The cost of the “new way to message on instagram” (2020)
eff.org
eff.org
I have seen this spill over into all sorts of everyday things. HR policy changes at work are communicated more like this now. You suddenly get an interstitial when logging in one day, demanding that you accept or acknowledge some change or new policy. There is often no other option, no avenues given to protest or question or even discuss it. These things used to be communicated by email, before that by memo, making it apparent who the author was and thus who to follow up to if you felt the need to do so. Now it's an annonymous "we" who have decided that this is the new order of things, and if I want to get on with doing my work I need to acquiesce.
A lot of places replaced a policy and procedure manual for stuff like HR and Procurement with video content.
I had to do something for an employee on workers compensation a few years ago and the training consisted of a 45 minute video consisting of recitation of a PowerPoint and some screenshots from PeopleSoft. Literally a monotone HR drone reading form the slide, except he also added critical, unwritten commentary.
Social media has the network effect so it's less easy.
Although tell that to mid level managers and they don't quite think it's easy to change jobs.
That's not true with social media outside of fringe options like Mastodon (Which is like quitting a FAANG job to work at Wendy's... and this is coming from someone that likes Mastodon)
I'm trying to fix these issues with my own fediverse project.
And probably with good reason. Not everything needs to be the largest thing it can be. It’s why bean sprouts are different from oak trees, as someone once put it.
Some people just don't have the need for social media, they have enough life without it. That's fine. For most, though, having some form of social media presence is beneficial. And the platform on which they have that presence better not be based on the scourge that is the attention economy.
What's the difference in just emailing HR to complain than replying to the email? In either case, can you really expect anything to happen in a large company?
This is the purpose of labor organizing. A strike, work stoppage, slow down, or other action will exert pressure on decision makers directly.
Lately I've been been wondering regarding labor organization: why not cut out the negotiation part and start companies directly run by unions? Or, as they're more commonly called, co-ops.
Intuitively, it seems to better align the decision-makers with the laborers because they become the same people.
Maybe it's the same Facebook-vs-Mastodon problem in that people want to work at the popular place with the large market share but they also want to have their human rights respected, and a co-op doesn't offer the former.
I'm curious which decisions you believe will be forced. The cases I can think of (particularly around "engagement" since I've been reading about that lately) are decisions that derive from deeper decisions (building your business around selling ads) that are at some point within a company's control.
And it may be that the company will need to make decisions employees don't like even if they're the ones who have to make the decisions, but at least then they're involved in the decision-making process rather than having it dictated to them.
> This is why we need a consciously planned economy. We cannot be free without the ability to make meaningful decisions.
At face value this sounds like an oxymoron to me. A planned economy is planned by someone. Then those living with that economy are beholden to the one(s) doing the planning, who will naturally be motivated to plan in their own favor to the detriment of others. Some mechanism would need to be applied to counteract the natural self-interest of the planner(s).
Decisions around how hard to work, how much to extract from customers, business model, suppliers, environmentalism, etc. Anything that is dictated by needing to be profitable. It is possible to run essential services at a loss or neutrally because they provide public benefits that are not easily capturable as private profit.
> And it may be that the company will need to make decisions employees don't like even if they're the ones who have to make the decisions, but at least then they're involved in the decision-making process rather than having it dictated to them.
Ideally they would be able to make decisions that serve them and their customers well. Not always possible, but market logic severely restricts the possibilities.
> At face value this sounds like an oxymoron to me. A planned economy is planned by someone.
There is a huge literature on how this might be accomplished. Local planning can be accomplished democratically at the ground level and information passed up and down a chain to larger bodies that gather more inputs. Smaller bodies at different levels of the chain can have various veto powers.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if anarchism could help you? Admitting it’s possible is the first step to intellectual curiosity.
The typical organisation that does stuff like this is quite large, has heavy bureaucracy baked-in, and has an HR department whose aim is to "protect" the company and squeeze every drop of productivity from employees at the lowest price possible. They do not care half a shit about people, and hell would freeze over before they allowed their people to vote on policy changes.
Will your HR find survey site CEO and buy them several times over?
Is there a hope to fork your company?
What you described looks like a solution looking for a problem. And it wouldn’t solve it either. If a change is worth enough money, “they” will add as many real-person fake opinions as needed until it’s not done.
* Your Messenger + Friend's Messenger
* Your Instagram + Friend's Instagram
* Your Messenger + Friend's Instagram
* Your Instagram + Friend's Messenger
Each of these conversations will result in a new, separate thread, even if your Facebook and Instagram accounts are linked. It's such a mess.
Successfully untangling this could result in some promotions once they realize the idiocy of this.
Sadly, the same is happening at other tech firms, where only something "new" gets praised, and we end up with all the icons looking the same, and good products killed (just count the number of chat/communication services from google).
I still find it puzzling that a bunch of people without actual product nor technical knowledge and experience dictate how products get build and evolve. Ego driven development.
It seems google has merged Hangouts back into gmail for some reason.
..to just name a few, and forget things like google wave...
>This is not an update, but a new messaging system from which you can’t switch back.
> These are simply features presented to artificially devalue one of the systems, distract from the real changes, and manipulate users into changing to a different system.
> this change will eventually link to your real name.
The third is a conjecture, and as I understand it this is only being offered to people who already have linked their Facebook and Instagram accounts?
The second is the cost of a degraded system of instagram messaging
If you want features not disappearing or changing when you don't want them to, you need to be in control. I know only two ways to be in control: you either pay (and the agreement contains a provision about the product properties you care about), or manage it yourself.
Using a free-as-in-beer service always puts someone else in control, not you. Bear it in mind every time you register with such a service, and shape your expectations.
You have to realize that what your saying here is a category error: The libre alternatives don't have billions of dollars of marketing, engineering, market cap and users.
EFF here is trying to point out exactly what you are espousing. These kind of dark patterns are used at all levels to drive engagement, including sign up and retention. ("But ... How will I be able to talk to my friends if I delete Facebook??")
I can't recommend a solution, but "Well, its free, what do you expect?" is even worse.
(Yes, indeed, the law works by coercion in the common interests. But I don't see any law having been broken here.)
So yes, it's free to play — what did you expect? Too much? Memorize this, and remember next time. Tell your friends and relatives what to not expect. Name and shame the entities which did something unsavory: this helps make users less gullible, and through that, nudges companies to be more careful.
Consider avoiding the use of stuff you don't control for important things. Be conscious when consuming free candy from a for-profit entity, even if you think your interests are currently aligned. But don't force anybody's hand.
This is excellent advice, but it doesn't help all the people who are not even in the same league as this idea, who are just making their way through the landscape using whatever they come across to not get herded further into the vortex of asshole walled gardens.
The value proposition of this to mom or some kid is gonna sound like: "What?"
But I hope that both the mom and the kid will understand my comparison to free candy. Some moms even teach their kids to be cautious with that.
Our society has really turned the screws up wrt attention, it's pretty taxing just living life sometimes. I hate to get all "hoi polloi", but I mean people are out there that are sure Sars-CoV-2 vaccines render them magnetic.
Facebook definitely has a "real name" policy, but it isn't clear to me why a unified messaging experience means that your real name will now be shown to other users. That seems like a product decision, rather than an inevitability.
As an aside, I don't like this feature and have not opted into it because I actually dislike interoperability. If there was a hypothetical way to get Twitter DM / IG Direct / Messenger / iMessages all in one unified inbox, I would never use it because I actually prefer to keep things in context. My persona and networks on the various platforms are different on purpose, and I like to keep it that way.
They've probably noticed that Instagram has more marketshare with younger audiences and better engagement, where Facebook is full of your grandma and "old people".
If they can slowly boil the frog and make them the same, they have a much stronger grip. Its better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.
When there are countless legitimate criticisms to make regarding Facebook, an institution as influential as EFF coming out with something this weak actually hurts the cause.
I hope free market economy prevails or in another words lawsuits fail. They should've learnt their lesson with Microsoft(antitrust is waste of taxpayers' money).
20 years on, Internet Explorer is dead and Microsoft Edge uses Blink (the same engine as Chrome). Firefox is the only other browser with a distinct rendering engine.
Microsoft's Java VM also died. It was removed in XP SP2 and Microsoft no longer distribute, even via MSDN, versions of Windows that shipped with it. You could argue these events lead directly to the creation of .net since Microsoft's original plan was to jump on the Java train.
So it worked, or at least certainly shaped those various markets.
And try to work from home or remote work on your smartphone and not on your PC or laptop and tell me how productive you are. Or try to get any serious task done on smartphone except taking photos, browsing the web and writing notes.
It did, actually. Microsoft was not able to engage in as many unfair anti-competitive practices in the browser space, and partially because of that, there was a increase in browser competition.
Preventing microsoft from locking the world in to its browser, with illegal and anti-competitive practices, caused lots of better browsers to be developed.
Definitely not, unless you are defining computer in a way that only includes computer form factors that existed in the 90s and also excludes server computers.
The European EC decision was different, but also was not targeting market share.
Everyone and everything is worth fighting over.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook are all companies that are beyond a reasonable scale - there are far too many eggs in those baskets for long term economic health. Those companies are making GD, Raytheon and Lockheed look like kids playing in a sandbox.
Maybe because >Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook are extremely useful consumer technology companies. I don't know about you but I won't be buying fighter aircraft anytime soon.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/01/02/ho...
Then came "the algorithms", capitalist refinement of the experience to increase user attention and interaction. Or more accurately, addiction. This is where I had to quit, a couple years ago. The updated algorithms (instead of linear time representation of posts) did cause me to care too much. There was too frequently new content to see, from things I didn't even care about. Cool videos from GoPro, RedBull, etc. Weeks old updates from forgotten friends sprinkled in to make it personal. Much of the time I used to spend in my head, in a good way, such as in line at a grocery store, or waiting for a project to compile, I was now refreshing feeds. My mind operated more in the realm of social media than in it's own existence.
Now we get to the consolidation. All of your social media, even your "private" chats on WhatsApp, tied to one profile. One centralized database of your life, quickly queryable, cleaned, sorted, and available to advertisers and governments alike. One part of me actually likes this change from Facebook. At least they're being honest about their data being merged. But it's another optimization designed to generate revenue, do not believe otherwise. It's one more step towards the apex of profitability. I don't know what the results of this step will be, but I'll probably be bitter about it, and make another rambling comment in a couple of years.
Maybe in the USA, but Facebook is seeing massive growth in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia and the Philippines.
The status quo is much more preferable to social networks and their shareholders, of course. Charging advertisers arbitrary amounts based on eyeball count no one can actually verify, while not having to worry about losing paying customers due to ignoring requests of locked-in users, is a nice position to be in.
To the point about market regulation, IMO there may be a place for a limited, surgically precise yet not targeting any specific companies intervention (for example, “you are obligated to provide an API covering the entirety of your GUI features if you serve more than N users”) that would, a few causal links down the line, break such shockingly dysfunctional customer-provider relationships, normalize paid social and let the market do its thing.
Either way, government is too blame. Both for not regulating these bad things away, and also for having some hand in causing them N-levels back (you just can't see or prove this one easily). It's a nice sweet spot for governments and their officials and advocates, because they can always absolve themselves by blaming the free-market in one way or another. They do too much or do the wrong regulation, causing something "bad" in the market, and boom they blame "the market". Likewise, they put some half-assed regulations that don't do much and yet again they blame "not enough regulation". The entire thing is ridiculously circular and self-reinforcing. Almost as if it's been designed for argumentative deadlock.
So it could be as frictionless as possible to get people on it and then everyone has a matrix ID as well.
The Facebook accounts must be deleted as part of any solution.
That worked for me but that was 5 years ago.
If they really mean that (and ofcourse they don’t), they should help drive a new, open protocol, not create a new closed, centralized platform.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/10/study...
> Instagram owner Facebook said in an email that its servers download only a downscaled version of an image, not the original file, and that the company doesn't store that data. The email also said that its servers run the JavaScript to vet it for security. Mysk, however, said that the video demonstrates that Instagram downloaded a 2.6GB file (an Ubuntu ISO with the file renamed to ubuntu.png) in its entirety. He also noted that most other messengers strip out JavaScript rather than downloading it and running it on their servers.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/link-...
Not pdfs or other files though!
>you can react to messages with the full emoji set.
Only on mobile for me
I will provide you with all of my personal data for you to sell it. Check here _
I will be spammed with ads for useless shit that I don't need. Check here _
I will not sue you for performing any unethical or illicit practices Check here _
Isn’t this the exact opposite though? Your data being used for targeting will minimize bad ads that you see.
(Facebook employee, never worked on ads or anything similar though)
But it's the truth. e.g. I visit the website of some weird brand of coffee. Suddenly, I get spammed with ads about artisan coffee, even though I could care less. Both intrusive (you took data from somewhere way outside of your domain to guess something about me) and annoying (you guessed wrong).
Moreover, this tends to happen very often for gambling, porn, weight loss, pregnancy, etc. all things which are very private, because they also happen to be stuff people spend a lot of money on. So I want to avoid those sites, not just because the government or insurance could use it against me, but because my ads will get even more annoying.
I bet that if the entire ad industry just binned all people into 16384 groups and hired 65536 specialists to curate these profiles, the industry would be much more succesful, because today it is a complete bullshit with all these pointless hi-tech and surveillance efforts. Modern ads is the stupidest thing ever created (apart from crypto).
I don't think I've ever bought something through a Google or reddit ad, or if I have it was a long time ago and/or with less frequency, and I use both of those much more actively than Facebook. reddit ads will sometimes capture my attention/engagement, though, whereas Google ads tend to be more like noise that I tune out.
This is why "influencer marketing" has an even higher conversion rate than Facebook or Instagram ads, because the distinction between organic content and advertising is removed entirely.
My wife bought me an ooni pizza oven for Christmas. A box showed up at our door labelled ooni and I didn't know what it was because I had never heard of that brand. My wife took it and hid it. Then I started getting ads for ooni pizza ovens on Instagram. So thanks for ruining Christmas, Facebook. Assholes.
Perhaps if it did what it says on the tin, but it usually doesn't, so no.
>(Facebook employee, never worked on ads or anything similar though)
Facebook is ads.
OP gets paid via ads, but does not work on the actual ad team and thus wouldn't know any actual inner workings of the targeting systems.
Expanded in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27759494
Reminder that Facebook and Google don't actually sell this information, you can't pay them for access to their ad database. You have to really loosen your definition of 'sell' if you want to include 'using data to target ads'.
That's not exactly selling the data, but it's close.
Disclosure: former Facebook employee, not in ads except for an ill-fated project that afaik hasn't launched and all my ideas were considered and rejected.
I used to be the standard kind of user of FB and Instagram who had friends and occasionally posted, etc. Then I realized it makes me feel like crap being on there and hated their business practices so stopped using it.
Lately though, I've had a few experiences that made me rethink how optional it really is. I recently sold a car and FB Marketplace has /so many more people/ along with a higher degree of trust than Craigslist. I got a bunch of offers from FB and none from Craigslist despite the same listing.
But even more significant is how businesses interact with the platforms. Because a bunch of people use FB/Insta, a lot of local businesses post new things or updates or specials there. Lately, new businesses are not even bothering with a website and just setting up an Insta. If I'm looking up what a store's hours were this past holiday weekend in the USA, then I know it's most likely going to be best to look it up on their Insta page. And just go ahead and see what the experience is to do that when you're not logged in!
Sure it'd be GREAT if those businesses didn't do that, but the alternatives aren't great and I'm not going to pressure them into reforming social media when they're just trying to make money off of selling an ice cream cone; they've got it hard enough!
I've been without Facebook or Instagram for over 6 years, it's totally optional. I sell stuff on Nextdoor and the dozens of other buy/sell/trade apps. I connect with my family via text/calls/video or other apps. People don't want to be the first to get off of a platform and convince others, and then we get into this situation where we think it isn't optional.
I had 3 pieces of lightly used Ikea furniture I wanted to get rid of. 2 weeks of craigslist with no bites. 2 hours of facebook market place and I offloaded them easy.
Completely anecdotal here, from within a small city. But people trust FB market place much more than CL for what that's worth.
This perspective is completely neglecting that a significant portion of the developing world communicates almost exclusively via Facebook/WhatsApp. For communicating with people in those parts of the world, these services become essential in every way that matters.
Saw numerous banners when I visited the Philippines, here's an example: https://smart.com.ph/About/newsroom/full-news/2019/11/08/sma...
I find a lot of times, people just don't want to change, regardless of whether they should. I was the first to delete my Facebook in my group of friends, and now they all have, and my family has mostly jumped ship as well.
I'm sure your friends can use something else, they just choose not to.
The company made a promise. People bought that promise.
Company changes the promise and puts a bow on it and dresses it up. Company only notes the promise in the fine print. But because it already has the power and because people don't want to be on alert 100% of the time (because that can actually kill you), the deception works.
So you bring up a fallacy. The actual option here is "pay attention to every company you use to communicate all the time" or don't pay attention and accidentally agree to something not well advertised.
Interesting fact, Facebook has an F rating on the BBB's website.
Of course, the very first complaint on there is an interesting one that completely misconstrues the first amendment right, but again, that's just interesting.
(https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/menlo-park/profile/social-media-ma...)
Cut the tentacles and they'll grow back with little issue.
P.S. I've kept HN because, you know... the last bastion of reasonable discourse.
I’m not sure what actions anyone reading this can take now. They may have already succumbed to the relentless prompts and accepted the new messenger.
When will we learn? These are businesses. A promise is worthless, the only thing that matters are contracts.
even those don't matter. The only thing that actually matters are the consequences.
If you rub a Big Tech company the wrong way, they will disable your account and dramatically alter your online life.
But if they pull the floor from under your feet, you have no practical recourse, maybe a complaint on Hacker News.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
can you explain how this should apply to "large corporations with massive network effects." would the other sections of the first amendment apply to private corps such that they couldn't deny medical coverage based on the corporation’s religious views?
The New York Times has revenue greater than the tax revenue of a few dozen nations. Should the government force the New York Times to carry any editorial anyone submits?
And good look suing a company with billions of dollars. Even with a strong case and good lawyers, they will drag out the process and all the court costs will make it impossible to finish, unless you also have billions of dollars.
Do you have the same liberty to change the terms? No. You are free to stop using the service.