[Sophie Zhang] joined Facebook in 2018 after the financial strain of living on part-time contract work in the Bay Area had worn her down. When she received Facebook’s offer, she was upfront with her recruiter: she didn’t think the company was making the world better, but she would join to help fix it.
“They told me, ‘You’d be surprised how many people at Facebook say that,’” she remembers.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/29/1030260/facebook...
Back in the 2000s before the financial crisis it was popular to portray the young as nauseating money grubbers who just wanted to get a job in banking. That wasn't great either, but I would rather honest greedheads rather than greedheads who lie to themselves and others about what they're doing with their lives.
Facebook will do as little as possible to benefit users, min/maxing as close to the breaking point as they can without going over the line.
Lot of things can be done. Look at what happened to Rockefeller.
I truly think it could move away from that model by innovating ?
Disclaimer: I don't like FB, work there, I don't use it personally, I do use Instagram though.
Sure there is: advertising. It's the root cause of nearly all evils in the internet today. Facebook itself is merely a symptom of the advertiser problem. The web and the internet will never be fixed until we get rid of the advertisers. Either we ban advertising or we spread ad blocking technology far and wide.
If ad blocking becomes pervasive then there will be more efforts to evade blocks, starting with technically ( operationally difficult) solutions like hosting ads first party etc.
There is simply too much money today in it for the industry to go away quietly.
Ad-blocking as a tool can help address the security issues with a trusted service hosting all sorts of unknown ad scripts that can potentially have malware and/or scrap your data, but issue of ad's itself can sadly not be controlled with ad-blocking only.
It already is.
> starting with technically ( operationally difficult) solutions like hosting ads first party
Already happening. Those ads are still getting blocked.
> There is simply too much money today in it for the industry to go away quietly.
Agreed. We need to drive them out.
> issue of ad's itself can sadly not be controlled with ad-blocking only
Why?
Also Google is removing web APIs and actively making its browser poorer and controlling the web standards that is making it increasingly technically difficult to block ads, it is much harder to block ads on mobile platforms where most users are, only Firefox supports an ad blocker at all and Mozilla generates 95% of its revenue from Google .
We need better regulations not better ad-blocking to protect vulnerable users . More common ad-blocking becomes more aggressive the counter measures will be, given Google's control of Android and Chrome (that also gives them influence of Edge(based on Chrome) and to some extent Safari - Webkit heritage ) they can easily effect changes that makes it impossible or extremely difficult to block ads.
It’s pretty easy to install apps like 1Blocker and NextDNS on an iPhone and eliminate nearly all ads. More importantly, the platform automatically prevents tracking [0] “across other companies apps and websites” without explicit opt-in since April, and Safari has already been blocking trackers for a couple of years (the above link to Seattle Times blocked googletagmanager.com, google.com, chartbeat.com, amazon-adsystem.com, with default settings, and no additional purchases).
On top of this the many iOS users who already pay for iCloud+ to get access to enough storage now have an onion router service available in beta that hides IP addresses from websites. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks and had no issues. [1]
I agree that it’s an arms race, and as Facebook and Google see ad revenue drop from users who have ad blocking enabled, they’ll grind the remaining ones even harder.
[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/facebook-no...
[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/prepare-your-network-for...
Sadly while Apple is reasonable choice in the U.S. market, it is not affordable choice in most of the world. This effectively means only the rich get protection from ads.
I'm sure people will figure out a solution. Maybe some machine learning thing that identifies brands and just deletes them.
We already have extensions such as sponsor block.
> Google is removing web APIs and actively making its browser poorer
Yeah, that sucks. I've already switched to Firefox and I also keep Brave around. Google made it easy for me when it killed sync for custom Chromium builds.
> controlling the web standards that is making it increasingly technically difficult to block ads
What, really? Do you have examples of this? What web standards have they proposed that would make blocking ads harder?
> only Firefox supports an ad blocker at all and Mozilla generates 95% of its revenue from Google
I agree, that's a massive conflict of interest. I think Mozilla should work to solve that.
> We need better regulations
Agreed, but I still believe that technology is a potent and subversive weapon. The mere existence of ad blockers has forced these tech giants to change the way they operate. If we keep up the pressure, either we'll win and drive them out of the internet or they'll become ever more tyrannical in their attempts to maintain control, drawing more attention to themselves and hopefully inviting public condemnation and regulation.
Specifically, moves like changes in manifest V3 and removal of chrome.webRequest is aimed squarely at adblocking, Forcing DRM in HTML5 is a step in this direction as well and can become dangerous in conjunction with AV1 enhancements .
For example it may become feasible to dynamically mux content and ad streams without a separate network request if encoding is not as expensive as H264 today with AV1 . Coupled with DRM on HTMl5 it would be impossible for any plugin as streams will never be exposed available for "Piracy reasons". Even HDMI has support for DRM , the only analog/open/accessible format left will be the light stream to your eyes.
God I hate these "industries".
They seem to be on a solid path, but I think it's too soon to hold them up as an archetype of a social networking service that can be massively successful on a freemium/subscription revenue model.
I also can't think of any company close to the size of facebook that is free for "users" rather than charging for their software/services. That doesn't mean it's impossible, but we're looking for a black swan event to change that, and it's unclear if Discord is going to have the hockey stick growth to make that happen, or if its recent increase in revenue is even sustainable as Covid becomes less disruptive.
Facebook's problem is not that it controls which ads a person sees based on their content and communities, but rather quite the reverse: it controls what content and communities a person sees in order to increase their engagement with ads!
Discord, if it were to maintain a strong commitment to a "one way flow" of information towards ad targeting (without leaking that information to advertisers, of course, which is easier said than done) and not towards content promotion, could find a sweet spot where it is not possible for them to ever enter the business of being incentivized to promote misinformation - except insofar as paid ads are the misinformation, which is still a problem but at least a more traceable and manageable one. People would still discover and choose their communities organically, and the mods and participants of communities would control their outbound edges of the discovery graph.
Of course, not being able to optimize the bulk of a user experience for engagement is somewhat anathema to both the data scientist and product management instincts in me... but I honestly would much rather work on any B2B recommender system, or even an ad system like the aforementioned one, than blindly write code that has now been proven to do harm.
The internet is a middleman.
Facebook is a public company whose purpose is serve advertisers. Online ads is the only way they can generate revenue. It is not some woo-woo about connecting the world, giving people a voice, or whatever. That's what the internet enables, not a single website controlled by someone else. Facebook tries to take credit for what is good about the internet.
Facebook is a barrel of fish, the website is the barrel, users are the fish (ad targets) and advertisers are the shooters. For advertisers and FB investors,^1 things are going great. Except for the bad publicity.
1. Attempts to oust Zuckerberg, the root of the problem, will always fail. https://www.forbes.com/sites/betsyatkins/2019/06/07/facebook...
There is nothing to fix. As other commenters point out, the "solution", for users, is to stop using Facebook and use other means to communicate over the internet that do not require middlemen, third party intermediaries and interlopers that seek to sell online ad services and are determined to conduct ever-increasing levels surveillance and personal data mining.