Re:NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendati...
by gbalduzzi on Thursday October 02, 2025 @11:01AM
(#45450574)
Even if the data collected by Meta is really worthless (and that is a big if), Meta shows content to a billion(s?) of people everyday.
That alone is definitely not worthless lol
Re:NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendati...
by delusional on Thursday October 02, 2025 @12:55PM
(#45452227)
Showing content to users that don't value watching the content is worthless. There's no inherent worth to showing content. My argument is that users consider the content worthless, and therefore any attempt to monetize the the showing of the content directly will end up failing.
Re:NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendati...
by array_key_first on Thursday October 02, 2025 @01:20PM
(#45452597)
The only reason the content works, at all, is because it's completely free and ad driven.
The truth is the content on Facebook is basically worthless and basically nobody wants to watch it. But humans are stupid. If you tell them something is free, they're gonna use it, even if they don't want to use it.
If Facebook cost even 1 dollar a month, I can garuantee those videos views would fall off a cliff.
I have a pet theory that these business models paper over the vast worthlessness of many modern technologies. That the value of Facebook is not in it's technologies or network, but rather in the arbitrage of the value of data when combined. We pay for the nearly worthless service of facebook, with our nearly worthless data. Facebook combines that data with other data from other people, and create data that is extremely valuable for advertisers.
The important bit of this theory is that Facebook is presumed nearly worthless. What that means is that outlawing their combining or collection of data from users wouldn't cause their service to transition to a pay-per-user model, but rather would completely dissolve the product, which nobody would miss.