Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

lifeisstillgood

I keep coming back to my default idea here - that PII needs to be seen as legally owned by me and only licensed to others for use. The default legal framework should include medical / epidemiology research as freely licensed and commercial use as ... well let's just say i think my license conditions will be expensive.

If an advertising channel then shows ads that breach license they are liable. A fairly simple licensing process will come into play and we can find new ways to fund things

Edit: Yes i do get a lot of the issues around regulation of tech - it's almost like saying regulation of every day life which is really broad. And the different bodies and approaches will also need to be broad. But i am a believer in markets and individual decision making and i also believe that personal information has in the past few years become a genuine new ... commodity? And we need to raise that commodity into visibility - to be able to put prices on it openly. Maybe it won't work, maybe privacy is like a human right and can only be dealt with at that level - but i don't think so - privacy to me seems ephemeral and usually poorly defined. Longer discussion to be had

If you're a US citizen with a Facebook account, your value for Facebook is about $ 200 per year. That's the average, including children, seniors, etc. If you're a tech worker in your 30s, it's probably 3x as much.

If you want to use Facebook without targeted advertising, you need to either convince them that they don't need all that money, or pay it yourself. And that's just Facebook.

In other words: the internet economy without targeted ads will be a very different place. Facebook will survive. imgurl / snopes / fivethirtyeight? Unlikely...

Worth noting that the $200 ultimately come from our pockets. We are paying those $200 anyway through markups on products ads made us buy.

Isn't the 200 bucks more a way for FB sellers to get your money instead of other shops?

No, because it's $200 on top of what you would otherwise spend on the stuff you buy. The cost of marketing has to get baked into the price of goods or the sellers would be losing money. If they weren't advertising, or could advertise for less, they'd be able to lower prices.

Advertising can lower the cost per item, if there was a large startup cost and marginal costs are small. More importantly, facebook ads have caused me to buy more things because the ads showed me things that I thought were useful that I otherwise wouldn't have known about. Honestly, I feel like maybe I should be paying to see FBs ads sometimes.

I would love to see a correlation score between profiles and purchases

Not necessarily. I don't know what percentage of advertising revenue is from political advertising, but that's money that Facebook makes off of you that doesn't come out of your pocket. Essentially any time you're shown an ad that aims to convince you to support some idea, or vote for something, or change your behavior in some way (like going vegan) instead of trying to get you go spend money, you provide value to Facebook that doesn't come out of your pocket.

I suspect that this is a lot of the value of "the next billion". Why bring Facebook to people who have little disposable income? Because there are still ad buyers who will pay to reach those audiences if they have votes to give, or even just public support for some cause or another.

Money spent on political advertising absolutely comes out of your pocket. The process is: politicians levy taxes and excise, divert the revenue to linked entities, pay Facebook out of the proceeds. Or they extract money from companies under threat of expropriation via adverse regulation and litigation. In developing countries this is blatant; in developed countries it is disguised (as lobbying, consulting fees etc.).

In fairness, there is an argument that at least some political advertising is consumption by politically engaged citizenry who don't stand to gain financially from the result; witness spending on unwinnable Senate races in the latest election, for example. But in general you have to assume that political advertising comes with some expectation of return, which comes out of the everyday citizen's pocket.

Let me rephrase. Someone advertises to you because they expect something in return. Coca-Cola advertises to you because they expect you to buy coke. If you're too poor to buy coke, you're not useful to them.

Joe's political campaign advertises to you because they want you to hate Bob, or be scared of those other guys, or whatever. This will help put Joe in charge, which is good for Joe and potentially bad for you, but it doesn't necessarily come out of your pocket. It comes out of the pockets of Joe and his friends. That might be taxpayer money, but you might not be the taxpayer paying for it. It might be private money from religious people who want gay marriage to be illegal. You pay for it with freedom, but not with money.

My point wasn't that there's a free lunch here. My point was that there are other mechanisms at play, costs of advertising that don't translate directly into cost of goods and services you buy.

I can't remember ever seeing an ad on Facebook trying to convince me to go vegan or do anything public-spirited.

Ever.

I have however seen plenty of ads trying to get me to spend money on something/someone.

And conflating the political process with the marketing process is absolutely pernicious in a democracy. The Brexit campaign used micro-targeting of individuals with knowingly dishonest ads that played to their biasses.

That's not persuasion - that's just manipulation.

Put simply, no one should ever be allowed to run organised campaigns based on lying and distortion for any reason. If you need to lie you don't have anything valid to say in the first place so removing you from the public discourse causes no harm to anyone.

That is a good point - in the UK the ASA has standards that the ads must be Honest etc.

But, really if we held politicians to honest, accurate and non-misleading statements ... well insert your own comment here

Maybe I wasn't clear. I'm not defending political advertising or saying it's a good thing. Just that it exists, and people will pay Facebook for the privilege of reaching your eyeballs even if they don't think they can get money out of you directly, if they think they can get something else out of you, like a vote. So even you're poor financially you are still useful to advertisers because you have something to give.

I agree that most of the time that's a bad thing, although it's possible it can be used by good people trying to convince you to be good, or raise awareness of an important cause. Probably much less frequently, but evaluating good and bad views is very subjective so I'm not going there.

Now perhaps all or advertising is manipulative , dishonest, and immoral. Doesn't detractfrom my point.

Potentially buy.

Product awareness is not the same thing as buying something.

>If you're a tech worker in your 30s, it's probably 3x as much.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's much more than that. Most businesses sales follow the Pareto principle, 80% of their revenue comes from 20% of their customers.

"Without ads" and "without targeted ads" are different things. There's an "ad-centrist" view whereby adverts should be OK so long as they're chosen to go with the content on the page and the community that the site aims at - you know, like all newspapers and magazines used to do.

I'm not sure how imgurl survives given the abuse workload; there is an inevitable death spiral of image hosting sites as they get cluttered by more and more adverts of worse and worse quality.

Stackexchange handles this very differently, too.

And what about all the sales that are made through Facebook ads? They support millions of jobs around the world. A less efficient ad machine would mean worse sales or higher marketing costs or both. Some of this excess goes directly to profits, but a good chunk of it supports employment.

Imagine if we got rid of all advertising and what that would do to demand. I know the discussion here is centered on targeted ads, but I think there would be significant economic effects if their incidence was decreased.

The global consumer economy runs on all these extra desires created by ads, and ads do fulfil the function of informing customers.

If I have to see ads (and I really don't), I'm not against tracking ads per se, but the long-term storage of them. Given current technology and governance, there's not a way to separate these two.

In any case, there's significant economic effects to stopping tracking ads.

> If you want to use Facebook without targeted advertising, you need to either convince them that they don't need all that money, or pay it yourself. And that's just Facebook.

I hate this argument. It's tries to find a solution to sustain the status quo in the face of change. But that's illogical because if there is a change, then the status quo is going to change too.

The only way Facebook is going to stop doing targeted advertising is if they're forced to, likely due to new regulations. If that happens, Facebook's entire business model will collapse, so they'll either have to make massive fundamental changes to how they make money, or they'll die and be taken over by a competitor.

In either case, users don't "owe" Facebook anything. Consumers are the life blood of the economy, and thinking about how consumers should change their behaviors to sustain a corporation is backwards thinking.

I think you might be missing the main point of the argument. It is not that users owe or need to sustain facebook.

It is that most users may prefer keeping FB and targeted adds, over losing FB and taking down targeted adds.

I always wondered what's stopping a rival to Facebook that offers users a share of the money they are generating. Besides the scale barrier to entry of course. Generally speaking, people like money and will switch products and services that puts money in their pocket.

>I always wondered what's stopping a rival to Facebook that offers users a share of the money they are generating.

They sort of do. The money is converted into the utility of the product to each user. Technically, they could lower the utility of Facebook and pay you the rest.

I think challenge it doesn't solve a user oriented problem.

Most users care about the enjoyment/utility/stimulation they get out of a social network. Some users care about their privacy. Needing an extra $30-60/year does not rank high on user priorities.

While facebook might make $200/US individual, their profit margin is only 30%.

Imagine if Facebook gave 10% to their users, lowering their profit margin to 20%.

Let's say every user gets 10% of the average, or $20/year. As you say, not a big priority. But some people would sign up, who otherwise would not. And some people would keep their accounts, who otherwise would not. Win for Facebook? Hard to say.

Now, what if Facebook gave each person 10% of what they personally brought in? That wouldn't take much more tracking than what they already do. But in this case, you'd have a lot of people maximizing their time on Facebook in order to increase their payout. Win for them, bigger win for Facebook. Heck, Facebook could even get rid of all their stupid dark patterns, and stop the endless research into more dark patterns, improving their bottom line even more. No need to trick people into engaging if they are voluntarily engaging for a small sum.

>Now, what if Facebook gave each person 10% of what they personally brought in? That wouldn't take much more tracking than what they already do. But in this case, you'd have a lot of people maximizing their time on Facebook in order to increase their payout. Win for them, bigger win for Facebook. Heck, Facebook could even get rid of all their stupid dark patterns, and stop the endless research into more dark patterns, improving their bottom line even more. No need to trick people into engaging if they are voluntarily engaging for a small sum.

I still don't think the ROI for the user is there. The average FB user spends about 35 min per day, or 210hrs/year on the platform. Assuming 10% revenue sharing, that is $0.10/hour. If the average user were to double their time on the platform, they would make an extra $20/year.

This is a laughable incentive for most people, let alone your most valuable add targets (people with disposable income).

Oh yes, the ROI is crap. But even today with an ROI of exactly $0 there are still vast numbers of people spending the day in their feed or playing whatever the hot FB game is these days or whatever. Getting paid (a pittance) for doing that would certainly drive more engagement. "They're actually paying me to do this!"

I mean, you already have that via the Facebook EULA for example. You give them a license to use your data however they want and in return you get access to Facebook. You can not accept their terms and in return they can not allow you to use Facebook.

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