% less effective. I wish
| it was more.
| tirpen wrote:
| Ads were around for hundreds of years before Apple even
| existed. The advertising industry will survive just fine.
| pcardoso wrote:
| Yes, but let's not get over excited.
|
| I'm fed up with their ads to subscribe to their services in
| macOS/iOS: the App Store, on Apple Music, Apple Arcade,
| Fitness+... I'm getting tired of clicking "no thank you".
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Maybe off topic but super ironic that I had managed to read the
| first sentence
|
| "POP-UP NOTIFICATIONS are often annoying."
|
| and then got punched in the face by a huge cookie popup from
| Economist
| echopurity wrote:
| EGreg wrote:
| I think their Metaverse push was actually a great way for rats to
| escape a sinking ship ... by finding a new ship!
|
| Facebook just could never really capture the whole "facilitating
| real world interactions" thing, and for most people it became
| simply a way to maintain an online avatar / identity, argue about
| politics, comment on cat memes, and otherwise waste time in
| cyberspace. That's what they're good at, and maybe with the
| metaverse they can at least make people more productive with
| that.
|
| Now there are BENEFITS to MetaVerse. Less usage of fossil fuels.
| Facebook also facilitated conversations between people around the
| world, that would otherwise not meet. But its centralized nature
| and limited flexibility held back the whole space.
|
| But when it comes to making plans in real life, forming
| relationships, deal flow etc. you need open source software like
| this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
| tromp wrote:
| > But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA
| by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be
| tracked. It seems most do not: a study in December by AppsFlyer,
| an ad-tech company, suggested that 54% of Apple users who saw the
| prompt opted out.
|
| Hard to believe that nearly half of all people is ok with being
| tracked...
| altdataseller wrote:
| Occams Razor: very few ppl actually care and just press a
| random choice so they can move forward and use the app.
| sneak wrote:
| I believe that most people live relatively uneventful lives,
| and truly believe that they have nothing to hide from anyone,
| and resultantly do not value their own privacy whatsoever. The
| loss of privacy from surveillance capitalism does not bother
| them at all, and practically it is all upside, because they
| lost nothing of value to themselves.
|
| It does not enter their minds that mass abandonment of privacy
| means that it renders privacy harder and harder, or even
| impossible, for the tiny minority of society that needs it to
| operate: human rights advocates, investigative journalists,
| labor organizers, political upstarts, et c.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| The best comeback I've heard to that sentiment is, "would you
| like a camera in your bathroom?". And then the other night I
| was talking to my aunt and she mentioned that she has an
| Alexa in the bathroom so she can listen to music and I
| realized it might not be as good a retort as I thought.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| A better retort might be: "Do you want your health
| insurance premiums to be set based on which recipes you
| Google?" This one has the advantage of having a material
| impact and being almost-real[1].
|
| [1] https://www.coverage.com/insurance/status-update-your-
| social...
| scatters wrote:
| On the contrary, they do realize that loss of privacy makes
| life harder for "troublemakers", and they see _that_ as a
| benefit. Don 't make the mistake of assuming that everyone
| shares your moral code.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I agree to an extent, but I think you're grossly
| oversimplifying the way that the average non-technical user
| views their privacy online. It's true that many people don't
| really care about advertisers tracking them, but they _do_
| care about other privacy-related aspects of their digital
| experience such as having their location tracked or the
| content of their communications monitored. As evidence of the
| latter, I present the enduring popularity of Signal and the
| fact that WhatsApp thought E2EE was an important enough
| feature to roll out across their entire user base.
|
| The small minority of society that needs privacy (we should
| be honest and say that it includes some really nasty
| criminals as well as the good guys) really needs _that_ kind
| of privacy, the kind that the average user is at least
| somewhat interested in. Ad-tracking isn 't a huge concern to
| your average union organizer.
| peregren wrote:
| Couple of possible factors (with speculation)
|
| -- Most apps nudge you to accept tracking before the dialog
| comes up. Probably influences some users - A lot of people
| probably don't even read the dialog properly. - a lot of people
| who have apps like facebook installed are either unaware of the
| tracking stuff or don't care
| curling_grad wrote:
| This. I saw many non-tech savvy people just blindly hitting
| OKs to whatever dialogs shown on their phones.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Also this is 54% of people who saw the prompt. The standard
| practice for this sort of prompt in products that are trying to
| _optimise_ acceptance is to pre-ask the user first, almost "If
| we asked you if we can track you, would you be likely to
| accept". So that's 54% of users who are probably ok with the
| idea of personalised ads or however the app pitched it, then go
| on to say "actually no".
|
| Essentially this number is far lower than the total population.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Facebook does pre ask.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Everyone does, because a) you get to control the messaging
| to the user, and b) once they've declined the OS prompt,
| you can never re-do in your app, whereas if they decline
| your own prompt, you can ask them again whenever you like,
| like when you know they've just had a positive experience.
| paulcole wrote:
| Unpopular opinion on HN, but I'm 100% OK with being tracked
| because it means:
|
| 1. I get to use products and services I like without paying
| money from my wallet. I have plenty of data to share that's
| effectively worthless to me.
|
| 2. I get exposed to new products and services (through ads)
| that I'd like to buy. I like buying things!
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| You _want_ companies to use your personal information to
| manipulate you into buying products you don't need?
| paulcole wrote:
| Yes! I don't earn money to watch it sit in the bank. If
| there's something fun out there that I might like to buy,
| show it to me!
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| I guess im talking about something else. You're talking
| about being shown ads that are related to your interests
| which is fine with me.
|
| I'm talking about Facebook radicalizing people and
| manipulating their viewpoints and selling them on things
| they otherwise would have never wanted in a million years
| if they hadn't used Facebook.
|
| I'm not talking "Facebook showed me a cool pen and I like
| to collect fountain pens so I bought it", no issues
| there. I'm talking "Facebook radicalized and manipulated
| me and now I am buying extremist books and courses that I
| otherwise never would have".
|
| The latter is why I disable targeted ads. Because it just
| an order of magnitude beyond "showing me relevant
| products"
| tiborsaas wrote:
| If you can be manipulated by ads to be a terrorist I
| guess you have greater problems than tracking. In this
| case I'd say it's better for the public if these people
| are keep getting tracked.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| Not sure where you grabbed terrorism from...
| tiborsaas wrote:
| "radicalizing people and manipulating their viewpoints"
|
| it doesn't matter though
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's not about him. Society at large has a problem if any
| people at all are able to be manipulated like this. And
| clearly, some are.
| tetraca wrote:
| This mindset is so weird to me. I can't imagine just
| wanting to buy things for the sake of buying things. I
| generally only buy things because I have problems I
| recognize and want to solve. And the more heavily
| advertised a solution to one of my problems is, the more
| I inherently distrust it to actually be a quality lasting
| product/service instead of something that's just
| desperately trying to program me that it's actually good.
| ddingus wrote:
| I go back and forth.
|
| I like to buy things myself, but I generally have a
| purpose of some sort, or having used similar things, am
| targeting a very robust thing that I can camp on and use
| for a decade or two.
|
| A good friend is always buying products, trying them out,
| gadgets and such. And they spend a lot, but they are
| always super happy with their new things and frankly,
| give me a lot of their older things so they can get more
| new things!
|
| (that's crazy, but they do them, and we are great
| friends, and I make good use of the stuff falling my way
| too)
|
| That said, I generally don't gauge off the AD campaigns.
| Big spends are a rational choice as are modest ones and
| or guerilla type campaigns, which the latent rebel in me
| is a sucker for.
|
| What I can say, knowing someone like that, is they are
| entertained by new things. I'm sometimes that way, but
| it's rare. Like a great watch might do that, or some cool
| tech thing I can use with my hobby computing / making.
| But, my entertainment is more centered on doing stuff,
| and or hanging with people, maybe doing things with them.
|
| I do hate getting a thing that sucks. Shuts me down for
| quite a while.
|
| I LOVE a good score, like a thing that is just awesome
| and I know it will perform for ages.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I'm doing the same as paulcole. If I already want to buy
| things, like a new table for my living room or new tiles
| for my bathroom, then I do want to see what's on the
| market beyond my bubble. That's not because I'm
| manipulated into buying them[1]. If I see a new ad and I
| like it, I do check if I can get same product for a
| cheaper price from a company who's ad budget is not baked
| into the price.
|
| Basically I can use targeted ads as a free product
| discovery engine. Seeing an ad doesn't mean I'm going to
| mindlessly buy it. I know some people do that, but
| there's a way to make use of the situation.
|
| [1] there might be an evil conspiracy among kitchen table
| manufacturing companies who teamed up with Hollywood
| producers to sell me the idea that I want a loft style
| new kitchen table :)
| ineedasername wrote:
| Everything but food, clothing, and a place to live are
| things we don't need. There are countless additional
| luxuries that make life more convenient or enjoyable. I
| found out about Instant Pots from ads, and when I finally
| decided to check it out and found it interesting I bought
| one. It has significantly improved my after-work quality of
| life multiple times a month with large reductions in food
| prep time.
|
| I found out about glowforge the same way and added a very
| useful & revenue generating tool to a small side-business I
| run.
|
| So I don't mind _a little_ bit of targeted ads. I don 't
| regard them as inherently bad. I do however believe that
| each individual _should have complete control_ over the
| process as it relates to their own personal data.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| I totally agree. But I don't think Facebook (or anyone
| else to my knowledge) gives the user proper control over
| their data. My fear is that by feeding them this
| information, they'll be able to gradually manipulate me
| in ways I otherwise never would have been interested in.
| For example I noticed that YouTube gradually started
| pushing me conservative leaning self improvement videos a
| la Jordan Peterson and co. I have never knowingly watched
| that type of video, and now I'm getting "alpha male" ads
| for supplements and courses.
| firechickenbird wrote:
| -$10bn is not enough. They are still able to read my brain
| somehow
| martini333 wrote:
| Why is every journalist blaming Apple's Privacy. Like, use your
| brains, get a life.
| bell-cot wrote:
| I'd guess that desperate-to-stay-employed journalists feel far
| more need to suck up to Zuck than to suck up to Cook. And the
| "why Apple is in the right" case takes a whole lot more &
| longer words and concepts to explain. Vs. "Big meanie Apple
| took $10B from every's-favorite-site Facebook".
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| If you were to physically track someone and catalog everything
| they do in meatspace, we'd call that stalking. Why is that
| behavior acceptable when done by software? It should not be okay,
| its still stalking - no matter your intentions or end goals.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Can we say that this puts a value on the non-consensual privacy
| violations that facebook's business model depends on?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Looks like I jumped on the iPhone bandwagon just in time to cost
| facebook some money! (got my iphone ~1.5 yrs ago). What I don't
| get is why iphone needs to scan your phone at all. I mean they
| literally have a treasure trove of information of most of their
| users, why do they need to sell that? Why don't they just act use
| the megatons of info they already have on you from scanning your
| page and your messages to other users? They should be rolling in
| ad revenue without needing to spy on data on phones.
| slenk wrote:
| What about just not using Facebook...
| babypuncher wrote:
| Before this change, Facebook could still track you in non-
| Facebook apps that use their software. Even if you are not a
| Facebook user.
| slenk wrote:
| This change actually eliminates/ed that? (never used iOS,
| unsure of how things are)
| mojuba wrote:
| I'm going to ask the same question here:
|
| If I run a Facebook ad campaign for my app and given that Apple
| already provides the SKAdNetwork attribution mechanism, does
| enabling IDFA benefit my app, or it benefits only Facebook?
| Marketing people are trying to convince me IDFA is important for
| ad efficiency and thus should be enabled (with the spooky ATT
| popup in the beginning), but something is telling me it's not. I
| might be wrong and would really like to know.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| If you want the Ad optimisation from FB/Google/whoever to work,
| it's important.
|
| More generally, if you want to be able to track your own users
| and where they come from, it matters.
|
| If all of your traffic is organic, then it's irrelevant.
| mojuba wrote:
| So if there's SKAdNetwork attribution, why do I need to give
| the unique device ID to FB or Google in addition to that?
| They will know which ad led to the install via SKAdNetwork
| calls anyway, right?
|
| I know IDFA benefits them because they can connect the dots
| and know which apps are installed on a given device. But does
| my app's campaign benefit from that so much that I should go
| for the ATT popup?
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > So if there's SKAdNetwork attribution, why do I need to
| give the unique device ID to FB or Google in addition to
| that? They will know which ad led to the install via
| SKAdNetwork calls anyway, right?
|
| Nope, they'll only know that some percentage of impressions
| of an ad lead to installs. With their SDK, they'll know
| _who_ installed, and they can then feed this back into
| their ML models to find more similar people for you.
| mojuba wrote:
| Thanks. I still doubt it though. Firstly even without the
| IDFA they can heuristically identify devices in vast
| majority of cases, in fact even more accurately compared
| to the IDFA method given the current opt-in rates of
| 30-50%. Branch does this with deep linking and it's
| pretty successful despite the tightened privacy on the
| iOS side (I can imagine how Branch and similar services
| irritate Apple).
|
| My hypothesis is that Facebook pushes developers to
| enable IDFA because it saves them some effort: of course
| it's faster and easier than heuristics. Therefore, apps
| don't benefit from enabling the IDFA. But I might be
| terribly wrong and am open to counter-arguments.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Hey man, it's entirely up to you. When you have pretty
| rare events (like purchase/website conversions) every
| single one matters, but I feel like you probably have
| enough information to make an informed decision now.
| sebow wrote:
| Correction: Apple's war on FB/Meta/Zucc cost Meta $10B.
|
| Let's not disingenuously pretend they did it out their own good
| hearts and for people's privacy: they did not. Also more people
| overly attribute this loss of Meta to Apple measure's than
| general Meta trends.Meta's rebranding, dystopian vision about the
| future and it's anti-society effects though their business model
| which promotes less trust in the population is what brings up
| this number, not entirely Apple, not entirely Android.Then again
| outlets and people who do these kind of oversimplifications might
| aswell do it for sensationalism, since we need the same people to
| be explained the truth when something changes.
| honkycat wrote:
| There was a great tweet today:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/kevinroose/status/148927407968513...
|
| Kevin Roose: Can't imagine why this platform is shrinking
|
| Facebook top ten: The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook
| pages in the last 24 hours are from:
|
| 1. Breitbart 2. Ben Shapiro 3. Dan Bongino 4. NPR 5. Ben Shapiro
| 6. Ben Shapiro 7. Ben Shapiro 8. Steven Crowder 9. Ben Shapiro
| 10. Franklin Graham
|
| I won't touch the platform anymore. It's so out of touch.
| crawsome wrote:
| [deleted]
| lvl100 wrote:
| What I don't understand is why is this hitting them now? Those
| privacy features were turned on for awhile.
| eric4smith wrote:
| Lies.
|
| Don't you all see it? Facebook has been declining over the past
| year and this is a convenient way to blame someone - anyone.
|
| Let's face it, what are your friends all using now? That's right
| - video - YouTube and TikTok.
|
| Facebook had no answer for video and thus lost a lot of eyeballs.
|
| Instagram is a poor clone of TikTok and most people just repost
| their popular TikTok videos on Instagram reels anyway - hardly
| any original videos show up there.
|
| As the world transitions to short form video even YouTube is
| going to feel the pinch.
|
| Don't you notice every one of your favorite content creators
| starting "clip" channels which are blowing up with YouTube shorts
| and reposts to TikTok?
|
| Facebook is beginning its long inevitable decline. Who knows if
| it will accelerate or just be a slow death?
|
| And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I
| knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the
| next frontier is the meta verse and so he's trying to make
| Facebook be the epicenter of it.
|
| Who knows if it will work. But this has nothing if anything to do
| with Apple. And everything to do with the long term trends of
| history... or if you will, psychohistory.
| samwillis wrote:
| While I agree with you that Facebook (the app) is in decline
| and Facebook/Meta are rushing to diversify as the market
| changes, the premise of the article that Apples change has
| significantly effected Facebooks revenues is not a lie.
|
| Apples change has fundamentally damaged ad conversion
| attribution from the Facebook/Instagram apps on iOS, we have
| seen it it ourselves.
|
| It may be that the exact figure of $10B is inflated, it could
| even be an underestimate. Meta may have an agenda in how they
| are spinning it, almost certainly do in fact. However I can
| assure you that the fundaments of the article and what they are
| saying is true.
| intrasight wrote:
| Please correct me if I'm wrong. This privacy change only
| affects apps on iOS? I only use the facebook.com website. Ad
| tracking in that context hasn't changed?
| lolinder wrote:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/377808/distribution-
| of-f...
|
| 80% of Facebook users exclusively use mobile, and iOS has
| the largest market share in Facebook's largest market by
| revenue.
| tnel77 wrote:
| That's true, but I'd guess that there are a lot of users
| that exclusively use the iOS app.
| intrasight wrote:
| Among my peers where I've observed how they use FB, I
| think it's an even split. For me, if there's a web site,
| I skip installing the app. And of course a majority of
| news and social and commerce web sites now prompt you to
| install the app.
| samwillis wrote:
| Personally when I occasionally use Facebook its via the
| app so that I am not logged in in by browser. Don't want
| them spying on everything I do online.
|
| Twitter on the other hand I use in the browser as I like
| to be able to open threads in tabs to come back to.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| Many don't just prompt you to install an app, they
| borderline force you. Reddit is guilty of this, as is
| Instagram and TikTok.
|
| Presumably this is because they can gather much more data
| via a mobile app.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| You can use Safari along with privacy relay enabled to
| minimize websites' tracking.
| throwhauser wrote:
| I was with you up to here:
|
| > And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta
| I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows
| the next frontier is the meta verse
|
| Zuckerberg has been a surprisingly good steward of the one
| successful idea he came across, the social network graph. His
| acquisitions (Instagram, etc) worked very well to supplement
| the social network graph and keep it going longer than it
| otherwise might have gone. But now that no one gives a shit
| about what anyone else is doing and just wants to see some
| jokes, that graph is getting less and less complete.
|
| The "metaverse" is an idiotic, last-ditch attempt to lock
| people back into the grid by turning them into cartoon versions
| of themselves in a private-sector universe. It's ridiculous.
| Facebook is flailing.
| biztos wrote:
| I agree he's been a good steward of the graph -- even people
| who hate Facebook and don't use Facebook are actually using
| Facebook! -- but I suspect he needed Sandberg to turn it into
| the big money.
| ghaff wrote:
| Even in my older demographic (i.e. those of us who got in
| when you still needed edu addresses or shortly thereafter)
| which is supposedly more the core audience for Facebook this
| days, I don't see people "rage quitting." But I do see
| essentially everyone in my circles (including myself) having
| dialed down usage a _lot_.
| oramit wrote:
| Mid 30's here and I joined right after the .edu requirement
| was dropped. Everyone in my age group is on Facebook but
| they rarely post anymore because they are busy! They all
| have kids and jobs and house projects they are working on
| and the novelty of updating about everything has worn off
| so they post very infrequently. When Gen-Zers make jokes
| about Facebook being for old people, that's us!
|
| The algorithmic feed can't handle the "lack" of new posts
| though so it keeps inserting lots of ads, videos, and
| whatever that I don't actually care about. I really like
| Facebook when it is about interacting with my friends but
| everything else is a distraction. The level of distraction
| in Facebook is just too high. It's okay if nothing is going
| on!
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Mid 40's here. I have a single friend that still posts
| frequently. Everyone else has either dropped off entirely
| or rarely posts. My wife is on facebook all the time, but
| it's for her social groups, like Mom, teacher groups.
|
| At least for me, the overheated political posts became a
| huge turn off. I think many people left after the
| election.
| dalbasal wrote:
| There's an element of having shot themselves in the foot. FB
| moviled from content driven purely by your friends and what
| they post to content that FB have decided to feed you.
|
| That worked great in a lot of senses. You never run out of
| content. FB have a lot more options for their optimisation
| efforts. It also made them more of a general media company.
|
| But... it also devalued the social network/friends aspect.
| Now it's just about content and holding user attention.
| Well... that means competition is everything again. Anyone
| can post anywhere, or consume content anywhere.
| orbifold wrote:
| Yeah, whenever I see others scrolling through content at
| Facebook, I can't help but wonder who would voluntarily
| subject themselves to so much garbage information. It is
| similar with Twitter, which I use for "science
| communication". But the amount of miscellaneous memes and
| low quality click bait ads that one has to endure is almost
| physically painful.
| np- wrote:
| Pretty sure some people's brains are just stuck in an
| infinite dopamine kick loop. I consider it similar to the
| opioid epidemic, where people's brains have been re-wired
| to compulsively do things they might not want to do. Next
| time try asking someone you see scrolling Facebook if
| they're actually enjoying themselves and I guarantee they
| will express some form of regret (but then will continue
| doing it).
| _1100 wrote:
| Isn't the short answer to "why are people subjecting
| themselves to this" just dark patterns?
|
| I know it sounds overly reductionist or boogeyman-esque,
| but they captured a market and refuse to let go, doing
| every single thing they can to keep and monetize human
| attention.
| orbifold wrote:
| It is kind of scary I've observed myself going to the
| "trending" hashtags section more and more.
| mathattack wrote:
| I concur. At some point I started looking for the best
| contest over caring about yahoo classmates engaging in
| political wars. It's entertainment for them but not for me.
| jliptzin wrote:
| I joined FB in 2004 as a stanford student. I used it
| religiously in college because it was the cool new thing at
| the time, but after that I mostly didn't see the appeal. I
| really never gave a shit what some guy from high school who I
| haven't spoken to in 10+ years is posting about. When there
| is so much more interesting content to consume in the world,
| why would I bother with the crap someone is posting just
| because we happened to touch paths at some point in the past?
| I care about _good_ content, not content just because it
| comes from someone I know. If it 's coming from a close
| friend, like news about a new job or a baby, I'll find out
| about it anyway when I see them. So for the last decade or so
| I sign into Facebook on avg once / month for maybe a minute
| at a time (only when someone tells me I need to check
| something), and it always perplexed me how people could spend
| so much time there. If everyone used Facebook like I did, it
| probably would have folded long ago. So I am either just a
| hermit or ahead of the curve, I guess time will tell.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Interesting. I feel the exact opposite. I don't really care
| about content anymore, it's really just mind numbing
| drudgery. There's a reason there's a meme about getting
| addicted to HN and doing "deep work" with "digital
| minimalism".
|
| In recent times I've cared more and more about what my
| friends and family are doing, because those are the people
| I'm connected with in actuality, in real life.
| potatolicious wrote:
| I agree with your position - but I don't think it
| necessarily means you disagree with the other post.
|
| I've completely stopped using FB _because_ I want to
| connect with my friends and family. After using the
| product for many years I realized that idly surfing past
| pictures of children, weddings, BBQs, etc, that despite
| FB 's loud insistence, that's not _connection_. Even
| commenting on friends ' posts isn't... really connection?
|
| It was idle voyeurism, or drive-by socialization.
|
| Now I make an active attempt to keep in touch with people
| by, well, directly talking to them. This isn't some
| brilliant insight on my part - let's be honest, online
| socialization has been moving towards this for some time.
| The group chats I'm a part of, and the virtual/IRL
| meetings are far more fulfilling to me than any amount of
| FB feed surfing.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| I prefer direct communication even though the surrounding
| culture seems to be less comfortable with that these
| days. While I will still post an update on FB every few
| months, I got annoyed with how the algorithm made the
| feed harder to follow so many years ago. In the early
| days I was a big proponent of blasting out a post to
| whoever might see it, but I have too many "friends" and
| even if I curated that list I'd still miss so much amidst
| the clutter because the algorithm made it so some
| important-to-me stuff will never appear in my feed. And
| so often the people I want to see something don't see my
| posts. Hence directly texting and emailing them photos!
| If there were a social media tool that had my best
| interests in mind, perhaps I could trust it to show my
| people the content I want to share. Maybe I'm old school
| since I appreciate getting email and snail mail letters
| from people, but now if I want to tell people something I
| send it to them directly. If there are too many people to
| email/text/call, maybe I should rethink what I'm doing
| and why. Some people respond positively to that and I'm
| guessing others find it too forward, but I don't feel bad
| about being too forward. Decades ago we used to knock on
| front doors without telling them in advance that we were
| dropping by, so I don't feel an unsolicited texted photo
| of my baby is so uncomfortably forward compared to that.
| :)
| cercatrova wrote:
| That's true, I have group chats in in as well, but FB and
| IG serve somewhat of a different purpose for me. See my
| other comment:
|
| >I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends
| with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow
| them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's
| interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and
| catch up with them that way.
|
| >It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and
| photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such
| as a trip you went on or something. People might also not
| necessarily want to see what you're sending all the time,
| so an IG post is an easy way for people to follow you and
| what you're up to.
|
| >You can almost think of it as RSS for your friends and
| family.
| ericmay wrote:
| I don't understand why you need Facebook or TikTok or
| Instagram to stay connected with friends and family. What
| even is "being connected"? I think people hold on to
| friends they meet too hard. People come and go. If you
| don't maintain a friendship outside of social media then
| that's ok. Let them go. Move on.
|
| We run a family Slack group. All the functionality of
| being connected, none of the bullshit.
| cercatrova wrote:
| I can follow all my friends and family on Instagram and
| see what they're doing. I don't necessarily need all my
| friends and family to talk to each other like in a big
| group chat. It's a one to many relationship (me to them)
| versus many to many (everyone to everyone else).
| ericmay wrote:
| > I feel the exact opposite. I don't really care about
| content anymore
|
| How do they express what they are doing without content
| using Instagram? Can you walk me through this?
| cercatrova wrote:
| I mean content as in what reddit or HN has, articles,
| posts, videos about a topic etc. Of course on Instagram
| people need to post stuff, photos and videos, but I don't
| think that when people say content they mean
| interpersonal photos and videos.
| ericmay wrote:
| I see. I definitely think it is content (I wouldn't draw
| a distinction between origin), but I can see how you have
| a different interpretation.
|
| When you use Instagram do you see ads or posts from
| people who aren't your friends or family members? I've
| never used it so I'm not sure how the algorithms work.
|
| _Personally_ if someone is my friend and has something
| worth sharing they'll tell me about it directly or send
| me a picture. I don't feel like I'm missing out on
| anything. I've had people I was friends with move and
| we've lost touch and so forth. I don't see a reason to
| struggle to try and stop that myself. Been pretty happy
| this way but that is what works for me.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Ads yes, usually from random B2C companies, but I adblock
| so I don't see any. People who aren't your friends, no,
| you only see those who you follow.
|
| I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends
| with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow
| them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's
| interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and
| catch up with them that way.
|
| It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and
| photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such
| as a trip you went on or something. People might also not
| necessarily want to see what you're sending all the time,
| so an IG post is an easy way for people to follow you and
| what you're up to.
|
| You can almost think of it as RSS for your friends and
| family.
| deckard1 wrote:
| > The "metaverse" is an idiotic, last-ditch attempt
|
| Exactly. It's a bet-the-farm move from a company that has a
| track record of, best I can tell, a big fat zero in terms of
| in-house innovation. This is like Google deciding to shift
| the entire company to Google+, except Google+ was just a
| clone of an existing thing that actually worked. Meta has no
| precursor. It's an entirely new thing that Facebook is trying
| to will into existence _without even so much as testing the
| waters first_.
|
| I have a feeling Zuckerberg is going to enrage investors
| enough that he has to flee Facebook in the middle of the
| night under the cover of darkness with the help of a few
| loyal toadies providing safe passage, _or_ he 's going to
| start building his Fuhrerbunker and be the last man standing
| while Facebook turns to rubble. I'm slightly joking, but
| also... Zuck has to be in the running for the worse tech CEO
| ever. They paid $16 billion for WhatsApp and then started
| promoting their own Facebook Messenger which no one used. I
| feel like their intent was to kill WhatsApp in the crib. But
| the "crib" turned out to be the entire global population and
| was, in fact, too big for them to kill and get people to
| switch to their own garbage chat app.
| eric4smith wrote:
| Zuck did not get to where he is by being short sighted or
| stupid.
|
| The Metaverse is the obvious next evolution of online.
| Accelerated by the happenings of the last 2 years.
| zarriak wrote:
| Zuck moved first in "metaverse" with Oculus 7 years ago and
| what does he have to show for it?
|
| Some decent/good hardware locked behind logging into your
| Facebook account.
|
| If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus
| what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked
| endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
| ghaff wrote:
| >If it had been any other company that had done with
| Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be
| mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
|
| Probably true but no one else would probably have made it
| work either.
|
| VR tech isn't really there today but even if it were
| better, it's still more of a niche use case than its fans
| would have it be. (Certain types of gaming, maybe virtual
| tourism...) People don't want things to be immersive most
| of the time. Ask me to wear a VR headset for a routine
| work meeting? That will be a big "nope" from me.
| krapp wrote:
| >If it had been any other company that had done with
| Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be
| mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
|
| Did they fail? Most people don't hate Facebook as much as
| HN and seem not to have a problem with Oculus requiring a
| Facebook account, given that the Quest 2 is the best
| selling VR headset by far.
| zarriak wrote:
| In my account they definitely failed. As you say, they
| did a great job with the hardware but the only real
| software they are even advertising for it is a worse
| version of vrchat that they took way too long to clone. I
| don't know how to chock it up other than as a failure,
| they acquired instagram only 2 years earlier. Instagram
| is now a Snapchat tiktok and a little YouTube wrapped
| into one.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's very unclear to me why Second Life v2 would be of
| interest to more than a tiny sliver of the population. The
| _last_ thing I 'd want from Facebook is to turn into a more
| immersive experience.
|
| >Accelerated by the happenings of the last 2 years.
|
| How? A fair number of people prefer to shut off their video
| on calls. And my observation is that coming out of COVID
| people want more in-person interactions, not less.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I couldn't agree with you more here. To me, it's a clear sign
| that he "wears no clothes". The Metaverse presentation was
| the most idiotic presentation I've ever seen. He must be
| completely surrounded himself by people that just agree with
| him.
|
| It reminds me of this clip from Silicon Valley.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAeEpbtHDPw
| bredren wrote:
| I wouldn't describe the presentation as idiotic but it was
| hard to take seriously. The dream of immersive VR
| experiences showcased in Snow Crash and Ready Player One
| will be realized.
|
| But it won't be soon, and the ideas shown in the video--
| like the surfing game--were the kind of ideas that litter
| the floor of the App Store.
|
| Compelling product experiences, especially on new
| platforms, are extremely difficult to craft.
|
| The taste of the creators must be exceptionally good and in
| this case the hardware quality and onboarding experience
| must bowl over anyone who touches it.
|
| The Facebook video for Meta looked very speculative. I
| suspect Meta was planned for 2023 or 2024, but was rushed
| out the door because the brand was getting pummeled.
|
| In that way, changing to Meta was very effective at
| derailing the negative attention. But not actually having a
| there, there is a problem when the chicken comes home to
| roost.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| It's realized right now -- as a heavy sweaty low res tech
| demo not many people would want to for long. I don't
| doubt something like that will eventually be possible as
| promised. However, the tech is so far from being there, I
| don't think it'll happen in our lifetime.
|
| Zuck may had well renamed his company "Flying cars".
| criddell wrote:
| If this isn't a lie and Apple flipping that switch cost
| Facebook $10bn, then that tells me my personal information is
| worth a lot. What I was getting from Facebook in exchange for
| my data was too little. I use Google a lot more than Facebook
| and frankly what I get from them in exchange for my data is
| probably also way too little.
|
| I wish there was some type of consumer union where we could
| negotiate with these companies as a block.
| aerosmile wrote:
| Your data are only as valuable to Facebook as your buying
| power. Obviously that's not the same across all people, and
| while the average revenue per US user might be in the teens
| per month, many US consumer are in the single digits. So
| presumably a consumer union might get you a fraction of that
| value back - a few bucks per month. Why not - who wouldn't
| want a free monthly cup of coffee? I suppose the only catch
| here is the more excited you get about this concept, the less
| money your union could negotiate on your behalf.
| gms wrote:
| There is no need as there is no coercion involved: just stop
| using them if you don't like it.
| criddell wrote:
| And never have email correspondence with anybody who uses
| GMail?
| echelon wrote:
| Not a lie at all. Apple is as dirty as they come.
|
| Apple is a cartel and Google pays the protection money that
| Facebook failed to. If Apple really cared about privacy and
| not money, they'd block Google from the platform too.
|
| A single policy changed wiped 25% of a trillion dollar
| company's market cap. That's a gravitational wave that shows
| what kind of overwhelming monopoly power Apple wields.
|
| To be clear, I hate Facebook and ads, but Apple is an
| incredibly dirty business and is doing massive amounts of
| harm to startups and our industry as a whole.
|
| Apple owns "America's computer" (50+% of average American's
| internet usage), and they control it like a dictatorship.
| High taxes, close inspection of every deploy, arbitrary
| rulings, forced use of Apple platform pieces, no possible
| business relationships with your customers.
|
| The DOJ needs to step in and remove the App Store monopoly,
| its tax, and its arbitrary rules. When you run a device this
| pervasive and entrenched, it's no longer a platform. It's a
| common carrier. App installs need to happen over web, where
| they'd still be just as safely sandboxed, monitored, and
| remote killswitchable.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So, you're complaining that Apple gave users a choice not
| to be tracked?
| echelon wrote:
| You keep making this kind of reply to all of my comments.
|
| I've already enumerated my problems with Apple here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30196852
|
| I would be fine if Apple removed tracking if the DOJ
| removed their app store.
| spideymans wrote:
| It's funny how the same reasons third party devs hate the
| iPhone are roughly the same reasons I bought into the
| iPhone ecosystem.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Because this article is not about developers having to
| pay 30%
|
| Your problems outside of the 30% (which is valid) is that
| you want to be able to ship crappy cross platform web
| apps and know more about your users (which I don't want).
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| > they'd block Google from the platform too.
|
| To be fair, they didn't block Facebook from their platform.
| Users now just need to agree that they want to be tracked
| (spoiler: practically no one wants to be tracked).
|
| I don't disagree with your general take and save for an
| iPod classic I don't own any Apple gear. But in my book
| that was one of the better moves that Apple ever pulled.
| philistine wrote:
| Yeah. More privacy by getting rid of third-party cookies
| and having the prompt for apps is a great thing. That it
| also reduces the revenue of the two monopolists who
| didn't even bother to differentiate that revenue
| (Facebook is 98% ads, Google is at something like 81%) is
| the cherry on top.
| criddell wrote:
| > Apple owns "America's computer" (50+% of average
| American's internet usage), and they control it like a
| dictatorship
|
| If Apple didn't give their users tools to control tracking,
| wouldn't that be more dictatorial?
| echelon wrote:
| It would be fair business if the DOJ removed the app
| store, but Apple removed APIs that allow tracking.
|
| I would be fully on board with that. 100% pro-consumer,
| pro-small business.
|
| Apple needs to protect its consumers, but the US
| government needs to protect businesses against the Apple
| monopoly.
| criddell wrote:
| > It would be fair business if the DOJ removed the app
| store, but Apple removed APIs that allow tracking.
|
| Why is that more fair? I bought an iPhone a month ago (my
| first) in part because I want their version of the App
| Store and I want more privacy controls. I actually like
| that Apple's requirements push developers to make a
| native app rather than a web app (for example).
|
| I'm certainly sympathetic to the argument that 30% is too
| large of a cut and it's well past time for payment
| reform. However, I think consumers would be worse off
| losing Apple's more tightly controlled app store
| implementation. If you want more options, go Android.
| That's what I did for more than a decade.
| sporkland wrote:
| $10B per year divided by say 150M users equals about $5.50 a
| month. Not bad, but not gonna cover your $20 Netflix fees.
| eric4smith wrote:
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Not different??!
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| How do you know what you are getting from them is too little
| until the service itself is gone? I suppose you can estimate
| but I feel like without targeted advertising the web would be
| a dark place. Personally I don't pay for much (prime,
| Netflix, NY Times) and expect a lot. The people I know are
| the same
| visarga wrote:
| This comes up again and again. People will continue
| creating and posting even without ad money. They will post
| for art, for study, hobbies, social issues or just to
| organize events. There are also those who publish free
| content and make a profit on something related. That's how
| the good old internet was working back in the day.
|
| The problem with current internet is that everyone is
| trying to get the ad money so they don't really align their
| interests with us who want quality content.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| The problem is the freeloaders of the internet far
| outweigh the people that want to pay for services. Until
| that changes, we will continue to see the internet
| dominated by targeted advertising. Honestly, it will be
| interesting to see what happens to services like DDG. I
| think it will be a true test of what the world wants, an
| extremely well funded machine like Google or a more lean
| privacy centric tool. Capitalism is an interesting thing
| though. Targeted advertising naturally brings in more
| money (back to the freeloaders point)
| throwoutway wrote:
| > I suppose you can estimate but I feel like without
| targeted advertising the web would be a dark place.
|
| Is this sarcasm? The web is a dark place because of
| targeted advertisement. I'd rather pay than be tracked and
| my data sold through bidding processes.
| airza wrote:
| The concept you are describing is a government.
| hn_neverguess wrote:
| Ah, the circle of life. Kids tend to despise their parents
| while they are teenagers, only to switch sides when they
| grow up and become super totalitarian parents themselves,
| despised by their own teenagers.
|
| And while they are teenagers, they also tend to develop all
| these ideas how the government is overly restrictive and
| doesn't allow them to live their lives freely. Well, it
| turns out the more anti-government and "anti-system" they
| get as teenagers, the more they fall behind in their
| careers in their 20s, and by the time they turn 30,
| suddenly more government interference is the answer to
| every question in the universe.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I get it - everyone here just wants as
| much money in their pockets as possible, and government
| interference is the only way to ensure that the wealth is
| as equally divided as possible. I would also be the first
| to admit that it's insane that we're not there yet - that
| there are still some elements in our society that favor the
| aggressive and bold ones. I am 100% convinced that with
| time we will only see a more and more egalitarian society
| with an equal distribution of wealth (don't worry about the
| few people who are still slipping through the cracks - this
| is nothing compared to monarchist societies).
|
| But here's the thing that nags at me. As much as I want to
| be in support of government interference, I can't shake off
| the feeling that this is a signal that I didn't make it.
| Let's tie this back to the topic on hand: iOS 14 destroying
| Facebook's business. If you were among the 6 million
| advertisers on Facebook who were making money from the
| platform, then you surely wish that Apple hadn't disabled
| the IDFA. Conversely, if your career wasn't impacted in any
| shape or form by your ability to sell goods or services to
| people, then you're likely thinking that Facebook shouldn't
| have had the IDFA in the first place. It's that simple - if
| you lost money due to the loss of the IDFA, then you're
| thinking this way, and vice versa. Well... the 6 million
| advertisers on Facebook are far wealthier than the average
| US citizen. In short, if you're excited about iOS 14, you
| are more likely to be poor than not (with enough anecdotal
| exceptions to easily poke a million holes in this argument,
| but at a 300 million scale, I bet there is a lot of truth
| to this argument).
| [deleted]
| germinalphrase wrote:
| " In short, if you're excited about iOS 14, you are more
| likely to be poor than not"
|
| Why are supposing that all rich people made their money
| through online advertising? It's clearly untrue and
| certainly not a robust enough a conclusion to feel bad
| about your relative success.
| hn_neverguess wrote:
| I said "more likely," not "guaranteed to be."
|
| > Why are supposing that all rich people made their money
| through online advertising
|
| If you replace "all" with "most," which is how I phrased
| it, then your sentence sounds like this:
|
| > Why are supposing that most rich people made their
| money through online advertising
|
| Ok now we're onto something interesting, but I can see
| how you might be still struggling with the phrasing. May
| I suggest to reformulate as follows:
|
| > Why are supposing that most rich people made their
| money by selling something for more than they paid for
| it?
|
| Perfect! So we just have to answer if in the context of
| most people who became rich, "online advertising" =
| "selling something for more than they paid for it." I
| would argue that you can sell things without advertising
| them, but you certainly have to make people aware that
| you're selling those things one way or another (and mind
| you, in the context of rich people, you have to do that
| at a very large scale). So when answering how MOST rich
| people attracted attention in 2021, and that AT SCALE, I
| think the above is not so untrue (you will certainly find
| many who ALSO used TV and other channels, but very few
| people with a TV budget had a $0 paid social budget).
| sfe22 wrote:
| Except the government is a monopoly with its own agenda. In
| addition it already kind of owns us (well a large
| percentage), what would it gain if it negotiated this deal
| for us? I would argue it can gain more power by making a
| deal with facebook.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Everyone who doesn't vote and ignores their role in
| Democracy let's this happen. The president matters much
| less then the Mayor or the Governor.
| alexashka wrote:
| No.
|
| You can't have a democracy with 100 IQ idiot majority,
| because their decisions are governed by whatever gets
| poured into their poorly working brains that week, so you
| end up with corporatocracy or fascism, pretending to be a
| democracy.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Jasper_ wrote:
| I know this isn't the point, but you do realize that the
| IQ is rearranged to fit a bell curve with 100 being the
| exact middle average, right? By literally the definition
| of IQ, 100 IQ is not "an idiot".
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I think the point is that the average person is an idiot.
| sfe22 wrote:
| Then we need to fix the apparent problem of idiot
| majority. If you say most people are stupid why would you
| want them to vote every 4 years. Can you trust their
| vote? Do you still advocate for the current form of
| "democracy"? Maybe we should go back to monarchy and have
| only one glorious ruler rather than one glorious
| government.
| alexashka wrote:
| You can fix most people, or you can just abandon one idea
| because it's incompatible with how most people are.
|
| Tough choice, but I think I'll opt in for the latter.
|
| Uh! Oh! But if not democracy, then what? Then fascism and
| corporatocracy - what we have had for as long as you've
| been alive. You just don't know it :)
| sfe22 wrote:
| Your reply is confusing. So you maintain that most people
| are stupid, and still want to give them voting rights.
| What is the logic behind that? To clarify, I don't think
| most people are stupid, and I advocate for direct
| democracy.
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| Which is why all the choices are pre-approved by the
| people who would be most damaged by a President.
| sfe22 wrote:
| Bullshit, if let say Facebook introduced a few parties
| that can will control its board, and gave you a right to
| vote every n years, and in turn required you (and your
| offspring) to permanently be a subject of their
| organization, would you accept. They will have mayors,
| presidents, congress and be a democracy ( you get the
| right to vote the board)
| sfe22 wrote:
| There is no democracy other than direct democracy. If you
| cant fire your government this afternoon, they own you,
| not the other way around.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| That's not how direct democracy works.
|
| If we assume that Switzerland is probably closest to the
| ideal of a direct democracy please take note that voters
| can not directly vote for the executive government (The
| Bundesrat, or federal council).
|
| They elect members of the two houses, which in turn
| elects the 7 executives. Usually this is based on the
| recommendation by the parties and with a specific formula
| considering party, language and area of the country.
|
| We also can't fire government members this afternoon.
| It's just like everywhere else. We can just not re-elect
| them.
| sfe22 wrote:
| I looked up the Swiss system, and it certainly is not
| direct democracy.
| ghaff wrote:
| So many towns where I live put issues on the agenda for
| town meetings. How this works in practice is that, if
| there's some issue that someone (like a developer) feels
| strongly about, they pack the town meeting with allies
| and push it through because most people probably don't
| care much and don't even attend the meeting.
| ebruchez wrote:
| > it certainly is not direct democracy
|
| You appear to make up your own extreme definition of what
| the words "direct democracy" should be and what they
| should mean. But it's not like that. There are ways words
| and condepts are commonly used. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy
| sfe22 wrote:
| Looks like I need a new word to describe a system where
| everyone rules, rather than certain people or
| organization, since both democracy and direct democracy
| are apparently taken to describe systems where all people
| don't actually rule. Maybe "actual true direct pure
| democracy" should do.
| ebruchez wrote:
| > Maybe "actual true direct pure democracy" should do.
|
| That would certainly be clearer :)
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| I'd argue that it's closest practical example of direct
| democracy. As in initiatives and referendums.
|
| But I'm always happy to learn if you can come up with a
| counter example.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Under a direct democracy, you should be able to vote that
| you can't do that.
| codechad wrote:
| scarface74 wrote:
| So let's say I'm in CA voting for my two Senators. How
| much does my vote actually count when 10 other states
| combined have the same population but 20 Senators?
|
| How much does my vote count even for representatives if
| I'm in a state that's heavily gerrymandered?
| ameister14 wrote:
| If you're in a district that is heavily gerrymandered,
| your vote may actually be more important.
|
| Still, the best proportional representation for you is
| local. So mayor, state rep, governor.
| scarface74 wrote:
| How do you propose the mayor legislate BigTech? Even on
| the state level, gerrymandering effects representation.
| Most of the population in GA (where I live), Florida, and
| Texas don't support the state laws. Those three states
| are passing all kinds of laws to make it harder for
| people to vote. Especially after the "stolen election"
| that saw GA turn blue.
|
| And before the whataboutism replies start, I'm sure the
| same happens on the other side. I just know more about my
| own state.
| barsonme wrote:
| The allocation of Senators isn't supposed to be
| proportionate to state population _by design_. It's a
| non-issue.
|
| Proportional representation occurs in the House.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Simply because something was designed a certain way 250
| years ago, doesn't mean it's a non issue.
|
| The political problem they were trying to solve at the
| time (balancing the interests of independent sovereign
| political entities with respect to land claims and future
| political power) doesn't necessarily map onto the
| problems we have today.
| FactolSarin wrote:
| Just because it was done by design doesn't mean it's a
| non-issue. The Senate is an extremely undemocratic
| organization. The population discrepancy between States
| is much higher now than when the country was founded.
|
| Nor do the reasons the founders did it this way exist
| anymore.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| People confuse the arguments made out of political
| expediency for political gospel.
|
| Even though many points made about the constitution were
| rooted in political theory, and make good sense even
| today, that doesn't change the fact that the people
| involved were politicians who were looking to make the
| best deal possible within the context of a rapidly
| failing state under the articles of confederation.
| scarface74 wrote:
| See also - slaves being counted as 3/5ths of a person...
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| The irony is that always gets brought up as though it was
| actually meant to represent the value of the slave's
| humanity.
|
| The large slaveholding states actually wanted 5/5ths
| whereas states will small slave populations wanted
| 0/5ths. Slaves couldn't vote, their interests were
| ancillary to the whole discussion. The compromise was
| about pure political power for those that dominated them.
|
| The repeal of the 3/5ths clause along with the subsequent
| legal restrictions and terrorism against the black
| population of the south that followed, gave the south
| _more_ power, and subsequently made it harder to dislodge
| Jim Crow.
|
| But your point is still very valid. Somehow people are
| comfortable compartmentalizing the notion that the
| constitution is/was perfect, except for that one part
| that somehow doesn't count and was "inevitably doomed"
| anyways.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Proportional representation also doesn't occur in the
| house because of gerrymandering.
|
| https://www.fairvote.org/votes_vs_seats_in_the_people_s_h
| ous...
| [deleted]
| newsclues wrote:
| Digital direct democracy is a potential opportunity that
| has only become possible with ubiquitous computing
| devices (iPhones)
| [deleted]
| scarface74 wrote:
| "I care a lot about my privacy. That's why I use Google"...
| criddell wrote:
| It's more about my privacy being worth a lot more than what
| Google is willing to pay in the form of services. As an
| individual, the only thing I can do is stop using Google
| and Google wouldn't miss me.
| bko wrote:
| It's not perfect but you can look at average revenue per user
| on Facebook. There are huge differences based on the country
| (note this is quarterly):
|
| Q4 '20
|
| Worldwide: 10.14
|
| US: 53.56
|
| Europe: 16.87
|
| Asia Pacific: 4.05
|
| Rest of world: 2.77
|
| So you're worth just over $200 a year. This has gone up a lot
| over time and is considerably higher than other social
| networks. Just a year ago, it was 41.41 (23% less) and a year
| before that is was 34.86 (15% less).
|
| It's harder to do a comparison to google, but I'm sure you're
| very valuable to them as well, increasingly so.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-
| average...
| skybrian wrote:
| Averages can mislead. In gaming there are "whales" who
| spend most of the money on in-app purchases.
|
| Certain ads being seen by certain people might be a lot
| more valuable than average? It might be interesting to know
| who these people are.
| ma2rten wrote:
| Why are you assuming that the parent commenter is in the
| US?
| criddell wrote:
| I am. I guess I should have said that.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| The earning slides from SNAP compare the DAU and ARPU of
| SNAP, Twitter and FB, reg. the ARPU, they are respectively
| $29, $72 and $274.
|
| https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_presentations/202
| 2...
| bushbaba wrote:
| It's funny as that's more than what people pay for Netflix.
| Showing yes your data is valuable and we are getting the
| short end of the deal.
| d_watt wrote:
| And likely a working professional adult who can afford an
| iPhone is worth at least a deviation or two above that.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Maybe, but I'm not sure a working professional adult is
| an ad-clicker, and I'm not sure that the ads they click
| on can con them into doing something they wouldn't
| normally do very often.
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| > Maybe, but I'm not sure a working professional adult is
| an ad-clicker, and I'm not sure that the ads they click
| on can con them into doing something they wouldn't
| normally do very often.
|
| As a working professional adult, who has access to many
| others working professional adults, I assure you, ads
| work.
|
| You're simplifying ads to a barebones click to rate
| exchange. Ads are way more subtle than that.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't doubt they work. I doubt the margin of work done
| by facebook ads on working professional adults over the
| work of ads that they are exposed to through other means
| and by word of mouth. And not that that margin doesn't
| exist and not that it's not worthwhile to advertise on
| facebook, but the doubt is that as compared to any other
| demographic being advertised to that it's worth so much
| more.
|
| Advertising to impulsive spenders is worth more than
| advertising to less impulsive spenders. Less impulsive
| spenders are informed by ads, more impulsive spenders are
| convinced by ads.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Wouldn't people with more disposable income (like
| professional adults) be more likely to be impulsive
| spenders? They can afford to be.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Maybe. But they can also afford to wait.
| sanedigital wrote:
| Ads are extremely successful for high-ticket offers. If
| you'll selling a multi-thousand dollar product or
| service, you can afford a lot of impressions to get just
| the few clicks that convert for you.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't see a lot TikTok type video on any of the channels I
| watch on YouTube.
| threeseed wrote:
| It really depends on the channel and style of content.
|
| I don't see it on any of the news or review channels but more
| common on the food, instructional etc ones.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah I guess the only one I can think of is the vscode
| channel that does some of those ... they're actually kinda
| 50/50 annoying / helpful. It's a weird thing to do a short
| on.
| eric4smith wrote:
| I never said they repost to YouTube
| zwirbl wrote:
| The comment is not about repost, it's about the short
| video, and I also don't see much of it on yt
| notriddle wrote:
| The YouTube recommendation algorithm prefers longer
| videos than that. It is specifically trained to optimize
| for "watch minutes," and longer videos seem more
| effective than extremely short ones.
| ratww wrote:
| Youtube has recently started recommending short videos
| too, varying from 10 sec to 1 min, but that depends on
| your viewing habits. They even have a "#shorts" feature
| to compete with TikTok.
| onlyfortoday2 wrote:
| Jenk wrote:
| Just fire up YT shorts. Nothing but content from TikTok.
| duxup wrote:
| I think I have seen that... I don't mind it in a way as I'd
| rather watch it on youtube than install the tiktok app.
|
| Granted I'm also not going out of my way to watch it so not
| a big win for YT.
| Jenk wrote:
| Honestly it's a really poor experience compared to TikTok
| - ignoring the whole Chinese State controlled thing - the
| algorithm on YT just doesn't match TT's ability for
| content discovery.
|
| I haven't installed the app either but on the odd
| occasion will doomscroll in a private browser session.
| duxup wrote:
| I think I have heard that.
|
| I suspect youtube is trying to do both at the same time
| and... doesn't work.
|
| But for me and a rando one off clip, I'd rather see it on
| youtube.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Good lord. FB makes HN go crazy.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Facebook videos are super annoying. Simple bait stretched out
| just long enough to get ads in the middle. Even if a video
| looks interesting I have to first ask myself if it's worth 2.5
| minutes of fluff and a 10 second ad for only a few seconds of
| payoff. Facebook has incentivized this behavior to the point I
| now simply refuse to click on their videos.
| [deleted]
| alephnan wrote:
| This seems like post-hoc confirmation of "I knew it! I told you
| guys so!" like people who claim a catastrophic recession is
| around the corner, quarter after next. If you have some special
| insight that the wider market doesn't and hasn't price in, then
| the odds and prices are asymmetrically tipped in your favor.
|
| As an example, I spent $13,580 shorting Facebook on Wednesday,
| which I haven't sold but will probably later today. Yesterday,
| those short contracts were worth north of $200k. I did it
| within a Roth IRA, too, which makes it even higher conviction.
|
| Truth is, it was a gamble. No one really knows. If you can
| truly predict where Facebook will be in 5 years, 2 years, even
| next quarter, you can be really rich.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| I thought you could not short stocks in an Ira, only sell
| covered calls? Is there some way around this rule?
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-
| finance/10311...
| gruez wrote:
| options, maybe?
| jliptzin wrote:
| Yea sounds like put options, an outright short wouldn't
| have gained that much %
| alephnan wrote:
| You can do Level 2 options trading in a IRA.
|
| So you can sell covered puts / calls, or buy puts /calls.
| Those do not require margin. You cannot sell uncovered
| calls / puts, which would require margin.
|
| Part of my position was buying $280 weekly puts which were
| $1.39 each, now $49.5 each ( still haven't sold lol).
| hnburnsy wrote:
| thx!
| dxbydt wrote:
| Incredibly good bet!!! Congrats all around. I made the
| opposite bet (whoops!) but on a much smaller scale. A tiny
| 300-270 put spread that lasted 2 days. Then, right before the
| earning, exactly 7 minutes before 4pm, I kid you not, I had a
| premonition. Something in my head said "Get out get out get
| out". So I closed out my spread, pocketed my measly gain of
| $775 and walked out the door to pick up my kid from school.
| So I'm back home at 4:30pm, I just login to ib for curiosity
| sake, just to see what would have happened if I had stuck to
| my guns. Jesus Mary & Joseph I was so shell shocked...would
| have lost well over 50K if I hadn't pulled the trigger !!! I
| was so glad I danced a jig & took my kid out for icecream. He
| wanted to know why, but explaining all this shit...$775
| profit over 2 days for pushing a couple of buy & sell buttons
| & narrowly avoiding a major, major $50,000 loss. Definite
| icecream day. I just said Daddy is happy lets buy icecream.
| chillage wrote:
| That seems a pretty smart short (in retrospect). I guess you
| were banking on them releasing concrete numbers on the iOS
| changes and people panicking from it? Seems really obvious in
| retrospect and relies on pretty common knowledge so I'm
| surprised that worked so straightforward. Good job.
| alephnan wrote:
| I've noticed they stopped showing ads from actual
| businesses. Instead, it was sponsored posts from
| individuals self-promoting for purely vain reasons as
| opposed to some commercial reason.
| dom96 wrote:
| On a more general note, anyone know of any good
| guides/articles describing these sorts of bets? I often have
| a sense of where a stock price will go but have no idea how
| to take advantage.
| jboy55 wrote:
| Just note, the poster most probably did not actually
| 'short' facebook, the poster used options to do this. Its
| pretty simple for the buy case.
|
| Options have a strike price and an expiration date. You buy
| a CALL option, with a strike price, that gives you an
| option to buy that stock for that price. Or you can buy a
| PUT option, that gives you the option to sell at that
| strike price.
|
| Example using made up numbers. FB is $240. You look on the
| options tab and you can see various expiration dates. Lets
| pick 3 months out. You may see a Call option for a strike
| of $250 for $20. That means that you have until 3/4/2022 to
| exercise that option, if FB is trading for > $260, you will
| make a profit. ($240 + $20). If FB doesn't trade you make
| nothing.
|
| Puts work similarly. The strike would just be $230. Note,
| you don't have to exercise, if next week FB goes to $300,
| your call's value will skyrocket to ~$60-70. You can sell
| the option any time, you don't have to wait.
|
| You may have noticed the cost of the option is greater than
| the delta between the exercise price and the value of the
| share. In my example this is roughly due to the time
| between now and the exercise date. Over time, this shrinks,
| this is called beta-decay.
| npongratz wrote:
| > _In my example this is roughly due to the time between
| now and the exercise date. Over time, this shrinks, this
| is called beta-decay._
|
| I think you mean theta decay. Theta is the time factor of
| an option's value.
|
| Beta is, roughly, a comparison of a security's (or
| portfolio's) volatility versus market vol.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/beta.asp
|
| Beta decay is studied in a completely different industry.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_decay
| bagacrap wrote:
| ig is neither a TikTok clone, nor is it poor.
|
| TikTok users in the West skew young (ie poor) and it's all
| short form video, which fb calls out as harder to monetize, so
| I can't see how TikTok is a threat to soak up the ad spend.
| We'll see what happens when they try to pivot from growth to
| profit. For reference, with similar userbase, ig brings in 6x
| the ad revenue of TikTok.
|
| The markets are unreasonably obsessed with growth imo.
| johnmato wrote:
| This is a good analysis of understand what's currently
| happening in the tech sphere.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago
|
| The only way the Metaverse would be a viable replacement for
| Facebook would be if Occulus (or similar VR headset) adoption
| was to rise to the level of iPhone adoption, and subsequent
| integration into nearly every aspect of daily life. This seems
| to be incredibly unlikely to me.
|
| I have an Occulus quest. The first week I had it I thought it
| was the most amazing device I ever owned. A month later I used
| it less, and now, a few years later, it's gathering dust on a
| shelf. VR is great, but it takes a fair amount of energy, space
| and time to use. Even from solely the perspective of gaming,
| the low-power, light weight Switch has had a much bigger impact
| on my life than the Quest. I can play BotW for 4 hours without
| fatigue if I have time, with VR more than an hour and I start
| to feel very tired of the experience.
|
| Now compare the Quest with the iphone, I'm looking at my iphone
| as I type this on my laptop. I use my iphone to order food,
| find directions around town, communicate with my family, check
| up on work. 8 or so years back I tried going back to a "dumb"
| phone and ultimately went back. I switched to android for a few
| years and still went back to the iphone since it has so many
| services nicely integrated.
|
| I simply can't imagine any world where the "metaverse" comes
| anywhere near the adoption of facebook, even if Meta mailed an
| occulus to everyone on the planet for free.
| bko wrote:
| > Let's face it, what are your friends all using now? That's
| right - video - YouTube and TikTok.
|
| I don't think HN reader's friends are Facebooks growth market.
| You might be looking at a biased sample. This is their growth
| levels of the last 3 years.
|
| Quarter Year MAU Q Growth A growth
|
| Q4 2021 2.912 0.07% 4.11%
|
| Q3 2021 2.91 0.52% 6.20%
|
| Q2 2021 2.895 1.47% 7.22%
|
| Q1 2021 2.853 2.00% 9.60%
|
| Q4 2020 2.797 2.08% 11.97%
|
| Q3 2020 2.74 1.48% 11.88%
|
| Q2 2020 2.7 3.73% 11.85%
|
| Q1 2020 2.603 4.20% 9.60%
|
| Q4 2019 2.498 2.00%
|
| Q3 2019 2.449 1.45%
|
| Q2 2019 2.414 1.64%
|
| Q1 2019 2.375
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
| jeromegv wrote:
| Looking at something from 2 years ago in social media isn't
| really relevant, trends change FAST. This TikTok trend has
| taken over the world quite a bit over the last few months.
|
| Also, annual growth worldwide tends to hide one key things.
| It might mean Facebook is arriving in markets where internet
| penetration was poor (poor/slow data, etc..), however you
| have to look at their core market where advertisers spend
| money. In those markets, have they been gaining users? It's
| been said that they were losing eyeballs in core markets
| while expanding in markets that didn't bring much money.
|
| If they lose customers in their core market, that means the
| service has been going down from their saturation point
| instead of stabilizing. And a worldwide growth would hide
| this data.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I don't think it's a (complete) lie. In the short term I think
| it is very much the truth: 2021 once again saw record revenue
| for them [0] so, absent a specific threat like Apple, there is
| no reason to project a $10B loss over expected revenue gains
| during the short 1-year term at issue during the call.
|
| On the other hand, Apple's actions are part of an overall trend
| that represents an existential threat, for the exact reasons
| you mention and others. The main issue is probably something
| like the innovators dilemma: they've become reactive, and slow
| in those reactions. Their largest successes in recent year
| haven't come from their own creations, but from acquisitions.
| NYT has a pretty good analysis of some of its systemic flaws
| [1]
|
| [0] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-
| details/...
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-
| files...
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| YouTube already saw this with Vines, though. TikTok is just a
| thousand times better than Vine. But ultimately the access to
| long-form content is going to help YouTube more because of the
| inherent access to more advertising. From what I know, people
| on TikTok make almost nothing from view counts. YouTube going
| to shorts is going to start eating away at those creators.
| krono wrote:
| Yes to everything, but what even is a metaverse? I still have
| no idea.
| tjpnz wrote:
| VR chat with your Facebook friends.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| A giant bag of hopium
| rgbrenner wrote:
| It's the same thing the marvelverse is... a way of referring
| to all of facebook's products. They're just trying to
| generate some hype and make their products look more forward
| thinking.. even though they're exactly the same as always.
| sporkland wrote:
| Metaverse is a concept originally popularized by Neal
| Stephenson in his book snowcrash.
|
| It's an online VR based world that is very cool and fun and
| most people spend there times there instead of the real
| world.
| rgbrenner wrote:
| It's a concept originally popularized in Snowcrash, that
| Facebook is attempting to latch on to as a marketing
| campaign to make their products seem future looking, but
| in reality havent changed one bit. To further this
| marketing effort, they created a VR chat that is a trash
| product that no one will ever use.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| Wow, thank you for this insight. I despise them both.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| "Don't you notice every one of your favorite content creators@
|
| NO! Because I don't care about stupid content creators.
|
| Facebook was never really about content creators, youtube and
| tiktok are all about that. It's a different thing. Not that I
| am a Facebook fan either but yes eyeballs are going to youtube
| and tiktok and other content creators but it's a different
| business and that is why Facebook is stuck versus these.
| codechad wrote:
| lovefeature wrote:
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| > And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta
| I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows
| the next frontier is the meta verse and so he's trying to make
| Facebook be the epicenter of it.
|
| Imagine believing this
| jamil7 wrote:
| > He knows the next frontier is the meta verse
|
| Agreed with everything in this comment up until that point.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think it works if you:
|
| s/knows/hopes/
| outside1234 wrote:
| Agreed - and the regular Facebook site is just awful now - my
| parents don't even use it
| 00000000005 wrote:
| Facebook failed to pay the big money to Apple that they should
| have been paying for years.
|
| If Zuck had been handing Apple $5,000,000,000 per year as google
| does, then Apple would never have kneecapped Facebook.
|
| Larry and Sergei know how the protection racket works. You pay
| your dues to the local mob, you get to do business in their
| street corners.
|
| What do google pay Apple $5b for? Ummm... to be in the search of
| Safari. Yeah right. They all know google simply pays Apple
| because they don't want no trouble, so they say "Safari", write a
| huge cheque, and google gets to keep doing business in Apple
| devices.
|
| Tim is The Godfather. He who owns the platform owns the city.
| Everyone must respect and pay their dues, if they want to do
| business in this city.
|
| Apple has sent Facebook to sleep with the fishes because zuck
| didn't show no respect and didn't pay no dues.
| wjnc wrote:
| Since I detect sarcasm, I'm not sure how to respond.
|
| As someone who chooses Apple partly because of the comparative
| privacy versus Android I'm actually quite happy that they
| bargain with other parties? It reminiscent of the working of
| efficient markets. I have a choice. No privacy (Google,
| Facebook), or a tidbit (Apple, G/F via Apple) or a lot (custom
| ROM options, drop all G/F/A). For a tidbit of privacy I pay
| more, but how much I pay more is lowered by the incoming
| cashflow at Apple due to these arrangements. So there is a
| cafateria model with a powerful party bargaining on my behalf
| and in line with my preferences. For me, that's glass half
| full.
| politelemon wrote:
| You don't have a choice with Apple, and that's at the crux of
| the definition of privacy. What you're doing is justifying a
| specific choice that you've made, by assuming good faith and
| bad faith with certain companies - take a few minutes to read
| up on recent news and you can easily see that they do make
| anti-privacy choices. Their aim is not user privacy, but user
| lock-in. But convincing us that it's in our best interest is
| what's called marketing. There is no 'bargaining' going on,
| there is no cafetaria, nor are your best interests in
| anyone's minds. It's simply a gray area in which your data is
| the currency.
|
| Privacy is not achieved through brand loyalty, it can only be
| achieved through understanding what you've got and taking
| control of it. It dismays me to see attitudes like this so
| prevalent in today's privacy conversations, I feel it will be
| 10 years too late before we collectively realize what a
| mistake we're making.
| conradev wrote:
| How does good privacy engineering at the platform level
| have any effect on lock-in?
|
| It is abundantly clear that Apple loves locking people in,
| and also clear that they love taunting their advantages
| over their competitors. But I just don't see how the better
| engineered platform protections for privacy have anything
| to do with the lock-in (no network effects, no switching
| costs)
|
| My favorite example of this is the Find My network: did
| they totally screw Tile in their own competitive interests?
| Absolutely. Does their end-to end-encrypted Find My network
| have state of the art cryptographic design to minimize data
| collection? Absolutely.
|
| Privacy also has concrete value for Apple. Apple made a
| fair argument that the Health app is HIPAA compliant
| because while the backend is nothing special, the syncing
| is end to end encrypted.
|
| They do make mistakes, and they are a large self-interested
| corrupt terrible bad corporation, but I am happy that they
| are pushing the industry forward.
| yladiz wrote:
| > You don't have a choice with Apple
|
| A choice about what? Your privacy? Privacy is not a choice,
| it's a right, so if that's what you mean I don't really
| understand.
| thaway2839 wrote:
| It's really interesting to see certain Apple users justify
| how Apple's choices are always the right one (even when
| they are diametrically opposite to Apple's choice from a
| few months ago, at which point they also defended the Apple
| choice as the right one).
|
| And I say this as a long time Apple user, both on macs and
| iPhones.
| tarsinge wrote:
| Only true in the US though.
| d12bb wrote:
| This is double bullshit:
|
| 1. All Apple did was giving users a choice (and they should've
| done that ages ago). If users didn't mind being tracked, or
| liked the "more relevant adverts" tracking provides, they would
| not have opted out.
|
| 2. Google is subject to exactly the same rules as Facebook is.
| Their apps have to ask for permission to track as Facebook's
| do, and Safari (which enforces privacy in many ways, too) is
| the same for google.com as for facebook.com.
|
| They pay Apple for being search provider in Safari and Siri the
| same way they pay Mozilla, because searches mean data and
| displayed adverts.
| treis wrote:
| Google doesn't really have apps though. Their users see ads
| through the browser and so, from what I understand, are
| unaffected by the change.
| falcolas wrote:
| Not counting gmail, calendar, or the docs/drive suite,
| Google has >12 applications on the app store. Apple's
| "search" is pretty crappy WRT seeing what a dev has
| released (or at least the Google LLC "dev"), hence the
| range.
|
| And ads definitely show up in YouTube and such.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Apple 's "search" is pretty crappy WRT seeing what a dev
| has released_
|
| Click on the dev's name and it shows everything that dev
| has published.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/google-
| llc/id281956209
| falcolas wrote:
| I did (on my phone, fwiw), and it only showed 12, and not
| their big ones.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Perhaps because on your phone it shows only phone apps?
| falcolas wrote:
| Well, it didn't show Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Sheets, or
| Docs. All of which are Google apps available on the
| phone.
| treis wrote:
| I didn't say they had no apps. I said they don't really
| have apps and they don't. Their main product is search
| and it's accessed through the browser.
|
| If what FB is saying is true then the move by Apple helps
| Google. There's more or less two options for online
| advertising. So if companies spend less on FB then
| they're probably going to spend those dollars with Google
| falcolas wrote:
| I give you Google, the app:
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google/id284815942
|
| Google search, in an iOS app. Not everyone uses it, sure,
| but has over 341k reviews. Facebook, as a point of
| comparison, only has about 4x more reviews at 1.2M. 4x is
| a lot, but it's also a lot less than I'd expect over
| something primarily used in the browser.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Google doesn 't really have apps though_
|
| Google has 17 apps for Apple devices.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-one/id1451784328
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/screenwise-meter/id1455562397
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google/id284815942
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notable-women-ar/id1425071635
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/just-a-line-draw-in-
| ar/id13672...
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-tasks-get-things-
| done/i...
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/looker-mobile/id1533498070
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-podcasts/id1398000105
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-stadia/id1471900213
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-fit-activity-
| tracker/id...
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-fi/id1413936031
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grasshopper-learn-to-
| code/id13...
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-music/id1017492454
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-keep-notes-and-
| lists/id...
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-maps/id585027354
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-tv/id1193350206
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-kids/id936971630
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-watch-listen-
| stream/id...
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's definitely not why they pay Mozilla. Being the default
| search engine in a browser that a minuscule percentage of the
| market uses, and then the vast majority of those only use
| because they're _hostile_ to Google, isn 't worth shit.
|
| If I go to my bodega once a month to spend $80 on sticks of
| $2 incense, it's because I'm buying drugs.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > 1. All Apple did was giving users a choice (and they
| should've done that ages ago). If users didn't mind being
| tracked, or liked the "more relevant adverts" tracking
| provides, they would not have opted out.
|
| The choice existed for a long time. What Apple did was make
| that choice front and centre for everyone, as opposed to
| being buried in a settings menu for privacy-conscious people
| to hunt down.
| strulovich wrote:
| Part of the issue is the language. Apple used the "ask no to
| track language", but when it came to their own services chose
| "turn off personalized ads":
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/02/apple-personalized-ads-
| target...
|
| Not saying tracking shouldn't be stopped. But remember Apple
| is much less privacy aware when it's their wallet.
| brimble wrote:
| Is the issue the language? It's not clear from the language
| or the article that Apple's version disables any tracking
| at all. It seems like two different things.
| thebean11 wrote:
| How could you possibly server personalized ads without
| tracking?
| brimble wrote:
| Why would disabling personalized ads _necessarily_
| disable tracking? [EDIT] Consider: toggling the display
| of something does not necessarily change the underlying
| data, or data collection, behavior.
|
| Why would all data used to personalize ads _have to be_
| tracking? It could also be things like purchase data from
| the very service that 's advertising to you. Halting
| collection--not use for ad personalization, but
| collection--of that would go beyond what even I would
| consider tracking (and I think most of what goes on in
| the ad world today should simply be illegal). It would be
| possible to personalize ads _only_ based on this kind of
| thing--in fact, that 's what the article seems to imply
| is going on, at least in part.
|
| So there are at least two ways that setting might mean
| something different from one that disables tracking.
| thebean11 wrote:
| I think we are coming at it from different directions.
| You need tracking for personalized ads, you don't need
| personalized ads for tracking.
| shuckles wrote:
| No you don't need tracking for personalized ads. Apple
| defines tracking as sharing information about the user
| between distinct 3rd parties, while it personalizes ads
| based on your behavior within Apple's own services.
| brimble wrote:
| Right. Consider:
|
| >>>
|
| What do you do for a living?
|
| "I track animals."
|
| Oh, cool, like you're a hunter or in animal control or
| something? Trekking all over the wilds, keen eye for
| detail, grand adventures, lots of mud and amazing
| stories?
|
| "No, I manage a zoo. I track the zoo animals in a
| spreadsheet. I sit in an office."
|
| >>>
|
| AFAIK Apple means the hunting kind, when they write
| "tracking". As in following a user around and watching
| them while they use services & apps that you don't
| operate.
| brimble wrote:
| Sort of. Again, it's possible to personalize ads without
| tracking, unless tracking means "collecting literally any
| data, including order history for a logged-in user" or
| things like selecting ads based on geography for an
| address _that you provided_ , not even GPS tracking or
| something like that.
|
| It is entirely possible that the settings do _totally
| different things_ , so the different language isn't some
| kind of trick. I think it's _likely_ that picking either
| of those phrases and using it for both would result in
| the description of the respective settings being less
| accurate.
|
| Swap the one that applies to applications to "disable
| personalized ads", rather than "disable tracking".
|
| But it doesn't do that--does it? It disables (a certain
| kind of) tracking. The tracking _may not even be used for
| ads_. Apple has no way to guarantee that. You may _still_
| see personalized ads based on other data.
|
| Make the Apple one "disable tracking" rather than
| "disable personalized ads". But the setting _might not do
| that at all_ , while still disabling personalization. In
| fact, the ad personalization may not have been based on
| tracking in the first place, and even if it were,
| disabling personalization could very well leave the
| tracking in place.
|
| The accusation was that Apple's describing the same thing
| two ways to give themselves an advantage, but I'd say the
| settings _very likely_ do not do the same thing.
| [deleted]
| caskstrength wrote:
| Do you suggest that Google apps on iOS are somehow exempt from
| new privacy protections?
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| It wouldn't be that straightforward
|
| Probably what OP is suggesting is that in return for that
| $5B, Apple will call up Google and say "hey we're adding
| these new privacy protections, will that be a problem?" and
| Google will have time in advance to get around them
| alwillis wrote:
| For Apple, which has a market cap of over _$3 trillion_ ,
| the $10B from Google is the equivalent of sofa cushion
| money.
|
| Apple isn't going do any favors for Google for a measly
| $10B.
|
| It's much more meaningful for Google and Google knows it.
| For them, it's a bargain, as it gives its advertisers
| access to customers who actually spend money.
| nsenifty wrote:
| You're comparing income with market cap. Apple's net
| income in 2021 was around $100B of which $10B is a
| significant sum.
| throwawaythekey wrote:
| Google has an easier time providing targeted ads via search
| keywords. Facebook users spend most of their time in their
| feeds which is a relatively weak signal for monetization.
|
| Note that google appears to be acting as though they are
| effected, you can see this in their push for FLOC/topics (but
| the impetus for this could be coming from android moreso than
| search)
| bla3 wrote:
| This suggests Google should charge FB a few billion per year,
| lest they implement the same feature in Android. They could
| spin it as a research partnership to investigate the social
| effects of platform tracking. As long as partners keep paying,
| the research can continue, but once they stop paying it's time
| to act on the research results...
| anovikov wrote:
| Thing is on Android, hardly anyone pays for everything. No
| money from iOS, no money... Many people i know say that
| Facebook ads simply stopped working. You pour in $100K and...
| nothing happens.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| dang can you please enforce the rules more? In the last weeks
| hn is getting overrun with spammy troll accounts splattering
| conspiracy theories left and right.
| tyrfing wrote:
| > E-commerce was an area where we saw a meaningful slowdown
| in growth in Q4. And similarly, we've seen other areas like
| gaming to be challenged. But on e-commerce, it's quite
| noticeable -- notable that Google called out, seeing strength
| in that very same vertical. And so given that we know that
| e-commerce is one of the most impacted verticals from iOS
| restrictions, it makes sense that those restrictions are
| probably part of the explanation for the difference between
| what they were seeing and what we were seeing.
|
| > ... we believe those restrictions from Apple are designed
| in a way that carves out browsers from the tracking prompts
| Apple requires for apps. And so what that means is that
| search ads could have access to far more third-party data for
| measurement and optimization purposes than app-based ad
| platforms like ours.
|
| > So when it comes to using data, you can think of it that
| it's not really apples-to-apples for us. And as a result, we
| believe Google Search ad business could have benefited
| relative to services like ours is based a different set of
| restrictions from Apple. And given that Apple continue to
| take billions of dollars a year from Google Search ads, the
| incentive clearly exists for this policy discrepancy to
| continue.
|
| Facebook CFO on iOS change effects: advertising business is
| being driven to Google since they are mostly unaffected by
| the changes. This is the statement the article would be based
| on, but with most of the interesting parts left out.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| This is unfortunately a remarkably well-documented conspiracy
| theory.
| trollied wrote:
| Something isn't a conspiracy theory just because it's an
| opinion that you do not like. I personally found the OPs take
| interesting, though obviously written a little tongue-in-
| cheek.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| The relationship between Google and Apple is outrageous,
| criminal even. Yet for some reason it hasn't dawned on the
| Economist. Maybe some clear spoken shitposts on a popular
| tech site is what it takes.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| it's a conspiracy theory because he presents it as facts
| without providing sources for his statements. it's about
| how not what. yikes.
| alexashka wrote:
| No.
|
| Google the definition of conspiracy, before presenting
| your _wrong_ opinion as fact.
|
| Do you even get the irony of what you've just done and
| I'm sure have been doing for years? Probably not.
| [deleted]
| scim-knox-twox wrote:
| > A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or
| situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and
| powerful groups, often political in motivation, _when
| other explanations are more probable_.
|
| https://wikiless.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory?lang=en
|
| It's not a conspiracy when we know that GAFA works
| together: https://gizmodo.com/google-paid-apple-to-stay-
| out-of-the-sea...
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| It is because you can't validate it how is it that hard
| to distinguish between true statements and speculations.
| The same goes for your sources claims brought up in court
| are not true statements until they are proven to be
| factually correct.
| paulcole wrote:
| You're basically saying every comment here is a
| conspiracy theory, since (essentially) nobody here
| provides sources and everybody is convinced they're
| spewing the unadulterated truth.
|
| By your definition, it's a conspiracy theory for me to
| say, "I'm sure JFK was shot!" Because I'm saying it as
| fact without source. But then it's also a conspiracy
| theory to say, "I'm sure JFK was shot by aliens."
|
| The _what_ is essential in defining a conspiracy theory.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| It's about how not what at least follow the discussion
| you are answering. And nobody cares about your definition
| of conspiracy theories or your assumption of mine, normal
| human beings open for discourse care about the definition
| of the term in the general public. You can easily find it
| in a dictionary of your choice.
| patrec wrote:
| How about a bit of critical thinking before yelling
| "Conspiracy!"? Concerning "sources", if Apple and Google
| are engaged in joint anti-competitive behavior, they'd
| probably not write press releases about it. But of course
| there is well-documented precedence of them doing exactly
| that, being caught and getting a mild slap on the wrist,
| so it's not a completely outlandish notion to entertain.
|
| As for the officially stated reason: do you really think
| that there is an alternative search engine provider that
| Apple would switch to if Google didn't pay them 10
| figures a year? If so, which one(s)? If not, what are
| they actually paying for? To mitigate the risk of a
| second Apple Maps? But is the case for entering the
| search engine market really remotely as compelling as
| entering the mapping space?
|
| I'm not saying it's an open and shut case, but the idea
| that Google essentially pays Apple money a) as a "good-
| will gesture" b) to give regulators the impression that
| the search engine market is more competitive than it is
| seems possible to me. Whereas one of the alternative
| scenarios proposed here, that Apple would pick duckduckgo
| otherwise, really does not.
|
| Personally, if I were Sundar, I'd be way more worried
| about anti-trust or Apple siding too much with the
| privacy of their users or stepping otherwise on my toes
| than say duckduckduckgo becoming a serious competitor
| because Apple anointed them default search provider after
| I failed to fork over enough money. I'd probably even do
| my best to keep a bunch of minimally viable competitors
| around -- not viable enough to ever pose a threat, but
| viable enough to keep anti-trust at bay for a bit longer.
| And both duckduckgo and firefox seem to fit that bill
| perfectly.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| You are speculating as much as the op does. It's just not
| based in truthful statements. Ofc everything you and op
| are rhyming together can be true but at least don't state
| it as fact like op did.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Pretend that everyone that you interact with on the
| internet is expressing their opinion about the facts.
| xvector wrote:
| I think this was more shitpost than conspiracy.
| ksec wrote:
| It isn't $5B, it is $10B+. Google's TAC in 2021 was $13B.
| 00000000005 wrote:
| OK so Google pays Apple around $13,000,000,000 per year.
|
| How much does Facebook pay Apple?
| ksec wrote:
| A tiny bit with their in App revenue split which Facebook
| tries to avoid. Although I doubt paying for it make much
| difference. You can tell Tim Cook and Apple, just like HN
| hate Facebook and Ads ( Which they have to backtrack and
| state they dont hate ads ). It is an ideology crash.
| actuator wrote:
| No, it is not an ideology crash. Apple is perfectly fine
| serving their own ads for which they are building a
| targeting profile.
|
| It is an incentive crash. Apple tried iAds before and it
| didn't work as they couldn't do good personalised ads,
| this is them keeping the advantage just for them and
| getting good PR.
|
| Apple is not a saint in this, not even a single bit.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| 5B? Nah, champ. The price is 15B ...
| nojito wrote:
| How so?
|
| Safari hides so much info from google search by default. The
| money google pays apple is strictly for marketing purposes.
| 00000000005 wrote:
| scim-knox-twox wrote:
| https://gizmodo.com/google-paid-apple-to-stay-out-of-the-
| sea...
| nojito wrote:
| I know that story but safari iOS is not like safari on
| macOS.
| danpalmer wrote:
| What would that payment be for from Facebook?
|
| Opinions aside, Google are paying for a thing, not just
| donating money. What would Facebook pay for? I'm not sure that
| them being a search engine makes sense, I don't think Apple
| would give up the position of iMessage in favour of Messenger.
|
| (Disclaimer, I work at Google, but don't have any inside info
| or opinion on the Apple/Google relationship.)
| chunkyguy wrote:
| Wasn't there a time where you could sign in to facebook at
| the system level? They could pay to get it back
|
| https://www.cnet.com/how-to/understanding-facebook-
| integrati...
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > I'm not sure that them being a search engine makes sense
|
| It really does. Want to search for a local house cleaner or
| children's entertainer, include Facebook pages with web
| results. Want to search for things to do in a particular
| town, include Facebook events with web results about museums
| and such like.
|
| This is just scratching the surface too. There are lots of
| possibilities here so I'd be very surprised if Facebook
| haven't explored this idea.
| 00000000005 wrote:
| > What would that payment be for from Facebook?
|
| To live.
|
| This is Tim's town and if you think you're doing business and
| cutting Tim out then you've got $10b concrete boots coming.
| dang wrote:
| Please stop creating accounts to post unsubstantive
| comments and flamebait. It destroys what this place is
| supposed to be for, and will eventually get your main
| account banned as well.
|
| If you'd please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick
| to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
| yokoprime wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're shitposting or actually replying.
| Alphabet pays Apple to be the default search-engine in
| Safari. Thats it, Google are not exempt from Apples privacy
| policies. Google dragged their feed after the iOS 15
| privacy changes, but in the end had to cave.
| Iolaum wrote:
| Apple's privacy policies are not set in stone. They are
| more like pray I don't alter the deal further.
|
| ATM only Apple can stop Apple from deciding they want no
| tracking done by search engine providers in iOS apps.
| gls2ro wrote:
| I think Google as the default search engine on Safari is a
| big win.
|
| How is that just an excuse to hand over money?
|
| Do think that putting DuckDuckGo as default in Safari will
| not have any influence in either DuckDuckGo or Google
| market share?
| patrec wrote:
| Right, like as without those 5B Apple would screw up its
| products by handing over all search to some guy with a
| Bing scraping Perl script cosplaying as a search engine.
| Foivos wrote:
| Then, why does google pay big money to Firefox?
| 00000000005 wrote:
| To avoid a competition lawsuit from the justice department.
| [deleted]
| xvector wrote:
| It's rackets all the way down!
| matt_s wrote:
| I think you mean: Its Webkits all the way down
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Users have the same privacy options with Google's apps that
| they have with Facebook's apps.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| But Google are much, much less dependent on apps because they
| get all that sweet juicy search data from each iPhone (which
| they can then use to track you across their apps, potentially
| (this is possible to implement, I have no idea if they do
| it)).
| GeekyBear wrote:
| So antitrust regulators should break up Google?
| samwillis wrote:
| There is an enormous deference between Search Ads (such as
| those in Google search results) and display advertising such as
| Facebook and Googles Display Network.
|
| I assure you Google are paying Apple to be the default search
| engine exactly because it's basically _a licence to print
| money_.
|
| It has nothing to do with display ads.
|
| If Facebook had a search engine they would bid against Google
| for that role, but as it appears to be the case there is a
| Google/Facebook gentlemens agreement to not compete in that
| area.
| ksec wrote:
| >There is an enormous deference between Search Ads (such as
| those in Google search results) and display advertising such
| as Facebook and Googles Display Network.
|
| I assure you HN does not understand anything about Ads. Ever
| since I realise HN had some deep misunderstanding with Online
| ads, I have been stating this difference for over 3 years.
| The only thing I got on HN was all ads are evil. Targeting
| Ads, Tracking Ads, Search Ads, or the latest buzzword
| surveillance capitalism.
| catach wrote:
| Have to wonder if that agreement would have survived a
| competitive Google Plus.
| rob74 wrote:
| Well yeah, Google tried to build a social network (actually
| several) and failed; Facebook didn't try to build a search
| engine - that wouldn't fit into their business model of
| sucking you in and driving you to sign up to Facebook. I
| mean, after they bought Oculus, they even started requiring
| a FB account to use the device, but they couldn't have done
| that for a search engine, nobody would have used it. But
| lots of others did, and failed (or at least couldn't
| compete with Google).
|
| So we can conclude that neither building a successful
| social network nor building a successful search engine is
| easy :)
| bagacrap wrote:
| but fb does have a search engine? Admittedly it only
| searches for content on their own site, but as you note
| the strategy has been to make the walled garden so
| expansive that users would never want to leave (or be
| able to --- see India). Building a general purpose web
| search engine would be to give up on the "own everything"
| strategy.
| thaway2839 wrote:
| Yet Google tries really hard to get you to log in, to the
| point where if you log into the browser to be able to
| sync your bookmarks and settings, you will be logged into
| your Google search as well.
| Iolaum wrote:
| Given the "success" of Google+ and Bing I am not sure if it
| is a gentleman's agreement rather than an endeavor not
| worth the investment.
| reallydontask wrote:
| Frankly, I would be surprised if it weren't both
| throwaway4good wrote:
| FB could surely muster the engineering resources to create a
| search engine that matches what Google has today.
|
| I think OP is right, it is pride that is holding Zuck back.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> FB could surely muster the engineering resources to
| create a search engine that matches what Google has today._
|
| I wouldn't be so sure. Bing is an excellent counter example
| to that statement. And not just because (from my
| experience) it doesn't produce the same quality of results.
| It's also about user adoption. MS built a reasonable, if
| not clearly superior alternative to Google and spend
| enormous sums of money marketing it, making it the default
| option on the default browser installed on millions of new
| PC's each year, and is has single-digit market share.
|
| Facebook doesn't have those inroads on the PC market to
| leverage. They'd have to build something so much better
| than Google that it would make Google look like Yahoo when
| Google first arrived on the scene. At which point Google
| could probably stop sandbagging their own search efforts
| that favor ads space over results and make up any lost
| ground pretty quickly.
|
| I'm also not confident in Facebook's ability to create high
| quality new products anymore. The most recent big successes
| have come from acquisitions. I suppose they _might_ be able
| to buy DDG, but they 'd almost immediately lose all of its
| users. And unless the still wanted to build their own
| actual engine, they'd have to rely on the goodwill of MS to
| continue getting most results via Bing's engine.
| xvector wrote:
| This is amazing! I love HN.
| yalogin wrote:
| I haven't followed the whole apple privacy push and how it
| impacted advertising. However, isn't everyone always logged into
| Facebook? If so they already know who is using it and any
| interaction will tell them exactly who used it. How does the
| Apple's platform level change effect them? Am I missing
| something?
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| i had this same question, maybe someone can explain.
| willio58 wrote:
| It's not Facebook knowing who used their app, it's restrictions
| on what data Facebook can pull from your phone. It's also
| making it clear to users how often this data is being fetched,
| and the option to opt out of data collection is new too.
| [deleted]
| lovefeature wrote:
| calebm wrote:
| This is quantitative proof that Facebook is extracting value
| directly from people's private data.
| paxys wrote:
| Snap is still somehow up 50% today. Google is similarly doing
| great. The problem is more on Facebook's end than Apple's. TikTok
| did way more damage than Apple ever could.
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| What they need to realize is that there are advantages _and_
| responsibilities that come with sheer scale. Their apps are
| rife with misinformation and gaslighting.
|
| Facebook has become associated with argument, fight and social
| misery in the minds of their consumers. They need to take some
| substantial steps to change that. Merely wishing these issues
| away with posts, launching new products or changing the company
| name does not cut it.
| [deleted]
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Snap still down 11% this month
| alanlammiman wrote:
| The problem isn't just Apple's action on IDFA. It's that Facebook
| seems to be so poorly managed on some fronts that its reactions,
| rather than mitigating problems, has caused further harm. For
| example - in a rushed effort to get their privacy issues in
| order, they are deactivating the live facebook integrations of
| customers based on cursory/mistaken/possibly machine-based
| readings of their privacy policies.
|
| They did that to us yesterday: https://shared-
| crater-f3a.notion.site/Facebook-is-Breaking-A...
|
| We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on facebook app ads per
| month. We can deal with IDFA giving way to more aggregated
| attribution (we don't want to track individuals - we just want to
| measure if the ads we paid for led to sales). But facebook
| breaking our app in production because they can't be bothered
| doing their job properly is very serious. It can't be solved by
| reducing ad spend, only by removing their SDK from our app.
|
| If this is also happening to many other developers right now,
| that, more than the Q4 results or the IDFA issue itself, could be
| causing the drop in the share price.
|
| In fact, if you look at the Q4 results, the earnings miss was
| more because of growth in G&A (which grew by 3 percentage-points
| of revenue if I'm not mistaken) than because of a top-line
| slowdown. And if you read the comments as to what made G&A grow,
| it's 'legal costs'.
| bagacrap wrote:
| "we don't want to track individuals" --- right, but each ad FB
| places has a lower conversion rate if they don't know as much
| about the user, so while your goal may not be tracking per se,
| tracking does get you the same sales in fewer placements, and
| Facebook can sell those saved placements to other buyers
|
| the fact that they're cracking down on partner privacy in a
| hamfisted way surely doesn't help matters but I can't see how
| angry devs are driving the share price down
| alanlammiman wrote:
| I agree with your first point in the sense that having
| individualised targeting data necessarily improves
| advertising by some amount vs. merely contextual and
| aggregate data. For our specific case I'm not convinced that
| amount is as big as some people imagine it is, but I haven't
| found a good way to test that precisely given that facebook
| doesn't really have a "just give me a representative sample
| of your audience in this region" targeting feature (wish it
| did) to compare with the targeted alternatives. In our case,
| app ads that now use SKAN (the Apple solution that provides
| aggregated attribution) seem to be working well enough - that
| was my point.
|
| Regarding your second point, yes, I agree - it's not obvious.
| Assuming this did indeed affect many developers like us and
| that it happened to everyone at the same time (which may not
| be the case - that it happened to us and that it coincided
| with their earnings report may have just been a coincidence -
| I haven't seen a mass outcry on twitter or anything), I was
| wondering whether it might be hedge funds that buy/track
| aggregated ad spend or attribution data, perhaps from MMPs or
| media buying agencies. I know they buy app download data from
| the likes of App Annie, but don't know if equivalent data is
| available and timely for ad spend. In any case, my point is
| more that this is illustrative of how they make bad
| situations worse for themselves.
| simpss wrote:
| > we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure
| if the ads we paid for led to sales
|
| well. if your goal isn't tracking individuals, then why are you
| attaching unique ID's (in cookies) to track individuals on your
| website?
|
| And I'm not talking about third-party cookies disguised as
| first-party.
|
| logglytrackingsession (lifetime: session)
|
| notion_experiment_device_id (lifetime: 1 year)
|
| Both are unique to a specific user and are used to identify a
| single individual. The first one is short-lived, but obviously
| meant for tracking and the second one can be used for tracking,
| identifies a single individual and is long-lived.
|
| edit: turning off my adblocker, some more appear.
|
| _ga, _ga_4GMCF7E1GC, intercom-id-gpfdrxfd, notion_browser_id,
| amp_af43d4
|
| none of these are listed or explained in your privacy
| policy.[1]
|
| [1] - https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Sticky-Privacy-
| Policy-...
| alanlammiman wrote:
| Yes like the peer reply said that's Notion, not us. But good
| point, another thing to keep in mind if you try to use the
| "Share to the web" notion feature.
| simpss wrote:
| the _ga stuff isn't Notion, but the rest is, yes.
|
| My real point is, if you use a service to provide your own
| service, you give them your blessing to do whatever they
| want with your brand. This includes facebook and their
| tracking scripts.
|
| Thus we need to audit what our service providers are doing
| and limit their impact once we've completed the evaluation,
| making sure they don't alter the deal later.
|
| Also tracking ad conversions is as simple as using a unique
| parameter per campaign, when buying the add. Just append
| `?campaign=facebook_campaign-name_202202` to your link and
| that's enough to measure the ads effectiveness. No need to
| attach unique ID's to users, sessions etc... Aggregates
| keep the users anonymous and give you enough actionable
| insight.
| sa1 wrote:
| One could choose a better host than Notion, but that's
| Notion's fault.
| alanlammiman wrote:
| Yes, agree, we wanted to try it out for this because we
| like it for work and it was quick to write up and publish
| and we thought it might be more flexible for writing up
| documentation, linking, etc. But we are not satisfied
| either: Very slow to load, formatting is fiddly and
| imperfect. We will have to use something else.
| btdmaster wrote:
| This "privacy push" is only a change with respect to IDFA --
| something specifically built by Apple to compete with Google's
| advertising ID. Opting out system-wide was already possible, but
| unsurprisingly its existence is not something that's well-known
| since Apple has established themselves as Goddess of Privacy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers.
|
| To me, this is closer to "Apple spying technology becomes opt-in
| and no one uses it anymore".
| scim-knox-twox wrote:
| > For years, Apple helped by offering an "identifier for
| advertisers" (IDFA), giving advertisers a way to track people's
| behaviour on its devices. (...) But last year, citing privacy
| concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask
| people if they want to be tracked.
|
| And everyone praised Apple for it. But if Apple really care about
| privacy, they'd never allowed for IDFA in the first place...
|
| > Google will soon offer most users of Android, its mobile
| operating system, the ability to opt out of ad tracking.
|
| I'll believe it when they pass some independent audits from EU
| countries xD
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Apple invented IDFA at the time as a compromise to prevent
| companies from building much more complicated and invasive
| tracking systems of their own.
|
| But of course they did anyway, Apple's ability to control those
| systems increased, and so it was time to stop providing it so
| easily.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| Why does Facebook even need the IDFA? Isn't your Facebook
| account UUID also a unique ID that only you have? It's not like
| people are browsing Facebook without logging in.
| ajayyy wrote:
| to link between the facebook app and other apps with the
| facebook ads sdk
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| They can't use your Facebook account or something else for
| that? I'm pretty ignorant about ad tech, it's something I'd
| like to learn more about.
| babypuncher wrote:
| So here's how IDFA works.
|
| User logs in to the Facebook app, and Facebook ties the
| user's IDFA to their Facebook account.
|
| User opens non-Facebook app X that uses the Facebook SDK
| for ads/tracking. App X sends the IDFA to Facebook, who
| then looks it up in their database and sees it on your
| account. They can now tie all user activity tracked by
| app X to the user's Facebook account.
|
| Without IDFA, this kind of cross-app tracking becomes
| considerably more difficult.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| Great explanation. Do you know of any resources where I
| can learn more about this? I find it really interesting.
| unixbane wrote:
| zahma wrote:
| Apple knows where the future of technology is going, and Meta is
| getting in the way. Meta, appropriately renamed to reflect the
| trend toward augmented and virtual reality, would eventually
| become a threat to Apple's walled garden business model. Apple
| gives lip service to privacy so long as it attracts users to
| their platform. However the moment we're in is when the their
| invasion of privacy is meant to benefit their vision for keeping
| a customer totally content from home, to work, to play; they have
| a service for everything, and the data with which they have
| determined hidden markets, pain points, and markets of desire is
| coming at a cost for Facebook/Meta.
|
| In the future, whether that's 5, 10, or 20 years, the biggest
| companies will produce their own platforms of walled garden
| experiences. Meta isn't there yet and has suffered a setback, but
| the reports that Meta is trying to poach Apple devs is telling
| about where this is all headed. The "metaverse" is nascent and
| mockable, but my kid will probably grow up in it just like I grew
| up on AIM, chat rooms, and texting.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Do you think the past 2 years of digital-only communications
| has really enticed kids into the arms of Facebook/the like and
| their live-your-life-in-a-headset plan?
|
| I get a sense of the opposite.
|
| Bloody cassette tapes and boomboxes are back in style. It's not
| just a gimmick. Kids are nostalgic for a past they didn't even
| know--one without such intense and obligatory interconnection--
| one where they can run around and get dirty and mess up and not
| have it broadcast to everyone and monetized by international
| corporations.
|
| I don't blame them.
| sfink wrote:
| Ironically, I think they're looking for (and finding) a life
| with _more_ interconnection by rejecting one with "such
| intense and obligatory interconnection" as you put it well.
|
| I guess it's the natural evolution of things:
|
| 1. we seek connectedness. 2. we invent a set of reductionist
| mechanisms for achieving connectedness 3. we discover that
| the reductionist aspect really matters and the connectedness
| we've achieved is hollow and fake 4. we (or rather our heirs
| since we're too stubborn to change) adapt to the new reality
| and build some degree of real connectedness on top of the old
| and a warped version of the new.
|
| "warped" meaning either "adapted to actual needs" or
| "perverted to serve unintended purposes" depending on whether
| your interests are being served or not.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| As the Dutch say: a cat that is backed into a corner, makes
| unpredictable jumps. And Zuckerberg is one really smart cat, with
| a lot of money at his disposal. So I wouldn't rule him out yet.
| isodev wrote:
| All Apple did was give users the choice. Users choosing to deny
| Facebook the permission to share their data? That's entirely on
| Facebook.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I see this in the thread but I have to say that I disagree a
| bit. I'm certainly glad Apple gave users a choice, but you have
| to consider "the tyranny of the default" which is a great
| phrase I think. Most people will simply use the default option,
| so Apple's choice of default says something.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The default is to ask you with buttons that are the same
| size. You can specifically go into settings and disable
| tracking for all apps. But it isn't the default.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| If they tyranny of the default is to protect my privacy, I
| see no tyranny at all.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I just like the phrase. Tyranny probably brings along a bad
| assumption, but it really just means that most people will
| stick with the default. It's something I learned
| independently, though it had been realized many times
| before I did. I'm also happy with the outcome in this case.
| travisporter wrote:
| Tyranny definitely has a negative connotation
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I agree, but default connotes that you are able to change
| it. Maybe it's that sort of built in contradiction that
| appeals to me.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Right and the previous default was to allow all tracking.
| OzCrimson wrote:
| Which never should have been the default.
|
| I don't want to be included in something that I never asked
| to be part of, and then have to put in the effort to get
| out.
|
| This is one of the things that is so upsetting: most of the
| industry puts it on the consumer to get out rather than
| come in. I often look at the list of third-parties when a
| website says I can opt out. There are often over 300 third
| parties that I would have to opt out of one at a time.
|
| That's just plain abusive.
| isodev wrote:
| There is no default, all users get a prompt if they want to
| allow Facebook to get their data or not.
| driverdan wrote:
| It shouldn't even be a choice. The whole concept of IDFA is
| incredibly anti-consumer. It shouldn't exist.
| asiachick wrote:
| I find it sad that Google's response to privacy is FLoC / Topics
| API instead of just embracing privacy like Apple. I know Google
| is an ad company. Still, they mostly control both Android and
| Chrome which means if they followed Apple's example on privacy
| they wouldn't be losing much of competitive advantage because if
| both Android and Chrome were privacy oriented that means there'd
| be no OS where some competitor could track. In other words, it
| still seems like they'd be #1 if they switched to content based
| ads and context (search) but zero tracking.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B
|
| It's a false narrative that Facebook is pushing out: "It' snot us
| that are bad, it's this big bad Apple who are hurting our poor
| business".
| 1024core wrote:
| Archive link: https://archive.ph/cyxRR
| gigatexal wrote:
| How can they make that number 10x bigger hrmm
| d12bb wrote:
| Nice how Zuck said $10bn in the analysts call with nothing to
| back it up, but the whole press jumps on it. Apple is not
| Facebook's problem, all they did was giving users a choice, which
| should have happened ages ago. So Facebook just says Apple kills
| our business without ever thinking that maybe users don't like
| the way they do business. If they did, they wouldn't opt out...
| ineedasername wrote:
| What would be his motive for saying revenue would be $10B less
| than previous trends would predict? They posted record revenue
| again in 2021, so it doesn't look like he's trying to cast a
| scapegoat for stagnant revenue.
| d12bb wrote:
| According to what I read (not first hand, of course), he said
| that 10bn _because of Apple 's decision_. That's a different
| thing than just saying 10bn, and to pressure Apple to let
| loose on privacy seems motivation enough to me.
| bagacrap wrote:
| with my tinfoil hat on -- planned stock buybacks?
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Nice how Zuck said $10bn in the analysts call with nothing
| to back it up, but the whole press jumps on it._
|
| If Zuck knowingly gave investors bad guidance, I don't think
| that would go over well with the SEC:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5#Forward-
| looking...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement
| 1024core wrote:
| _Wilson Sonsini (the consiglieri to the Valley CEOs) has
| entered the chat.._
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| Yeah, the CEO of a company saying numbers on official
| communication to investors is pretty compelling evidence on
| its own, especially if it's bad news. Executives don't
| generally lie about specifics to their investors, unless
| they're doing something completely fraudulent. And if you
| think that's the case for Facebook, you're going to need more
| evidence then just a gut feeling.
| bduerst wrote:
| Not to mention supporting data for announcements like these
| tend to come up in discovery requests for lawsuits so I
| highly doubt they'd make such a definitive statement w/o
| the points to back it up.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Eh, the picture in the article seems to actually be a better
| picture of him than a lot of articles use. That being said, I
| think the biggest issue is his eye brows are very thin and
| fair, which combined with his pale skin, lips, and no facial
| hair gives his face very few defining features.
| pestatije wrote:
| It's a known effect. The older you get, the more difficult your
| true persona to disguise.
| mattkevan wrote:
| He looks utterly haunted.
|
| It's tough to have sympathy for him, but if I'd built a website
| to rate women at my uni for a laugh, then accidentally found
| myself in charge of one of the world's most powerful companies
| that's destroying society from the inside out - and personally
| one of the world's most hated people, I'd look pretty haunted
| too.
| hollowdene wrote:
| There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook
| that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years.
|
| I used to work at a publisher where 80% of their website traffic
| came from Facebook. They haven't seen audience growth in years
| and their audience is skewing older and older, which is bad for
| their advertising business
|
| Businesses like that are going to get steadily squeezed both by
| Facebook's declining audience share and Facebook's own efforts to
| change what people see.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > They haven't seen audience growth in years and their audience
| is skewing older and older, which is bad for their advertising
| business
|
| Older people have more money to spend and are therefore worth
| more to advertisers.
| altdataseller wrote:
| Yeah publishers like BuzzFeed are in deep trouble, as less ppl
| are discovering content on FB
| mtberatwork wrote:
| > There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook
| that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years.
|
| Starting? Did these publishers not learn anything from the
| whole Facebook Video debacle? [1] Also, who at these companies
| thinks tying their core business to a single, third party is a
| good idea?
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-
| inaccu...
| hollowdene wrote:
| Video on Facebook is still very big, though. A lot of
| publishers have taken to recycling TikTok videos and turning
| them into compilations for Facebook and Instagram. It's all
| low quality stuff, but it works. It's hugely ironic that some
| of the most popular content on Facebook's platforms is coming
| from TikTok.
| nottorp wrote:
| > their audience is skewing older and older
|
| Been reading that facebook is out of fashion for the young uns
| for several years, way before any privacy changes on part of
| anyone.
|
| Also, question: how do they know their audience's average age?
| From invasive tracking?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Good riddance? People will keep finding & buying things they
| need.
|
| If nobody's buying anything from these businesses without
| invasive advertising & tracking then maybe whatever goods they
| were selling aren't actually necessary?
|
| Of course there is nuance and edge cases to this, but in
| general I wouldn't be surprised if society and the planet was
| better off once we stop producing useless garbage.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I don't know... I've seen some interesting products thanks to
| Facebook that I wouldn't have otherwise.
|
| Life would be pretty boring if we all only bought what we
| need.
| OzCrimson wrote:
| The question is more about the trade-off.
|
| 1. I see an ad for some really nice pens. COOL! 2. I go to
| a website that allows me to opt out of tracking but I'd
| have to opt out of their 300 affiliates one at a time. 3.
| The privacy policies that state: we do not honor do-not-
| track signals because we don't know if it was the user or a
| browser default.
|
| For me: not worth the tradeoff.
| troyvit wrote:
| That seems to imply that we need to buy stuff to create
| excitement in life. Is that what you meant?
| missedthecue wrote:
| No, but buying stuff makes me happy.
| chillage wrote:
| I don't think you've ever started a company with a new
| product. What if you make the world's best cheese grater.
| Nobody knows about it. You don't have connections to
| supermarkets. Smaller stores don't want to carry your niche
| item. You have $5000 budget to get your cheese grater out.
| How do you let people know about it?
|
| Online targetted advertising is basically the current
| established way to find those people who actually would care
| about your special cheese grater and start to get your
| business going. If you're looking at alternatives those would
| be either untargetted online advertising (incredibly
| inefficient, only people who don't care about cheese graters
| would see your ads and that's your $5000 down the toilet) or
| real world advertising like... Door to door salesmen? Or take
| out fliers in your local newspaper? That's what people used
| to do
|
| If you feel cheese graters are useless and somehow deserve to
| remain unbought, then replace it with any other item which
| does match your bar for utility value.
| jjulius wrote:
| I still don't care. My privacy shouldn't be forced to be
| sacrificed just because you decided to make a cheese grater
| that's better than every other cheese grater in existence.
|
| >If you feel cheese graters are useless and somehow deserve
| to remain unbought, then replace it with any other item
| which does match your bar for utility value.
|
| I am doing this for nearly everything I can think of, and
| my privacy wins every single time.
| chillage wrote:
| This is off topic, I was responding to OP's statement
| that online ads are always useless
|
| You may well find that any societal usefulness is offset
| by your own principles, whether that's privacy or
| aversion to tech or aversion to capitalism or aversion to
| marketing or aversion to small businesses or what have
| you. Can't argue with principles, and I won't try. The
| topic though is whether there is any societal usefulness
| or not.
| jjulius wrote:
| In a thread that is broadly about giving users the choice
| in how their personal data is tracked, analyzed, and
| utilized for the sake of ads, how is my comment off-
| topic? I mean, OP posited that perhaps we're better off
| without companies whose goods rely on targeted/invasive
| advertising, you provided the perspective of someone who
| might really rely on that sort of advertising, and I
| suggested that my right to privacy should not be
| superseded by someone's "need" (though I think "desire"
| would be more apt there) to get the word out about their
| product.
|
| Privacy is incredibly useful to society, as is
| advertising I suppose, so I'm not quite sure how you can
| have a conversation about targeted advertising's societal
| usefulness without also talking about the impact it has
| to other things that are useful to society, eg privacy,
| that that advertising depends on.
| chillage wrote:
| Fair enough, it was relevant to the topic of the thread,
| albeit not my comment. Apologies
| gbear605 wrote:
| Societal usefulness is not defined in a vacuum - it's
| fundamentally based on the principles of everyone in the
| society. And judging by the people who chose not to share
| data with Facebook, society is better off without the
| targeted ads.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| What the heck is the world's best cheese grater? Some
| products are effectively "finished" and the best there is
| already exists and we don't need your new business.
|
| Traditionally, cookware and kitchenware makers targeted
| restaurant buyers. If you think you have a great product,
| go to a restaurant conference. Everyone there has publicly
| expressed an interest in what you're selling without
| requiring a global corporate panopticon.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think this covers how it's _supposed_ to work, but the
| reality is far messier and worse. In particular, the
| hypothetical cheese grater manufacturer would probably be
| have to pay Google to advertise on their own brand name
| adword so a generic competitor doesn 't steal customers
| that already _know_ about their great cheese graters. Oh,
| and about 90% of the people who see your cheese grater ads
| would be people who just bought one of your cheese graters.
| Even worse, cheesegraterreviews.com would be paid off by
| your (larger) competitors to review their cheese graters
| better and this site has much better SEO than
| forums.graterenthusiasts.com so they would list higher in
| organic cheese grater search.
|
| All of this is to say that targeted advertising for niche,
| high-quality brands is only viable (at least if you're
| targeting someone like _me_ ) in an environment where
| search isn't beshitted by SEO, Google doesn't run a
| trademark protection racket, and reviews aren't 90% noise.
| Unfortunately, that's not the world we find ourselves in.
| At this point I'm more likely to just go to the kitchen
| store and physically examine cheese graters to find one I
| like than relying on the internet.
| chillage wrote:
| You are right of course, it's not a perfect situation
| and, yes, many times may still not be able to get your
| cheese grater off the ground. My question remains though
| - if you are not allowed targeted advertising, what
| practical alternatives do you have to mass market your
| useful product?
|
| We are not looking at this from the point of view of your
| personal preference where you would rather the product
| was in a store already, but from the point of view of a
| legitimate, useful small business which does not have
| access to a store and which is trying to match their
| product to consumers.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > if you are not allowed targeted advertising, what
| practical alternatives do you have to mass market your
| useful product?
|
| Contextual advertising.
| uncomputation wrote:
| We should advertise cheese graters to people who search
| "good cheese graters" instead of trying to track people
| across the web panopticon-style and cross reference if they
| are a) moving houses b) making a cheese-based dish c)
| friends with chefs or cooks d) planning a dinner party e)
| physically located in a kitchen goods store.
| Lio wrote:
| Really what you're saying is that there's a whole ecosystem of
| businesses that depend on unavoidable surveillance.
|
| All Apple have done is allow users to say no.
|
| They haven't even stopped anyone opting into surveillance if
| they want to. It just turns out that, when given the choice,
| people don't like being snooped on.
| hollowdene wrote:
| I agree. Some businesses are addicted to Facebook and the
| data it provides, but they certainly have no right to it.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| this seems to be the main new data point that is now evident
| for all to see
|
| I mean it is sort of obvious to anybody not captured and with
| basic morals but such is the allure of greed that for ages
| people were cynically and hypocritically pretending otherwise
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| and that's ok.
| yokoprime wrote:
| > There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook
| that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years.
|
| Good riddance, what a bunch of bottom feeders.
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