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Comment by adpirz | Hacker News Reader

What's facebook's boiling point? My guess is they'll respond, they'll no longer use 2FA #'s for ads, the damage will have been done, and 99% of the population won't know any of it occurred. We'll repeat this cycle when a fresh revelation occurs months from now, as facebook continues to test how much they can leverage for more ad revenue.

But none of it is actually slowing FB down. Its biggest dip in value came from decelerating growth and spending to make FB more user-friendly, so there's a clear disconnect between shareholder incentives and those of the general populace.

On top of that, most people remain unaware that FB owns both WhatsApp and IG, and while the departures of their top brass have made waves in these circles, it's not a concern for most.

I don't see FB's dominance relenting any time soon, though I wish it would.

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A reminder that if you work for Facebook you are fully complicit. Especially if you're an engineer, there should be no shortage of jobs available to you at this time. There is no excuse to work for a company that's sole focus is exploitation of its users.

This is an asinine, Deference to authority, nanny state garbage take..

No-one is forced to give all their info to fb. Better yet, no one is forced to use fb.. Of your using these services, and you give all your info to them, that's on you, not engineers just earning a check.

Did you read TFA? It's clear that FB has info on people that they never willingly gave to FB. It's also clear that FB can mine information about people who have never used FB, simply by virtue of their being in the contact list of someone who DOES use FB.

You are absolutely right this calls for nanny state involvement. This is precisely a case where the invisible hand of capitalism is impotent and government regulation is essential.

Exactly. When I get recruitment emails from Facebook I like to kindly remind the recruiters that I am not interested in furthering the interests of a company that in my opinion is making the world worse, not better.

Reminder that the same applies to Google.

Yes, but it’s not about business model, it’s about trust. Both companies, Facebook and Google, built their business modeles around advertisers and have no other option than to sell your data. But, for some reason, 9 out of 10 engineers that I work with dislike Facebook and don’t trust them. They are willing to share work documents and emails with Google, but not Facebook.

That's only because Facebook is optional. They use Google for their email and documents because they need something for those things.

> They are willing to share work documents and emails with Google, but not Facebook.

Last time I checked, Facebook did not offer free personal and company e-mail and collaborative office suite.

The problem with this argument - I care about issue X, company C is known to disregard/exploit users with X and so I assume all employees of company C are complicit while I give a free pass to the users who remain ignorant and simply don't care no matter how many times these issues surface.

And where do you stop? Are all doctors working for big pharma related to opioid crisis complicit? what about people working for firms related to the financial crisis? engineers working for any company that suffered data breaches due to lax data security? what about engineers working for companies that haven't suffered data breaches yet but might have lax security? scientists working to certain biotech firms related to GM? engineers working for car manufacturers that cheated emission norms? engineers working for telecom/internet service providers that cheat users by throttling/net neutrality etc. etc. etc.

Yes, they’re all complicit, to different degrees. Even the janitors and cooks are complicit when they support unethical enterprises.

If any Facebook engineer suddenly acquired some moral sense, he should spend his time working to sabotage the company from within. Some have walked away; others have walked away and publicly spoken about facebook’s dubious culture.

Now it’s time to see some sabotage.

I was with you until sabotage. It’s spending energy maliciously when as you say, there are plentiful options. Non aggression principle rules.

Whistleblowing would be a good middle-ground here. Also, I don't think sabotage would be as efficient since FB would just restore everything in an instant.

The problem with whistleblowing is that the consequences need to be more direct and actually leave a dent. As it is right now, FB can absorb pretty much any fines they're hit with.

No need for “aggression”. The CIA wrote a sabotage manual, which involved things like “forgetting” to lubricate wheels, spending lots of time in meetings which go nowhere, slowing down and getting distracted while working, etc.

I consider all of the energy being spent in the maintenance of facebook to be malicious. If a datacenter caved in because of a structural flaw in the building, then that’s a lot less energy going into supporting facebook. How many datacenters would have to cave in before they wouldn’t be able to recover?

https://www.businessinsider.com/cia-manual-sabotage-producti...

As someone who has occasionally runs experiments with FB adverts for various types of business. I feel it's boiling point will be when people and organisations advertising on the platform really start to look deeply into the value for money they are getting on it. I can't tell you the amount of times I've seen organisations throw money at it in return for dubious clicks from markets they never targeted, bot like users and poor really ROI after advertising with it.

from that egoistically lawless point of view, they will do better on each privacy violation that gets reported as it signal better return for the investment of advertisers.

Are you hinting that FB advertisers are throwing 50 billion (expected 2018 revenue) at ads that are poorly performing? Obviously that is not correct, the result of all this detailed targeting is campaigns that are performing very well for experienced marketeers.

okay so…

- not all people buying FB ads are experienced marketers

- companies throw tons of money at ineffective ads, that should be obvious…

- we have no idea what the ratio of "successful" to unsuccessful campaigns is

- even if that ratio is negative, Facebook is still one of the only remaining "games" in town, so people _will_ continue throwing money at it. “Least worst” is a fine and lucrative place to be in.

- can we just get over this idea of rational economies, by the way

- marketing is less of a science than a craft, and all the implications thereof

> can we just get over this idea of rational economies, by the way

This is key and undermines a lot of rational arguments. People buying ads aren't reading HN and then making a buying decision based on the general vibe they get there. They'll buy based on budget. Budget is based on decisions made in a meeting a year or two before. Those decisions will be based on a strategy. For many that strategy is to the tune of 'I keep hearing about this social media thing that's supposed to be the future. I notice we aren't spending anything in digital. We need to buy more digital'.

If public opinion sours on Facebook it may be a while before we see a significant drop in revenues.

I'm in ad tech, and believe me: FB advertising works. The vast majority of their ad revenue is coming from experienced ad buyers that are spending immense amounts on direct response campaigns, not branding.

If you want to see how things work, start a small ad campaign yourself of FB. It's all about ROI, attribution, cost per action, super detailed targeting, etc. It's the opposite of "throwing money at it hoping that it'll work", unlike offline advertising or even traditional display ads.

Exactly like this article states. You can give Facebook a list of phone numbers or email addresses and it will put your ad in front of only those people. Does anyone know how small a list you can target? List of one? List of one plus N number of dead email addresses? Therefore a list of one, but more expensive?

> The smallest audience you can upload is an audience size of 30 people. Also, this audience size needs to be 30 people which Facebook can identify and find. So, if you upload an email list of 30 and Facebook can match only 20 of those email addresses to Facebook profiles then it will reject your list, so in most cases you need to upload a list of about 60 people. You then need ensure you upload a list of only females or males which includes the one email address of the person you are targeting (the opposite to the one person that you are targeting). Lastly you need to choose the gender in the demographic filtering which matches the intended target. Here’s a step by step example below

"Sniper Targeting on Facebook: How to Target ONE specific person with super targeted ads" https://medium.com/@MichaelH_3009/sniper-targeting-on-facebo...

Informative article, mostly about how amoral this salesman is. I wonder if most people in sales think this way. Maybe the article was created solely as an ad for the author's company and the content is all lies. I'd have no way to know with out trying the myself and a fake article would be in complete alignment with the author's value system.

http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...

Also:

- marketing companies they ask to run Facebook campaigns for you may be as clueless as they are

Source: I used to work for one (we had separate development and social media marketing departments). People doing marketing had no clue about statistics, they just shoved random whale graphs from Facebook's fanpage panel into a word document and wrote narratives that suggested everything is peachy. Customers read those reports, and since they had no way or skill of reevaluating the results on their end, they were happy and willing to pay. I'm not even assuming malicious intent on the part of the provider - just general cluelessness.

I'm increasingly convinced a lot of marketing on the Internet looks that way. Neither party understands the real meaning of the results, but as long as the buyer is happy, money keeps flowing.

FB is making sure you can't calculate the ROI of a campaign. Marketers are putting money in FB because they think this is where they can the most accurately target people.

https://adage.com/article/digital/p-g-decided-facebook-ad-ta...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2012/05/15/gm-says-...

By spending x amount per week and by measuring signups/purchases/leads marketers are tracking roi.

This is demonstrably not true. FB provides better tools than pretty much anyone else to tie sales to advertising (online or off) and to track app instal lifetime advertising revenue generated over time. The human data and walled garden of tracking they have are hugely valuable in proving ROI.

So... not anytime soon? As long as FB has real and active users advertisers will advertise and throw money at them.

I mean, Facebook tricked advertisers initially into spending 100s of millions into the platform (if not billions?) with their bait and switch of telling advertisers they'd "own" the users that liked their pages - and people still trust them even with that starting pointing to keep advertising? It's strange to me.

People have been doing this for years on Google's platform and the behaviors still haven't changed (I have a lot of hands-on experience with $100k+ annual ad spend budgets that are atrocious), so I disagree. People set it and forget it (mainly to ad ops agencies who charge 10%), because they don't know any different as long as sales keep coming in.

This is how I feel about ads in general.

The only type of ad that makes sense to me at all is one that educates someone about a class of problem and that there's at least one product (X) that can be used to solve this problem.

In many cases it would make more sense to focus these efforts on making stores more effective at presenting solutions and grouping related solutions in expected areas to improve the search effectiveness of independent agents that have black box algorithms and are outside of the store's control.

Attempting to modify said black boxes by an inundation of annoyances is ethnically wrong to me. (As implied above, when it ceases being educational it's increasingly likely to cross that line, particularly if the campaign is based on gimmicks or repetition to be effective in vulnerable population segments.)

My problem is how easy it is to "fake" advertising. As in I go to website browse and buy then I get ads after about said product. Is that counted as evidence of a successful add sale?

That's most likely poor retargeting setup

Buying digital advertising is big part of my job. I find the exact opposite to be true. FB provides high quality, low fraud. Especially compared to anything that's not Google/FB.

When we advertise to raise money (for politicians) that provides a direct provable ROI and I can tell you nothing else has come close. Seems that is true for many corporations as well just look at FBs growing revenue. FB provides the tools to measure either a sale or the value of an app install over time the increased spend is proof of quality/value so clearly many others have also found success. I wonder who/what/how your campaigns didn't provide value?

FB is now running it's own branding ads in out of home media [1], which is a signal they've done the cost/benefit analysis internally and are now losing enough user trust to justify this brand spend.

Also, FB MAUs and DAUs are stalled [2], meaning users are becoming less interested in the blue website.

If anything, FB is closer to a 'boiling point' now than ever in the past.

[1] https://www.ispot.tv/ad/wUQP/facebook-a-little-closer

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-maus-daus-stalled-u...

Definitely worth noting, but I think they felt pressured to respond because the election meddling made enough waves with the gen pop to warrant a message, I don’t see it having a lasting impact.

The MAUs and DAUs are more interesting, especially since younger people seem to be avoiding it entirely (although many are flocking to IG, so again, no loss for FB).

> most people remain unaware that FB owns both WhatsApp and IG

I am not surprised. If you let Google autocomplete the search "is facebook o" for you, you'll find these autocomplete results in order:

  1. is facebook owned by google
  2. is facebook on roku
  3. is facebook over
  4. is facebook offline
  5. is facebook overvalued
    ...
  10. is facebook on its way out

Seriously, people? "Is Facebook owned by Google?". AFAIK most people have no idea what goes on with tech companies and they have no idea how much power they have and how they work with your data, or what personal data is even comprised of.

The best one is 'is facebook and twitter owned by the same person'.

True. The other day I was talking to my cousin and the conversation was something like:

— Facebook copied Snapchat's functionality on all their platforms.

— Instagram and Whatsapp copied it too.

— Yeah, that's what I meant by all their platforms.

— They're owned by Facebook?

She uses Instagram and Whatsapp everyday!

TBH, people don't really care about who owns what. We know it because it's our domain of expertise, but, for instance, I couldn't tell you if Uncle Ben's rice is owned by Nestlé, Unilever, Kraft Foods, Mars, Coca-Cola or some other food brand. Yet I eat rice several times a week.

I told my girlfriend about this just now, and she said "omg, they do?!", and went right back to her phone. Probably to check Facebook or Instagram.

Which is the reaction most people will have, I'm guessing.

Out of respect for you said "omg, they do", I reckon.

I think platforms like Facebook depend on being "cool" over some demographic. Then other demographics adopt it, time passes, other demographics grow tired of the same old Facebook look their parents also used, and Facebook starts to die. We've seen this as well with other social networks like hi5, myspace, that once dominated entire continents as the preferred social website. Of course they are smart and competent people so they will try to prevent it, and it seems to have lasted longer and left a bigger mark already, but still; I'm sure a lot of people around the world already share the sentiment of "not doing anything on FB", and just keeping it open for messenger chat.

I see what you mean, but I'm under the impression that Facebook is not "your father's social network" in that it's not even comparable to what MySpace was, neither in numbers nor in qualities.

What I mean is that we are comparing two different beasts, so I'm not sure "it happened to MySpace" is a good telltale sign of what will eventually happen to Facebook.

Not to mention the growing number of people who only use a mobile phone as their gateway to internet services (along with all of the personal info to be gleaned from them) and who spend the vast majority of their time on the web using Facebook.

I've seen this a lot more in countries where internet access wasn't too common until the past 5-10 years and people didn't start out with a less centralized web before apps and closed networks gained popularity.

My partner isn't from the US originally and when I mention how obnoxious it is that Facebook is like the new AOL and I thought we were past this, she reminds me that it's all anyone back home uses for anything and they didn't have internet access back then.

To her and her friends/family back home, the internet basically is Facebook (and occasionally being forced to open their browser app to search for something if they don't just ask around on Facebook). A handful of other apps and defaults define the internet for them and anything else just sounds like too much hassle.

This is why acquisitions such as IG and WhatsApp are crucial. If they purchase the next cool thing, they never really go out of fashion. FB has gone from throwing sheep at your friends to this. I don't think they are stopping anytime soon

> This is why acquisitions such as IG and WhatsApp are crucial. If they purchase the next cool thing, they never really go out of fashion. FB has gone from throwing sheep at your friends to this. I don't think they are stopping anytime soon

But it does mean that an even somewhat diligent antitrust enforcement could strangle them to death. They shouldn't be allowed to acquire their future competitors. If the US won't stop them, maybe European regulators can?

We have a hard time making them pay their taxes, I'm pretty sure we won't be able to regulate them anytime soon.

It is an anti-network effect. The early adaptors are cool, the late adaptors are not. In Facebook's case, the early adaptors are now old people posting photos of their children. The users aged to irrelevance.

There definitely was a big difference between MySpace and the other social networks. Facebook ran well and worked. People forget the total shit show MySpace was in the middle of 2008. The site ran terribly, was getting hammered by spammers, and they starting covering it in banner ads. We didn't see a repeat of those problems with Instagram or Snapchat.

There is a coolness factor. It isn't as defined as fashion, or the latest hot nightclub, but it is there. That alone won't be enough to make the "next" Facebook, but I think it is the foot that gets stuck in the door.

Facebook might be able to acquire the next challenger in the US, but they will definitely fail to get it by EU regulators.

They're both network effects. The difference is that the relative value per node, to other nodes has changed. Disaster hits when the high-value nodes leave.

Networks are driven by positive feedback both going up and down. This sounds good, but isn't: the system and balance points are inherently unstable. Nothing succeeds like success, or fails like failure.

Facebook adopters were never cool. It began as a place for uptight Ivy bratlings, then grew by being more square and "safer" than Myspace.

Nevertheless, your larger point holds, Facebook users are even less cool now than they were before.

This is a very good point. In particular kids wouldn’t be caught dead on a network their parents (and other elderly relatives) are on.

I suspect Facebook knows this and will keep acquiring new platforms when they can.

I wonder too if there is a boiling point with the mechanisms at play. Google was a "do no evil" company, and yet there was maybe a small earthquake within the company regarding the news coming to light they're making a censorship-friendly version of their search.

I take everything Facebook has done that caused any level of public outcry as a guide book to design a better platform, likewise with Google. And I won't dive into the history or foundation of Facebook, however it's not surprising their path would lead to problems - and at indirect cost to society.

It all comes down to Wall Street. As long as investors are OK with FB's shenanigans, they'll continue to find innovative ways to sell off their users.

Which is a bit of a mug's game, as most investors are explicitly about profits. Externalities be damned.

I would much rather see industries self-regulate. But I have big concerns about industries where people are mainly the product, not the customer. I think it breaks the key feedback loop that makes most self-regulation work: irritable users/customers.

For me America's best backup to irritable customers has always been class action suits. It allows aggrieved customers to band together and force accountability where otherwise individual harm would be too small to justify the costs of a lawsuit. But mandatory arbitration is breaking that too, and anyway doesn't work as well when users aren't customers.

So if we don't have user-fueled self-regulation, and we don't have class action, then I'm not sure what we can do short of government regulation. It's a last resort for me, but nothing else seems to have worked on Facebook.

> ... there's a clear disconnect between shareholder incentives and those of the general populace.

This is always the case when the general populace are not customers but products. It cannot not be the case.

>"...they'll no longer use 2FA #'s for ads..."

What are 2FA numbers in the context of ads?

I'm assuming it's meant that a user connects their phone to secure their account, but FB is also using it for marketing etc.

Ah I see, so the same 2FA just repurposed for things it wasn't intended to do. Thanks.

Facebook is already in decline (people have stopped using it, either completely or drastically reduced their usage of it).

The problem is Facebook is allowed to buy rising competitors on its way down, thus prolonging its monopoly in the social media space.

It may be in decline, but like a ship slowing down from light speed, it will take years before there's any significant change in the social media landscape. They have a very long time-frame of opportunity to turn their ship around, and it wouldn't surprise me if they do.

A good real world example is Disney. Disney has been almost broke a few times over its lifetime, yet currently it's so huge that people believe it will never fail again.

Facebook have so much money in the bank, that the moment their primary model is no longer viable, they'll just go to market and buy up the next hot thing, and switch their focus there. They are like an unstoppable pandemic virus in this aspect.

In dystopian sci-fi novels and films, there is commonly the concept of 'The Company' who see-all, and control-all. It used to be that we'd predict it would be IBM, or Microsoft who would be 'The Company', more recently we'd say it would be Google. Currently however, it's more likely to be Facebook.

It used to be that we'd predict it would be IBM, or Microsoft who would be 'The Company', more recently we'd say it would be Google. Currently however, it's more likely to be Facebook.

This is exactly why we shouldn’t worry about it. The company that we think is going to rule the world forever changes every ten years.

FB seems to be the favorite punching bag for HN, probably because it’s full of people who have tried to set up 600 different startups and raised exactly $0 where as Zuckerberg made more money than all the people here combined in 100 years.

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