It's standard go to strategy once you control the supply chain.

Maybe it should be called Walmart strategy because it was perfected by them. First they propose a deal. You get access to the massive Walmart supply channel for this good deal. Sales volumes and profits soar. Half year later Walmart buyers negotiate price little lower, then lower still. You must lower the quality of the brand little to make it. And it goes on and on. Finally it becomes almost impossible to separate from Walmart because finding another supply channel for the bulk you end up making is next to impossible. Walmart never stops squeezing once it has you.

For more info on this strategy, see this study of Walmart's squeeze of Vlasic (pickles).

https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know

How is this a Walmart problem though? This is a totally natural result of free-market competition. When two competing pizza restaurants can no longer squeeze a lower price by reducing quality or working staff harder, they move the production offshore to countries with lower costs (usually looks like slavery). If we want to stop this natural phenomenon we would need new trade agreements to provide a financial incentive to keep the production within USA. I'm not a fan of Walmart but this is not at all a fair criticism of their business practices.

Human society's categorization of Capitalism as "natural" is probably the reason most responsible for keeping us back from a better world. When you do that, greed is no longer considered a vice but a virtue.

Are you implying that communism is the way forward? I think a lot of murdered people would like to have a word with you, but that wasn't real communism right?

If not, please explain your "way forward" that solves the problems that capitalism doesn't while still retaining the same incentives that appeal to basic human psychology. I'm sincerely interested.

This is an unnecessary strawman. Additionally, any political/economic system is going to have its fair share of blood on its hands. Capitalism included.

I think the person you replied to was opting for evaluating these and other systems in a different light. Judging by your extreme overreaction, I think you missed this important point.

Edit to add: Also, as feedback, the degree of sincerity you claim to have of your interest is undermined by the rest of your response. It would not surprise me if no one took the risk to have a more productive conversation, so please do not take silence as validation.

Capitalism isn't a package deal. There's plenty you can do to rein it in, without awakening the spirit of Comrade Stalin.

It's not Walmart's problem, it's market failure and problem for others.

Natural result of free-market competition is sometimes market failure.

The natural result of free-market competition is the ultimately the sale of the market.

Usually piece by piece, as we are seeing here, and in congress.

It's a monopoly or concentration of power problem, not a problem with capitalism per se.

It's not a monopoly though, this is simply the inevitable conclusion to any price competition: suppliers will be pressed to cut costs in ways that lose American jobs. Having a minimum wage means other countries can undercut our labor and pass some of the savings on to the retailers, who then compete more efficiently vs those who do not put pressure on suppliers. There are many legitimate reasons to criticize Walmart, this one is not one of those.

> But I figure everyone knew this about 5 years ago if not earlier.

This is something that keep surprising me. This year we had stories after stories against facebook. But nothing unexpected. Only about things we said again and again would happen, for years. We wrote about it. We discussed about it with friends.

But apparently, being loud and clear about something very obvious is not enough. When things are too good to be true, people will want to keep believing it is. All you have to do to keep the frogs in is to raise the temperature slowly enough so that there is no outrage.

I hate that frog analogy. People always use it as shorthand for "small changes over time go unnoticed" but in the actual experiment, the frogs were basically lobotomized.

So how are we lobotomized? One sort of answer would be how people are convinced that their data is not important. They are convinced of this while Google and Facebook mine it to no end and the NSA stores pretty much everything you do in Utah. So maybe you don't think it's important, but Some very big players who have a lot more money and knowledge sure do.

> One sort of answer would be how people are convinced that their data is not important.

When I'm wandering through my yard watering plants, I like to imagine a world where our personal data, or more precisely access to it, is treated more like mineral rights today.

Companies would be required to pay a small micro-payment royalty anytime your data was used to make them money, and you would be able to transfer/split the rights just as you could mineral rights today. This micro-payment world would supplant the current "your data is the price of admission" world we live in.

We do not live in a "your data is the price of admission" world. We live in a "your data is extra gravy we monetize for free because in small quantities it is useless to you but in aggregate it has value so we will extract that value even if you've already paid for the product and legally own it"

With people, I'd say it works like this: you tolerate ever increasing temperature, because escaping it would require you to jump out of the pot and traverse the sea of flames surrounding it, to reach a safe spot. You look around, see the hellscape of roaring fire, and decide that maybe the pot is relatively better place for you.

It's the usual way incentives work. You may or may not have realized this will keep happening, but it doesn't matter either way. At every stage of the process you're presented with a choice - do business with Facebook, or not. And every time, the deal is beneficial to you short-term. In a competitive environment, you usually cannot afford not to take that deal.

>"Facebook is like a game where the difficulty rises after you've had a taste of success. And by difficulty I mean you have to pay to reach your previously levels of success"

Your analogy would sound better, and imo, reflect reality more if you swapped out 'game' for 'drug'.

That is to say, Facebook is like a drug (like heroin), the more you use it the more you have to pay to get the same level of high. Don't become dependent on the freebies because that's how the dealers get you hooked.

Except that doesn't work as an analogy because the end-users are not the ones paying.

It does work as an analogy, because the difference between heroin, and a useful product is that heroin doesn't make your life better. Becoming addicted to heroin means that not using it makes your life worse then using it, even if the net value add is negative.

I often feel the same way about Facebook. I stay on because the cost of disconnecting is too high, not because its particular implementation of 'A social network' for what I pay for it (Time and ad spam) is a net gain.

Sure, but thats not the only reason why the analogy doesn't work. The heroin analogy is B2C. The Facebook discussion is B2B.

Utilising that reasoning the game analogy fails also

I wasn't alluding to cost as in money, though I do agree with others here that you're paying one way or another.

In relation to Facebook user I was alluding to addiction and the way you pay for that addiction.

Yes, but the discussion is about service providers using Facebook's platform, not Facebook's end users.

That's true but you are, hence so was I when replying to you.

I was not, actually. That's why I said it was a bad analogy.

Oh I must have been confused when you said "end-users". But either way I think my analogy stands.

Drugs are not always paid with money. Services like facebook neither.

But maybe drugs is a bit overkill.

Like sugar maybe ?

They are paying with their data and attention to advertisements

I don’t know - how many posts is an individual meant to consume in a day?

X friends + Y followed pages x Z average posts per day.

What’s the baseline X for an average user, 100? 300? What about Y pages liked / followed, another hundred?

Plus if like half the feed is “A friend liked this post: “ you have even more content to consume that you didn’t even sign up for directly.

>> X friends + Y followed pages x Z average posts per day.

Not sure how it works for you, but facebook feed dropped in quality about 9mo ago for me -- Without any change from my side, I usually only see "Close Friends" posts plus significant posts (high likes, live events) from all friends. I also see lots of repeats of posts I already saw earlier in the day or previous days.

At first I thought, perhaps my friends have blocked me, but no -- I can see their posts if I search for them. Then I thought, perhaps you have to be mutual "Close" but even that was a no -- because I actually verified with others.

All I can guess is i'm on the wrong side of some A/B test where you see the same old stuff and keep coming back hoping to see more. Except in my case, i've just stopped using it...not enough to look at on the "infinite" scroll.

So for me it is more like X friends (* 0.05) + Y followed pages x Z average posts per day. I wish i could reset it somehow back to 2015 functionality.

I think I noticed the same change in my feed as well, but it's part of a lot of small changes over the past few years that have in general reduced the enjoyment I got from FB to the point where I deleted the apps from my phones and quit using it entirely. I've kept my account active because it's useful for getting in contact with people when I need to, but I never look at FB anymore without a very specific reason for doing so, and I leave as soon as I'm done.

I'm the same, I almost never see anything new in timeline except 2 or 3 people, some who I don't even care about.

yeah wow, it's almost like if FB let you store and categorize things in a chronologically ordered list, and filter posts based on customizable preferences, people might be able to manage their feed GASP...

themselves!

But then how would they know about all the highest-ranked paid/sponsored/promoted posts from Facebook's closest friends?

At least with games like Farmville, they did it because there was a huge backlash from users who were sick and tired of their friends spamming them with game invites and cluttering up their news feeds with game updates.

Facebook did the right thing.