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Comment by knolan | Hacker News Reader

This is also true for a lot of older people new to the internet. My mother doesn’t understand that her laptop can do more than browse Facebook and buy things on Amazon. Her bookmarks are the random pages of her friends. Her primary source of news is fast becoming whatever click bait she sees there.

I tell her not to trust Facebook, I explain how she is their product and they exploit her but she doesn’t listen.

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People with less formal education also equals Facebook and Internet. I had a startup that sold B2B2C products to restaurants. I had to train wiaters and cashiers to use their product on their phone (as the customers would). Most of the times when I asked them to open the internet they would open Facebook app directly. They wouldn't understand "browser" or "chrome" either. When I clicked on the chrome icon for them, they would say "Oh, you mean Google??". And then I had to go on and explain that you could go to the URL field and type an specific address you of a site.

B2b2c? Could you explain?

A product that is "Business to Business to Consumer".

It was a loyalty program for restaurants. I had to sell to the restaurants (B2B), but the main user was their customers (B2C).

Never seen the term used before, but pretty sure it means Business to Business to Consumer i.e. they are a business that sells consumer facing software to other businesses. Example would be a POS (Point of Sale) system which I am guessing based on above anecdote is the family of software grandparent was referring to.

With respect to the supply chain; business to business to consumer.

I guess this is something like a CRM, where you're primary customers are another business, but you're building something that's visible to their customers, so you're also trying to satisfy these end users.

This is a good point and one that is recognized often here: there's a good chunk of internet users that are mobile only.

That's an entirely different way to come up and learn technology than those of us who went through any variation of DOS > MS or Apple Desktops > Smartphones.

Conjecture: the browser, if thought about at all by mobile users, is an afterthought to apps like FB, messaging, Youtube, etc.

I can see a few problems with this. The concept of "you are their product" is not an easy one to understand if people don't have any relevant background or experience in thinking critically about the problem. It requires thinking through several non-obvious layers: for example, it's easy for people to get stuck at "yes, I don't pay for Facebook, that's why it has advertising" without making the leap to "most businesses cannot just support themselves on advertising, they actually sell something to you too - so how does Facebook do it? By making their advertising more effective. How do they make their advertising more effective? By building up a detailed profile of everything about you without your knowledge or consent"... and even then people will get stuck at why their knowing so much about you is bad.

Secondly, exploitation sounds very scary and bad, but it makes people think of slaves and working in coal pits and blood diamonds, not looking at pictures of babies from the comfort of their sofa.

Do I have a solution? No, of course not. Many people just don't want to hear it, they want to carry on blithely communicating with their friends in real-time for free and looking at pictures of babies.

The “Facebook sells your data” myth is too often rehashed. Facebook has done studies and actually found that your personal info is not all that valuable in and of itself. Your likes, statuses, friends and photos do not provide meaningful targeting data. (Age and geography are meaningful, but those are already available with traditional media). Facebook’s huge money maker is its ability to let other companies target their own customers on the Facebook platform.

If Nordstrom keeps track of its website customers and what products they look at, and can then target those same users directly on Facebook with related products, they’re willing to pay way more for that kind of targeting than they are “women in their 40s who ‘like’ shopping”. Facebook supports both, but facebooks real success comes from letting companies leverage their own data on the Facebook platform.

That and the fact that they have a billion users log in per day. If any other site had that kind of traffic they’d be killing it regardless of the personal data they possessed.

What killed Facebook for me was their creepy targeted advertising. About a year ago I saw an ad buried in my facebook feed to "buy Gallium and Bismuth metal in Australia" I thought it was an oddly specific ad so I made a joking post about it - turned out several of my friends were seeing the same ad.

A common friend we all shared who is a high school science teacher spoke up. He explained his class was studying the periodic table and he had purchased samples of Bismuth and Gallium online to show to the class. That was the eye opening moment for me if my friends and I can see ads based on another friend's online purchases what can my friends see about me? I've rarely used the site since then.

To be honest, I think I got lucky that I first became a frequent web user pre-Facebook, as I can see that I might have ended up a similar way. A decent sized chunk of my early web usage had some form of social element, but chat rooms, web forums and news aggregators don't have the same stigma as social media, perhaps because the discussions revolve around subjects someone is interested in, rather than discussions surrounding the people using that service. HN is a continuation of that early online behaviour, for me at least. However, if I'd grown up in the post-Facebook era, would my Internet activity gravitate towards social media for online discussions? I don't know for sure, but it seems plausible.

I'd say the larger question is, how do we let people know there's online communities outside Facebook that they might enjoy just as much or even more? Perhaps Reddit is a useful gateway out of the social media bubble, there's a huge range of communities on Reddit, it'd be hard not to find something someone was interested in.

That's true. It's like AOL all over again.

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