All this is is the reining in of a few greedy corporations that offer information-sharing platforms in exchange for exploitation. New communities will pop up, and old ones resurface.
Got a popular page on Facebook? pay for it to be seen. Got a great unique website? Pay to be seen via Adwords.
Website owners don't link so liberally as they once did because the link graph has been obliterated by "what people think will please Google" rather than linking to things they think other people might like to see.
When I used FB I lost count of the number of times I had to re-jig my setting for displaying content from "most popular" (according to them) versus most recent.
I still find that when I'm browsing Facebook. I see an article with XXXX number of comments and try to see what's newly been said, it's almost impossible- it's like I'm fighting against what new information is available vs their preferred method of displaying things due to the technical limitations of how they store information.
Here's something I've always wondered: I don't really get this obsession with maximizing the number of people who go to one's web page. If you're just a regular person who's not profiting from ads or something, it shouldn't matter.
If I post something to the internet, I maybe send it to a few people who might want to see it and that's it. I don't care about collecting pageviews, or likes, or follows, or upvotes, or any of these vanity metrics. It doesn't really matter to me if something I wrote was viewed by 10 people, 1000 people, or 100,000 people. Who cares? What difference does it make? My life is not richer because thousands of random people read some blog post or forum comment.
The only reason I can see to promote some creative work is if you're making a profit off of it. In that case, it's an investment. Spend $X on discovery and make $Y in revenue from ads or conversions or whatever. But just to put up some web site about your stamp collection? Who cares how many people visit?
I wrote hundreds of pieces about language learning, teaching and elementary school-aged education. One benefit from that work was that it helped me grow as a teacher and later as a curriculum designer. But that wasn't the whole thing. I made friends from that blog.
I also got emails from teachers living all over the world, asking questions and thanking me for the topic. Cambridge University Press contacted me and purchased rights to some of my writing and distributed it far further than I ever could have.
Given the assumption that the content really was useful, more people seeing it meant better educational outcomes for many, many young students that I'll never meet.
The reach of media is a multiplier for its impact.
How about in 2020, would you agree that the amount of visibility your site gets is dependent on FB and G algos? Even if the content is evergreen? Of course that disregards other sites making new things but I'd say your value is not diminished either way.
Google has also been keeping more and more traffic within its ecosystem, but it's still by far the largest remaining source for most independent sites.
The landscape for independents to get even traffic, let alone comments is very, very different than it was. As fb and reddit grew, my site comments reduced by over 80% while traffic was flat. Readers who had been around for years continued but newer visitors stopped.
For a while social media shares made up the difference, but over time social media traffic dropped to less than 5% of its original level. I started seeing less and less value in what I'd once thought was evergreen content.
Then, I changed careers to software. It wasn't because of the drop in RSS readers, blog commenters, etc, but those changes did decrease my enthusiasm about blogging as a social activity.
Reach out?
Find presence on a specialized platform rather than generic portal containers steered by proprietary algorithms.
Today we view that number as approximately zero. But that's past Dunbar's number. That's more people than I will have any kind of meaningful relationship with simultaneously. Most people would get a little nervous standing up in front of 200 people and saying anything.
Our sense of scale has been mutated.
There used to be a time when websites were linking eachother and the information sharing formed a wonderful community. At first, search engines were indexing these webpages but those times are unfortunately over. Now the community turned into walled gardens.
I'd agree, it's not about volume.
I'd disagree about your supposition of an 'maximizing the number of people who go to one's web page', which the rest of your post alludes to. Most smart online marketers are concerned with conversions rates, not volume of visitors. ROI as you mention with $X and $Y
The point is about how people discover new information. As an end user, on which platform, how that platform allows me to discover the new information, are there platform or result alternatives etc etc.
IF we're reducing my online information discovery to "how advertisers can effectively make an ROI out of me", especially from one or two portals, I suspect the outcome is I'm being duped or at the very least, shortchanged of all the other sources that should be available to me.
Kind of what blogging was about (and still can be).
Comments.
Comments are the final frontier. Why do you think I never bother getting a personal blog website off the ground? Because the traffic it gets pales in comparison to the audience I get from writing comments. This comment for instance might be seen by several hundred people, all within my target demographic. How many people might see my longform blog content? Maybe dozens if I'm lucky. I've never really written a meaningful blog post, but I've probably written a novel's worth of comments.
And because comments aren't really written for monetary gains, they are one of purest forms of writing left on the internet today. People still write comments liberally and openly, speaking their mind and even voicing unpopular opinions, because they don't give a shit about what Google thinks. Google doesn't read comments. Say the quiet parts loudly.
Maybe someday there will be an age where you can be certain almost every comment you read is already bought and paid for by some corporate interest or a guerrilla advertiser, but fortunately we are still not there yet.
But there's some comment sections where you say something and it gets filtered out. What say you after this? I'm sure you're aware of shadow banning/filtering, which YouTube at least does, perhaps other large platforms.
Maybe a case in point. There was a referendum in Scotland about independence from the UK. There was a very prominent blog ranked in Google regarding the question of aye/nay, but you found that the comments were moderated towards one disposition.
If all the funnels point to that information source, the comments are almost useless, especially so if they're curated towards one conclusion. We're relying on a middle man (or many middle men) offering a variety of conclusions which we should reach ourselves, rather than one hand delivered to us by one or two algorithms and/or social engineering.
Diversity, basically, not just in results, but opinions and conclusions.
Only, no one does link pages anymore, because they're fearful of platform algos deciding that their inbound/outbound link profile is toxic.
What I'm after is a more decentralised Internet, less black box algo, where people link to whatever they want without cutting off their oxygen, or having to pay for exposure. Might be idealistic, but FB/Google have certainly been diagnosed as part of the problem.
In my case, getting a good link from harvard.edu really helped wrt search. And obviously a great link from Harvard drived traffic by itself.
Just a hint for the downvoters, that's how it was done 20 years ago. Nowadays due to systemic link building spam, perhaps not. I'm addressing the above reply is all.
What means to do we have of discovering new content, right now. All the eyeball time on social media, all the searches done for the most part on Google.
You've basically two methods of discovering new things when considering the sum time of everyone who might recommend something they've seen.
That's not romantic at all to me!
FWIW I don't think the link hunting of 20 years ago was systematically better, but it was definitely more individually minded, problem is it's been systematically spammed/undermined as well as the SEO issues I've mentioned so people are generally going to ignore 'link suggestions'
My main point is, diversify away from one or two central platforms. The issue is their consensus of what should and shouldn't be seen and the size of the market behind this.
I have received quite a few visitors from a Reddit post on the right subreddit. Hackernews posts generate a lot of traffic. You can also advertise on a number of platforms.
I'm not saying that reddit or HN aren't dead ends but we're talking about the main arteries of information discovery. I'm sure we can agree the general populous don't have the nous to regularly visit HN or subscribe to relevant subreddits, the question is how do they find their information and conclusions.
[0] Of course only partially "solved" with many limitations. Just like how Twitter's predecessors Reddit and Hacker News "solved" the same problem by voting with their respective limitations.
Sometimes there's 10's, 100's or 1000's of pages/sites that are relevant to what we are searching for. All I'd say is that if we diversified the way in which we search/discover new information a little bit more, there's less reliance on a platform or a single algorithm- to me that sounds healthier.
It is totally worth remembering that as much as the likes of Google and FB control a huge share of browsing time and clicks, their algos don't make them the arbiters of truth and information discovery. Sounds quite daft to say it but that is pretty much what the reality is of the modern web- if the portals don't want to rank you, you aren't seen.
Twitter lets anybody publish small things. And it lets anybody select a set of accounts and get a time-ordered list of what they've published. That's how I use it. I follow a couple thousand interesting people, ones who tend to point to other interesting people and articles. If at any point I'm bored, I can drink from a firehose of good content.
I also maintain a feed reader, which is how I follow people who have their own sites. But I don't need to use those sites for discovery, the pattern you describe in the old days. Discovery just isn't a problem I have much. These days, my problem is filtering down to what I actually have time to read.
SEO isn't as complicated as anyone makes it out to be. It's really simple.
But when it comes to linking, people generally link out less. I can't source anything right now, but the information is available, perhaps through Majestic that shows that over time, people are more shy about linking out to the wider web, anecdotally, from fear of being penalised for doing so.
The threat of having a bad outlink meaning your inbound organic search traffic disappears means people err on the side of caution.
The amount of links you can shove into a page before it makes any negative impact is very high.
1. https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/long-term-outgoing-link-ex...
If I brought that site up today as it was then I doubt it would show up on the first 3 pages of a Google search for the topic. But hay, at least you could view it with noscript turned on.
And if you stop paying Facebook will severely limit any organic traffic to your page. That should be illegal, unfortunately it is not being viewed as something serious, meanwhile Facebook gets showered with billions extracted out of small businesses.
Has nothing to do with technical limitations and everything with engagement metrics. Facebook does not want to show you what you want to see, they want to show you what will hook you and keep you in the platform. If anything, it takes more resources to show their view than just a time posted order.
And if it's a case of guessing what's going to be engaged more with, I want to see everything and make my own choice.
wrt to resources, perhaps they index one or the other and they make their choice rather than mine.
Sounds like drug dealers. I'm not hooked to their platform because they don't show me what I want to see. But what you said imply that there is some addictive content that people would normally avoid, but Facebook helps them get addicted. Truly evil. I'm not active Facebook user so I don't know how it goes there.
I don’t believe that is what the platform is doing. It is displaying content the user will most likely interact with, resulting in the user staying on the platform longer. It seems quite dangerous to me, as it could cause users to assign some sort of weight to the content, particularly if the content is well liked by others it could lead to the belief that ‘this is the correct information’.
On the other hand it can be too easy for too many people to be seen: spam.
Which makes you wish for more curated and controlled platforms.
And that’s why we have moderators and upvotes and downvotes.
Do you think it was easier in the age before the internet to be gain an audience?
I made a site in the late 90's, biology-online.org which I harried universities and whatnot to link to which they happily obliged, ad-free educational content laid out well. Nowadays that kind of solicitation is ignored. All I'm saying is it was easier then than what it is now, and large platforms deciding what gets seen and what isn't certainly doesn't grease the wheels of discovery.
This has always been my own reaction to pronouncements that the Internet as we knew it is dead, or over.
I'm usually quite optimistic about our ability to freely (and usually without monetary cost) create and share, globally.
However, the closure of Nekochan (an old fashioned web forum dedicated to SGI hardware and the IRIX OS) has changed my mind a little bit. The owner of that site became convinced that it was literally impossible to run a forum website and maintain GDPR compliance. He believed that it introduced infinite liability and would require constant purging of data based on requests that could come at any time into the infinite future.
I'm paraphrasing, of course, and I was not actively using the site when it shut down, but it was one of my favorite spots online and a source of priceless information and richness.
And now it's gone ...
To be clear, I thought his concerns about GDPR were unfounded.
The point is, the environment is much more complex than it used to be and I see examples of that complexity stifling sharing and expression.
I would quite like my data to stay in the UK, where national governments I don't elect or pay taxes to, can't touch it.
I sure as shit can't hold the US government to account.
How will you know?
Point is I help elect the UK government, that means I can change it. Does not apply to the US government, so the US government could put full page ads in the Daily Mail talking about how the abuse the data of UK citizens, and there's diddly squat I could do about it.
It's very hard to have popular control over secret operations where you may only sporadically learn about things via whistleblowers once in a while. It's quite different from visible policies like banning or legalizing gay marriage, abortion, raising or lowering taxes or the minimum wage etc.
I really don’t understand why you’re struggling to understand that. Talking about the relative merits of different governments is completely meaningless, if I can only elect and influence one of them.
Based on your arguments I should just lie down and let every world government and company trample all over my rights, because it’s all hopeless anyway.
Also on the other side of things, does it harm me more if a foreign government holds information on me, random Joe, or if my own government holds the same info? Which one cares more about the info and might have incentives to abuse it? What if China has a profile on me? I'll most likely never enter China anyway. I don't live and work in the US, why would them mining my data be so dangerous?
Might be a good question for Kim Dotcom. Regardless of your views on his various business, it hard to explain how the US arresting a non-US citizen outside of the US isn’t a huge and worrying overstep by the US.
Now I probably don’t need to worry about a Kim Dotcom style raid on my home, but I see no reason why I should make it easy for the US to do that if they wanted too.
And regardless of hypothetical harms by the US government. Privacy is my right, and I’ll defend it. Why on earth should I be comfortable with my data being taken by governments around the world that don’t share my world view? (And the US government certainly doesn’t share my world views).
Once again, at least I can hold my government accountable. I notionally understand U.K. law, and the U.K. legal system, and thus what abuses I might be subject too. I see no reason why I should have to learn about US law and the US legal system, just to use the internet from my computer in the U.K.
- If FB is to operate under US law with US data centers you prefer to be geo-blocked by them based on IP and feel you need to be protected against your own will and you can't trust yourself to just not use the service
- You are concerned about shadow profiles and the like, i.e. the unavoidability of FB even if you want to avoid it. But otherwise you'd be okay with FB offering its services to those who accept it on the foreign terms.
- You are concerned for your fellow citizens who may be less informed and may accept conditions they don't understand and are harmful for them. Therefore rather geo-block foreign FB from them for their own good.
If FB don’t want to do that, then, yes, they should geo-block the U.K. to avoid the liability.
Being an American company doesn’t give them the right to just ignore local laws and customs of other countries, and it would be hypocritical to think otherwise. The US certainly doesn’t allow counterfeit products to enter from China, despite the fact those products would be mostly considered legal in China. So why the hell should American company’s have the right to ignore laws in other countries, just because somethings not illegal in the US?
Whether I trust myself to use a service is irrelevant. I should be able to use almost any service made readily available to me in the U.K. under the assumption they follow U.K. law. The onus should be on FB to operate legally and ethical, not on me audit every service I use for legal and ethical violations.
I have to disagree with this statement. I would agree with it, if people from the U.K. were using FB without FB explicitly catering for a U.K. audience, or collecting enough information to fairly accurately identify a U.K. audience. But both of those statements are false.
1. FB advertises on TV and in meatspace in the U.K. I don’t understand how you could not consider that operating in the U.K. Even if the physical servers our elsewhere.
2. We know that FB collect enough data to identify people from the U.K. They undoubtedly segment and sell adverts based on the location of users. So they’re more than capable to identifying U.K. users for legal reasons.
> even though no money changes hands?
I don’t think this is the standard for determining if someone is operating in a country. I would say the bar is slightly fuzzier, are you offering a simple method for a population to use your product, and targeting them in some manner.
The targeting could be anything from explicitly advertising to them, to simply offering cheap and simple shipping to their country. Of people are signing up without you targeting them, then I would happily accept you don’t really have an obligation to follow their local laws.
As I mentioned above, I think FB more than qualifies as operating in the U.K. and no doubt if you asked them, they to would agree that they operate in the U.K.
Is the fact that you are friends with John Smith "your" data or "John's" data? What happens if John lives in the US?
Is a message you send to John "your" data or "his"? What about his reply? And vice-versa?
You still have 15 days to force them to delete everything under threat of GDPR.
Equally if you buy a product from a Chinese company in the US, you would expect that product to meet US standards, not Chinese standards.
Conversely, if China had higher standards, I wouldn't be surprised if the product met the chinese standards.
In this case, California standards will meet or exceed those of the UK.
That's very unlikely. California may be the left-leaning, liberal, forward thinking state of the US. But it's got nothing on the EU/UK when it comes to things like food, safety or privacy standards (except for vehicle emissions where California is ahead, thanks VW).
Remember the "left" in US would be considered far "right" (I don't mean neo-Nazi far right, I just mean further right wing than our mainstream right wing parties) in the UK/EU when it comes to social and economic policy.
It could be done by a company you did business with, or through some tracking pixel
The rest I do feel sorry for.
It's like asking why can't I get my garbage back because I threw it in the recycling bin but they incinerated it.
I think a better analogy with the recycling bin is if the company who owned the bin (say, WM) suddenly started selling your junk mail to amass a psychological profile of you for advertising purposes. Sure, you can say maybe you shouldn’t have trusted the company (after all, companies suck) but at some point we have to stop blaming the users and go at the root.
> They're on HN so they should be aware of the risks and means of mitigation, including means against shadow profiling. If they weren't, they should be by now, and still have means to extricate themselves from it. Facebook is despicable in its practices and I cannot wait to see it die.
EU society has decided it's despicable, and thanks to our functioning democracy, national and super national governments are taking direct action to protect their citizens. Which is the first mandate of any democratic government.
Venturing into the internet should not require me to do hours worth of research on how to prevent tracking and fingerprinting. Companies should respect my right to privacy, and my government should annihilate companies that refuse to follow the rules. There's a reason why Europe doesn't have an equivalent to the US 2nd amendment, that's because we trust and expect our governments to offer that protection on our behalf. I respect the fact that US culture has a different view, but that doesn't mean I think European's should adopt a similar culture.
Very true. We don’t expect consumers to read medical and pharmaceutical journals to know that their medications are safe. We have agencies for that. The same for cars, building codes, etc. and I believe the same for the Internet.
You can be in full support of the law while still cautioning to avoid the criminals. The law does exist, especially in the EU where they're from (at least until the end of the year) but there are wolves about. You should still protect yourself if you can.
Your argument amounts to little more than victim blaming, and does nothing to help those who don’t have the knowledge to protect themselves.
I believe strongly that the social media and internet ad business models are at best amoral but responsible for the second order effects, much as coal plants are responsible for pollution. At worst they are making money off of making people crazy by giving every crazy person a megaphone and making sure you have to hear from them.
Human beings can't develop essential emotional skill hanging around at FB, Netflix, TikTok, Insta ... what ever. Kids are becoming emotionally crippled for their whole lives. The big companies know what they're doing with us, but they don't care.
It's billions of dollars of science and research of how to get customers and make them addictive vs. individual fate.
I know that this needs to stop but unfortunately don't know how.
Its because everyone is already there that this stuff is allowed to fester. Nobody who's not crazy right wing is going on Parler - that is the way it should be. It should be totally self-selected which grouping you use, and there shouldn't be one thing that has "everyone" that prevents all others from starting. White supremacist websites existed well before this stuff, but in a decade they didn't get the traffic that one popular FB post gets.
Where's "Apolotical" Facebook? Where's "only share photos of your kids and vacation" Facebook? They can sell ads for baby clothes and cheap flights. There's more of a market need for that sort of thing than what it is that Facebook provides.
Here's a solution - a bunch of competing "profile" companies that you can choose to manage your online profiles that would work on any social network. They get kickbacks from those social networks running ads. Some of those profile companies might be incredibly private, some might give out a ton of info about you for targeted advertising. Regulate it so companies must have X and Y user access controls on your user profile, and also so sites must use those sites.
I don't even think the above is actually a workable solution. But the idea that things are inevitable is a lack of imagination.
So Facebook apparently laid off 800 or so PhD‘s?
I kid.
I am willing to bet your family is saying the same thing but calling it "radicalization of liberals" it works both ways
Anti vaxxers and people wanting police dept reform aren’t the same as the people who want and are preparing for a second civil war
Bullets are just pieces of metal and gunpowder, why are you afraid of them?
Slavoj Zizek (controversial I know) has good observations about this, that ideology is precisely the whole framing, which is invisible from the inside. You don't notice it as something "sold to you", it's deeper than that, it's something that informs what you should strive for.
Ideas like "if only you could afford XYZ, things would become so much more $positive_adjective". But not explicitly. Through implication, stories, association. That you need to work more, build a career, buy better things, or become free, express your inner authentic self through self-expression using this and that brand, this and that political slogan etc.
I anticipate that this is already too much of a cliche for some people, while for others it's just a strange way to look at things...
Then in practice there are way more ads that sell you a worldview, adjust your desires in some small way that's small in one iteration but can transform your values over the years.
Also the problem isn't just the ads, but also the tools they use to keep you engaged with the ads and spend longer time on the platform. Their tactics follow the sparse rewards patterns that gambling also follows. They use lots of counter-intuitive patterns like intentionally throwing in irrelevant stuff, because it's how our brains are wired: we get hooked more if the interesting stuff only comes every once in a while, and otherwise it's boring. This gives the activity an overall unpredictable nature that makes our brains want to explore and understand and build a better model of this environment, to reduce this unpredictability. But if it's carefully designed and always in motion, shapeshifting in response to how the masses interact with it, it stays mysterious for our brain and we get hooked.
It's worrying how many otherwise smart people dismiss this saying "whatever, I don't buy luxury cars anyway, who cares if I saw some ads for them?" (and we could go into how the car companies can benefit from you seeing the ad even if you never buy the car yourself)
Marketing psychology and addiction psychology have developed a lot over the years and there is basically zero amount of this taught in normal schools. People just don't think in terms of these tactics. We are like some naive old trusting grandma in the eyes of the manipulators (who, by the way, aren't evil, they just want accomplishments, want to achieve metric targets, get good evaluations, get promoted, build their CV etc.).
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
...but the product they're actually offering is "behaviour".
They sell access to the levers to influence behaviour.
The only area it’s been truly successful in has been levying fines against foreign companies and restricting access to the EU market. It’s a very successful piece of tariff legislation. Because the compliance strategy from most organizations was either stop trading in the EU, or accept the fines as a cost of business. (edit: there's also a 3rd common compliance strategy, which is just to pretend that since you're not specifically targeting EU data subjects, that you don't have to comply. I believe this is part of the reason that HN ignores the GDPR for instance)
Russian regulation against corruption has not achieved the intended outcomes, therefore they should have no regulation against corruption at all?
Given they have largely failed to achieve their stated goal, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to see the EU imposing further regulation on online services/information distribution. However it makes perfect sense when you look at what they actually accomplish. Which is implementing (rather controversial) economic protectionist policies, under the guise of something unrelated and far less controversial.
To answer your reductio ad absurdum more directly, if you’re doing something that doesn’t work, it doesn’t make sense to keep doing it.
Getting into your car doesn't get you to work in the morning. Why do it? Because it's a part of a larger process.
As a side note, why has the weak analogy become such a popular logical fallacy? Do you honestly see similarities between regulating data access and driving to work?
followed by
> [list of benefits to privacy and one that maybe needs more work]
stay salty.
And as I said, for the companies that actually do have to worry about enforcement, it's largely just incorporated into the cost of business.
I think in the future there will definitely be regional internets so to speak. You will still be able to talk to people via the boring protocols, like email for instance. But a lot of people are seeing the enormous value in controlling higher level access. News, social media, etc etc.
Have you been watching the last four years?