Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier | Hacker News Reader

Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

wsj.com

336 pointswyclif170 comments

> For example, when Mr. Zuckerberg met with the founders of startups, including Evan Spiegel, chief executive of Snap, and Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare Inc., he presented them with two scenarios: either they accept the price he was offering for their companies, or face Facebook’s efforts to copy their products and make operating more difficult, according to people familiar with the conversations. In both cases, after the companies rejected the overtures, Facebook soon after released features that mimicked the products from Snap and Foursquare.

This seems to be a critical bit

I don’t see the problem with this. Isn’t it fair market competition? Facebook had (and has) deeper pockets and more users, so they won against Snap and Foursquare. Their acquisition of IG and WA were great moves too, it’s almost impossible to escape the Facebook and Google internet.

It's rather easy. Delete your fb and use bing + ddg. Done.

Then you go on your news outlet and meet your friendly facebook "like" button that keep stalking you.

uBlock w/ social filter

Yeah it's quite easy to block social widgets, trackers and the like. A more extreme approach is blocking scripts by default and whitelisting sites you want. Finally don't accept cookies from remote origins, and you're pretty (but not totally) well covered against trackers.

And throw in https://adnauseam.io/ to taint the underlying ad/tracking data.

There are many economists that think the acquisition of IG should have warranted antitrust.

This is a good case on it:

https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...

We don’t even need to go that far. Facebook snooped in users via an advertised VPN app to make WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions. That in itself should be enough fodder to discuss them.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-social-me...

Instagram was way before Onavo acquisition. WhatsApp was officially announced as an acquisition 4 months after Onavo purchase. The article does say insiders say they used Onavo for WhatsApp purchase decision.

However I’m assuming you don’t do a $19B acquisition (and 10% of your market cap) in a month. Wouldn’t Facebook have already been close to or starting the process of trying to buy WhatsApp before the end of 2013? Onavo was announced as a purchase in mid Oct 2013.

I tried seeing where it stated that. I don’t see it. Instagram was a relatively tiny iPhone app back in 2012. Two years old and 30M users.

I think it's more nuanced, and goes beyond just the content of the quoted excerpt. While copying the features (acceptable market competition), did Facebook leverage/abuse their monopoly status to prevent users from migrating to the upstart with better features? Further, are users being kept on Instagram using better features, or by abusing network effects? If it's the latter, then I would consider that a clear target for antitrust litigation. And preventing users from switching products while you catch-up (or not) seems squarely in that ballpark.

If these features were critical enough that you could found a company on them, then clearly they brought innovation to the scene. If they had not come along, it's unclear as to whether Facebook would have ever introduced those features in their products.

"Fair market competition" is the idea that products compete on their own merits, not that you can leverage your market position to destroy competitors. "Deeper pockets" is certainly antithetical to fair competition even if it's a reality we must sometimes accept. Exploiting the fact that you have "more users" should probably also be looked at as anti-competitive since it certainly doesn't benefit consumers by locking people into exclusive platforms.

Are we really going to resign ourselves to the idea that FAANG will now and forever own nearly all the internet? What good are the "principles" of "free market competition" if we allow consolidation to effectively eliminate the market?

"Fair market competition" is the idea that products compete on their own merits, not that you can leverage your market position to destroy competitors.

This idea implies something akin to an implicit patent on every imaginable product "merit". But I should remind you that patents are not intended to be free market devices - rather, if a patent is granted, it is monopoly given in exchange for an individual describing their honest advancement of the craft. If Snap deserved a patent on their "business process", they could have stopped Facebook, if not, there's no reason that a deep pocketed entity shouldn't look at modest innovations and copy them. The alternative is every small innovation is controlled by a petty dictator, blocking all progress.

I think FAANG is less useful as an abbreviation these days because it includes Netflix. I don’t think Netflix is guilty of much of anything sinister, at least by anyone’s reckoning except certain movie and tv studio executives.

While that’s a good point, if the alternative is going around and using the acronym FAAG I think we can stick with the original.

This is the main reason Netflix is included in the group, I think.

GAFA?

GAFAM is what the french use which includes Microsoft [0].

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM

Virtually anybody but Hollywood exec types love Netflix, particularly creatives (the people who actually DO the things). Netflix has been making enormous amounts of content, even for smaller markets like Spain and betting on great people who are making really good shows (see ‘casa de papel’)

If you are a creative person you are enthused about streaming because suddenly there’s a huge amount of content being funded. Think about standup comedy and what Netflix has done for it.

Netflix is run by very smart people who are making very good content that most Hollywood execs wouldn’t touch. Scorcese’s next film is being funded by them! It’s nuts that Wolf of Wall Street, The Departed, multiple Scorsese projects were VERY HARD to fund. Jonah Hill worked essentially for the lowest money you can work for in a movie (SAG which is the actors union says 20k minimum) in Wolf of Wall St. Because they couldn’t afford him. Stuff that you look back and wonder “how the fuck?”

I don't understand why movies like The Wolf of Wall Street would be hard to fund. The talent i.e. DiCaprio, Jonah Hill etc are all great and known actors bound to make a movie succeed, especially DiCaprio. and Scorsese is also a well-known, successful director. Why would producers have any issues funding a movie for them?

Is it the controversial nature i.e. nudity etc that was the problem?

Movies are an insanely risky business if you look past the top blockbusters. And right now the blockbusters are almost purely superhero movies, remakes and reboots, so outside of that it's gonna be hard to get any funding.

Why does this read like an ad? I found Netflix content to be of really poor quality. It is a huge datamining machine that creates content based on the data gathered by it's user. I.e. if a lot of people watch TV series including cats and bank robbery thrilled. They will make a show mixing the two. No risk, no originality. Pure mindless entertainment based on algorithm productivism.

g-mafia

google, microsoft, apple, facebook, ibm, apple

But IBM isn’t that powerful in any direct way any more compared to other tech companies.

Oracle and rising powers like PayPal and Salesforce would make more sense. The latter companies still do a fraction of IBM’s revenue and profit. but they’re growing. I wouldn’t be surprised if their market caps are past IBM by now.

Unless IBM is being included because of the Red Hat acquisition.

Looks like they are included because their name starts with an I.

Microsoft isn't that powerful either. Windows is a small percentage of computing and Office simply isn't a big deal. They're also a pretty good company now.

“Microsoft. Microsoft had a market capitalization of US$ 904.86 billion for the first quarter of 2019, ranking as the largest company in the world. ...”

and that’s just the average. Today they’re a trillion dollar company. That’s 2x Facebook.

And yeah, ibm is included because it makes the mneumonic better.

Yep Microsoft are certainty valuable, they're just not influential. Like IBM or Oracle. Not like Apple, Google or Facebook.

Netflix is also tiny compared to the others. Its entire business is analogous to a single product of Amazon's (Prime video). Not only that but they're reliant on Amazon AWS for hosting.

> Exploiting the fact that you have "more users" should probably also be looked at as anti-competitive since it certainly doesn't benefit consumers by locking people into exclusive platforms.

It's not quite as clear cut as you say. The downsides of being locked into a single platform exist, but the upsides of a new feature benefiting from an existing network also exist. Many consumers have benefited by getting access to ephemeral messages with their existing friends, when they wouldn't have installed a separate app and nagged their friends to switch just to get that feature.

Do you really think Facebook rolled out Stories specifically to kill Snapchat? That may have been a side effect that Facebook wouldn't care about, but they rolled out Stories because they were a good feature that could increase the value of Facebook.

Does having deeper pockets mean you aren't allowed to learn from competitors who do something better than you do? Should Snapchat not be allowed to have a social graph because Facebook has one? It really seems like those who think stories was just "copying to kill Snapchat" actually think something like the former, but not the latter, despite the logic being identical.

It may be competition, but it certainly isn't fair competition. As you note, Facebook has much deeper pockets than even a well-funded startup. They can afford to build a clone of your product and give it away for free, without any expectation of even future revenue, specifically to drive you out of business. And they can bundle their clone with their already-popular apps, so people never even feel the need to check out your original product since they have a "good enough" version placed right at their doorstep.

This is the exact same playbook that Microsoft used to strangle many, many promising companies back in the '80s and '90s: Stac Electronics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics), WordPerfect, Netscape, the list goes on and on. It's just impossible to successfully compete with someone who has an endless supply of money and can stand as a gatekeeper between you and your potential customers.

Would we prefer a world where disk compression, document editors, and web browsers weren't available as free apps?

There seems to be a fine line between price-dumping that ends up hurting consumers once competitors are driven out of business, and aggressive competition that benefits consumers by driving down prices and increasing availability.

Efficient markets have never been about absolute fairness. There's no industry that has been built without the attempted participation of deep pocketed enterprises from earlier, related industries - adding machine companies (like IBM) naturally wanted to jump into computers.

The system we live under is capitalism. It's aims are to provide profits to those who invest their existing wealth in innovations. If those with wealth can't use it to gain more wealth, they have no incentive to use it.

The government steps in when a given enterprise meets the definition of monopoly - IE, actually prevent new entries into a field (Microsoft met this definition). Google and Facebook are unpopular but I'd say it's pretty clear they don't meet the definition of monopolies preventing entry into their industry (at least on the net, Android is another matter).

I don't get why people play devil's advocate in defense of scummy behavior by tech companies. Every shitty thing they do should be called out, exposed and condemned. If they know they don't have public support or defenders they will be better behaved.

I don't get why people play devil's advocate in defense of scummy behavior by tech companies.

"Scummy behavior" is dumping poison in rivers or working people 90 hours a week. Normal competition is large companies putting smaller companies out of business through greater leverage. I don't care about a random small company getting rewarded for its random innovations. Why should I? The smaller company would probably crush an even small company given the opportunity. Large companies can sometimes offer more health benefits and such and smaller companies work 90 hour weeks more often.

If you want a different social system or something, good for you. If we're talking the present system, weeping for the operations of the market is waste of time. Regulate actual bad behavior, sure. But otherwise, save all regulatory effort, I'd suggest.

    > ...I don't care about a random small company getting rewarded for its random innovations. Why should I?

Actually, the 800 lb gorilla companies DO CARE about random small companies and their random innovations. That's why they try to buy them, sometimes aggressively. Quite frankly, it's how larger companies can get innovation.

As a company grows, true innovation usually gets squelched in favor of derpy project management bullshit. Creative people get burned out and leave, or, in some cases become "a fellow". The main way these big companies can actually innovate is to buy these smaller companies. It might be good for the owners of the small company, some folks cash-out, some get new jobs, some aren't so lucky. Whatever happens a bunch of folks got some great experiences and the satisfaction of creating something new.

I don't see this stuff as a bad thing-- and especially not for social media stuff.

"Actually, the 800 lb gorilla companies DO CARE about random small companies and their random innovations. That's why they try to buy them, sometimes aggressively. Quite frankly, it's how larger companies can get innovation."

Yes, the market takes care of this so I don't have to care.

The role of the citizen is caring about situations where markets malfunction - true monopolies, externalities, and all that jazz.

It's also the exact same playbook Google used against Facebook with Google+.

Except both companies had deep pockets in this scenario.

Facebook was further along than Snapchat, but there was still a 10x disparity in headcount and market cap. This was before Facebook had IPO'd.

Google had around 1,000 engineers dedicated to Google+, plus the entire company had KPIs based on the success of the project. Facebook had less than 1,000 engineers in total.

Facebook was nowhere near where it is today. It doesn’t even make money the same way with the majority of revenue and profits coming from mobile, with IG being a bigger and bigger factor. And it’s much more international (and monetizing international) now. Google was the giant when they tried Google+.

Before google+ launched Facebook had over 750 million users. It was hardly a small fish.

In either case, though, using market supremecy to crush competition should not be rewarded.

During that time period FB’s growth was meteoric and unprecedented. That’s the only reason Google likely took so long as to launch when FB is at 800M users. Because at beginning of decade they were at half that. Go back to beginning of 2009 and they are close to a third from beginning of decade.

They weren’t small in terms of users. But they were small in that just a few years prior, their user amounts were a fraction of what they were during Google+‘s launch. With Friendster, Mysapce, and all the me too social networks losing, there was no way to know for sure Facebook would win out and last as a huge company in the early 00s.

In early 00s, their revenue and profits hadn’t caught up to user growth either. The mobile explosion hadn’t fully happened yet. As well as Instagram now being a key part of their growth and solid part of their revenue and profit.

For one, pretty much every example cited in the article are "clones" of products that the "aggrieved" party was also giving away for free. But let's ignore that.

Let's take Stories. Facebook has monetized them, and pretty clearly realized they could monetize them when they rolled out. Does the fact that Snapchat came up with them mean Facebook should not be able to launch something that they plan to monetize? By this logic, anything Facebook rolls out that someone else did first wouldn't be allowed.

It's fairly easy to escape Facebook and Google in the grand scheme of things. A lot easier than avoiding, say, Nestlé or Coca Cola IRL. It's easier to change your homepage than your dietary habits. The problem is convincing people that they need to switch, clearly the vast majority doesn't care enough to download Firefox or make two click in their settings to change the default search engine.

I dont use foursquare but I dont think they won there. There data is being used all over the place -no?

> Isn’t it fair market competition?

Exploiting a monopoly in one segment in order to capture another is text book unfair competition.

I mean, they're competing social networks.

Exactly, that's illegal under US anti-trust law. It's called product tying.

It's legal to achieve a monopoly by competitive means, via pure excellence in product and operations. But it's illegal to then attempt to achieve another monopoly in a different product by tying it to your legal monopoly product.

That was part of the US DoJ suit against Microsoft in the 90s.

Agreed. Facebook came out with the Newsfeed, and now nearly every social product has a newsfeed: MyFitnessPal, Twitter, Venmo, etc.

It is until it isn’t. That came when Facebook deliberately targeted these young with policies whose obvious intent is to choke the growth of competitors before they attain critical mass. For example, policies which penalized content producers if they linked to Snapchat accounts.

I kind of agree with you. More specifically, to your example, would Snapchat, Whatsapp, etc, have been served well in this case by specifically patenting their implementations of specific features?

Like Facebook just totally ripped off Tinder with their new Dating feature -- could Match have just patented the profile with heart/pass buttons and then have grounds to sue?

It's anti-competitive behavior. There's no such thing as a fair market when one player has a monopoly.

I'm actually not in favor of anti-trust law and breaking up large companies. We should just properly tax them so that they can't grow this large.

Fair market competition is not possible if one actor is in a monopoly position.

And I am curious to read what economic theory says about competition over a free product. I mean, I understand their revenues come from advertisers, but they are trying to get users, for free, like if it were a market competition. I wonder how much this model holds water in that case.

Fair market competition is dead. It has been for a long time. Companies use every trick in the book to gain advantage, ethics be damned. Fair market competition was the first casualty of Neoliberalism when companies took greed is good to their heart and focused only on increasing shareholder wealth. Ayn Rand must be spinning in her grave now.

Just thought I'd post a supporting post to contrast the posts saying the move is unfair.

Imagine that Facebook wanted to have that functionality. They offer to buy the companies involved, but the companies ask for an unfair price ("1 million dollars!"). Should Facebook be compelled to pay that price? If they do not wish to pay that price, should they be forbidden from entering the market? Should Snap or Foursquare have a monopoly against any competitor that might be able to out compete them?

We can say that Facebook has a monopoly, but does that mean they should be forbidden from entering any new (to them) markets? We can say that they have a lot more money than their competition. Does that mean that they should be forbidden from competing? I don't think any of that makes sense.

I think what people are concerned about is the idea that Facebook will abuse their market position to compete unfairly. I think it's reasonable to fear that, but I don't think you can shut them down a priori. We don't have thought police yet. You can't be punished for something you haven't done yet.

If the argument is that Facebook should be punished for their past actions and forbidden from entering new markets, that's an argument that at least makes sense (I'm not sure I agree with it, though). I just can't understand any argument that says that lacking such a punishment, Facebook has to refrain from entering markets that they didn't create.

If we had such a mechanism in place, I think the potential for serious abuse would far exceed what Facebook has done to this point. In fact, I think we would be encouraging companies that act even more irresponsibly than the bad actors we have now in the market place. I can't really see an upside.

Steve Jobs made a similar offer to Dropbox.

This is implicit in almost every acquisition though.

It's one of the first things any investor will ask you which is how you can you defend your product from duplication by a larger company. If you are a company that overly relies on a single feature e.g. Snap stories then of course you will be more sensitive to threats like Facebook presented.

The headline doesn't really match the story. I don't doubt the likelihood that Facebook engaged in these sorts of things, but from the headline I expected a laundry list of complaints and at least anecdotes to support them. Instead there's only two vague accusation without support that Facebook discouraged influencers from Snap, and suppressed Snap content from trending.

The Onavo thing alone sounds utterly insane to me. I often think criticisms of Facebook and similar companies are overblown, personally, but Facebook really should have, at the least, faced as many repercussions as Volkswagen did for their deceit, if the facts are correct.

>One area of focus for the FTC is Onavo, an Israeli mobile-analytics startup that Facebook purchased in 2013. Onavo offered a free mobile app that described itself as a way to “keep you and your data safe” by creating a virtual private network. To do this, the company redirected internet traffic on Onavo to Facebook’s servers, which allowed it to log every action in a central database.

>That enabled Facebook to quietly track what users did on their phones, including which apps they used and for how long, the Journal reported in 2017. Onavo data was frequently cited in internal research and strategy decks

>At one point, Facebook—through Onavo—was able to see Snap data as specific as the number of messages a user sent or how much time those users spent in specific Snapchat features, the former employees said. Facebook couldn’t see the content of the messages or images. The visibility into Snap usage lessened considerably after Snap encrypted its app traffic.

>A Facebook spokeswoman said the app was similar to other industry market research tools.

Facebook literally published MitM (technically "MitMo") malware disguised as a VPN security app so it could intercept all unencrypted network traffic and record user actions, in part so they could spy on competing apps (and also, presumably, to spy on everything you do to serve you more ads and sell your behavioral data). This is exactly what spyware-distributing criminal organizations with front companies do, as documented by threat intelligence firms.

If this actually is similar to any other industry "market research tools", as they claim, the entire industry is fucked. If you bought a home security camera and later found out it was secretly sending back everything it saw and heard so they could sell the video and audio to advertising firms, causing the banner ads you come across to be tailored to your observed food, TV, and sexual preferences, the uproar would undoubtedly put them out of business. But Facebook can just quietly shut things down once there's negative press, and move on like it never happened. Snap is 100% in the right for compiling all of this info on "Voldemort".

Thank you! It’s been 2 years since this story and yet there have been no follow ups.

This is the dirty secret of usage analytics. Both Google and Facebook got in trouble with Apple for effectively doing the same thing by abusing internal apps - https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/31/18205795/apple-google-blo...

There is a major free AV vendor logging the usage of their 100m+ users for years and selling that data to third parties, and no one seems to care.

Does anyone else have trouble getting upset about these kind of stories? I can believe anti-competitive behavior is happening, but we're talking about snapchat stories and Instagram trends. It's not like they are a phone company raising prices on their customers or a railroad squeezing shippers. I get why this could be bad for a competitive marketplace, but does this hurt the consumer? What are the net downsides of this sort of behavior (not being sarcastic. I really have trouble thinking of any serious ones)

The downside is that if you know Facebook can and will do this to any competitive threat, you just won't bother to start your company in the first place.

As I mentioned before if your product is so weak at differentiation and defensibility then it doesn't deserve to be launched in the first place.

Facebook can only compete with you if you let them.

I can think of many reasons why I wouldn't want to start a company, but a fear that one day Facebook will show up and threaten to copy me unless I accept a multi-billion dollar acquisition offer is not one of them.

Firstly, those offers will shrink over time as Facebook refines its playbook, and it becomes more and more clear that they can win by copying. Secondly, it doesn't just impact you the founder, it also impacts VCs thinking about funding you. $1-2 billion may be a lot of money for you and me, but if you're a venture capitalist investing $10 million in lots of low probability bets, you need them to have the potential for very high returns.

Fantastic^

The counterexamples: Facebook and Microsoft exist, yet Slack is worth over a billion dollars.

Facebook, Microsoft and Cisco exist, and Zoom is over a billion. I can't find a valuation for Bluejeans is doing, but they're no slouch either (they've raised at least 100M).

Google tried to kill Facebook this way, and failed.

The feared downside is that FAANG quintopoly will forever own the Internet, which will stagnate and how we currently experience the Internet is how it will always be. That's a bit paranoid, to be sure, but in the face of anti-competitive behavior, it's not hard to believe in that possibility.

Microsoft was convicted of anti-competitive behavior, but by then it was too late, and Windows reigned supreme until it lost smartphones.

I'm not quite sure how Netflix (and to a lesser extent Apple) registers alongside the rest as "owning the Internet". They're not even assured dominance in the streaming market alone.

This is the coal that feeds the engine that cannibalizes the market. This particular circumstance might not matter to you, but what if FB uses proceeds like this to (fund legislation that makes it easier for them to) smother other companies in the cradle and assimilate their corpses?

What might that monster look like fully formed, I wonder?

Whatsapp, Instagram, Oculus, ... do you want all companies to be under three main tech companies?

What would the three be? Alphabet is obviously one. Microsoft does far more mid sized and big acquisitions than Facebook. Even Amazon does more known or consumer facing company acquisitions (Ring, PillPack, Souq (big If you’re in the Middle East countries it’s big in) in last few years)) than Facebook.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190923121641/https://www.wsj.c...

How about a dossier detailing how Spiegel managed to piss on 85% of world-wide mobile users?

You cannot recover from something like that no matter how many times you rewrite your app.

Why is this thread full of commentators attacking Snap for completely unrelated things? Strikes me as odd.

FB told IG influencers they might lose their verified status if they link to a SC profile? Seems like that was a mistake on their part, could they really not anticipate future antitrust action?

That's a lot of HN though, you'll see people talk about tangentially related things to the main topic, and never address the linked topic.

I've learned to accept it as is, and not to worry about it too much.

Some news.ycombinator readers may actually work for Facebook, and have a direct financial stake in the outcome of this matter.

It sounds like a conspiracy, but it's possible. You know the old saying about "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

Speculating about sock puppets is not only not interesting, it’s against the guidelines. If there’s a post you want to make a substantive argument against, please reply to it directly.

I don't think he's suggesting sock puppets as much as employees using their personal accounts, which I don't think is the same.

Not just employees, there's basically financial incentives for anyone who holds facebook stock.

> could they really not anticipate future antitrust action?

I we go by the pattern of behavior at Facebook, it really doesn't seem like the decision makers consider much in the way of anti-trust or much of anything.

The pattern is well established and their version of move fast and break things is almost entirely off the rails.

And if we look at the pattern of behavior at the Department of Justice, the pattern of behavior at Facebook seems (at least at this moment) to be perfectly rational.

I don't understand what you mean by that.

I took GP to mean that the DoJ hasn't been enforcing antitrust laws the way they used to, so the rational action for selfish companies to take is to break those unenforced laws.

Most industries can engage in anticompetitive behaviors with impunity. But I think if Facebook watches which way the political winds are blowing for them, they would be more careful.

Yes, rational + unethical = current status quo.

This is definitely not-nice behavior but is common. On an iOS App Store listing you can't even say the word Android, etc.

Ah yes, the iOS App Store that just lost a Supreme Court anti-trust case

Did you check this before you wrote this comment ?

Because there are apps called Android Remote, Android TV, Google formerly had a an Android Wear app and plenty of Remote Desktop apps that mention Android.

When I last published an app it was cross-platform and I was denied for having "sync with the Android version and the Chrome extension" in my listing even though that was one of the main value props for my app.

Are you saying that it's OK because it's common, or that the DOJ should be doing even more than it is? Or something else?

They probably anticipated it to the penny.

Its much simpler than that. Decision making at a big company is layered. Anti-trust considerations is about as C-suite a concern as I can possibly think about. Operational leadership even VP is singing for their supper on a project by project basis (to gain status and move up the company ladder). So you get these things.

It's almost certainly a reflection of a culture who's motto was/maybe still is "move fast and break stuff." I think the idea of existential consequences for actions is relatively new one for FB (and to a lesser extent Google) and your seeing a company not move fast enough and a CEO who is probably a little bit underarmed when it comes to really understanding the stakes of certain types of public perception.

IMO, it's because Evan Spiegel and Snap by extension is just as cutthroat and unlikable as Mark Zuckerburg and based on what I've read about it I feel like he would be doing the exact same things as FB is if the roles we reversed.

This doesn't feel like some altruistic, whistle-blowing gesture for the good of the consumer. This feels like Snap being pissy that there is a bigger bully on the playground.

I'm not saying what Facebook is doing is okay, because it's not, but Snap has a vested interest in FBs demise and Spiegel and Zuckerburg have their own pissing match. I have a hard time feeling sympathy for either company in this issue.

You don't necessarily need sympathy to see what's right and wrong.

Assuming FB gave any thought to antitrust action -- which is unlikely the prevailing doctrine that businesses can do as they like as long as they don't charge customers too much -- I think they ran some risk analysis and reached the conclusion that in a worst-case scenario they might take a hit to revenue and have to throw a VP or two under the bus, but would otherwise be able to continue with business as usual.

The DOJ antitrust people and the FTC got a lot of their teeth knocked out when they went after Microsoft in the 1990s. However, you think conservatives would be more open to the possibility of using antitrust as a cudgel against social media companies that seem intolerant toward right-wing viewpoints. (Never mind that the end of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine helped enable the rise of right-wing media in the first place.)

> The DOJ antitrust people and the FTC got a lot of their teeth knocked out when they went after Microsoft in the 1990s.

How do you mean? Microsoft got throughly declawed in the 90s, and never regained their top predator status.

I think Microsoft got off relatively easily compared to AT&T and Standard Oil, but I was in the camp hoping they'd be forcibly partitioned so that the applications business was separate from the OS business, both of which were separate from Microsoft's hardware operations (which consisted mainly of peripherals, because they hadn't gotten into the game console business yet).

I was too.

But at least all their scuzzy business practices were put to light, and they weren't able to behave that way anymore.

For all we know Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon would all be much more powerful if Microsoft got split up. And maybe throw in a few other companies like Oracle.

> However, you think conservatives would be more open to the possibility of using antitrust as a cudgel against social media companies that seem intolerant toward right-wing viewpoints.

No, most of us actually welcome diversity of thought, and free expression of opposing ideas. Typically we don't want Big Brother to tell us, or anyone else what to do or how to do it.

Big Brother is just some guys or gals; like the crew that hung out in the parking lot at the mall, and after all--who the fuck are they anyway to tell us what to do, or how to do it??

Wow, they said they might revoke one's verified status if they linked to SC? I wish "verified" just meant "this account with identity X has been verified to be managed by person with identity X," instead of, "this account with identity X has been verified (or deemed, by us) to be a popular (or even, preferred) person."

I mean, I understand that verification of one's identity may not be that simple to do technologically, and yet, it seems more and more like they're not even trying to help bring more humanity to their platforms.

Most threads are full of commenters attacking whatever for unrelated things.

Please don't insinuate astroturfing without evidence; this is in the site guidelines because it's so common, off-topic, and undermining of community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I didn't claim astroturfing and frankly I don't think that is quite what is occurring. And FWIW, it seems like the general tone of the comments has changed substantially since I posted.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I believe you. It's just that vague references like "strikes me as odd" usually amount to that when it comes to seeming patterns of comments in threads.

Snap can blame Facebook all they want, but what they had was a feature, not a product, and then they alienated their users with the redesign.

Nobody else is to blame for their own stagnation then failing to reimagine their product.

I mean, Snap Spectacles, really?

Not really relevant for the antitrust investigation.

The article is about Facebook copying features and draws a connection to Snaps subsequent downfall.

I’m claiming the downfall was inevitable (no product, bad redesign, those useless spectacles), and once again Facebook is the scapegoat in all this.

You do realize both of these things can be true? Snap playing a role in their issues and Facebook also participating in behaviors that are relevant to an anti-trust investigation?

I’m looking forward to the proof coming from the company that was unable to succeed because of their own ability to execute.

Try compartmentalizing

Everyone and everything is multifaceted

I think you should reread the article, it has very little to do with copying features. If Snap are correct then Facebook

- actively discouraged IG users from discussing Snap

- prevented Snap from trending on FB

- used data from an acquisition Onavo to track what users did on other apps (such as Snap)

Furthermore - whether or not these shady practices were the downfall of Snap does not absolve FB from doing them.

I'm curious - why is facebook required to promote a competing social network?

Did snap promote facebook properly on its network?

> I'm curious - why is facebook required to promote a competing social network?

They aren't required to promote, but arguably also can't actively find ways to prevent it from trending "organically" as that could ostensibly constitute an anti-competitive practice

Snap’s not a bankrupt Startup without product, they’re still a 23.5B company with growing market share and features Facebook has been copying hand over fist, that would be arguably be worth a lot more if FB had to come up with their own features instead of Xeroxing Snaps ideas.

Copying features of your competitors and innovating on them is part of competition.

Both things seem to be true. Snap created an unsustainable business model that could be easily copied, and Facebook did a lot of highly unethical and possibly illegal things to accelerate their domination of Snap's market.

If you read the article in full, there's really no defending Facebook's alleged behavior. The article doesn't even mention feature-copying, other than Zuckerberg saying "accept our buyout price or we'll copy you", but it's a single sentence in an article with a laundry list of unrelated allegations. I feel like a lot of people who dislike Snap are commenting without actually reading the article.

Actually, I'm super, super grateful they redesigned the Android app from the ground up. Before the redesign it was a disaster that would occasionally soft-brick my camera, mandating a reboot.

Seems like a problem with your camera hardware and/or software. An unprivileged, user-space app should not be able to soft-brick a hardware part.

My phone is a Nexus 5X. All I know is that the old Snapchat app would occasionally soft-brick my camera such that no other application (including the camera app) could use it until I rebooted my phone. I confirmed with multiple experiments that Snapchat was the culprit. After the redesign, the problem went away.

I remember the same problem in a Nexus 4. And Google said they couldn't fix it because it was a bug in a Qualcomm driver and they had no access to the source code.

I think the redesign fixed that because Snapchat no longer takes pictures with the camera. Instead, they take screenshots of the camera preview.

Is that true across the board or just on Android?

If such a problem arose on iOS, Apple would patch it. Android manufacturers don't usually have that option, as they sometimes don't even have the code to the drivers.

I recall that in Android if an app doesn't release control of the camera then no other app can access it until the phone is rebooted. I suspect this is what was happening here. AFAIK, it isn't a bug with the phone hardware etc. just poor os design. Hopefully they'll fix it one day.

Ref: 'Release the Camera - After using the camera, your application must properly release it for use by other applications.'

the feature/product dichotomy is a subtle gradient that ultimately means nothing. It's only ever seems poignant with the benefit of hindsight. It's sort of like saying "well, the way the market shook out is the way the market shook out"

Indeed, you could say the same thing about IG vs FB, it’s an empty criticism.

Also, curious why we always see these “Snap must regret not selling to FB for $7 billion” comments parroted so often? Snap currently has a market cap of almost $24 billion, and it’s stock price has nearly doubled since the start of 2019. Still not quite at their IPO price, but close. Seems like they should be very happy they went the IPO route?

>the belief that Facebook was preventing Snap’s most popular content from trending on Instagram

>Snap executives noted their belief that Instagram was blocking searches of these Snap-related terms

Real solid data driven analysis here..

>Facebook’s tactics have long engendered concern across Silicon Valley, said Paul Keable, chief strategy officer at Ashley Madison. The dating site, which caters to married people seeking affairs, is blocked from advertising on Facebook, which now operates its own dating feature.

Yes, Ashley Madison, the "dating" site.

Lol, the same Ashley Madison who screwed over their entire user-base by failing to secure their database. Please Ashley Madison, lecture us more about unethical behavior.

it was not only that, it was revealed they ran bots to chat with users to convince them they had a shot with beautiful women that made up the bulk of user activity iirc. no sympathy obviously but it was a total scam

Being incompetent isn’t the same as being unethical however given their target audience they were more negligent than incompetent.

I think the biggest take away from that site was just how few women were there compared to men, like we were talking in the single digits for verifiable active accounts.

Which is also where the unethical part comes in as AM was running chat bots or ignoring their existence to keep men on the site.

I don't understand what editor allowed the A.M. section to remain in the article. Felt like an afterthought.

They built up the 'Voldemort' file but then barely referred back to it.

Would have preferred they wait to publish when the had the report in hand or could at least quote directly from it.

> Yes, Ashley Madison, the "dating" site.

Not sure why you seem to be implying that the article is using a euphemism, as literally the next phrase in that sentence is "which caters to married people seeking affairs".

I don't know if you are aware of the specific details of what Ashley Madison did, but basically they were using bots to convince men that there were actual women interested in meeting (if only the use paid the membership fee to enable messaging), when by-and-large there were none. It was a scam.

I mean, most dating websites use a series of tricks of messaging and "matches" to trick people into thinking there are more people available than there actual are. I did a study of eHarmony years ago and came to the conclusion that only 10% of all "matches" were people who had the capability of returning a message. But Ashley Madison took it to a whole new level of creating accounts ran by bots that actively messaged people. IIRC, it was much more on the order of 99% of activity.

Do you have that study - sounds an interesting read.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10125704

I think lifeisstillgood was asking for the eHarmony study.

Yes I was looking for the study behind moron4hire's comment:

I did a study of eHarmony years ago and came to the conclusion that only 10% of all "matches" were people who had the capability of returning a message.

I can quite believe that dating sites manipulate the numbers to look better themselves, and weirdly it's something that with my old school hat on is "not worth regulating" - but as we move to a world where most (?) people will find a partner online this way, being able to trust those numbers would be paramount.

(oddly perhaps such regulation would kill off the market. One of my wife's now divorced friends showed me her Tinder matches - and boy the pickings are poor for middle aged women. Now if you showed a parade of out of shape morons and then said actually only 2 of them are available, people might just stop the whole market and take up needlepoint)

Old blog, now gone, sorry :(

There werent any women on AM. When the story broke they couldnt find anyone who actually had an affair. It was scams all the way down.

(And when the mounties responded after the hack there wasnt any evidence either. A so-called unicorn had no cohesive security program.)

wow that's ... in a way ... sad. pretty telling about the state of relationships in this day

Well, it's not really that sad that there was no one actually having affairs on Ashley Madison.

lol, I didnt know that. It was basically an extortion racket.

> I did a study of eHarmony years ago and came to the conclusion that only 10% of all "matches" were people who had the capability of returning a message.

Do you mind expanding as to how you were able to establish this?

Not the OP, but on Bumble, I matched with someone who I knew - she showed me her app and no such match had appeared on her app. I think this sort of behavior is not uncommon.

Any more info on this or maybe some screen shots? I'm not on the market but given the complaints about the current state of dating apps I think lots of people would be curious to see this.

Unfortunately I don't have screenshots. I'm happy to provide more info -

for instance, to those who might say "she just didn't want to acknowledge you had matched," I saw it with my own eyes and also we were already involved with each other at the time.

FWIW, my perception is that this is not the case on Tinder, but obviously can't be sure.

At the time (mind you, this was 10 years ago) eHarmony had a "tell": paid-member profiles were rendered subtly differently than free ones. I got fed up with using the site and decided I was just going to game it and see what I could learn, so I started taking meticulous notes on what I saw. I took every match that was sent, I kept notes on how I replied, and eventually some patterns emerged. Eventually had it confirmed when a person I was matched with, and went on a date with, decided to let her membership lapse and suddenly her profile was rendered differently.

eHarmony's system only let you message people from a daily, "curated" list of matches. On any given day, you'd get 6 or 7 profiles on your email to review and decide to message or not. I'm sure you just did the math, 10% of 7 is less than one. Less than one viable connection a day.

Once I got past that "90% of these matches are dead ends" hurdle, it turned out about 50% of the people who were capable of replying actually did. I don't remember the exact breakdown, but basically there were a number of questionnaires you why through before getting through to love messages and asking people out. It was essentially a 50/50 filter at each step. IIRC, it was something like a half a percent chance that any profile eHarmony sent you would end up in an actual date.

I suppose dating sites figure, if someone finds their soul mate, they won't need to pay for a membership anymore, so don't actually match anyone, just strong them along for as long as possible.

So, my understanding is that FB blocks all dating apps except a bunch of white-listed partners. This goes back to 2013, and was driven (AFAIK) by user feedback (people hate dating ads, who knew?). The compromise was that dating ads could only be shown to people who reported their status as single, which clearly wouldn't work for Ashley Madison.

Interesting parent is so downvoted - the whole dating / facebook thing has been an issue for a while. Users didn't like cross-pollination between Facebook and dating and not all sites (AM comes to mind) even maintained facebooks LOW LOW standards.

Good to see AM lecturing though as a source for these articles.

I still don't see the problem here. None of these sites actually make or sell anything besides maybe an ad-platform.

Any cachet they have is based on social viability or popularity... i.e. waning psychological value, not intrinsic hard tangibility

>None of these sites actually make or sell anything besides maybe an ad-platform.

Why does that matter?

Classic. Not a day goes by that Evan Spiegel doesn’t regret selling Snap for a cool 7 billion to Facebook and just moving on with his life, so they throw out crap like this as some kind of revenge by social mob justice. He drank too much of his own koolaid.

not selling, you mean

Yes

SNAP have had a great last 12 months, market cap up to 23.65B

7B and 24B are both effectively infinite money. If I could have the former just for signing my name or the latter but I need to go through an IPO and get slammed in the press every day, I go with the former.

why? he already has more money than he can spend. what should he do with his life? spend it on the beach or lead a company? beach is boring. I'd chose the company and have it my way. if it fails, it fails, who cares, I'm already rich.

never thought of it this way. if it was laid out as a red/blue pill like that, i'm not sure what id take. i think once you are a billionaire the average person probably just assumes your not nice anyways, might as well triple up the cash.

Well here’s another way to think about: you’re not just “tripling up your cash”, you’re getting a new boss in the form of thousands of shareholders expecting you to meet specific performance goals or else the value of your company goes to shit. Running a public company is hell compared to a private one.

When you take your 7 billion in cash you are free, no one gives a shit about what you do or even cares unless you’re looking to give away some money.

oh headache wise, id take the 7b and run for the hills. if it was cash play, id stick out the shareholder issues at least until i lost on them and they sent me packing. :)

i would really never want to be "important" at a public company, unless it came with big golden handcuffs and parachutes.

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