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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
Of course, these are addons to the platform. But the platform is still the same fundamental application as a forum. Nothing more.
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!
There is no forum aspect to Snapchat. I don’t think you should be arguing about this topic, without having used it. G’day!
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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).
I’m not sure how to reply to someone that compares multimedia, feature-filled social networks to a mostly-read-only information store.
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.
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.
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.
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 was merely pointing out that you can't toss off "complex and complicated are synonyms" as some kind of argument "gotcha".
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 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.
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".
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[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
[1] - "When YC funded Dropbox, it was because they believed in Drew, not file synchronization"
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.
They have since asked for some compensation it looks like: https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tec...
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.
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.
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[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.
If your users are unwilling to pay for the service, then perhaps the value it provides is zero and it shouldn't exist.
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.
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?
That maybe provided for free. However the hosting infrastructure is paid typically by advertising.
NB: I vouched for your comment - not sure why people flagged it.
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.
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".
Frankly, hidden externalities should be illegal.
I'd love to see how the lawyers would phrase that one.
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?
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.
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.
These companies need to find a better business model, otherwise they are about to go the way of the dodo.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I think it's safe to say their ads are doing A LOT more than just paying for the service.
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.
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.
Just stick with content ads.
How capitalistically gauche!
> 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.
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.
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.