Zuckerberg World President | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg World President

mondaynote.com

61 pointszdw23 comments

Open articleView on HN

If you don't use Facebook, you should block all their domains

https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/tree/master/corporatio...

Thanks for this. I had a subset of this list already blocked but didn't realize it had grown this much.

How would one go about blocking their domains? Is that a router config thing?

You can probably just add those domains to your hosts file, and redirect them to 127.0.0.1.

Save the following text file as your hosts file (the location is mentioned in the first few comments of the text) https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...

I am not as worried as other people are about Facebook, and here is why:

a) Facebook has less users not more, while they always emphasize their user growth I come across more and more people in real life who simply don't have a Facebook-Account, and those are social people. I am careful about basing too much on my own experience ofc, but this was very seldomly the case 4-5 years ago and now happens to me very often.

b) More and more users are disillusioned with Facebook to some extent. Due to some minor reasons I keep a Facebook account (various purposes, among those domain-specific groups to get questions answered and log in maybe once a month) and I see among my peers many who aren't really using it for much anymore. The occasional photo update with minor interaction via comments, the occasional posting of a music video, or the few users in between with heavy political activism on their timeline who apparently don't realize that next to no one will read it anyways and sigh about that crap. Facebook simply isn't cool anymore, so many don't care for most of its features and instead all they want is something to easily chat with people, aka WhatsApp.

c) Facebook certainly has trouble with attracting younger users and this won't stop. A social media platform where it takes a few days after account creation til your grandfather sends you a friend request and you have to answer to your parents about what you just posted? Definitely the cool place to be. Similar things probably can be said about WhatsApp to some extent. WhatsApp is what used to be normal SMS functionality in a way, while probably everyone has it cause everyone has it, it certainly isn't something exiting anymore.

d) Those who in my opinion over-estimate Facebook's role grossly under-estimate how fragile companies are and how easy (in my opinion) something like Facebook could start to fail. It happened to companies before, it will happen again. I don't know when, I don't know exactly why (though many possible reasons are viable). Everyone being on Facebook instead of just your 10 coolest friends might be what kills it in the end for young people for example, who knows what comes along and might attract user growth. The mobile market has made that certainly more dynamic via Apps, it's easier for a new chat App to gain traction than for a new social media website and WhatsApp with 1+ Billion users might not be bold enough to explore what the next big feature is people yet don't know they want. I know Facebook owns WhatsApp, I know Facebook invests in VR, I know their revenue is extreme and they have money stockpiled, I also know that isn't a guarantee of anything...

After thought: Anyone believing in the mighty power of Facebook should put their money where their mouth is and invest heavily in the stock, if Facebook is this monster of a multinational all-controlling company led by this young genius, a company with only growth ahead and such a minimal risk of failing then it shouldn't be a tough decision to make right?

> Facebook has less users not more, while they always emphasize their user growth I come across more and more people in real life who simply don't have a Facebook-Account,

The data strongly disagrees with your anecdote. It wasn't but a few years ago they were targeting 1 billion users. Now they're at almost 2 billion.

http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...

How do they define active though? Does that just mean someone that logs in once during that month? Admittedly, that's still something, but it's not the kind of engagement that will excite advertisers.

$27,000,000,000 worldwide advertising revenue in 2016. Up 50% from 2015. I'd say advertisers are sufficiently excited.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/271258/facebooks-adverti...

So I've always wondered about this. How many of those companies are making a return on their advertising? Everybody knows that there are bots that click on ads, so for clicks I'd imagine the metrics are useless. So then the obvious follow-up is conversion - how many people click through and then buy something? I imagine for some companies this is a positive return and then obviously the money was well spent, but what about the many companies where that just doesn't directly translate? Advertising for cars is very different than advertising for toys. I imagine a lot of companies trying to generate brand awareness through advertising are wasting money. And it's obvious many sites are gaming the system with autoplay videos and a bunch of other obnoxious shit.

Obviously this works well for Facebook as they continue to generate revenue. I've just never understood the advertising world. Then again, I use adblock and when I used to watch broadcast TV I muted commercials, so I'm not the target demographic. I know in addition to ads they make money selling your information, such as Facebook's patent to determine your credit score based on your friends (doesn't that sound fun).

I realize this is a mature industry and I do not pretend that I have some brilliant insight nobody has thought of before. But I do question the assumptions on which modern advertising is based.

My industry is premium video games. But a lot of my industry friends are in the mobile f2p world. According to them not only is Facebook a clear return on investment it's by far the best. No other advertising platform comes close in efficiency.

Successful games can achieve a user lifetime value (LTV) in the range of $5 to $10. Which lets them turn on a firehouse of advertising money. If user acqusition costs $4/user but their LTV is $8 that's a good deal!

I'm somewhat with you. I also block all the ads. And I'm not a fan of the vast majority of f2p games. But the proof is in the pudding. It works and businesses are highly profitable off the back of Facebook advertising. <shrug>

Per the sibling comment, your experience is not upheld by the data. But that does not mean you're making an invalid observation, just that you have to be careful with your conclusions.

There has always been a privacy sensitive cohort in the population, and they have been moving off Facebook, however I can tell you from marketing to them that they are a small fraction of the bulk of the world :-(.

As Facebooks user population has doubled the 'kind' of place changes, and that causes people who were there to sometimes become disillusioned while the 'new' people love it. I got to watch this experience first hand in the changing population of Sunnyvale. New apartment buildings (vociferously opposed by long time residents in less dense housing) have attracted new people to Sunnyvale who really like the experience and the vibrancy of a denser down town. Some older folks move out, and then new people move in, and for them, Sunnyvale has "always been like this". No doubt in 20 years they will be griping about something as well. The point is that communities are a function of who is there and who isn't. And as people arrive and people leave the community changes but the overall vibrancy of the community isn't dictated by what people who used to live here think about it. Remember the Yogi Barra quote "Nobody goes there any more, it's too crowded."

The bottom line is that everyone in your city can leave Facebook and its a drop in the bucket with respect to the population that are there. It is only when you have year over year declines can you really say that Facebook is 'dying.'

As already mentioned in some other comments, unfortunately data tells you are being wrong here. I had the same feeling, but numbers tell me I am wrong as well. [0] Now, either numbers are fake (...) or I simply admit that I don't care and that it was just my hope that people use FB less than they do now. It may not be anymore the new thing but it has become part of everyone's daily life, which is even worse :s

[0]: https://nyti.ms/1TpIVI7

(reaching now) - i wonder that fb mightn't be a phenomenon that transforms the "we" that we're so used to into the "us" that forms the basis of super-human organizations.

that this ain't a similar transition that might've occurred as singular-celled organisms became co-opted into the multicellular, and the multicellular became co-opted into communities, and those communities became co-opted into cultures, and those cultures became co-opted into...

Its a laddering fractal up into scale-similar, and self-organizing, beings...

The keyword is self-organising. In order for evolution to work, partial information decentralisation is key.

> His company sells persuasion tools to manufacturers of consumer (and industrial) goods and services producers.

I think the whole "Fake News" is the start of a new thing. What has happened is that traditional media failed to manufacture consent like it was supposed to. It surely wasn't for the lack of trying. They were passing debate questions to their favorite candidate, claiming reading leaked document is only legal for the media and so on. So they really tried, failed, and everyone noticed.

That in effect, created a vacuum in that market. That is the market of "pay us a lots of money and we'll persuade millions of people to accept whatever ideology, products, ideas you want". It is good for selling trinkets, but also good for electing officials and so on.

Notice how quickly (and smartly) both Google and Facebook jumped in:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/technology/google-faceboo...

Now it has to be wrapped officially in "We are saving those poor uneducated slobs from being told lizard people run the government" and so on, but I think the message has to be read between the lines.

I need more upvotes for this.

Meh. I think you fail to account for the conversational drift in the meaning of fake news. The quick response was to the pile of pure click bait websites pushing stories like pizza-gate, claims that Clinton was having interns murdered, and so on. After the election, I was writing to electors in the state I grew up in, and found they were actually re-sharing these kinds of stories on their Facebook pages. As a protective measure, the Breitbarts of the world responded by calling everything else fake news, and diluting the meaning of the term.

Apparently they successfully persuaded a Chomsky fan that the term was meaningless?

>They were passing debate questions to their favorite candidate

Sort of. Rather, Donna Brazile, a high-ranking Democrat at the time, was also working as a CNN analyst. She got access to general debate topics and sent them to Clinton's camp.

CNN fired her almost immediately upon learning this, and said:

>"CNN never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate." [0]

Brazile doubled down, criticized CNN, and said her only regret was getting caught. [0]

>“My conscience — as an activist, a strategist — is very clear [...] if I had to do it all over again, I would know a hell of a lot more about cybersecurity.”

CNN is not at fault here. Brazile violated her contract and general ethical standards to support her party. I'm no fan of CNN, but they did not leak questions intentionally.

Sure, CNN could be lying and Brazile could be agreeing to take the fall. But considering they both shittalked each other in the media after she was fired, and CNN's immediate condemnation of her and her actions, then that's a pretty hefty conspiracy theory claim. To me, this just seems like the Democratic leadership wasn't afraid to play a little dirty - all of their own doing.

>claiming reading leaked document is only legal for the media

Who did this? Every major media source, including the left-leaning ones, openly discussed and sometimes provided links to the Wikileaks archives.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/do...

>Who did this?

The claim that "reading leaked document[s] is only legal for the media" isn't what was actually said, but this clip is probably what parent is referring to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DcATG9Qy_A

Well, that's pretty bad.

A charitable interpretation would be that the scriptwriter, or Cuomo, genuinely believed this to be true and so were ignorantly trying to give helpful advice to the audience. Maybe not, though.

Regardless, both of the grandparent post's criticisms (and I'd really only merit this one criticism as particularly valid) apply to CNN, which has consistently proved itself to be one of the worst mainstream outlets of the decade. So I wouldn't take that as a huge indictment of the media in general. He'll have to provide more examples than that.

You may be dismayed that many the new voters in the new few elections do not share your high level of faith in the mainstream media: a Data & Society report posted last week finds that American teenagers have low levels of trust in the media:

https://datasociety.net/blog/2017/03/01/navigating-the-news/

I'm not dismayed by it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com