Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

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In particular, I find these assertions troubling and controversial:

> "Cynics might not believe it, but Google and Facebook didn’t adopt the free model in order to serve advertisers. On the contrary, they adopted the advertising model as a way to keep serving their users for free. Google did so only with great reluctance [...]"

> "That helps to explain why Google and Facebook really don’t think of their users as their products—at least, not their main products. Their leaders have always regarded advertising, and by extension users’ attention and data, as means to the end of building the products they really care about: Google search, Google Assistant, Facebook’s news feed."

This runs contrary to all we know about these companies. For example, "common sense" knowledge about Google has always been that it's primarily an advertising company that happens to do search very well and is technologically innovative. Now, common sense is wrong often enough that it's reasonable to question it now and then, but what evidence has the author to support his assertions? I'd be interested to know if there's any actual evidence that Facebook and Google would ditch advertising if they could (instead of it being their primary business).

I find the author makes several extraordinary and unsupported assertions which contradict all we thought we knew about these companies. He may very well be right, but he really should support these assertions.

You're right, I probably could have done a better job citing sources on these claims. You can read about Larry Page and Sergey Brin's early anti-ads stance in any number of books about Google, or in their own published paper that first introduced the idea for Google: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

I summarized a lot of the literature in this article a while back about how Google landed on its business model: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/when_big_businesses_w...

See in particular John Battelle's "The Search" (2005), Steven Levy's "In the Plex" (2011), and Doug Edwards' "I'm Feeling Lucky" (2011).

As for Facebook, there's probably less public documentation but I have been following/covering it from very early on and personally know a few of its earliest employees. Ads have never been Zuck's focus.

Again, as I say in this piece, the fact that these companies didn't set out to become advertising/surveillance juggernauts doesn't excuse anything. They absolutely are. But I raised this point about their mission and origins to help explain why it seems obvious to those companies' leaders that customers' data is not their primary product.

Thanks for the reply! I assure you my comment wasn't made in bad faith.

By the way, I do agree with this other statement you made:

> "The pithiness that makes “you are the product” so quotable risks obscuring the complex pact between Facebook and its users, in ways that make social media’s problems seem inevitable and insoluble. They’re not—but if we want to fix them, the first thing we need to do is redefine our relationship."

I don't have much faith in Facebook's "pact" with its users, but I do agree the fatalistic mindset of "this is the way things are, and you are a fool if you expect otherwise" (implied by "you are the product") is worse than useless: it trains us to accept a rather unacceptable state of things.

What if "all we know", "all we thought we knew" is the problem ?

There is a really telling and truthful scene in the Social Network movie about that, when Saverin wants to introduce ads and sponsoring opportunities way too early and Zuck refuses.

Former-employees-turned-critics like the author of the "Chaos Monkeys" book also agree with that : I'm paraphrasing but he says 2 important things : 1) that the ads sales organization within FB often felt neglected because Zuck initially really, really didn't care or understand this industry. Sheryl basically ran that, and still does to some extent 2) They were really serious about "make the world more open and connected" mantra internally. It's a genuinely mission driven company (and I'm sure recent controversies must have made huge waves)

I'm a former Facebook engineer. For sure, and especially since the IPO, it's definitely become an ads company, no point denying that. But it's also very fair to say it wasn't built to be one.

Same goes for Google really : who believes Larry & Sergei were thinking "let's build an advertising behemoth !" when they came up with PageRank in a Stanford dorm ?

Most ideas that became big weren't built from the get go with money as the end goal. That's just what follows after success.

Yes, I agree with all of this. I guess I was writing my explanation above at the same time you were writing this.

> What if "all we know", "all we thought we knew" is the problem

This is entirely possible and I acknowledged it in my post! I was mostly asking for evidence (and, I admit, expressing some skepticism).

> Most ideas that became big weren't built from the get go with money as the end goal

Agreed! To be honest, I'm more interested in the viable business stage than in the "two guys in a dorm" stage. I assume the people who built the first TV weren't all that interested in making tons of money either. But you have a point.

The author, Will Oremus, supports the assertion you highlighted in the portion of the article that you removed from your quotation with brackets and an ellipsis. In Oremus' original, the words "only with great reluctance" link to a previous article [1] by Oremus about the genesis of Google's advertising strategy, and he goes on to quote Brin and Page's 1998 paper [2] criticizing ad-funded search engines as inherently biased. The sourcing on Oremus' anecdotal knowledge of Zuckerberg's indifference to advertising is rather thin, but it's also a typical bit of color from a tech writer who, readers can assume, knows a lot of people in the industry. In any case, it strikes me as bad faith to argue that an author doesn't provide support for his assertions when you have excised some of that very support from your quote of the article.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/when_big_businesses_w...

[2] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

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