And where do you stop? Are all doctors working for big pharma related to opioid crisis complicit? what about people working for firms related to the financial crisis? engineers working for any company that suffered data breaches due to lax data security? what about engineers working for companies that haven't suffered data breaches yet but might have lax security? scientists working to certain biotech firms related to GM? engineers working for car manufacturers that cheated emission norms? engineers working for telecom/internet service providers that cheat users by throttling/net neutrality etc. etc. etc.
If any Facebook engineer suddenly acquired some moral sense, he should spend his time working to sabotage the company from within. Some have walked away; others have walked away and publicly spoken about facebook’s dubious culture.
Now it’s time to see some sabotage.
The problem with whistleblowing is that the consequences need to be more direct and actually leave a dent. As it is right now, FB can absorb pretty much any fines they're hit with.
I consider all of the energy being spent in the maintenance of facebook to be malicious. If a datacenter caved in because of a structural flaw in the building, then that’s a lot less energy going into supporting facebook. How many datacenters would have to cave in before they wouldn’t be able to recover?
https://www.businessinsider.com/cia-manual-sabotage-producti...
Last time I checked, Facebook did not offer free personal and company e-mail and collaborative office suite.
No-one is forced to give all their info to fb. Better yet, no one is forced to use fb.. Of your using these services, and you give all your info to them, that's on you, not engineers just earning a check.
You are absolutely right this calls for nanny state involvement. This is precisely a case where the invisible hand of capitalism is impotent and government regulation is essential.
The only type of ad that makes sense to me at all is one that educates someone about a class of problem and that there's at least one product (X) that can be used to solve this problem.
In many cases it would make more sense to focus these efforts on making stores more effective at presenting solutions and grouping related solutions in expected areas to improve the search effectiveness of independent agents that have black box algorithms and are outside of the store's control.
Attempting to modify said black boxes by an inundation of annoyances is ethnically wrong to me. (As implied above, when it ceases being educational it's increasingly likely to cross that line, particularly if the campaign is based on gimmicks or repetition to be effective in vulnerable population segments.)
https://adage.com/article/digital/p-g-decided-facebook-ad-ta...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2012/05/15/gm-says-...
- not all people buying FB ads are experienced marketers
- companies throw tons of money at ineffective ads, that should be obvious…
- we have no idea what the ratio of "successful" to unsuccessful campaigns is
- even if that ratio is negative, Facebook is still one of the only remaining "games" in town, so people _will_ continue throwing money at it. “Least worst” is a fine and lucrative place to be in.
- can we just get over this idea of rational economies, by the way
- marketing is less of a science than a craft, and all the implications thereof
If you want to see how things work, start a small ad campaign yourself of FB. It's all about ROI, attribution, cost per action, super detailed targeting, etc. It's the opposite of "throwing money at it hoping that it'll work", unlike offline advertising or even traditional display ads.
"Sniper Targeting on Facebook: How to Target ONE specific person with super targeted ads" https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebo...
This is key and undermines a lot of rational arguments. People buying ads aren't reading HN and then making a buying decision based on the general vibe they get there. They'll buy based on budget. Budget is based on decisions made in a meeting a year or two before. Those decisions will be based on a strategy. For many that strategy is to the tune of 'I keep hearing about this social media thing that's supposed to be the future. I notice we aren't spending anything in digital. We need to buy more digital'.
If public opinion sours on Facebook it may be a while before we see a significant drop in revenues.
- marketing companies they ask to run Facebook campaigns for you may be as clueless as they are
Source: I used to work for one (we had separate development and social media marketing departments). People doing marketing had no clue about statistics, they just shoved random whale graphs from Facebook's fanpage panel into a word document and wrote narratives that suggested everything is peachy. Customers read those reports, and since they had no way or skill of reevaluating the results on their end, they were happy and willing to pay. I'm not even assuming malicious intent on the part of the provider - just general cluelessness.
I'm increasingly convinced a lot of marketing on the Internet looks that way. Neither party understands the real meaning of the results, but as long as the buyer is happy, money keeps flowing.
When we advertise to raise money (for politicians) that provides a direct provable ROI and I can tell you nothing else has come close. Seems that is true for many corporations as well just look at FBs growing revenue. FB provides the tools to measure either a sale or the value of an app install over time the increased spend is proof of quality/value so clearly many others have also found success. I wonder who/what/how your campaigns didn't provide value?
Also, FB MAUs and DAUs are stalled [2], meaning users are becoming less interested in the blue website.
If anything, FB is closer to a 'boiling point' now than ever in the past.
[1] https://www.ispot.tv/ad/wUQP/facebook-a-little-closer
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-maus-daus-stalled-u...
The MAUs and DAUs are more interesting, especially since younger people seem to be avoiding it entirely (although many are flocking to IG, so again, no loss for FB).
I am not surprised. If you let Google autocomplete the search "is facebook o" for you, you'll find these autocomplete results in order:
1. is facebook owned by google
2. is facebook on roku
3. is facebook over
4. is facebook offline
5. is facebook overvalued
...
10. is facebook on its way out
— Facebook copied Snapchat's functionality on all their platforms.
— Instagram and Whatsapp copied it too.
— Yeah, that's what I meant by all their platforms.
— They're owned by Facebook?
She uses Instagram and Whatsapp everyday!
Which is the reaction most people will have, I'm guessing.
There definitely was a big difference between MySpace and the other social networks. Facebook ran well and worked. People forget the total shit show MySpace was in the middle of 2008. The site ran terribly, was getting hammered by spammers, and they starting covering it in banner ads. We didn't see a repeat of those problems with Instagram or Snapchat.
There is a coolness factor. It isn't as defined as fashion, or the latest hot nightclub, but it is there. That alone won't be enough to make the "next" Facebook, but I think it is the foot that gets stuck in the door.
Facebook might be able to acquire the next challenger in the US, but they will definitely fail to get it by EU regulators.
Nevertheless, your larger point holds, Facebook users are even less cool now than they were before.
Networks are driven by positive feedback both going up and down. This sounds good, but isn't: the system and balance points are inherently unstable. Nothing succeeds like success, or fails like failure.
But it does mean that an even somewhat diligent antitrust enforcement could strangle them to death. They shouldn't be allowed to acquire their future competitors. If the US won't stop them, maybe European regulators can?
What I mean is that we are comparing two different beasts, so I'm not sure "it happened to MySpace" is a good telltale sign of what will eventually happen to Facebook.
I've seen this a lot more in countries where internet access wasn't too common until the past 5-10 years and people didn't start out with a less centralized web before apps and closed networks gained popularity.
My partner isn't from the US originally and when I mention how obnoxious it is that Facebook is like the new AOL and I thought we were past this, she reminds me that it's all anyone back home uses for anything and they didn't have internet access back then.
To her and her friends/family back home, the internet basically is Facebook (and occasionally being forced to open their browser app to search for something if they don't just ask around on Facebook). A handful of other apps and defaults define the internet for them and anything else just sounds like too much hassle.
I suspect Facebook knows this and will keep acquiring new platforms when they can.
I take everything Facebook has done that caused any level of public outcry as a guide book to design a better platform, likewise with Google. And I won't dive into the history or foundation of Facebook, however it's not surprising their path would lead to problems - and at indirect cost to society.
I would much rather see industries self-regulate. But I have big concerns about industries where people are mainly the product, not the customer. I think it breaks the key feedback loop that makes most self-regulation work: irritable users/customers.
For me America's best backup to irritable customers has always been class action suits. It allows aggrieved customers to band together and force accountability where otherwise individual harm would be too small to justify the costs of a lawsuit. But mandatory arbitration is breaking that too, and anyway doesn't work as well when users aren't customers.
So if we don't have user-fueled self-regulation, and we don't have class action, then I'm not sure what we can do short of government regulation. It's a last resort for me, but nothing else seems to have worked on Facebook.
This is always the case when the general populace are not customers but products. It cannot not be the case.
What are 2FA numbers in the context of ads?
The problem is Facebook is allowed to buy rising competitors on its way down, thus prolonging its monopoly in the social media space.
A good real world example is Disney. Disney has been almost broke a few times over its lifetime, yet currently it's so huge that people believe it will never fail again.
Facebook have so much money in the bank, that the moment their primary model is no longer viable, they'll just go to market and buy up the next hot thing, and switch their focus there. They are like an unstoppable pandemic virus in this aspect.
In dystopian sci-fi novels and films, there is commonly the concept of 'The Company' who see-all, and control-all. It used to be that we'd predict it would be IBM, or Microsoft who would be 'The Company', more recently we'd say it would be Google. Currently however, it's more likely to be Facebook.
This is exactly why we shouldn’t worry about it. The company that we think is going to rule the world forever changes every ten years.
But none of it is actually slowing FB down. Its biggest dip in value came from decelerating growth and spending to make FB more user-friendly, so there's a clear disconnect between shareholder incentives and those of the general populace.
On top of that, most people remain unaware that FB owns both WhatsApp and IG, and while the departures of their top brass have made waves in these circles, it's not a concern for most.
I don't see FB's dominance relenting any time soon, though I wish it would.