Facebook buying ads for Messenger to be top result when you search for 'Signal'
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I know I say this a lot but ad-supported business models are corrupting. Spam is the original sin of the open internet and the unwillingness to get to grips with this is a big part of why we can't have nice things.
Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
On Usenet, which ran on NNTP, every user could maintain their own killfile, which would allow people to hide spam. But it wasn't easy to share killfiles, and while the more technically capable people would easily filter it out they were also blinding themselves to a problem that eventually choked the life out of the community. Similar observations could be made about advertising on the web, from standardized banners leading towards today's web horrible mess.
The basic problem is that the costs of spamming and lying are generally a lot lower than the potential profits, so the more opent he system the more spam it tends to attract. Try looking at used car adverts on Craigslist for example, dealers in busy areas tend to run a hundred ads a day with 500 keywords. Some people flag them, of course, but most don't bother and the profit in selling a single car is worth the minor downsides.
I think we have two separate issues here.
One is the business model problem. Google puts ads on YouTube, then out-competes actually-free software alternatives because they have money from advertising and for-pay alternatives because they don't charge money to users. Hello surveillance capitalism.
The other is the Twitter problem. It's harder to block (only) low-quality posts than make them, therefore Twitter.
I think the first one is just a coordination problem. We need a one-time expenditure to get the likes of PeerTube to a level of usability, reliability and performance equal to YouTube, and that's it. Then you don't need YouTube anymore, or Twitter or Gmail or anything else that could be replaced in that way. It takes a one-time expenditure of resources to create the technology, so we just need a way to raise the money. Once it exists it's a lot easier to raise the smaller amount of money needed for incremental improvements. (And really it's already happening but it's taking too long to get to the mass adoption phase for lack of resources.)
The second problem is harder, but maybe some kind of proof of work system for account creation. So there is a one-time cost of some kind for account creation, negligible for an ordinary user who will use it for ten years but costly to a spammer who will have their account blocked with all its posts removed in 30 seconds.
Also, in article about first commercial spammer:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
> Occupation: lawyer (disbarred in 1997)
software is never a one-time expenditure. Even more so than usual for something as large and complex as YouTube.
Software is a continuing expense because software developers want to justify continuing to get paid. Tell me what I get from YouTube today, that I should care about, that I didn't get five years ago.
Qmail does late bounces for a very specific reason: since it was architected and implemented long before spam became a serious problem, Daniel J. Bernstein (DJB) implemented Qmail in a highly efficient, but inflexible way. ... Qmail is essentially dead - there is no further development on the project as a whole, users of it are stuck with an old core, and lots of ad-hoc and sometimes conflicting patches. In other words, an obsolete design, and no ongoing coordinated maintenance.
Five years of progress in the spam filtering arms race?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/350461/mobile-messenger-...
When I visited some friends in Chile it was also #1 by far
It's actually really annoying that all my international friends are on whatsapp while all my US friends are not.
No more than a Ford dealer buying a billboard outside a Chevy dealership. It's not anti-competitive to advertise in the same place your competition advertises.
It is illegal and anticompetitive to be a huge company using enormous resources to squash competition for smaller firms. There are many ways in which this is done. Not all of them are illegal, depending on how you look at it.
My opinion: Buying marketshare is usually bad for the user.
You're telling me Coke can't advertise soda because there's a small local craft soda manufacturer here in town?
Facebook also “doesn’t support” these sorts of links (at least to Telegram, Snapchat, others) on Instagram: https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/03/instagram-starts-blocking-...
Either fb/wa is doing something odd in the request when generating the preview, or the other end is responding badly to something unusual-but-correct that there's are doing. Perhaps due to the initial request's accept headers a redirect is being sent instead of the usual content, and requesting that results in a 404.
Could be malicious as many are suggesting, I certainly wouldn't put it past them, but I suspect cockup is a more likely explanation.
Bill Gates squirming during his anti-trust testimony when answering questions from David Boies was game-changing for the company and our industry
I don't think it will be pretty - but it will inform all users for the better
Yeah, right. Was this sarcasm? I think most day-to-day users have zero color on this kind of stuff.
Whatsapp blocking Telegram links
I'm fact I had always assumed those are generated by the local application
The preview is generated and sent along with the message. Nothing is loaded from the other chats' side.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/09/09/whatsapp-is-blockin...
It's actually surprising why it's not perceived to be more hostile.
In all seriousness though, this kind of advertising should not be beneficial to Facebook. You're telling a group of people biased not to buy your product, to buy your product. There's obviously some other reason.
Tough for the advertiser, but maximizing advertiser dissatisfaction is also in my interest (at least since I don’t advertise anymore - after an important realization that I had poured money into it for very few actual new customers).
But the ad networks get paid for those clicks, so while businesses keep buying ads from a known[1] mostly fraudulent industry, they will not.
1: "Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend" -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858
I hate ads too, but let's not pretend like this childish rebellion is actually self-serving. It's like me saying I'm upset with politics so I'll show the world by not voting.
Then they shouldn't be using Signal either. Signal is not peer to peer at all and doesn't even federate.
I guess maybe there might be some who don't know about Facebook Messenger and so they heard about this new Signal app and now they see a new chat app that works with Facebook.
I'm sure there's analytics and testing behind the decision to support it.
It's also common to book political ads in newspapers that will be placed next to articles discussing that topic.
Whoever pays most, gets that screen/paper space.
I miss the old Google layout where it was crystal clear what is an ad. Nowadays, you can't even blame normal people that they don't notice the tiny "Ad"
It seems that Facebook bidding on Signal keywords is unlikely to gain them much, as those searching for signal right now are very likely going there expressly to escape from Facebook, and are searching for a specific brand name already.
But there are absolutely people like this, and FB makes money off of them in droves.
(Sadly, in spite of the noise in my personal social bubble, I suspect the number of users departing WhatsApp over that is so small it's completely indiscernible from regular churn...)
I do agree that a lot of these companies do have the ability to use advertising to crush their competition, but I’m not sure what the solution is to that.
Not sure why this is a big deal. Is it good? No. Is it new? Not particularly.
[1]: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/101985252700794470...
Really?
Seems a very strange thing to think, particularly in a thread mentioning Epic games, who've chosen to allow Fortnite to be delisted from the app store in protest over the 30% commission the store takes on their sales...
My suspicion is that ad revenue in Apple's app store is insignificant compared to revenue from paid app commissions. (I do have nothing except gut feel and some probably obly vaguely informed opinion to base that on...)
It's extremely common now and before the internet this sort of marketing i.e. positioning against your competitor was also extremely common.
I don't think this practice is generally bad.
I'm not in deep enough to tell you whether that's a net loss or benefit, but it's probably close enough to zero...
But you're always going to see an ad regardless, right? If that's the case I don't see any advantage in making yourself more expensive.
Your impact on any other keyword would be effectively zero.
You would be better off spending the 5 minutes you wasted on something positive.
I hope we can get this right one day. Allowing trademark squatting helps nobody but scammers (and search engines).
You think it's better than Google only follows the letter of the law, and destroy it's search credibility, than put some process in place to prevent deceptive advertising.
Searching for one thing, seeing something different at the top of the page feels pretty deceptive to me. If it didn't work, they probably wouldn't do it.
Words matter. Inflammatory nonsense has no place on HN.
Signal is a registered Trademark. They are buying ads for the word Signal. How is that not Trademark squatting?
> Facebook is not bribing anyone.
I think OPs point is that it should be considered bribery to pay Google to show up at the top of the search results. I think they chose their words very intentionally.
It does not mean bidding on your competitor's keywords or paying to use Google's advertising platform.
You do understand that what you are saying is libellous right ?
https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/newsletter/inve...
It's legal, but I don't understand why. The broader discussion point is why we do this to ourselves.
Which shows that it is a fairly grey area. "Fair use" doctrines apply to trademark infringement and using your competitor's name in this way has in the past been allowed.
[1] https://corporate.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/ours-wor...
Except for the time they weren't... https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/squint-and-youll-click-it/
I've seen it for any popular app - at best it's a tax apple is charging apps to protect themselves by buying ad slots for their own name.
At worst it's an attack on old people.
Whenever I see it I think less of the company trying to manipulate less technical users.
You should not be able to buy ads on a company name that isn’t yours.
I suspect people higher up at Apple that see this would agree and change policy if they thought about it.
There are some who skip this and just assume that the app they downloaded is Signal even if the app clearly says Facebook Messenger.
^ This is how scamsters take advantage of the elderly and those who do not have basic tech know-how. You'll be surprised to know that there are millions like that.
It's unethical and anti-competitive to try to drown out your competition because you have enough money to be able to do it.
IMO both Google and Facebook should be punished for allowing it and doing it respectively. It shouldn't be possible to bid for your competitors' names.
When buying App Store ads, the default is to use a "broad match" for the keywords you enter -- i.e. Apple automatically decides what keywords are similar to the keywords you selected and runs your ads against those as well.
It's pretty annoying because there's no way to switch the default -- you have to remember to put your keywords in brackets to disable it -- but probably great for Apple's revenue.
But then I read stuff about Oculus and how hard it is to create new accounts. If that is true the user base growing would be strange... Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
I don't believe my data belongs in my hands when I use Signal, because they own the servers and the only one who takes design decisions for backend side are they.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
And remember you are authorizing yourself with your number, which is for most people is valid identifying point, and can be used to trace back to individuals.
While Signal claims phone numbers are hashed and never used for any real identification purposes and whatsoever, I think this is still very questionable. They could easily design the system to allow one to authorize with username from the beginning.
I don't wanna go into much details, but I personally will never take anything Signal tells for granted for two main reasons, first it's centralized (it's doesn't matter if it's owned by non-profit organization), second it's operated in the USA, meaning they are bound to cooperate with intelligence agencies when they have to.
Also, please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait to HN (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25696652). We're trying for something different on this site, especially now.
Regarding your second point, I agree it was not substantive, noted.
Please be specific and remove ambiguity when you moderate, otherwise your point seems subjective and is misleading.
Plus I believe everyone in this site can freely express their thoughts without attacking anyone. With that in mind I don’t see any wrongdoing with previous version of parent comment, I just edited my comment to be specific.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
That's mainly what I was responding to, though there were some smaller things that you also edited. However, what matters most is that the form you edited it into is really good, and if you comment in that way going forward, everything will be better.
Lol, yes I recalled from my memory, that I forgot as well as slight edits, sorry. I agree and admit that it is not polite.
I appreciate your elaboration.