When Facebook went down this week, traffic to news sites went up
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This is a very serious problem - hyper-centalization in hands of one corporation which can fail you intentionally or not. Facebook is becoming sort of the Chinese system (AFAIK standard WWW is almost nonexistent in China, they mostly use apps within social networks which are easier for the government to control) for the whole world.
Looking more broadly it's another layer of the malicious trend to wrap the things in more and more layers.
First we had native desktop apps (which always could communicate data to network servers). Then we have wrapped the apps in the browser (which essentially is an OS on an OS) but we had our pages on independent servers. Then we invented "social networks" and are putting everything in there.
We could just improve desktop apps tech (including discoverability, delivery, interoperability, portability and UI design flexibility) but we chose the browsers. We could stop here, use the standard WWW and improve experience of using RSS/Atom/RDF/XMPP/etc but we gave up our pages/subscriptions/contacts to Facebook.
I don't think Joey's Pizza is going to have a web presence if not for Facebook. I don't think they should have to hire a developer or use the latest no-code platform to just throw up their name, location and address on the web. It's centralized, sure, but its free, simple, SEO optimized and as a user I'd prefer that to some home-spun website.
There are issues with Facebook, but people who hate on it tend to try to make everything an issues. And having Joey's pizza on Facebook and it being unavailable for a few hours every decade or so is not a big concern. There's a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of web presence that Facebook addresses. Other websites and apps are still going to exist as long as regulations don't neuter the competition as would invariably be the case.
My recollection is that far fewer businesses had any web presence in 2004. Big professional ones did, but random family-owned restaurants usually didn’t.
Some places that definitely would have a site otherwise, don't, but have Facebook instead. Some have a site but neglect it, so if you want current info you have to check their Facebook page. Others had sites and let them lapse because FB took over that role. Hell, the local public schools are like that, too. Have sites, send emails and texts and such, but FB is absolutely the best channel to get school & district news from.
Every time I order food the restaurant puts a flyer in there begging me to use their own site.
Meanwhile "Just Eat Takeaway confirms it’s gobbling up Grubhub in a $7.3B deal".
Immediately, when we connect web servers they are pentested and port scanned.
Joey also wants to let customers comment on those posts with questions and general excitement, or to reach out directly in a way that isn’t a phone line.
The issue is that Facebook and IG are really really good business and marketing platforms. That and ads is basically their whole reason for existence. And you get a huge audience, organic discovery, and moderation for free.
Every restaurant in my city’s primary social media presence is on IG. Unless you’re a huge chain and have a marketing department that’s basically all they get that isn’t mayyyybe a local mailing, or a sponsored story in a local newspaper or food blog.
Don’t get me wrong, I think you should have your own website for nothing else other than to lend some legitimacy when people Google your name but if you could only have one I would probably skip the website. “The Web” from a business standpoint is just Google’s centralized platform at this point since the thing that matters is audience and discovery.
https://palermospizzamenu.com/
You don't even need a website actually, you can just register your business in Google and local competitors (if any, depends on the country) and put your email address (needless to say how easy it is to get for free) there. People will find you via location-targeted search, email/call you and update your rating. I wouldn't consider Google much better than Facebook in this context but at least it's an alternative and let's you share independent contact channels visibly.
I don't understand how you can type this and then still say you don't understand why people just create a free Facebook page instead. And that is not even touching on the network effect that your Facebook page enjoys.
The GrubHub result is the most frustrating, because the pizzeria does it's own direct delivery too. And if you get it delivered through GrubHub, or even call the place via the # GrubHub lists, GrubHub gets a fee if some sort.
Google at least still shows their business listing in the right margin of search results though, so hopefully people mostly use that.
A contractor of mine gets most of his business via his FB page, and he knows absolutely nothing about coding. He complains a lot about labor shortage. Imagine he'd have to worry about finding a web developer as well.
Most of these places offer plugins to take online orders too. Its' $5-10 a month for the standard menu & phone number deal, and a bit of a premium over stripe for payment services (still cheaper than Grubhub).
We are long past the days of small businesses needing a coder to have a website.
Whereas at a single point in time, Facebook can sell many ad spots and allow individuals to target certain groups of people. Unsurprisingly, media thinks you can do very specific ad targeting but you can’t.. not to the level of doomsday-ness that people suggest. They’ve put limits on the min # of people you can target.
It is worth mentioning that FB’s ad bidding system is completely automated, so prices are almost entirely determined by demand and ad spots.
The other side is that, pizza business is not in the business of making a website or dealing with technology. They are in the business of managing a restaurant which is hard work. Anything that takes away technology work can be a huge plus for them, especially if they don’t have to manage it.
When I worked in a restaurant, it would be 12-14 hour shifts. Leadership would do those shifts nearly every single day putting out (non-literal) fires and keeping the ship afloat. You have to pick your battles carefully when running restaurant.
I find it painful when people say.. let’s just go back to the old form of advertising. Old form of advertising highly favored large conglomerates, because the ad spots were limited. Instead businesses had to rely on word of mouth.
But what if you are a small internet business making niche jewelry or whatever? Well, if you only rely on word of mouth you will probably saturate your customer base early. Instead if you could put out ads for your demographic cheaply across your entire country, now you are talking!
Does that mean FB is net good? I think that is up to the individual, I’m not going to tell people otherwise. But there is value there, and everyone should recognize that even if they don’t believe it is net good.
> Every pizzeria I know has a web site.
This is because pizza delivery is insanely profitable. Over the past decade, Domino's Pizza has outperformed FB and Google. By a _lot_. They have plenty of incentive to spend on marketing and reachability.
And they have far more leverage than tech does, in terms of consumer preference. Think of it like this: if you want to order pizza, and your preferred pizzeria isn't on Apple Maps, do you order from somewhere else? No, you load up Google Maps instead. Or any of the other dozen replacements for the Yellow Pages launched in the past 20 years. And they all fall over themselves to find and add these places, making it easy to list (just a postcard in Google's case).
To ask what the point of being on Google is because people can find you by walking seems almost deliberately obtuse.
Assuming everyone has FB is part of the problem. Joeys Pizza doesnt need anything other than a static page with a menu and phone number/address.
If Facebook shuts down tomorrow or everyone suddenly starts thinking that it's evil enough to stop using, Joey's Pizza is more likely than not to go to yet another centralized service just like Facebook. You just can't beat free and easy with the open web.
After a certain point, a business must switch from a "graphics design is my passion" style logo to something inexpensive designed by a (semi-)professional to be taken seriously. Why is web presence any different?
Yes, this is a problem. I have never met such people though, but I believe they exist.
> You just can't beat free and easy with the open web.
You can make free, easy and open without Facebook.
It's far from impossible to make a nice app which would let you choose a template, some customizations (way more flexible and probably even easier than Facebook at the same time) and put a website on any dirt-cheap shared PHP hosting which supports FTP, SFTP or Git. I could make it myself if I had some time to spare, people would just have to sign-up at GitHub, click and get a page there, and even a QR code to put on their door/cards :-). But even if I made it I doubt many people are going to use it - Facebook is too popular already and it also provides them with an easy way to advertise.
Any (or almost any, perhaps really poor governments exist, I dunno) government can also easily afford to contract a shared hosting provider to give every citizen and every small business a simple web site. This would be a win for the government as they would hugely improve their nation digital independence this way.
Looks like it was a trendy thing to hop into a platform and turn every other channel off until recently. The worst that I've seen was at the start of the pandemics. But at least around here, the trend seems to have completely reversed. On the last few months I haven't find any place doing it.
It works fine for me without being logged in to Facebook.
Other sorts of small organizations, which might make FB their main web presence - it'll vary, but generally a "Joey's Pizza" is the best case scenario.
We just need to again, accidentally discover/create whatever it is that's going to cater to the masses without handing control to a dysfunctional sect of humans.
Even for small business that have nothing to do with tech, it is important to have redundancies.
We cant win!
That's because they actually paid carriers to provide Facebook access for free to people. See Facebook Zero and Internet.org. The latter is particularly insidious because it looks like a charity offering internet access to those who can't afford it. It is not the whole internet, but there is a list of mostly educational websites, like Wikipedia, but in the middle of that list, there is of course Facebook. So really, they are offering Facebook access under then name "internet".
This has happened in every industry due to economies of scale and network effects. We've seen the negative issues of this with our supply chain problems, everything got outsourced for efficiency at the cost of redundancy. Even the news sites complaining about Facebook are examples of this, we are down to a handful of major media companies controlling everything
Who do you mean "we"? There is, in a fundamental sense, no "we", only a bunch of competing companies, uncoordinated individuals, and tiny groups of enthusiasts.
The browser situation is the no-mans-land in the middle of a war between platform monopolists on the desktop, platform monopolists in the browser, malware authors, privacy-invading advertisers, software pirates, and the poor third party developers just trying to find a place to sell software.
Neither Microsoft nor Apple are going to surrender the total control of their platforms; cross platform development is always going to straddle those.
Heck how many times has a small company forgot to renew their domain name.
What’s the solution to this problem? You outsource to someone that mostly stops hackers.
Now accounts being hacked is a major problem as my wife and her friends can attest to.
What’s the solution to that?
Just make another account. Highly annoying and upsetting. But a simple and easy solution.
Those solutions are all free and easy.
So yes Facebook is evil. But it’s also extremely practical for small little groups that can barley use a computer.
Any ideas how to fix it?
This would require a lot of effort somebody has to fund however. I would expect governments to fund this if they recognized the seriousness of the problem. Governments already start taking climate change more and more seriously, this (web) problem is the next we face.
Perhaps if I were a person in the government in charge of this I would just pay the Qt company to make full (including the Qt Design Studio) modern Qt totally free for everybody to use (as HTML, CSS, JS and the browsers are) and keep developing it. It is more cross-platform and fast than Chrome, very powerful and is not limited to classic widgets but can also do any visually fancy stuff with ease. This way (after addressing the discoverability problem also) we could revert straight to the native app phase.
That said, my biggest takeaway from Facebook is that Qt may be overkill. Small businesses seem to want to post plain text (like on Hacker News), photos, and videos. Even Wordpress is probably too complicated.
Thinking about the Firefox ads article that was front page today, I wonder if Mozilla could instead make money by selling extremely basic web hosting and putting an edit button into the browser?
In fact, come to think of it, all technical solutions ultimately solve "people problems". Everything bottoms out at the human level.
Once Facebook usage becomes a real nuissance for whatever reason, businesses will slowly migrate off of it.
Speaking to people working in agriculture and fishing industry (Portugal and the Baltic sea), I can tel you that their opinion differs from yours by a large margin.
Sometimes this can mean shifting the harvest date by a month, sometimes not being able to find certain types of fish due to seemingly minor water temperature/climate changes.
I live in a similar bubble as an average HN reader, so I see where you're coming from though.
> Once Facebook usage becomes a real nuissance for whatever reason, businesses will slowly migrate off of it.
>> The same can be said about climate change.
Yeah, we will start migrating to Mars!
my hunch is, yeah, maybe people had a look to see if the news confirmed their suspicions... but then maybe stayed a while and/or sought out alternatives for the ultimate distraction contraption.
Same as saying people who wanted to go to the park did something else instead because the park was closed. Its not good or bad. It just 'is'.
It's framed on such a way as to imply that people are more informed without Facebook, and maybe that is true, but that isn't all that is going on there.
- The increases far exceeded what was lost. The dip in the social line was offset three-fold when you add up external, search and direct. They're not to be averaged.
- Unmentioned, but reflected in graph: people using facebook tend to share articles far more than they read them. As in social share count > pageview count. Sometimes by a factor of 100.
After all, what does facebook really do except just repost news from low quality article factories?
It could also just be looking for their content fix.
Most people are probably aware of the names of several major news organisations in their country or city, but it's less obvious what the domain name should be - what is written in full? what is abbreviated?
If you prohibit the use of a lookup system (that's what you did, effectively), some people will be able remember the domain name (it's easier than a telephone number), but it's not hard to guess people will find the system much less useful.
It's a little like saying "if everyone had to use a CLI to start the programs they want to use on their phone, more people would watch TV".
Which is in itself a major news story. Before talking about facebook v. other new sites we mush take account of the greater number of people looking for news content regardless of platform. The increase might more people looking for news rather than people having to go elsewhere than facebook.
There's now an obvious conflict of interest with regard to news sites reporting on Facebook. Their generalized antagonism towards Facebook, and the tech industry has a pretty clear root: they're getting outcompeted, thus the calls for regulation.
Furthermore, many of the original landmark copyright decisions regarding, say, Google; were specifically decided to be fair use... partially on the basis that things Google did were sending monetizable traffic back to web publishers. Facebook's actions take the form of these fair uses, but they use their control over their platform to reclaim the value they would ordinarily be creating for publishers. This puts those exceptions to copyright in jeopardy - and that's exactly what we're seeing in, say, the EU.
Also remember that media companies tried collaborating with Facebook. Remember Pivot to video? Only to discover that Facebook inflated their stats on video views.
Of course, Facebook was sorry.
Theoretically all companies under capitalism would want to become true monopolies because having competition means leaving money on the table, but in practice a duopoly or a de facto monopoly is preferable to skirt regulations and interventions. There is a good reason Google still props up Mozilla despite competing with them in the browser space.
It would also be interesting so see how many of the larger non-Amazons run on AWS.
It's so nice to have hundreds of small online shops actually competing with quality and or cheap products. Instead of a AliExpress clone with worse support.
idk im surprised people just like didnt go do other things, like we just have to scroll?
(Cue the pile on of "But this wasn't a real disaster", sure. But unfortunately for a lot of people, it really was. They couldn't communicate with loved ones etc.)
How is this a surprise?
One factor is that people wanted to know how this whole outage evolves (your example). It's similar to a "disaster", so people want to know the latest updates. It's not a surprise, but it might not explain the whole picture.
Another factor is that Facebook (when it's up) has a negative effect on most news site's traffic. People might find your news article on Facebook, but most of the time, they just skim the title, and read the comments on Facebook, and they don't bother visiting your website (or they don't stay there and browse the rest of the articles).
This could be interesting for you if you've been following the love-hate relationship that news websites and Facebook have been having for almost a decade now.
I don't know exactly what makes an event a "real disaster", but I agree that suddenly being isolated from your family is a significant event, and if anyone wanted to belittle your characterisation, they should probably recallibrate their understanding of the world. (And they should also be careful to distinguish their oughts and their is-es.)
> […] social shares that do not contain any digital referral information about the source.
> In contrary to the sharing on social networking service like Facebook, which is done publicly, Dark social is done privately through IRC channels, emails, SMS or simply copy-and-paste and other ways of private sharing.
> To combat this lack of transparency, websites can include more attractive ways to share links than simply copy-pasting into another application; ...
I guess one man's privacy is another man's "lack of transparency".
A good example of this are jobs that post your salary online. Those are usually in government and some NGOs.
Interestingly, some Nordic countries allow people to see each others income tax info.
What's more interesting for me is that Pornhub's traffic surged by 10% [1] during the outage ;)
[1] - https://www.pornhub.com/insights/facebook-instagram-outage-2...
It's interesting anyways to see proof that most people likely didn't use the extra free time to stay off the internet. We truly are internet junkies.
There have been ex-FB employees publicly accusing the company of enabling foreign political interference in the US, lynching mobs forming via WhatsApp, governments spreading misinformation, not to mention gross privacy abuses by its own employees. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
Heck, nothing fundamentally changed after Wikileaks' Collateral Murder video (in fact, there have now been reports that the supposed retaliatory precision strike in Afghanistan actually killed an aid worker and his children and this too changes nothing) and nothing fundamentally changed after the Snowden leaks. Obama literally went on public television and admitted to torture and nothing fundamentally changed.
As much as us nerds tend to think otherwise, information on its own changes nothing. Scandals like this are just another piece of outrage fuel to be consumed on social media and to be liked, shared and subscribed to. Without actually organizing and defining solutions rather than just the problems, nothing fundamentally changes. Otherwise the best you can hope for is the POTUS reading off a script while making a concerned face or Congress passing a toothless bill before things return to normal.
For example, see https://www.akamai.com/blog/news/the-impact-of-third-party-s... and https://twitter.com/paulcalvano/status/1445244384598011906
Link for reference:
https://www.pornhub.com/insights/facebook-instagram-outage-2...
Most news sites are littered with beacons so I imagine they had similar issues (times 10).
As a small retailer, we probably ended up losing 15-20% of our sales that day.
This is obvious, but it's worth noting how different this is from most companies of comparable size. If Toyota go dark, the world makes fewer cars. It would take time and investment to recover the capacity.
Whether FB is good or bad, it's interesting how unnecessary it is.
I think the world would be just fine - car manufacturing capacity has already dropped due to the chip shortage, but the world is humming along, albeit with slightly higher car prices. If Toyota became insolvent, second-hand Toyotas would go up in price, and some other car company would buy their factories. It wouldn't be Armageddon.
*When Facebook went down, traffic to all other sites went up
If I go to hacker news whilst procrastination lock out is on I curse and go to another news site. If the top 10 YouTubers accounts were frozen - YouTube wouldn't likely see a drop in total videos watched, people would watch something else.
Takes basic logic to realise that's not the case at all; people would've flocked to news sites to see why Facebook was down. Once it's back up they'll return to the bubble.
Sometimes I wish I born before the internet, or even a century ago.
Where people still communicate mostly in-person.
(I'm only half joking haha).
> Does Facebook really make anyone's life better?
I can only answer for myself. It made my life better:
1. At the start of my career, I got connections, jobs, etc from local groups. 2. I connected with old school mates I wouldn't have found other wise. 3. ...
My assumption is when people are not addicted or living/following fake lives on social media, there is a lot of benefits to it.
You could also get into sailing, specifically offshore cruising. Until Starlink becomes available for mobile installations your options are either ruinously expensive and slow satellite internet or if you’re a radio amateur shortwave services for email and SSB voice.
(A bit dramatic - it's meant to be satiric).
By the way, yes, i do have a FB account, but no I do not check it much at all except for the rare "like" for a post from my mom, etc. Dang it, and now i exposed that my mom is on FB...there goes my ops sec! /s ;-)
<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" description="Sorry, but no. No pinning." />
I guess you could look for Facebook’s spiders retrieving content and block those requests. But why bother?
The claims of Facebook promoting hate and extremism are part of this campaign to rollback the changes brought about by Facebook. And the claims are all disingenuous nonsense.
The Facebook "whistleblower" for example explained how she was motivated to blow the whistle after one of her friends was, in her words, radicalized, through Facebook. Of course she doesn't consider herself, a lifelong "ally" and supporter of far-left causes, who worked on a search feature allowing Pinterest users to search by skin tone - in order to discriminate in favor of people of certain colors - radicalized. Because that's pro-establishment radicalism.
The claims of Facebook promoting hate and extremism are part of this campaign to rollback the changes brought about by Facebook"
You think Facebook not a gatekeeper? You think it liberalized speech?
4chan is free speech, facebook just privatised hate