> The fraud bots will keep the ecosystem running

It's like that everywhere.

Yesterday a friend of mind was revealing to me that crypto currency exchanges were pressuring them to create bots so that their coin trading volume would go up or they would be delisted.

There are bots to write comments on trip advisor and to star on amazon. Bots to follow on twitter. Bot to click on referal links and bot to farm in games.

I'm pretty sure if we all suddenly went offline, half the internet would seem to keep going as usual.

One aspect that shouldn't be lost - the implicit framing of the platforms being "under attack" by the bots is wrong - the bots are likely a net positive for the platforms - they're very much complicit with the fraud, or at least condone it. They sell views and clicks - if bots create more views and clicks, so be it. It's the advertisers who bear the cost.

Taking Facebook as an example:

Creating an account, linking Oculus Quest to it and leaving the account dormant - accounts locked en masse.

US account that logs in from Indonesian IPs, never posts anything, likes 5000 random things ranging from a shampoo to a cafe in a small Ohio town, to the new shirts of an Albanian soccer club - in Facebook's view that's a perfectly legitimate account.

The people bearing the real cost are the people trying to sell products with ads. Facebook more or less sets up the system to pass that cost along.

To be fair the cost of ads varies based on demand; advertisers wouldn't pay more than the ROI they're seeing from their ads, so the prices have the cost of ad fraud somewhat priced in?

Most marketing departments I've met don't check their ROI. They request budget, spend it on campaign, then make power points to tell the rest of the company that they were successful.

Dunno who you’ve worked with but in 2021 that’s patently false. Optimizing Facebook ad performance for ROAS is a precise science. Marketing budgets are heavily scrutinized and hard to defend precisely because of dismissive attitudes like this, so you better believe most marketers are working their tails off to measure and deliver ROI.

Maybe in the short term it works like that, but ultimately a platform's value comes from its real users. And bots make the platform less attractive to real users.

But Facebook, like most social media platforms, is addictive, so it is not obvious that in the long term a reasonable usage of them will emerge.

Lack of movement in sales after paying Facebook for advertisements will emerge, and that will certainly be noticed.

You may overestimate the sophistication of ad buyers, and underestimate the ability of Facebook to convince buyers that their ads are working

The increased ability to track the efficacy of ads is the value of the tracking that the internet enabled, hence the value of Facebook. Hampering this ability to match ads to purchases reduces the price these ads can be sold at, it is what the whole article and situation are talking about.

Movies make billions of dollars from users who don't contribute any content. As long as users consume content, who cares who makes it?

> I'm pretty sure if we all suddenly went offline, half the internet would seem to keep going as usual.

That could be a good Black Mirror like scifi movie, everyone dies but chatter and social media just keep living on.

"Did you guys see that amazing sunset last night? Check out this book to capture these amazing moments!"

"Can't wait to see the new [dystopian movie] this weekend!"

"Amazing shows to see this weekend. Download our event app to log on and find the fun!"

"The [other party] are a it again today... protests should be intense today at the capitol."

... no one there ...

I love these kinds of stories

> CGI 3D Animated Shorts : "LAST DAY OF WAR" - by Dima Fedotov https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjJmTeBSEzU

sounds a little like autofac by philip k dick[1]. there's an electric dreams episode about it, ironically streaming on amazon[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac

[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6902176/

> I'm pretty sure if we all suddenly went offline, half the internet would seem to keep going as usual.

Seems like a reasonable estimate if half the internet is porn.

There's a name for this: The Dead Internet theory[0]

It postulates that the majority of the "organic" content is actually generated by bots, and the number of human interactions online is a tiny subset. We are all wandering unknowingly through a wasteland haunted by robot ghosts.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-...

In this case at least the article implies this not to be true, one of the interviewed ceos said he used to generate 80% of his revenue from Facebook ad buys and now it’s only 20%. This would imply he’s getting his ads in front of real people.

Beep beep boop boop. I regular person, like your comment!

There are massive bot farms that watch videos, click on ads, sometimes even do a download of the app after clicking and open the app. I've sometimes thought Google could cut out the middleman and just allow creators to outright buy 'views' on YouTube. You could pay like $100 to get 10,000 additional views which would translate to some additional ad revenue, which ad companies would know is inflated so they would discount the rates appropriately and no money would need to be sent to bot farms. This would also be far greener and need less servers and bandwidth and would be an overall win-win.

It's one thing to read about the click farms, but nothing can prepare one to actually see the videos of them in action - just visceral. It has an eerie Matrix-like feeling to it.

13 sec video of a Chinese click farm (quite loud):

https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1072114511212109824

10 sec - thousands of phones (not loud):

https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1148447866366464000

And the scene from Silicon Valley

That is laughably sad. I've been depressed, but for some reason started to laugh.

This has been since what feels like forever. Once a couple of people I worked with found and penetrated one of these "click farms". We saw all the stats, the number where impressive.

I had a private contact within google's SRE team and spilled all the beans, ask where I should dump the information within google. The answer was as blunt as telling: no one would be interested since it would hurt their bottom line.

Tried to inform a couple of Googlies at different cons in the months following: as much as they liked the tricks we pulled to get in, as little did they want to bring the subject up in their teams.

Clicks are Google's Crack.

But what about the workers. It's likely that those working at the bot farms aren't wealthy, and that they're from less wealthy countries. So this is good, addressing the immediate problem of energy waste, but doesn't address the underlying problem of wealth inequality that - in general - drives people to work on systems to rip others off.

Those who run the bot farms will find other scummy work, and no end of desperate workers.

It makes sense. If that happened, who would lose in the short term?

> Of course any time someone looks into it they find that that click-rate fraud is at outrageous levels. So maybe no one needs Apple. The fraud bots will keep the ecosystem running.

Could this be why ad recommendations are so bad? Recommendation engines being trained on (mostly fraudulent) click-through rates instead of ROI?

Edit: It seems like it would be just a little more work to check both, but often incentives aren't aligned to doing the best work...

Good. And bad.

I am not sure that Apple deserves this power. What if Apple is the next evil megacorp?

For me this sounds like science fiction. Megacorps waging subtle war against each other. What's next?

> I am not sure that Apple deserves this power. What if Apple is the next evil megacorp?

Power to... present user with dialog asking whether they consent to be tracked? The horror!

Uh. Imagine presenting user with dialog asking if they want to pay 30% apple tax or they want an option to use 3rd-party app stores.

Oops, users are too dumb for that, but Apple will protect them!

Surreptitious tracking and breakout of proceed distributions are not really comparable. Does Best Buy tell you “we take a 20% cut out of every purchase you make here.” If they did, would you care? I’m not sure I would, especially if the in store experience is excellent.

Framing matters. What if instead the message was “You’re paying 30% more than the developer wants for EVERY digital good you buy on iPhone. Forever. “ and “We are the wealthiest company in the world and this portion of our business operates at a 75% profit margin but cannot protect you from fraud.”

“Opt out? Yes/No.”

you bet your ass consumers would care. ignorance is bliss.

They are presented with that. Just in real life. When they choose to buy the iPhone or something else.

But they aren't because users aren't aware of this.

If users aren't aware that for-profit companies make money and one of the ways they do that is by adding margins to the prices of items sold, I don't think Apple, Microsoft or Google are your real problems.

Wait till they learn about how shops operate!

Users aren't aware that the only way to install apps on an iPhone officially is through the App Store?

Russia asked to block Putin's rivals apps. Google and Apple complied. The only people who could side-load it were Android users. I guess that's good for Democracy, right? because Apple said so…

It totally wouldn't happen to us…

How is that relevant to the post I replied to?

All this "wAlLeD gArDeN!!!11" cries are so trite. People who want 3rd-party app stores are long gone to other platforms (me included).

My decisions to pick one platform over the other have nothing to do with something so subtle.

I kept both platforms for _years_...then in a time where I was actively looking for work, discovered that my Nexus phone and GoogleFi was sending folks to voicemail without actually ringing me through. When my phone can't phone, that's a pretty good reason to jump ship.

The processors are similar, the form-factors are similar, the OS's are at near feature parity...it's the glue that binds it all together that seems to time the scales slightly to Apple.

(Where did that SMS go? I swear, I can choose from 3 or 4 different places for it to do, and now I can't tell if it's in the SMS app, Messenger, GoogleChat...or?)

I’m a new Apple user because I was so fed up with the atrocious UX on other platforms. Yet I still expect normal freedoms.

Ok, let's not dismiss the one dialog they show as harmful just because they choose to harm their users by not showing those other two.

Why should a user care what percentage of a transaction a platform takes?

Do you ask every grocery store or 7/11 what their processing fees for the transaction are?

When Facebook does it, "consent to be tracked online". When Apple does it, "customized user experience".

I am not a fan of either company, but one sells thousand dollar phones to the global 1%, an the other provides services to 2B people, supporting infrastructure through ads.

The fact that one of these companies is considered evil and other other "the good guys who care about your data" blows my mind.

Facebook is free to continue showing ads. Apparently, it is just their tracking that is not particularly popular with the users. Maybe it is time for them to introduce paid no-tracking subscription?

As long as they are not acting illegally, I am fine with them stomping on Facebook. Our interests align here.

As far as I can tell, what Apple is doing with their privacy settings is merely what is required of data controllers (e.g. Facebook) by GDPR anyway, and as an EU resident by choice, I don’t personally see it as a huge issue for them to say “all apps must be compliant with EU law” (but then, if I did have a problem, I would not have migrated to here).

I'm sure corporations have been waging war against each other for as long as corporations have existed.

> What if Apple is the next evil megacorp?

Apple is one of the evil megacorps, this is not in question.

> What's next?

Given that apparently the thing that is in vogue now is making the universe of snow crash more real, probably a long slide into (more) corporatism.

Apple is a company that plans the obsolence of billions of expensive devices per year, wasting more CO2 and energy than almost any other company on the planet.

Why does then Apple have a Ad service?. Should they not be tracking nothing?

A company keeping records of it's own interactions with it's customers is fine, nobody is arguing against that.

The problem is companies selling customer data to each other and snooping on customer activity outside the company's own web site or app. This is what is meant by tracking and Apple doesn't do this in their ad service.

It seems like what Apple is doing is trying to cripple tracking for other ad services to make their own service more competitive.

>> ...snooping on customer activity outside the company's own web site or app. This is what is meant by tracking and Apple doesn't do this in their ad service.

I'm sure Apple is going to offer exactly that, as the conversion-rate data of an Ad into an actual purchase elsewhere is where the big Ad-money is. Apple will just do all that without handing off any data to another party, providing only the persona of an end-user to the Ad-customer.

Their dilemma is that doing this today at an "Apple-price" has limited competitive value to Advertisers. But if Apple cripples the competition to become the ONLY company able to provide such data, they suddenly become a mandatory supplier for every Ad-campaign in the world, as only Apple will be able to provide effective Ad-analytics on iOS.

>> It seems like what Apple is doing is trying to cripple tracking for other ad services to make their own service more competitive.

Exactly. Which should be a strong sign that regulation is urgently required, but somehow people still are stuck on the wrong narrative.

Legislation to ban tracking and respect customer privacy? Yes, absolutely. Discipline and integrity in this area should be the standard.

Even when that company is responsible for more than half of the mobile software installs in the US?

Amazon and Google have abused this data in the past to undercut the competition with their own better promoted offerings and make purchase decisions with data the competition just could not have access to.

Facebook doesnt sell data they sell access to demographics generated based on data.

First that's like saying a bar that gives away drinks with every bag of peanuts isn't selling alcohol. The fact that ad was only shown to a specific demographic reveals that the person clicking it is in that demographic.

But second, sure they didn't sell it, they gave it away. Facebook claims the data delivered to Cambridge Analytica wasn't sold. No, it was given away because facebook calculates that it benefits from research which improves targeting on their platform. Nobody is fooled by any of this, unless they choose to be.

> reveals that the person clicking it is in that demographic.

But you don't know who that person is [ until they create an account or give you info ]

That's how you end up with a single megacorp that does everything.

> It seems like what Apple is doing is trying to cripple tracking for other ad services to make their own service more competitive.

This is exactly what they're doing to FB and i hope FB wins a maassive anti-competative suit. I hope they still don't get to track but i hope apple is given a slap on the wrist.

They should stop advertising, they created a conflict of interest for themselves. That said, they do not track across applications: they don’t need to.

Different ad services provide different levels of targeting, based on the data that different platforms collect about consumers and what those platforms are willing to let you use for targeting.

FWIW, iAd for third-party apps was shut down. They still sells adds for Apple News and the App Store.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd

Selling search ads on the App Store kinda sucks--I wish they hadn't done that.

What ad service? App Store ads? Those are based only on the actual search term.

No they aren’t. Here https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin... have a nice read.

But summary is they use a bunch of stuff about the device (past purchases, location, fingerprinting-like data such as carrier and so on) and your usage of a bunch of apps like apple news and stocks.

If you set brand image aside and just think about the huge amounts of money at stake, it becomes obvious that the whole app tracking transparency thing is just Apple taking over the ad market on iOS. They invented the term “cross app tracking” and defined it to not include their own conversion tracking through their various apps to purchases of their advertisers’ products via Apple Pay. Then they forced their ad-sales competitors to send all their conversion data to Apple, while providing separate APIs with richer data to their own advertisers.

Beside AppStore ads, how can I buy ads from Apple for the Apple ecosystem to replace Facebook ads?

Apple is also selling app install ads in the News and Stocks apps. Tens of billions of dollars are spent on app install ads on iOS each year, so this is a very lucrative market for Apple if they can corner it (and probably necessary if they are going to achieve expected Services revenue growth in the years to come). It remains to be seen whether they’ll take another crack at the rest of the ad market, after the failure of iAd. They seem to be laying the groundwork for it.

It’s also worth mentioning that apples prompt gives no benefit to tracking. It basically just asks “Facebook wants to track you. OPT OUT, or not”. Who is going to agree to that?

If Apple gave developers a way to add a benefit or two, eg personalized experience or whatever, I bet we would see that % be much lower

There’s [essentially] no contentful benefit to any major site’s tracking any more, [almost] nothing is ‘collaboratively filtered” and “personalized” around the content and your interests, [by and large] only around ad placement performance or conversion.

The only remaining arguable benefit is that you will see “more relevant” ads, in other words, instead of seeing ads from whoever pays the most for your [well guessed] demographic, you’ll see endless “retargeted” begging for you to buy the thing you ordered last week.

The only problem with that is that tracking the end user only helps the developer not the end user.

Does Apple use the same prompt for their own services tracking? If not, why don't they?

My "allow apps to ask to track" setting defaulted to off, too. Not sure what determines that, but in my case, I never even got the option to opt-in; the dialog never comes up because apps aren't even allowed to try asking me.

I'm presumably in that 96%, but it wasn't an explicit choice. (I'd have opted-out, obviously.)

> My "allow apps to ask to track" setting defaulted to off, too.

I have an employer profile on my phone for email/internal app/etc and one of the things this does is force this setting off.

FB was toying with adding a screen before Apple's prompt: "Here's why tracking is good, actually." Wonder what happened to that.

People “want” the free content and services that this advertising has been paying for. And the actual consequences of Apple’s decision for users and small businesses that rely on efficient advertising to connect with users will take time to become clear.

The vast majority of the actual content of the internet is provided by people for free to the internet in general. Even your post right now that I disagree with, you likely didn't get paid to post.

That content on Facebook that keeps people coming back? It's not the ads or deals; What keeps people coming back is what their friends, families, and idols post. They're effectively generating content for Facebook which they are then profiting off of "for free".

The straw man argument here is that Facebook is providing the platform and that is how people are compensated for their content. It's kind of fair, but it's been wildly abused. There are competitors, but it's the lock in and invasion that has given Facebook it's value not choice.

There is no informed opt-in, discussion or debate about the value you provide to Facebook in exchange for the value they get out of you. That is the cash-cow Facebook has been milking and when given an informed choice people are now saying, "No, I'm worth more than this garbage."

I'm tearing into Facebook because that's the target of this post but that content is provided on every platform. The value is in what the users are providing not the platform. Reddit, Hacker News, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Google Everything. The content is provided by the users for free to the platforms. The marketing content is noise that people complain about and do not want.

> The value is in what the users are providing not the platform. Reddit, Hacker News, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Google Everything. The content is provided by the users for free to the platforms.

What is missing from your rant is, why would any platform exist then? Nobody is building them without expecting to profit off the mutual relationship. I never understand the POV that everything should somehow magically be provided for free. You want a BBForum, go right ahead. But every platform you listed is significantly more complex than that.

> But every platform you listed is significantly more complex than that.

I'd agree with that on the surface but those platforms you listed are basically forums with a new name! They provide very little over and above that. So, in actual fact, they're only made more complex as a result of rules added by the owners to squeeze as much data from every visitor as is legally (and illegally in some cases) allowed! So they provide nothing of value above a regular forum imo.

In reality, they are lists of submissions from end users that have been categorized, however the categorization engine happens to be algorithmically generated, rather than ordered by date. And the companies themselves are doing whatever it takes to monetize your eyeballs regardless of whether it affects your health or not! They are abusing every visitor to the maximum extent that the laws allow!

Their business model is to centralize all forums on their platform and for that there is a massive cost at that scale. That's their choice to host all forums! However to pay for that they are abusing every visitor.

Using Reddit, a single forum about Ubuntu (/r/Ubuntu) would cost around $5 a month on DO for someone to host themselves. Using something like BBForum or something similar would not require much in the way of maintenance.

The point I am making is that all this stuff existed long before the big tech platforms. It can easily exist without them too. They are not actually providing anything of any worth that couldn't easily be found elsewhere (well, used to be found elsewhere!).

> They provide very little over and above that.

For people who love BBForums (like HN tbh), everything may seem “like a forum”. But that is very reductive and uninspired.

There are various features provided by Snapchat (camera, filters, games) and FB (marketplace, messenger) that nobody would ever compare to a BBForum/Wikipedia. They are inherently complex and valuable to the majority of their users.

> There are various features provided by Snapchat (camera, filters, games) and FB (marketplace, messenger) that nobody would ever compare to a BBForum/Wikipedia.

Yeah. That's because all those features used to be separate applications, not tied to BBForum/Wikipedia engine. They're all complex, but they're also orthogonal to the platform, and their implementations are pretty much commodities.

The only value provided here is by integration with platform (particularly UX-wise). Which seems fine, except the only reason this is valuable in the first place, is because the platforms prevent everyone else from doing such integrations themselves.

There is incredible value provided by a marketplace having a forum attached to it. It provides trust and community.

> There are various features provided by Snapchat (camera, filters, games)

Of course, these are addons to the platform. But the platform is still the same fundamental application as a forum. Nothing more.

I don’t think anyone would agree that Snapchat is a forum. It’s primarily for direct (media) messages, and the company themselves considers them a camera app.

> and the company themselves considers them a camera app.

Doesn't matter what the company calls themselves, it's a forum that people upload phone pics to and those photos/images are then displayed in an algorithmic form (used to be chronological with forums)... same as a forum!

Remember, Google is an advertising company but they'd consider themselves more of an engineering or search company... doesn't mean they're right!

Edit: Forgot to ask, how do Snapchat make their money? Is it all through advertising? It's a genuine question, I don't use it and have no idea! If it's all advertising revenue then they're an advertising company like Google and Facebook!

> I don't use it and have no idea

There is no forum aspect to Snapchat. I don’t think you should be arguing about this topic, without having used it. G’day!

> Using Reddit, a single forum about Ubuntu (/r/Ubuntu) would cost around $5 a month on DO for someone to host themselves. Using something like BBForum or something similar would not require much in the way of maintenance.

For that $5 however, you're not getting DDoS and spam protection.

> The point I am making is that all this stuff existed long before the big tech platforms. It can easily exist without them too. They are not actually providing anything of any worth that couldn't easily be found elsewhere (well, used to be found elsewhere!).

There's a reason ye olde ways of communication are pretty much dead, replaced by centralized platforms... dealing with the obvious noise of hackers, script-kiddies, spammers, piracy and CSAM is the biggest IMO. As a moderator of a sub-reddit, you don't have to deal with any of that, you are free to focus on moderating content - and unlike mailing lists, usenet or classic forums the users can perform self-moderation by downvoting, further lessening your load.

Spam protection has been around for years and years. It's nothing new. Sure, Reddit may have a handful of devs dedicated to perfecting it for their platform but there are a huge number of solutions to spam and I bet many commercial and OSS ones too.

DDOS is provided by many hosting companies now for free.

Now, I'm not trying to make this out like the Dropbox post many years ago comparing it to self-hosting, nothing of the sort.

But Reddit (and other tech giants) provide very little above basic forums imo and in any case, the price is too high!

Although the point of being centralised is portrayed as a negative, that is the single largest benefit these platforms provide over forums.

Yes it is easy to make a forum and throw it on some low cost hosting, for a person skilled in IT. However FB, Reddit et al. provide a platform (heh) to any kind of group no matter the size. Nobody wants to create dozens of accounts for their local chess club, their local shop, their local pub and whatever. I can be a member of a anti Phillips screw subreddit, but wouldn’t create a forum for it.

The value of centralised identity is enormous.

> Nobody wants to create dozens of accounts for their local chess club, their local shop, their local pub and whatever.

> The value of centralised identity is enormous.

That's what OAuth is for. As usual, the technical problem has been solved but social problems remain.

Counter anecdote: the last traditional forum that I have any interaction with was so plagued by spam that they turned off registration and the new registration system is “send an email to the admin asking for an account”. Needless to say, they aren’t a growing community anymore. They also don’t use SSL because none of their admins are fluent enough to set up LetsEncrypt. Don’t forget that lots of non-technical or less-technical people like to have forums too.

Reddit’s scale provides eyeballs Facebook’s friend web provides a bunch of people you know

They aren’t really more complicated than Wikipedia, though.

Because it’s all network effects, it either needs to be a centralised walled garden (even Wikipedia fits here to certain extent) or else a federated system like email. Whether the business model that maintains a centralised system is for-profit or not is basically irrelevant. Facebook would have as much difficulty taking over wikipedia’s leadership in online encycolpedias as Wikipedia would have trying to become the dominant social network. It’s just a matter of who got there first (at least until they possibly get displaced by something else that users drift toward).

> They aren’t really more complicated than Wikipedia, though.

I’m not sure how to reply to someone that compares multimedia, feature-filled social networks to a mostly-read-only information store.

And yet you did reply, with apparent incredulity. Wikipedia is a method by which users generate, disseminate, and moderate content of a specific media type. Facebook, et al., don't innovate on the content being produced, because they do not produce it. They innovate on removing friction to the first two, or producing new methods for the third.

Yeah, they really aren't that much more complex. More complicated, I'll grant you, simply owing to the vast amount of cruft and legacy that such privacy-eating titans inherently accrue. But the actual media type is pretty irrelevant as far as I care.

> And yet you did reply, with apparent incredulity.

While you can be pedantic, I did not reply to their actual points.

> Yeah, they really aren't that much more complex.

This really reminds me of the infamous HN Dropbox comment, but worse.

The comparison to the Dropbox comment is very fair. I maintain that I paid the piper his dues; it's complicated, but not complex, and I would never dare charge that I could make an equivalent service. However, I do charge that it's extremely overblown.

> it's complicated, but not complex

These are synonyms. Please disambiguate with contextual examples, if you believe otherwise.

There are various features provided by Snapchat (camera, filters, games) and FB (marketplace, messenger) that nobody would ever compare to a BBForum/Wikipedia. They are inherently complex and valuable to the majority of their users.

> [complicated, complex] are synonyms.

I mean, sure, but you can't just swap them in and out like that - you can have something complicated which is not complex (say a knitting pattern with four colours) and something complex which is not complicated ("put this arrow into the centre of that target").

I asked for contextual examples, not random ones. Though I guess if we’re in a thread of people reducing various platforms to a BBForum/Wikipedia, it wouldn’t make any sense to them.

> I asked for contextual examples, not random ones.

I was merely pointing out that you can't toss off "complex and complicated are synonyms" as some kind of argument "gotcha".

There was no gotcha. If the commenter claims their point revolves around the difference in meaning between two synonyms, they should explain themselves better in the given context.

They aren't synonyms, though they are related concepts: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10459/what-is-th...

I admit the distinction got me at first as it is quite a subtle one but the point made by the parent commenter is valid.

I'll compare them to a BBForum/Wikipedia.

I disagree that these features are inherently valuable; in fact, I disagree that they have any value at all.

As far as I'm concerned, the basis of any media enterprise is the generation, dissemination, and moderation of content. The smallest, most well-known, prototype of an enterprise that accomplishes all three is Wikipedia. Aside from these features, anything extra is cruft.

Yes, this is overly-reductionist, weirdly neo-ludditic, and speaks past your points without paying your arguments the proper dues. We're cross-talking because we have different values; I do not value the things that you value.

The games, filters, marketplace, and messenger you mention are not features. They are deficiently complicated ways to achieve the core features of media enterprise; further, I don't think they're valuable media to deliver in the first place.

As to how I disambiguate complexity vs complicatedness, the first relates to the variety of interactions in a system while complicatedness relates to the sum total state of a system. A system with one node whose only input is its output, which outputs a TB of data to itself every second, and which stores all data it generates, is complicated. A system with two nodes, whose only inputs are each others' outputs, where one generates a byte of data every century and neither saves state, is more complex than the first but less complicated, and the converse is true.

I only consider the complicatedness vs complexity of features that _I_ deem worthwhile; if I don't consider a feature worthwhile, then all of its complexity is just cruft, which gets lumped into the less-granular metric of complicatedness.

I don't deem any of the features you mention (which differentiate FB, etc., from Wikipedia) to be worthwhile; therefore, they're all just more complicated versions of Wikipedia, without any meaningful improvements in the base complexity.

Also, how inherently complex are these features? Can you give me a best-case complexity? How are you measuring this 'inherent complexity'?

I've read through your replies to this thread. If I had your values, I'd agree heartily with you. What you say makes sense, your arguments are well-reasoned, and you present yourself well. I sincerely appreciate that you've taken the time to engage.

I hope I've confirmed the suspicion that seems to be built into your replies: our disagreement is not logical. It's entirely based on a difference in our values.

> This really reminds me of the infamous HN Dropbox comment, but worse.

Or at least the common misconception about it. See [0] for a summary of how the comment was actually mostly spot on, and even YC agreed[1]. Quoting dang, "we should see it as a successful conversation with a graceful ending, rather than mocking someone for not knowing the future".

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275

[1] - "When YC funded Dropbox, it was because they believed in Drew, not file synchronization"

No, I disagree. Similar to that infamous comment, the person above was reducing multiple full featured social media platforms to BBForums. While the context and outcome night be different, the gist is still the same.

Last I checked Wikimedia was primarily funded by big donors, with Google.org being one of them (and my understanding is that this is not a google donation matching program, but a direct contribution) https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/don...

Wikimedia Foundation is funded primarily by small donations (<$100), during its fundraising campaign once a year. You're linking to a page that names donors who contributed $1000+.

Notice that Wikimedia Foundation has little to no influence over the content or community that runs Wikimedia sites. The money is primarily used for running the infrastructure, developing the software, paying the staff (a large percentage of which is spent on tech and legal), and organizing community events.

disclosure: I worked for Wikimedia during the earlier years.

Those are donors who have given over $1k. AIUI the vast majority of the wikimedia's money comes from small individual donations

Is that purely a donation or is that payment to continue using Wikipedia contents in their search result cards and IOT devices?

No, not in regards to Google.org in the 2018 financials I linked (it’s at least not an official quid pro quo).

They have since asked for some compensation it looks like: https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tec...

People are not expecting everything to be free at all. But they're making the point that if you are advertising something as 'free' when you're actually paying through the nose by having every piece of personal data extracted and sold to the highest bidder, it should not be advertised as 'free'. Becuase it isn't.

Make it free, or make it paid, or if you really must use the data harvesting model then at the very least make it very clear that it is not free because you are paying via a different means.

Indeed. They are giving trinkets to the natives for their land. Maybe we need to educate the natives on how valuable their land actually is.

How are you paying through the nose? i never click on ads so every ad service ive used for the last twenty years really has been free.

Did you just stop reading the comment at that phrase? You are paying through the data collected, regardless of whether you engage with the adverts or not.

What are you paying though. Can anyone explain the consequences to me?

> What is missing from your rant is, why would any platform exist then? Nobody is building them without expecting to profit off the mutual relationship.

Plenty of smaller platforms exist for reasons other than profit (e.g. altruism, or desire for feeling important). But for-profit platforms are fine too! Mutually beneficial relationships are a good thing.

But we're talking about Facebook, et al. here - advertising-based platforms. They way they're making profit off the relationship is not through mutually beneficial exchange of value. The platforms instead are abusing their position of power in the relationship to pull the users in, keep them glued, and expose to maximum amount of advertising. This is not a case "here's an ad box because we have some server costs to cover, you know". These platforms are thoroughly optimized to maximize ad revenue. Every feature they just "can't seem to get right", every weird UX blunder, every feature that's obvious but missing for unexplained reasons[0] - all that are not mistakes, but decisions to give you a shitty product in order to make you more exploitable[1].

Or, in short: as a user, your actual relationship with big social media platforms is the same as between a cow and a farm. Cows are there to be milked, and make more cows for milking. They're not the ones who get to say how the farm is run.

> I never understand the POV that everything should somehow magically be provided for free.

Right? They have costs, after all. But you're looking at the wrong people. This expectations wasn't created by regular people - it was created by companies who figured they can do the ultimate undercut of their competition by offering their product for free, and make money through a side channel. Since most people are extremely price sensitive, nobody can compete on price with $0 - so the model stuck, and it's because of this that people expect everything on the Internet to be free.

> But every platform you listed is significantly more complex than that.

That's mostly because they have more money than they know what to do with, and are competing against other platforms with similar amount of spending cash. Most of that complexity goes to supporting the advertising aspects of the platform and the dark patterns that keep the users in their pens.

I mean, modern factory farms are significantly more complex than the stereotypical family farm of centuries past - but as a cow, you probably don't want to experience that complexity.

--

[0] - E.g. sorting your feed by date, or searching posts by date, or a "dislike" button, or ...

[1] - One interesting facet of attention economy is that it seeks to make every task as inefficient as possible - because money is being made on friction. The longer it takes you to do a thing, the longer you can be exposed to advertising. The more frustrated you are, the more susceptible you are to that advertising.

> why would any platform exist then?

If your users are unwilling to pay for the service, then perhaps the value it provides is zero and it shouldn't exist.

What's missing from his rant is the inclusion of wikipedia, showing that platforms can exist without an expectation of profit. What's more, I'm not entirely convinced, we as a society would be worse off without most of the above.

There’s plenty of room between the current vig (0%) and profits.

Which is how I’ve come around to blockchains for social. Not just for equity, but trust: you can see the governance contracts / how equitable / how easy to change the deal is.

> Which is how I’ve come around to blockchains for social.

I’m speechless. If you’re actually serious, could you give some examples of the social networking apps/features you are using via the blockchain?

There's a ton of small DAOs, I don't think anyone has scaled up yet. But given you're speechless, hard to assume you're even open to the idea.

I’ve never heard anyone describe a DAO as a social network. Could you explain what that means in relation to more commonly known social networks (FB, Reddit, HN)?

There are many, but the best are smaller for now. Many feel a bit more akin to the early web, on purpose.

- https://www.fwb.help

- https://mirror.xyz

I never understand why crypt enthusiasts can’t explain their crypto applications? Everything is DYOR and links to landing pages or white papers.

I agree on this point more generally in the space, but for DAO's a bit different. Clubs are social and often designed to have a barrier to entry, this mirrors the real world. Small communities are higher quality, so this is rational.

> The vast majority of the actual content of the internet is provided by people for free to the internet in general.

That maybe provided for free. However the hosting infrastructure is paid typically by advertising.

This is absolutely true. Someone needs to pay for the development and infrastructure. Even if open source, real people and machines need to exist for actual value.

NB: I vouched for your comment - not sure why people flagged it.

Idk I find myself scrolling on Instagram and being more interested in the ads they show then some of the content I see. People want to see ads for cool things, there’s a reason places like Pinterest are big.

I honestly cannot fathom this opinion. I literally cannot think of a single instance where I've ever seen an ad and thought "Yes, I'm glad that I'm seeing this instead of the content I came here for." If that's true, why bother even going on Instagram at all?

I'll admit that I don't use Pinterest, but from what I understand, it's main feature is being a place for user-curated image collections, yes? That's very different than algorithmically distributed, paid-for ads.

Well, if ads were never relevant, people would never click them and purchase the products they link to, and CPMs would be $0. The vast majority of people I know either run an ad blocker or don’t click ads - but a lot of people do, especially if the ad provides some discount on an item they viewed last week. I even got a free Nest Mini one time from clicking an official Google store ad.

On Instagram the content itself resembles ads. It's not hard for me to imagine that an ad for something you could actually buy might be more interesting than an ad for some dork's fake online persona you can buy into.

We can't know what the Web would look like without spying, data-moated giants wandering the landscape, making everything "free". The thing about a "free" spying service is that it competes with paid services and with actually-free ones. There's a reason open protocols have stagnated over the last couple decades—it's less rewarding to work on and promote a free, open social network based Email + a hypercharged, dynamic, living and evolving RSS (or whatever, maybe Mastadon, who knows) when the competition is Facebook and Twitter, and they're both "free" and the teams you're competing with are funded at eight, nine, or even ten figures.

And let's not forget that every time some promising alternative appears Facebook either fast follows (i.e. plagiarizes) it, or buys it and buries it in a hole somewhere.

This. That's the problem. It's not just one company unfairly being screwed by Apple. They've lied about everything else.

Has Facebook ever done this to an alternative that wasn’t just ‘Facebook 2’, ie. it would have solved the problems and grievances people here have with the Facebook platform?

Hard to say, as many of the industry’s more famous acquisitions/destructions were before any effective attempts to monetise.

I think there's a possibility it would resemble similar industries like mobile services - you would subscribe to a social media service provider of your choice and you'd use their service which is interoperable with other social media service providers. They could sell different monthly plans with some amount of allowed photo/video uploads, messages, etc. To us it might sound strange now, but it would feel entirely normal to people in a world who never experienced free services powered by spying. Not sure if that would be better or worse than what we have now.

That’s almost exactly how Usenet worked back when I was a kid.

That's one way to look at it, and it's easy to see that conclusion. Nobody wants to pay for anything they don't have to, so it is a fair conclusion.

However, it could also be that people are sick and tired of having all of the data collected with no control over how it is used. It could be initially used for one thing, but then re-accessed later when something new the data is determined useful. It could even be used by a different company than what originally collected it.

When asked in a manner that makes it obvious it is tracking, people clearly are saying no. When phrased in a manner like 'allow us to offer you deals', as it has been in the past, it is less obvious and people have just shrugged their shoulders and said "whatevs just stop bugging me".

That’s a good observation but it remains that no amount of hosts are going to foot the bill of a billion Facebook users without some serious societal shift to people realizing they can ‘say no to tracking’ if they give up real dollars.

Taking advantage of humanity's cognitive bias towards seeking free & convenient services while ignoring the fine print or the long term consequences is still exploitation.

Frankly, hidden externalities should be illegal.

>Frankly, hidden externalities should be illegal.

I'd love to see how the lawyers would phrase that one.

It’s an externality, but certainly not hidden.

But that bullshit of course. Advertising has existed for hundreds of years in different forms, and it also existed in the Internet, without the planet-scale tracking and spying networks the tech giants have now set up.

Nobody was complaining or refusing to use advertising to their benefit pre-internet, so why wouldn't the same non-privacy-destroying methods work just as well as previously?

Advertisers already settle for non-targeted ads when they need to, ie. the contextual App Store ads pre-iOS 15 (15 or maybe 14.x added personalized ads based on location).

But advertisers will always go to the ad exchange that promises more conversions, and website owners will partner with the ad exchange that promises the highest payout. If you can achieve the highest of both without tracking, I can guarantee you advertisers and web admins will jump ship and swim to your ad exchange.

Well, the advertisers that have no morals will, naturally. That's why setting up these global spying networks should be made illegal. Or, like what TFA is about, why other parts of the modern technology stack providers should be making a stand that those advertisers are going much too far with much too little upsides.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for advertising as a business model and it's awesome how advertising on the web has allowed at least some of the content creators on the web to monetize their valuable work. But I'm strongly against the idea that anything in that equation actually depends on the global spy network of the advertisers.

People don’t “want” the free content at the cost of privacy infringing surveillance and toxic behavior manipulation.

These companies need to find a better business model, otherwise they are about to go the way of the dodo.

I'm honestly not sure we've proven that. All this experiment shows is 96% of people want something for free (without ads) and 4% of people feel bad about taking something for free.

I don't want the tracking either, but not badly enough to stop using the free services I get.

I think most people probably actually feel this way, but I don't have data to back my assertion.

96% of people want something for free, sure; but these are iPhone users, so they’ve already paid extra money for a premium product.

At the moment you can't really pay for Facebook. A fair experiment would be for FB to launch a premium version with no ads/spying for a monthly fee equivalent to their average revenue per user in that country and see how many people sign up.

The problem with that is that the premium users then become a more valuable ad target, and the free users less valuable. So you have to charge even more making them even more valuable. Eventually you reach some equilibrium. But by this point the premium users are such an attractive ad target that the platform eventually starts sneaking in an occasional ad, and then more frequently etc…

Cable TV used to be ad free when it started out.

HBO is probably the best counterexample, but if you look at what they’re doing with HBO max, even they might not be able to resist forever.

In my opinion regulation should be implemented to explicitly forbid using someone's willingness to pay to raise prices but that's besides the point here - my point is that until Facebook offers a paid version at a reasonable price (and I think current average revenue per user would be reasonable) it would be misleading to say that people have chosen and prefer free with ads/spying over paid when the paid option simply doesn't exist.

No,they want content that advertising paid for and are totalky fine with advertising. They just don't want surveillance or "efficiency" as you call it.

So what changes? Currently you can buy ads and you can buy surveillance, which costs about 3x as much. If surveillance stops being an option, there is no reason to believe prices for ads won't change. However, even if they didn't the only thing that would happen is that ads replace surveillance and the number and size of ads might change a bit. The end. Why is this a big deal to you?

> People “want” the free content and services that this advertising has been paying for.

Eventually people pay for advertising.

First, we pay with our data, and then we pay for the ads too (in the form of more expensive products). We pay twice!

And people don't want these services as most are perfectly fine without them.

Is the data valuable without ads to monetize it?

Anecdotal, but I am people so I think it’s fair. I never went back to “free” tv after Switching over to Netflix and Hulu.

I was quite shocked to learn that when US cable tv was a new thing, one of its advertising thrusts was that there were no ads.

Not being in the US, I don't know what the situation is precisely. But I do know that a "1 hour" tv show is over after 42 minutes... apparently, cable went from almost no ads to 1/3rd ads.

I moderate my long-term expectations for streaming accordingly.

Depends on the channel too. I was visiting the US and tried to watch history channel show. The ads made it unwatchable; there where literally a break in the ads to show what was coming up on the show I had been watching for 20 min before going back to ads. Felt like they where saying: “ don’t forget you where watching this”. Never going to watch cable without a dvr again (still annoying but better).

Facebook makes $9.5B in profits per quarter.

I think it's safe to say their ads are doing A LOT more than just paying for the service.

> People “want” the free content and services that this advertising has been paying for. And the actual consequences of Apple’s decision for users and small businesses that rely on efficient advertising to connect with users will take time to become clear.

You are being downvoted, but I agree in principle. This is why I have multi-tier privacy protections (NextDNS, uBlock Origin, etc.) but subscribe to services that offer paid subscription (YouTube, several news sites, etc.). Unfortunately, FB doesn't give users that choice.

Yeah. But HN audience are people with good disposable income. So its say for them to say pay for it.

Apple have not stopped advertising or user tracking.

They’ve just made apps behave in an upfront honest way by letting the user know about it and giving the user the option to stop it.

Nobody is banning advertising. They're letting people opt out of tracking advertisements/data brokering.

Just stick with content ads.

You mean... they might need to charge money in exchange for goods and/or services?

How capitalistically gauche!

Good. This will just accelerate the shift to crypto, where I can pay per page or per click, just tiny amount at a time.

$0.15 for the page and $50.00 for the gas fee.

Twitter has announced support for lightning. Why would anyone use eth when streamable money in isolated payment channels on top of the most secure monetary network in the world exists, is beyond me.

Because rollups exist on Ethereum that are cheap and are far more suited to end user self-custody then lightning ever can be. At the moment zk-rollups are roughly 100x cheaper then mainnet, don't require the user to run a node to self custody, and the user can force a withdrawal to mainnet even if the roll-up operator completely dies.

Right, you’re only missing one important detail:

> on top of the most secure monetary network

Because eth is a circus: major cult of personality issues, major scalability issues, monetary policy is all over the place, changed at a whim of god knows who or in reaction to past shortsightedness and a planned transition away from the one thing that keeps at least some semblance of stability - PoW towards even less politically stable rich-get-richer PoS, being sold as scalability solution without having anything to do with scalability at all.

It’s a joke.

The problem is twofold:

1. I want to look around and find what is useful for me. I'm not willing to spend very much money per unit of information, because I'm sifting through a bunch of crap.

2. For stuff that is valuable, I'm willing to pay, but I can't tell if something is valuable until I look at it in its totality.

I've been holding out hope for at least 15 years that Apple would find a way to make micropayments work for news. I pay for a few subscriptions, but I'd happily pay a little bit for news items I read elsewhere.

"shift to crypto" mmm that seems unlikely

Did people "want" a thousand dollar phone?

People are dumb as hell. Most people just do, say and think what the people around them do, say and think.

Information asymmetry within the chimp troupe is at all time highs and those who have info exploit those who dont. Fact of life.

> Hell, US intelligence agencies block ads at the network level because the ad industry is so infested with tracking/malware/spyware/exploits/etc. That’s a hell of an indictment.

I think this just means that they have a different threat profile than I do, and they take it seriously. There is a chance that an ad could attempt to attack me, but I am not likely to be targeted. If I thought state level attacks were going to target me specifically I would do a bunch of things differently, but it is not currently worth the effort.

The two times I ever got a virus was both from an advert exploiting flash, the threat is real.

I think its not about attacks as much as its about information gathering. There is value in knowing what the US Gov is searching for, visiting, from where, and when. The potential for attacks is just an added bonus. The problem is the tracking.

I suspect US Intel staff who browse fear being identified, tracked, and their interests monitored more than they fear being attacked. The host from which they browse should be free of any sensitive data and easily disposable if hacked.

And the other 4% tapped the wrong button by mistake...

I can tell you marketers are freaking out. And it’s delicious to watch.

appol will seve you its own ads and spyware now!!