Fark NotNewsletter: Google farked us over | Hacker News Reader

Fark NotNewsletter: Google farked us over

fark.com

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It's free market, isn't it? Take it or leave it - nobody forces you to use Google ad network. ;). /s

At this point I'm convinced that nothing but regulation can make those big companies - on which our digital lives are more and more dependent - to provide even a modicum of customer support. Right now they don't care, because they simply don't have to - a HN headline every other week doesn't create measurable losses, because users don't have comparable alternatives (and the Internet, paradoxically, has very short memory). On the other hand, having customer support costs real money...

EDIT: Added a sarcasm tag next to the winkie, just in case someone mistakes my comment for a defense of Google.

I never really understand why comments like this get downvoted.

There seems to be love for the free market. That is until the free market goes against what I want. Then the free market sucks!

What if FARK was another type of business. Say it is the corner 7-11[1]. They have been there for 18 years, and their major source of customers was the big factory next door.

Factory decides to either move / redesign / whatever, where the customers are no longer available.

The store makes a big noise - would anyone care?

[1] in this example, I mean any sort of "corner store". 20 years ago we'd call them milk bars, but now I'm showing my age...

You raise a good point, but I start to have a feeling people read my comment as a defense of Google and free markets. It's not. The opening sentence was meant sarcastically.

These days, you can never tell for sure.

Poe's Law strikes again!

In a free market, if a company breaks its Terms of Service with me I have the legal right to walk up and shoot every Employee and Shareholder of that company (No limited liability in a free market -- that's a government decree.)

What people really want is a competitive market.

What people want is in conflict.

What entrepreneurs want is to play the game and win big. What consumers want is for every entrepreneur to play the game, but for no one to win big. So yes, consumers want competition - entrepreneurs not so much.

This whole thing is actually funny to look from the outside - big payoffs are essentially a carrot dangled in front of people so that they start companies and get into competition with each other, which drives innovation and lowers prices. But it's meant to be a lie - you can't deliver on the promise too much, you can't have one player actually win, because this destroys competition, and with it it destroys the benefits the whole process brings to the society.

>That is until the free market goes against what I want. Then the free market sucks!

I'm not sure anyone is saying that the free market sucks. People are saying that there is no free market in some sectors and that, in the absence of a reasonably efficient free market, the least worst alternative is regulation.

I think it sucks, but that's because I'm a Communist.

heh, fair point. Command economy advocates aside nobody is saying the free market sucks :)

Because the theoretical "free market" is nothing like what actually happens in practice. The Economist had a great writeup on this a few days ago [1], but the short of it is that Google is the definitive market leader, with almost no one in second place. Moving to a different network is simply accepting that your ads will perform worse.

Additionally, responding to outright fraud by Google with the statement "move elsewhere" is a pretty incredible admission of the power they have. They can abuse their near-monopoly of the market with almost no fear of reprisal.

[1]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/01/ec...

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EDIT: Just saw your below comment that you were trying to be sarcastic. Ah well, it was apparently lost on me.

Indeed, and that is precisely my point.

And this applies not just to Google - but also to Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and probably few others, as proven by the amount of such stories popping up on HN in the past few years.

>They can abuse their near-monopoly of the market with almost no fear of reprisal.

What checkbox isn't Google checking to be hit by anti-trust action for its ad networks?

The government doesn't seem to prosecute those cases anymore. Internet ISP's with their geographically bound actual physical monopolies would be an even stronger case but you don't hear anything from the feds about prosecuting those companies either

Google lost a lawsuit in Germany a few years ago. Evidently German law says that if a customer reaches out to a corporation, that corporation must have a human respond.

It's not good enough (as google argued) to use an email auto-responder.

Not the best summaries but here is more information:

http://www.vzbv.de/sites/default/files/downloads/google-vzbv... http://www.computerworld.com/article/2497169/search/consumer...

>This doesn't mean that every incoming email should now be checked and processed individually by a Google employee, the court said. But the company has to provide the possibility for users to contact it via email, it said. It was left up to Google how to deal with future incoming email.

In other words, they must not send an auto-reply to users saying the email is not monitored, but it is basically okay that they don't monitor it.

[1] http://www.itworld.com/article/2694219/it-management/german-... [2] http://www.cgerli.org/fileadmin/user_upload/interne_Dokument...

Google has long since passed the point of critical mass and a self-sustaining reaction. These days an individual publisher needs Google much more than Google needs an individual publisher. So why should Google spend resources on customer care when, as years of HN and other sites' threads demonstrate, it doesn't matter? The individual publisher can be relied on to claw at the rock at his own expense to attempt resolution.

Google is doing very well, and lack of support hasn't harmed them. It's not just that customer care is done algorithmically; my guess is that the meta-decision on whether or how much customer care is needed is also algorithmic.

The funny thing is, for ad networks like Google, the publisher is not the customer. There is no incentive to treat them well. The customer is where the revenue comes from: the advertisers. For Google, publishers are just "supply". And there is a glut of supply.

Ah. Not being a publisher, it hadn't occurred to me that they're a product just like us.

Always follow the money.

I have complex feelings about this. As a libertarian type I say one forces you to use Google (yes, I know they're by far the most effective ad network). I don't feel like their natural monopoly in search has hurt me much. Normally I would not see any reason for the US to get involved in GOOG's business.

On the other hand, I have seen Google do its very best to pervert the free market. Their name appears well over 300 times in the Obama White House guestbook and they support tons of liberal causes while slipping into bed with the three-lettered branches of federal government whenever it suits them. Diversity is every bit as important as Google preaches it. So where are their Filipinos, Samoans, Latinos, African Americans, and other persons of color?

Their contempt for paying customers like Fark is legendary. I have heard many, many stories like Fark's over the years. I personally know people put out of business this way. And I suspect Google puts their political thumb on many search results.

Because of this detestable level of hypocrisy, I say regulate the hell out them. Unlike Lavabit, they welcomed the government with open arms in lobbying efforts, committed gross violations of their customers' privacy, and have chosen to sequester tens of billions of dollars in taxes over three continents in a way that small businesses like mine never could.

Google loves the Feds so much? Throw them to the antitrust wolves.

> Filipinos, Samoans, Latinos, African Americans, and other persons of color?

Plenty of non-white people working at Google. What does this ethnic diversity have to do with your little free market rant?

> your little free market rant

Great way to contribute to the conversation!

Great way to not answer his question.

Name-calling indicated no civil discourse would occur

There's no such thing as an unperverted free market, and even if such a thing existed, it would be a horror.

I really wish there was more understanding that economic theory is essentially political, that markets are about political power relationships, not about goods and services, and that there's always a government of some kind as a central enforcer behind every market - and it probably isn't truly democratically accountable, no matter how often people get to vote.

Monopolies and cartels that treat customers with arrogance and contempt are the inevitable, predictable products of competitive market capitalism.

And antitrust is a political weapon, not a moral or economic one. Google will not be hit with antitrust action unless it makes some political missteps. I expect that for now, it's far more useful to keep Google intact.

We always try to tell people to not put all their eggs in one basket. The problem here is that there is almost no other basket besides Google anymore. Or the ones that are there, are not even close because of Google's power over the online advertising industry.

I think that it's becoming the same way with email. and i'm worried that it's that way with what small businesses. The default for so many is "oh, just use Google Apps." What's the alternative? It's usually just Microsoft.

Woah, Fark still exists and looks almost exactly how I remember it 15 years ago

My reaction as well! Even the label graphics (eg Florida, Assine) are exactly the same. It's funny because I first learned about DrudgeReport from Fark and that site hasn't had a redesign in 15 years (or ever) either.

oh, hey, new strongbad email!

Oh hey, new Maddox!

I think this is from the culture at Google. To be clear, I think its perfectly fine to use AI or whatever other innovation - if it works. But to me, so many of their projects seem to be perpetually stuck in alpha/beta release mode and never seem to have all the features and polish to handle all the edge cases (which would require a TON more work).

> Due to the way Fark was built, we are invisible to both SEO and Social Media traffic.

What does this mean? Clearly, they can't block anyone from sharing fark links on facebook and also, this: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Afark.com

While fark.com may rank well, as a news aggregator the individual pages inside the site don't rank well. My site suffers the same problem: despite having thousands of pages of content, they all sit at the bottom of Google's results. So now I don't even bother to try to rank on Google and just use traffic from social media instead.

Why would Google want to have an aggregator rank high on their search results? They are the middlemen of online news. It seems much better to have the actual article come first so you don't have to click through the link in the header to get to the content you care about.

Yes, that's the reason, and that's why it's a challenge for anyone trying to promote a news aggregator using Google search.

Hubris combined with the amount of power Google has is a recipe for disaster.

Isn't there enough competition within the ad industry to just switch to a different provider?

Nope. There really isn't, or if there is, it's niche dependent. To diversify away from Google, I've tried other ad providers and struggled to make 20% as much...

agreed. most of the time it's google or bust.

Header bidding will begin to cut into Google when it becomes more widespread.

https://adexchanger.com/the-sell-sider/the-strategic-implica...

And then Google will start to treat publishers better.

Google is a legal monopoly, by most definitions. http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-google-monopoly-2...

>Google owns less than 3% of the global advertising market

whats their internet advertising share? Leading in search isnt the same as leading in internet advertising

Google and Facebook basically split the market between them. Almost all growth goes their way. And Facebook doesn't have an on-page network. https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/793562463119745024/pho...

It's disturbing that many companies don't have humans to respond soon enough or don't have humans to reach out to at all. Machines can learn and get better at analyzing and classifying information, but it'll be a long time before a machine can pick up the phone to answer a customer's call with a proper conversation (with understanding and decisions based on arguments) or truly read and understand an email conversation back and forth and understand the entire context and allow for exceptions and more "appropriate" decisions like humans could (depending on the situation and the background).

Why is it disturbing? Many products bring in very little revenue per user. It's unfair to require a support system when the expense can easily far outweigh the revenue, especially when answers are often easy to find online.

Not related to the topic at hand, but I wish this site had an About page. I read this whole article and felt the author was very passionate about the online community he hosts, so I thought maybe I could hang around there a bit, but couldn't find out what Fark is about. I don't mean to be negative by the way, in fact I liked the way the author is passionate about the site.

It does: http://www.fark.com/farq/

Who decides what is bannable images and what are not?

Do they use machine learning or people? Does someone just flag it or something? Was Fark given the chance to remove the link or file an appeal?

Read the article.

I don't know if I can applaud any harder given the way Fark treated its userbase around the whole SJW/GamerGate beginnings. Karma is one trifling bastard.

>Our ads were turned off for almost five weeks - completely and totally their mistake

Who is running your campaigns that they can be disabled for more than a month without anyone noticing?!

They obviously mean it took that long to get a resolve.

They mean Google disabled the ad serving on their site, not ad campaigns. Despite rapid followups by fark, Google's process to resume took that long.

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