The reason Facebook won’t ever change
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Facebook measures how people behave, not what pundits say.
Sort of like non-smokers in the fifties, but times change. More predictable and depressing than people who don’t use FB chiming in are the people who have endless rationalizations for why they need it. Often the reasons boil down to “network effects” which fits with the tendency of some here to cite Tragedy of The Commoms whenever a hard problem crops up.
Willing to admit I’m wrong though. I just don’t think FB is as necessary as you think it is. How did you all manage to have social lives before FB existed?
Social interaction mechanisms are pretty much the poster child for network effects, where using what other people are using matters a lot to utility.
To the network of people using a compatible encrypted messenger, not to people using "the internet" in some generic sense. Network effects definitely apply to each of the options at the level that they have their own network (e.g., "email" is a network, to the extent that it is interoperable; "Facebook" and any particular encrypted messaging system are each their own networks. The utility of each is determined largely by how many and which other people are using them and what those other people are using them for.)
I pull my FB list of upcoming events via CalDAV to my local calendar, for local handling of reminders. So yes, I could invite people manually, but it would be a bit of a mess.
FB has all the artists and all the venues in one place. The convenience should not be underestimated.
I have absolutely nothing on Facebook that isn't related to either bands or musical venues.
Banner adds since I switched to Android this year were interesting as I used to use my gmail account for FB. First, a week of banner ads saying "come back to Facebook"; Very Uber-creepy. Then a week of sign up for Instagram! Followed by a week of "Facebook messenger doesn't require a facebook account!" which I don't understand.
At that point, I created a new Google account and deleted my old one. Now I see ads for foot fungus!
You can actually sign up for a Messenger account independently of a Facebook account. However, this doesn't seem to be well supported. There is no way that I can tell to delete a Messenger-only account, or to remove contacts that were automatically uploaded from your phone.
have searched online and cant find anything which leads me to believe that no one really does this.
I could trigger Messenger to log in to your shadow Facebook account. It will work mostly like a regular account with the exception you (mostly) can't interact with your friends. I reported it as a security bug last year. Somehow after I reported it, the app doesn't do it anymore. Fb security took another 6 months to discard it as a security bug.
I was too disappointed by how much they cared, so I don't even bother to make a blog post about that. I trust both Facebook and Facebook security less after working with them. I don't have a Messenger only account anymore (but then, my Messenger-only account was never deleted). But do they care? Probably not. Do I care? Maybe - but what can I do about it?
Here is the draft that I wrote up but didn't publish about the experience: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSa-LjM5IzyTWJuD...
Obtain a visa to an EU country and/or sell your account to an EU citizen after May 25, so that they can either file a "right to be forgotten" request under the GDPR, or, generally, engage their "right of a Data Subject to withdraw consent" for personal data to be held against the account.
Either way this is by far one of the most exciting reasons I've encountered to still have my original citizenship!
Now, the downside is that small, local companies probably won't care about the GDPR. However, you buy soap (and everything else) from multinationals with European operations -- and crucially, bank accounts.
Where were these banner ads exactly? FB uses Google's ad network to target people who recently quit FB? Is that correct?
The stench of treacherous, defecting feet walking away.
I noted that, too. Advertisers have become really good at tracking health-related issues. For example, some ten years ago, I bought some device on Amazon for coping with some sensory disability issue. I am still regularly getting ads for the same issue, even if I use the net in a mostly pseudonymous way.
My personal facebook has been disabled for 9 months and I had to recently reactivate it because you can't have an app (for using their auth) without a personal account.
So yeah until the network effect they have changes (the majority leave), people are "trapped" using it.
"My cog in the machine is not hurting anyone, why should I care" is how things get very, very bad.
making the hard choice is easy when you have nothing to lose, and it's even easier when you're so rich that the losses don't matter. the folks in the middle have just enough that it would really hurt to lose it. I can't say I blame them for guarding that jealously.
While I totally agree with this, I'm wondering where that tipping point would be with them.
They have (depending on who you believe) somewhere north of 200 million users with some estimates in the 500 million range. Does losing 100 million users impact them at all or their bottom line?
At what point do you think they would actually start changing? How much revenue would they have to lose before they started to make noticeable reforms?
Moreover, I noticed that my comments with links to laws and court decisions on government sites were silently marked as spam and hidden by FB. Moderators are helped me once to fix that, then it happens again and again, and FB refuses to fix that.
I made backup accounts on G+ and local social networks just in case I will be banned again by FB for posting well known poems or links to laws. I see also that traffic is increased a bit on these sites.
I also looking for way to setup my own node of a federated social network, such as Mastodon or PeerTube, but they are too heavyweight.
This is a very dangerous game, with a lot to lose. It was the same with any other, now dead, giant on the web. Only because people are still using Facebook now, does not mean, that as soon as a worthy competitor will appear, people will move et masse. Facebook is a necessity now, but it might be not, for example, tomorrow.
Yet similar services like AOL, Friendster, and Myspace were once big and are no longer what they were. I have no idea what will possibly supersede Facebook but I bet it will be something out of left field.
I think we are entering much more violent times, where huge corporations will see a crashing end.
If there will be great, easy to use, easy for user alternative to Facebook, that will be able to fill all the blanks quickly, would Facebook's value, stock and revenue withstand for example 250 Million user drop? Those would be the users that are unlikely to come back, and this would initiate huge migration.
There is a time when a company screws one time too many, disruptor shows up at the right time with the right cards in its hand and literally syphon the value out of the big company. This happened many times before. See how Google showed up with better solution, very adaptive strategy and no annoying noise and rip apart the whole search engine niche.
Kind of. But it shouldn't be a mental model where something like Facebook, but better, comes along. Rather, you should expect something that fulfills the same emotional, practical need or occupies time that makes people use Facebook less, but fulfills a need that better clicks with what people want.
As an analogy, consider how Apple and Microsoft flipped places. It's not that Mac OS was like Windows but better and supplanted them. Rather, smartphones changed the game in such a way that Microsoft's core strengths didn't seem so strong anymore. Apple was able to innovate in such a way because of their DNA as a design focused product company, but those strengths didn't get to shine until the paradigm shifted to favor cohesive product experiences rather than versatile software platforms.
So the thing that supplants Facebook won't look like Facebook, it'll be some better way to keep in touch with people from previous walks of life, get in arguments with your distant family members, and share photos. And it won't happen all at once either. It'll probably sit as some obscure niche for a while as it slowly refines itself and evolves.
That was a dependency game.
Windows had created an incredibly strong lock-in effect, leading it to become like an invincible bastion. But at the same time, the bastion's walls make it difficult to connect any device from the outside to it. The same stones the walls were build with are what is dragging the Microsoft ship down.
What we need to realize is that FB is creating and exploiting dependencies, too. I could imagine that a new wave of communication tools would be just much more economical with our time and attention, and would match both to the real importance the people we communicate with have for us.
Not that I am disagreeing, but I once read an essay by a famous economist who pointed out that criminals are not as stupid as people think they are because their behavior makes a lot of economic sense if they can lower their risk of getting caught. Combine that with the "1% of turnover" fine that FB copped from the EU, and you can see how they can get away with this kind of stuff.
When you think about it, FB is doing a sort of "micro-doxing" of its user base on a regular basis. But since it happens invisibly, and over a long time frame, they are generally getting away scot free. One day it will catch up to them, and you will start to see folks who worked at FB trying to hide that fact from their resume.
whats frustrating is blogs and comments that carry an air that facebook can change in the user's favor, much less that it ever will. i have read quite a few complaints myself that backtrack once it gets to presenting a positive, constructive solution to the problem (i.e. deleting your facebook) and suggest that facebook can be used by users for their benefit if users change their behavior. this puts an insurmountable burden on users to change a product that they are not in any way shape or form in control of. truly the only thing users have in their control regarding facebook is whether or not they have and/or use an account. deleting facebook is exhibiting control, and i believe everyone should do so.
"Many people vote with their time and attention." .
Of course. We could argue that you have voted with your comment. The "statistically invisible" commenter got your time and attention (=vote).
"Facebook measures how people behave, not what pundits say."
There is a saying that goes something like, "What you measure you can control." It follows that what the "pundits" posit outside of Facebook is not something Facebook can control.
Its simple. Users and non-users will stop publishing comments about Facebook when Facebook loses popularity.
I would nitpick slightly. Google core DNA is advertising. Search is a huge component to driving their advertising business, but let's not pretend that they are driven by anything other than ad revenue.
google was an intentional step away from the kind of “engagement” that so much of social media represents — and FB epitomizes. the problem with your argument is that it loses sight of what is really at stake here.
Not my memory of Altavista. Also, when I google any book ever written, I don't hit any link not trying to sell it to me, just showing me wikipedia copy, and/or trying to trick me into something completely unrelated until around the tenth page.
* reviews, * analysis (historical context, more about author etc), * other peoples thoughts about that book, * free legal copy on Guttenberg, * I am bored and dont care what comes out as long as it is interesting (which excludes selling places due to them not being interesting).
I tried searching for the last 5 or 6 books I've read, in every single case the results that came up were Amazon and Wikipedia, but also Goodreads, the authors website, at least one review or article about the book, and several had wikis.
In the main results I never saw more than two places to buy the book (unless the authors are selling it directly through their site, I didn't check). The bar on the right side of the page did include additional places to buy the ebooks, but it also includes places to borrow the ebooks, which is a cool feature I didn't even know existed until now.
I moved to Google from Altavista _specifically_ because of how shitty the experience had become.
It was good during the days of digital.altavista.com but they quickly started adding a lot of noise to the point where the actual power of a search was relegated to a small search field and a bunch of hard-to_parse results. Maybe they were not banners, but it was still a lot of crap.
I think Google quickly learned that lesson. I was expecting them to pivot to a website full of gunk but it didn't really happen. For better or worse, they found other ways to make money.
The money comes in from promising to the real customers that they will deliver the right ad to the right eyes.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users
> For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
> Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.
And most importantly
> But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
I think especially the last statement shows very well that they were ideologically opposed to advertisement-funded search engines.
Source: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
How was Google making a living before advertising?
> Advertising is very much its core now but it wasn't always that way.
What was its core prior to advertising? I mean a money-making core.
It wasn't. Every search engine at the time had struggled to make money. It wasn't until Google "borrowed" pay-per-click auction bidding from Overture that advertising became their focus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search_Marketing#Patent...
I suspect they'd planned to roll out enterprise products. (You know - "the box" - like they did in Silicon Valley). That business started later (circa 2002):
https://enterprise.google.com/search/products/gsa.html
But, by that stage, their ad revenue was killing everything.
How quick people are to forget the 20 page research paper by Larry Wall and Sergey Brin that started all this: "anatomy of an ad engine", I think it was called.[1]
Google could exist even if it was just an empty page with banner ads, as long as it could get people to visit it, for example if it paid Firefox to set it as the default startup ad page. It doesn't really need to offer any services and has never been about that.
/s/s/s/s/s/s/s/s/s/ssssss in case you need it
The idea that Google's core DNA is advertising is simply laughable on its face.
Heres a list of advertising companies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advertising_agencies
WPP Group is the biggest in the world. Does Google have the same DNA as WPP Group? Does that mean we can tell what Google will do by watching what WPP group does?
Google was an engineering and search company before they had any advertising whatsoever. There are just things about what Google did then, and do now, that pushed them into an advertising based revenue model.
Google's technology is based on gathering information about the structure of the web and user behaviour. That is their core competency, nobody does it better than them. They leverage that core competency, that killer unique advantage, to earn revenue through advertising. Is HBO's DNA advertising and subscriptions? Sounds like a magazine publisher to me, does HBO have the same DNA as Vogue Magazine or Time?
Yes understanding their revenue model can tell you useful things about the constraints on a company. It can tell you about the forces that act on them to direct their behaviour, but to say that it constitutes their DNA is to put the cart way out in front of the horse.
If Google finds a new revenue stream other than advertising, they will deploy their core competencies to exploit it, just as the carniverous ancestors of Panda Bears adapted to a herbivorous diet. Dont confuse ecological niche for innate nature.
An ad agency works with companies to produce ads. It does the concepting and production of ads(etc.).
An 'ad service'(unsure of proper name) provides the medium of which to display the ads. These include tv stations, google, youtube(owned by google), facebook, amazon, all those annoying ones in free mobile games etc.
There's a huge difference to what wpp and google provides. Google earns 90% of it's revenue(source: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busin... - i googled it) from ads.
That said I agree that just because google provides a platform for ads doesn't mean it's "dna" is based in advertising. It's a core component of the company, though, and drives everything else the company does.
Does Facebook deserve our time ?
I deleted my account while ago, also explained my family members how Facebook pays habit experts to steal people's time, runs research on how to manipulate emotions for "science". My mom and dad also happily deleted their accounts, too.
Make a favor to yourself, delete your account. Also help your family delete their accounts, too.
You can actually delete your Facebook permanently through their help pages: https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
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P.S: Upvote this submission so we can help more people delete their FB accounts; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443354
Also, if you use Facebook delightedly, it can be a great tool. The trick is to spread awareness of its danger and tell people to use it at caution. At one point or another I think people are going to have to accept that it is a primary form of communication this day and age. Simply telling people to delete the application without better alternatives and citing it's worst flaws are not going to get you very far.
Of course they won't. But we shouldn't want FB to "change" (meaning, "improve", whatever that means). We should wish it stay exactly as it is, and die.
There has never been a TV in my home. As time passes, I notice my kids tend to make friends with other kids coming from non-tv homes (probably because they have more to share with them, and nothing to say about what was on TV last night.
Those who care enough can raise a generation of social-networks-free people.
TV and social media serve as vital cultural references that kids have a social need to be 'in on.' It is one of the most awkward things when you're the only one in a room who has no clue what everyone else is talking about because you didn't see that post, or watch that show.
So while social networks may be bad, it's just as bad to cut kids off from the culture their peers are regularly immersed in.
It's okay to be awkward with everyone, as long as you have strong friends, even just one. Why would blending in be a goal.
It's a glorified ad company. It will do anything and everything to collect people's data and sell more ads.
I occasionally watch the evening news and I am sick and tired of ads for drugs for old people. I'm not old and I don't need drugs. But the television stations can't target their ads at specific viewers (yet) so they target them at demographics. And old people tend to watch the evening news more than other demographics so that's what they show.
People act like Facebook (and every other company) is gathering data about people for some sort of nefarious plan for world domination. But all they're doing is improving the quality of connections between people making things (advertisers) and people who might want those things (consumers). Is that really so terrible?
No, I prefer poorly targeted ads. Seeing ads for stuff I might want to buy is more distracting, more tempting, and forces me to expend my limited supply of willpower to resist the temptation.
People who are tricked into getting new cars, phones, credit cards or even houses, despite being unable to deal with the accompanying debt, are the victims here.
They have traffic but it is relatively disengaged, in terms of commercial intent. Sure, you can target - but there's a long path between looking at your friend's party pictures and actually pulling out your credit card.
Now... if they looked at their content and communities and made a real effort to warm up commercial intent before running the ad... perhaps moved into the content business (for real)... that audience would be worth a lot more.
Without creepy tracking moves. Just by making it easy for someone to follow their interests.
Just one example: I work in the music industry. YouTube has a fingerprinting service is used to pay out royalties on music. The tech is similar to Shazam.. whereby if the girl next door uses "Island In The Sun" by Weezer in her vlog, YouTube detects that song and pays Weezer a small royalty.
The alternative option for Weezer is to block this content (meaning her video would be taken down) but obviously it's in their best interest to monetize.
This is just one way YouTube gets in bed with content producers like record labels.
This same thing is now being implemented in Facebook videos, so clearly that's something they're going to push.. having their users host longer-form video than what is normally seen on facebook. And I'm sure there's other parallel efforts on Facebook's side to get more premium video and gaming content onto their platform.
I don't have a ton of insight but I'm sure it gets more complicated when you have creators that get a cut of the money, as well as potentially multiple advertisers in the case of longer videos. But it all comes out of that ad revenue.
It has turned into a PR nightmare for ESL. They shot themselves in the foot by throwing fits on Twitter and DMCA'ing (in bad faith) other prominent Twitch streamers who broadcast the matches directly from the game client, which is explicitly allowed by Valve.
The whole ordeal seems like a land grab by Facebook. Why would anyone want their friends / family to know they're watching people play video games for hours? Why put up with a terrible streaming interface when Twitch and Youtube are well-known and proven? No one wanted this except Facebook; buying up users to track and monetize them is just what they do best.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/search?q=esl&restrict_sr=on
> recently acquired exclusive rights to broadcast ESL Dota 2
Yup I heard this as well. I was just saying that it's not a question of if/when Facebook is making said land-grab into the content space. They're already on the move.
Facebook might be more aggressive (or perhaps just more transparent) about it. However, to think, as a rule, any company (particularly a public company) is making decisions based on ethics or your best interest is naive. It's all about revenue.
Deleting your account outright seems keep it away forever. There won’t be any going back but I don’t see any way around it. Otherwise they’ll always have something to nab you by.
And that there is the Achilles' heel of both Google and Facebook: disrupting the attention market.
I've been having a debate with someone on this subject, and it prompted me to run a consumer survey asking people: "Thinking about free services (e.g., print, radio, TV, websites), do you like it when they sell your attention to advertisers?" Yes, No, Undecided.
Of 511 responses, only 6% liked having their attention sold. 68% dislike it, and 26% were on the fence.
Personally, I think there is a huge opportunity to re-invent the attention market. Until then, companies like Google and Facebook will keep stealing our attention and selling it to the highest bidder.
As long as Facebook keeps and increased the eyeballs (aka €$£¥), nothing will change.
If tomorrow 200 milion users stop using FB due to privacy concerns, then the very next day I promise you FB will change. But not a moment before that!
>"Overseas users of Facebook are using the social platform on phones that are usually pre-paid phones and don’t have as much personalized information available from third party sources to create profiles."
Could someone say why "pre-paid phone don’t have as much personalized information available from third party sources"?
Also what are these "third party sources", who would these be in the EU/US? The carriers?
You can get a pre-paid with cash in many if not most places. Your identity can probably be deduced from call/text graph analysis, but that's not the same as having the people whom you're paying regularly for the account selling your identity to anyone with a buck to spare.
The VSM is an theory elaborated from classic cybernetics, the science of feedback-based control, which aims to predict how and if a particular system will be able to adapt to a changing environment.
VSM is a fractal system with five types of blocks organized in three layers (a core defining long-term strategy, a bureaucracy evaluating compliance of defined plans and its adequacy to respond to external threats, and operative units to carry specific parts of the plan). In this model, the strategic core defines which should be the unchanging essence of the organization, while the rest of the system may change more drastically in order to adapt and survive against external threats. (The fractal part is because each component block is in turn divided into the same three layers).
He can pretty much say the “DNA” is anything he wants, since it’s after the fact.
Also people who use “sciency-sounding” words this brazenly make me want to puke.
“It’s hard-wired in the neural net!”
"I really don't trust FB with my data anymore. I actually anti-trust them."
The government only punishes once there’s blood in the water.
With other countries, sometimes nobody owns the one in question and they will have various willingness to sell it or not, with various levels of paperwork.
The Corporate DNA
source: https://om.co/2011/02/11/change-is-good-but-its-also-really-...
"You can't buy new DNA and companies can't acquire their way into new corporate cultures." - Om Malik
Is there any other way a company could acquire "new DNA"?
151 "virus" wn "WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)"
virus
n 1: (virology) ultramicroscopic infectious agent that replicates itself only within cells of living hosts; many are pathogenic; a piece of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) wrapped in a thin coat of protein
diff -q googledna.2018 googledna.1998 || cat googledna.1998
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
* * *
Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious.
* * *
* * *
* * *
source: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=297827
Authors: Sergey Brin, Lawrence Page
Published in: WWW7 Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems
Volume 30 Issue 1-7, April 1, 1998
Pages 107-117
Elsevier Science Publishers B. V. Amsterdam, The Netherlands
doi 10.1016/S0169-7552(98)00110-X
The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine 1998
Citation Count: 3,024
Uh, sounds like you didn't actually leave Facebook, dude. To leave, try DELETING your account, instead of just deactivating it.