https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30631047 (March 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24512955 (Sept 2020)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Good.
Why do people so strongly critique Facebook for selling ads but not businesses from buying them?
For instance [0]
> The story of Ramon van Meer. He runs a company that sells ramps that help wiener dogs get up and down off the couch. For years, his company reached its niche audience through targeted Facebook ads. Then Apple changed the privacy settings on the iPhone, and suddenly those Facebook ads stopped working.
Why don't small & medium business owners like Ramon get critiqued for feeding the beast?
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087425495/tech-giants-and-ti...
> suddenly those Facebook ads stopped working
Maybe Ramon should go onto wiener dog forums, groups, subreddits, and advertise his product. List on Amazon, or partner with smaller, online pet businesses like Chewy. I guarantee these will have high conversion rates than vacuuming up search queries for “wiener dog,” cross referencing them with device identifiers, browser fingerprints, Facebook pixels, computer vision tagged photos, and IP addresses to build a psychological profile you sell to Ramon. It may be easier for Ramon to click “sell to people who have wiener dogs,” but why shouldn’t a business be in charge of their own marketing?
So advertise, but just not on FB?
>It may be easier for Ramon to click “sell to people who have wiener dogs,” but why shouldn’t a business be in charge of their own marketing?
You answered your own question. Marketing is hard work, and FB makes it very easy to target a huge customer base. Conversion might be good on reddit, but you can do that in addition. Why is FB off limits?
That's a pretty bold claim though. There may be other options but that doesn't mean that they are enough to sustain his business. I think it's plausible that there's a vast swath of products that could not exist without Facebook. A lot of them are probably crap products that I wouldn't like but someone does.
But then again oh, I don't have any problem with targeted advertising for products. I have a bigger problem with targeted political advertising and radicalizing engagement content.
Almost nothing is essential.
I think what people have trouble with are the other things forced on them. They don't want to be spied on, and they don't want to have loud full page videos thrown in their face.
I think it's plainly obvious that spying makes targeted advertising better, but I don't think we have proof that it can't work at all without the private-sector equivalent of the Stasi surveillance state.
I find the argument that advertising was somehow okay before the internet a hard pill to swallow. My recollection is that ads were misleading back then and reserved for larger businesses. It pains me to think about going back to that era.
On the other hand, it’s nice to find small businesses to buy from on YouTube / Instagram / Reddit. It’s also nice that I do not have to pay for these services with money.
So it’s not perfect on the internet. But it does seem a hell of a lot better.
Yes exactly. Advertising in a relevant forum is both on topic there and not infringing anyone's privacy.
Doing anything well is hard work. Facebook is just the easy cop out method to cut corners.
That's a very different thing to just dumping ads on people because they looked at one video about a dog.
Of course such forums have become pretty extinct recently but for some interests they are still there.
Simple: Facebook is particularly slimy in their approach to engagement and making ad impressions, and so supporting their business is morally fraught. I won't elaborate because it's been beat to death as a topic.
Wow. Have you tried this? Reddit mods will ban you in 5 seconds if it smells addy. Forums wtf? that is a niche niche thing these days. Even if you have good standing with a Twitter - that is close to a full time job building followers. FB makes a ton of money - cause this stuff is locked down.
Your example falls flat immediately: the ad buyers are not children. They're adults and should be held to adult standards of awareness and responsibility.
It makes zero sense that you used children and micro transactions as the example for why blame should or should not be allocated to ad buyers.
I somewhat expect adults to understand gambling and in-game transactions and the fact that they are somewhat manipulative [0]. I hold no such expectations for children who generally accept whatever is presented to them. Blaming a child for buying a box of digital gems or what have you will do no good.
Similarly, I don’t think blaming Ramon the wiener dog ramp salesman for advertising on FB is really going to challenge FB’s market dominance and iron grip of advertising. I don’t expect Ramon to understand issues of data privacy, internet surveillance, advertising monopolies, and walled gardens, or - if he does know about them from passing - I don’t think pressuring him to follow his conscience and resist the market size of FB will do any good.
“Blaming” businesses who advertise on FB without providing some alternative in the market will not succeed. Rather than blame Ramon, we should restrict FB’s ability to surveil people whether through private (e.g. Apple) or public (e.g. regulation) means. This way, as FB’s effectiveness dwindles, the market will produce some solutions as alternatives for these businesses to go.
Instead, pressuring and blaming FB for their handlings of these issues will prove far more effective. We’ve already seen some limited success with this strategy, landing FB in Congress multiple times and getting the Netherlands to reconsider their huge data center, not to mention issues of GDPR, the “right to be forgotten,” etc.
I chose children because just as I don’t expect them to resist loot boxes, I don’t expect business owners to resist FB advertising. I listed alternatives that Ramon should do as a good businessman if FB is not an option, and options I believe will yield more direct results and a more loyal customer base. The world is not divided into clueless children and perfectly knowledgeable and ethical adults. But rather than blame the advertisers (Ramon), we should go after the ad market (FB).
[0]: That said, I still think we should blame the companies who use dark patterns and casino strategies to trigger people’s tendencies to gamble or “roll the dice” after a couple hours playing a game. You could say “players” instead of children, but this isn’t really analogous to small businesses because I still expect some adult players to know when they’re being played. I don’t expect any small business to reject FB advertising if it is presented as a way to reach a huge customer base.
On Facebook, I recall seeing an ad for a sticker you can put on your phone which supposedly blocks radiation to protect your brain. That is, in my not so humble opinion, a scam product which preys on and perpetuates a false fear. The first time I saw this ad, I recall commenting that it was a scam and people shouldn't waste their money, and reporting the ad. I saw it again recently on my monthly-or-so visit to FB, and the commenting was turned off, which is how most ads are delivered.
On car forums I used to visit, it wasn't uncommon for people to push scammy products, but there were also respected members identifying them as BS.
Cry me a river, Facebook/Meta.
I ask because of the few small businesses that I know personally that bought ads on Facebook never saw an attributable increase in sales.
Throwing money at internet marketing without a lot of thought is probably throwing it away for many businesses. Hiring a specialist to do your marketing is often not really any better because the industry is rife with shysters.
If you choose 1024 people to give stock tips to, telling half that a random stock will go up and the other half it will go down, then ignore the group you were wrong at and repeat the process, you’ll end up with someone convinced you’re a genius because you gave them 10 accurate stock tips in a row.
Hide this inside a black box labelled “innovative machine learning” and you might even unwittingly fool yourself so it’s not even a lie.
The onus is not on the buyers of the access. If the steward is negligent and/or careless, there will never be any shortage of ad-space buyers who couldn't care less about the steward's reputation and/or the long-term consequences for the publication and/or audience. If FB is open to becoming a raging dumpster fire, it will happen overnight if that were profitable for someone who could afford it.
A useful metaphor might be a homeowner next door who lets all-night parties attended by random assholes who trash the street and have zero respect for the neighborhood. No sane person blames the partiers, the problem is clearly the enabling, negligent homeowner.
A Danish/British lawyer has filed for a collective legal action towards Meta [0][1] seeking USD 3.2 billions in damages to Facebook users. The optics is that Facebook, from a perspective of competition law, has acted unfairly.
[0]https://www.reuters.com/article/tech-antitrust-facebook-idCN... [1]https://www.facebookclaim.co.uk/talks/interview-with-dr-liza...
I guess for the same reason people tend to criticise drug barons more than street dealers, and dealers more than addicts.
Though everyone plays their part in an ugly business, there are power relationships in operation. Facebook know what they are selling and are gatekeepers to a near monopoly product. Businesses are desperately in need and find few alternatives these days. Facebook are apex predators and simply carry more responsibility and so deserve more scrutiny for their role.
But yea influencers and the lot I tend to advise to stop using but well they struggle with their habits.
I can't wait to cancel them in the town-crier for using a Meta ad platform to find me.
People created this “problem” and now they have to artificially provide additional paraphernalia for them to be able to ambulate properly.
That demand should not exist.
Welcome to capitalism and the free world. Sometimes we just need to be tolerant of others and let them get on with it.
Blue dye on wool doesn't harm anyone. Even the Soviet Union a totally non-capitalist country allowed colors, so I don't know what your point there is.
Maybe you should ask these dogs; would you prefer to have never experienced life at all?
(Basically, I wonder how miserable they are. They seem happy when I see them.)
I'm not proposing to cull the existing dogs, just not to further a breed and other breeds of dogs that suffer health problems due to our artificial breeding. There are lots of other dog breeds that do not suffer more health problems than average.
It doesn’t help that it’s Facebook, which implies it’s unlikely to have much impact in terms of enabling an ecosystem of third party users (which is unlike, say, Microsoft or Google datacenters).
Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ?
A quick search suggests FB consume on average about 1 gigawatt globally. The original article calls it a 200 megawatt DC. That would be 20% of facebooks global energy consumption.
Given FB seem to have 18 existing Data center locations it would imply huge growth or consildation plans for that DC to consume 200 megawatts all the time.
In 2020 the global renewable energy supply capacity was approximately 2500 gigawatts so facebook used less than 0.5% of that capacity.
There are lots of valid reasons to oppose facebook, but it doesnt seem that monopolising the consumption of renewabel energy is a credible one.
https://sustainability.fb.com/report/2020-sustainability-rep...
https://www.irena.org/publications/2020/Mar/Renewable-Capaci...
This data centre alone was going to use 10% of all wind power capacity in the NL [1].
It is not only about this data centre either, this was merely the largest and most egregious. There have been a number of new data centre construction plans in the Netherlands by other tech giants, all planning to use government subsidised wind parks. All so that these companies can pretend to be green and put up nice websites like the one you linked, while the actual wind parks and green energy generation is paid for by the taxpayers.
> Has somebody confused or misrepresented measures of capacity and consumption ?
This was supposed to a colossal data center, the largest data centre in Europe [2]. They bought 166 hectares of ground (23M square feet) for its construction. It consuming as much as three of their other data centres would not be terribly surprising.
[1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2409557-megadatacenter-facebook-zet-e...
[2] https://siliconcanals.com/news/europe-largest-data-centre-ne...
As it stands, the data centre will use up much of the green energy that NL has created over the past few years, purely for Facebook to... sell more ads. That's not palatable.