Re:Apple's Power Move to Kneecap Facebook Advertising Is Wor...
by TeMPOraL on Friday September 24, 2021 @03:43AM
(#28639647)
> 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.
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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.
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.