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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

If it wasn't really exhausting to argue about FB on HN I would put a long post here. But in short, FB ads are a net good for society.

1) They replace worse and spammy ads.

2) The tracking is really mild. If a big bad government or hacker wants to get dirt on you, they don't dig into FBs tracking algos, they go straight to the ISP or they hack the website you visited. FB also doesn't sell your data.

3) People genuinely find products they like all the time through ads.

4) Whole categories of businesses get a chance for customers to discover their products. Almost every new Shopify store selling cool new products relies on FB ads to get in front of customers. Many really cool useful b2b tech products rely on FB to be discovered.

Advertising isn't magic. It's not mind control. 90% of it is clearly showing a product to the market and you pray you find product market fit.

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Disclaimer: This user is in clear conflict of interests here

From his profile - "I co-founded Right Percent to help b2b businesses scale with Facebook and AdWords ads."

I think this experience makes their opinion more valuable actually. Maybe they should have put in a disclaimer, but I always assume posters on HN have distinct insight based on relevant experience in the topic. At least this person provides a nice counter-argument to the general trend in these comments. I appreciate it even if I disagree.

Conflict of interest? Lol. It sounds like he or she has relevant expertise in the matter being discussed. Rare for Hacker News commenters.

Only people engaged in a field are prone to have a conflict of interest. Not only aren't those two things mutually exclusive, they are highly correlated.

Does that change anything in my argument? Who else but someone who's seen it work could tell you about the other side of it?

It is useful to hear your perspective. It is also useful to know that perspective is informed by self-interest.

Some bias is shown through:

#2 hackers and big bad government aren't the only reason for being leery about 'big tracking'

#3 People also buy damaging(mlm) products and products they genuinely hate from these same ads

but I agree with your other points.

I think this viewpoint doesn't get enough credence on HN.

As a consumer, I started doing ~all searches and browsing in Firefox with uBlock, and I never log in to FB on Firefox. The ads I've gotten have, indeed, become a lot less relevant. Honestly, it's not great! Lowest-common-denominator ads feel really gross.

As an entrepreneur selling a consumer product I created on Shopify, access to well-targeted ads would make a huge difference to my business. (I can't use FB to advertise since I sell a pandemic-related product, long story).

It's a niche product, so non-targeted ads like "local newspaper ads" would probably perform far too poorly to justify their expense.

People who buy my product tend to be very grateful for it, but not many know it exists! It's crazy how much your perspective on personalized ads change once you're on the other side – I really wish I could use them!

It seems like this is yet another problem caused by Facebook's dominance. You should be able to target ads without using ubiquitous tracking, by looking for forums, newsletters, podcasts, shows, meetups, etc. related to your target audience or product area. But if everybody uses Facebook for everything, you can't do any targeting, you have to just describe your audience to Facebook and ask them to please find people for you.

The internet should have made targeted marketing easier, because people would effectively target themselves by visiting sites devoted to topics and communities they care about, instead of everyone watching the same four TV channels. But Facebook wants to become the only "internet channel", monopolizing the ability to target and forcing you to go through them.

Maybe... but I'm not sure that's right.

My impression from talking to people who run ads for a living is that FB's ML-driven targeting is just orders of magnitude more effective than traditional "put an ad in a relevant forum" kind of thing. I don't have personal insight into how true that is.

As an individual, I really don't like having monopolies in ads, especially ones that _also_ have monopolies on personal data (FB and Google know everyone I talk to, everywhere I go, etc - yikes). But as a business, I really like the idea of having one platform to buy ads that can put them everywhere, and do a good job deciding where to show them.

I don't know what the solution is but I don't think I've seen it proposed anywhere yet. It's hard.

Oh obviously it's more effective, but as we're seeing, that efficiency requires a tradeoff that many people are not willing to make. And in the long run, it's not more effective if it drives everyone to ad blockers and privacy-oriented operating systems. It's like saying dictatorships are more effective than democracies, which is true until people decide they want to get rid of the dictator. My point was that this doesn't have to be a choice between ultra-targeted Facebook ads and non-targeted billboards. We can imagine a compromise with semi-targeted ads that most consumers can tolerate and most marketers can live with, but it just isn't viable if Facebook maintains its dominance.

The solution I'm suggesting is to either break up Facebook or legislate away their business model. I know that would make your life as a business owner more difficult, but wouldn't you also feel a little bit better knowing your business couldn't be wiped out by a broken algorithm disabling your ad account?

My business already can't run fb ads because of a broken algorithm ;)

Yeah, I definitely agree with your main thrust that a different business model, probably spurred by legislation, is needed. I just don't know what that business model (or the legislation) should be exactly - and I think the obvious things will have bad unintended consequences.

Your point on FBs targeting is correct. I've extensively tested ads in forums and the reach, targeting and click quality are much lower than FB, esp at any scale.

For those of us who don’t want the ads at all, oh well. When I want ads I can go to Amazon.

For me:

1) not true. (I am currently happy to get ads for condos in St. Petersburg and banks in Cyprus, as I hope it shows Google has very little idea of who I really am, or at least just that I'm an unsought demographic?)

2) not true at all, compared to the tracking available from broadcast and free periodical advertising, which was how local businesses used to do it: in local media.

3) People genuinely find products they like all the time without ads, also.

4) Whole categories of businesses were introduced before FB ads as well. I know someone who got rich on selling copycat Uzi sealing rings as a teen fad, and that was before AOL and Google, let alone FB.

You probably don't care about convincing me, but if you wished to, you'd have to somehow demonstrate that FB provides a great deal of additional value in return for all the additional information they collect.

If all this is true, what's the problem with Apple's change? Won't people opt in to maintain all these benefits?

Yeah, if this is as good as it sounds for users Facebook should have taken out full page ads explaining why they should just tap "Allow" instead of "Ask App not to track"

Really you'd think Facebook would be happy about this change, because it gives extra visibility to all the hard work Facebook engineers are doing to deliver you quality ads. Many users might not know about these efforts right now, since it all happens invisibly in the background.

This is a funny way to frame it and puts it all in perspective, exactly right.

If just telling people what is happening causes this reaction, it certainly makes you think.

99% of people don't change the default, same reason why people don't opt out. It's not really an argument in either direction.

Right, but with this change there is no default. iOS asks you, for every app, whether or not you want to allow tracking, as opposed to just silently defaulting to "allow".

I understand the default though on iOS is to have tracking enabled — but present the user with an alert to allow them to turn it off.

Yea, it’s funny how a community that started based on tech startups now advocates totally burning down businesses that rely on advertising for revenue or customer growth. I don’t love the optics of this FB ad, but it is a fact that it’s going to:

1. Make targeted advertising significantly more expensive, which affects small businesses

2. Potentially cause those businesses to advertise less, which hurts apps that rely on that ad revenue

3. Give users more privacy control over cross-app tracking

All the coverage of this is 100% focused on #3 while assuming 1 and 2 are free or worth burning to the ground.

Facebook sells us adspace. If we as a community are against personalized ads it gives two things:

1. Cheaper facebook ads as people pull out from advertising on Facebook since they see less effective targetting

2. An opportunity to do better optimization on our end, which currently Facebook offers to everyone including our competitors.

From a cynical point of view, the average HN-user at a VC-run startup could benefit from this.

The hurt given to regular small businesses is irrelevant because we aren't Mom & Pop firms. It isn't in the nature of business people to care about all businesses anywhere. Rather you care about your business, and aim to bury your competition.

Additionally the people who run ad-supported sites outside of Facebook will welcome this change, since it reduces the effectiveness of Facebook's competition.

Well, perhaps we are reacting to having been inundated with 1 & 2 for decades now and we loathe it, have found no benefit worth sacrificing our privacy for.

Burn (1) and (2) to the ground. Is this an attention economy? If so great, get rid of those two things and I will have more time for myself and my kids!

That's not the point.

Those personalized ads may be very useful, but they require extremely invasive tracking that the user does not necessarily consent to. On desktop I can use uBlock Origin and Firefox to block as much tracking as possibile, on mobile the Facebook SDK is embedded everywhere and it's very difficult to escape from it.

If there was a way to opt out of tracking I would have no problems with Facebook, I don't even use it. I hope this iOS change will come to Android too.

None of these conclusions are based on any sort of evidence.

Pdf warning.

https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/...

Targeted advertising is a net boom for ad networks but not for the actual publishers of content.

It's definitely not good for publishers (newspapers, etc). Because fb ads work so much better than newspaper ads.

Why do Facebook ads appear in the newspapers and not on Facebook then?

They are trying to generate earned media from the press, and it worked.

Agreed. They provide value to the consumer. They also are good for small businesses. People will scoff, but it's true. Compare them to other companies like Amazon or Uber who's model is to drive small businesses to extinction.

That may be true if your conception of people is limited to their role as consumers. But people are more than consumers. They are also citizens, moral agents, members of families, workers, conscious and experiencing subjectivities, biological entities with evolved neurophysiologies and psychologies, and so on. What is good for people as consumers may not be good for them considered from a different perspective.

And who's job is it to decide what's best for the people?

> They provide value to the consumer. They also are good for small businesses.

Apparently you believe that you should decide that. Which argument are you making? "Facebooks Ads are good" or "Even if they aren't good people should decide for themselves"?

Facebook decides that Ads are good for its users every time they show one. Either that or they know Ads are harmful but show them anyway.

It is perfectly easy to go through life without a Facebook account. Yet people choose to use it. This suggests to me that they feel they are getting some utility out of it.

People do all sorts of things that are bad for them. Sometimes by choice and sometimes because they don’t recognise the potential downsides.

And targeted political ads? What about those?

Honestly both sides suck at using them and they have little impact on the national elections as is. But both sides want them to continue existing. They make it possible for challenger politicians in small races to get their names known.

How do you know that they have little impact? That's just pure speculation on your part.

> How do you know that they have little impact?

There's no research proving or denying this claim, but as anecdotal evidence: Mike Bloomberg spent more on advertising than any candidate in history for his primary election campaign (~$500 million), which he lost spectacularly.

People often credit Facebook Ads for Trump's 2016 victory, and it's an interesting claim considering that he spent substantially less than Bloomberg on the platform (~$40 million).

Who wants to see ads? The fact that people buy on impulse shouldn't be the defining reason for trashing privacy. Like someone else said, we're not only consumers and the tracking goes beyond the boundaries of commerce.

Just like carpeting a hillside with billboards would be? Ads are hardly a net benefit. Other ways of getting the word out to people who actually want the thing will be available.

But why not let users turn off tracking if they choose to?

You never addressed that.

Yeah, I can imagine that defending marketing+advertisement companies can be exhausting.

I don’t think you know anything about the ad business other than being an end user. “They replace worse and spammy ads”? What does that even mean? Your post is a spam.

Which part of user choice do you not understand?

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