Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B
economist.com
economist.com
Important to note about 60% of our customers are on an iOS device, which is a little higher than the global average but matches the market segment we are in in the UK.
The situation improved after about 4 weeks, I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS, but it's somewhat difficult to be sure as by then we had other campaigns running.
So, this will definitely be effecting marketers decision making process of where to allocate spend. It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.
Word-of-mouth exists. It's possible Facebook wasn't making it up. Did you use a Facebook-specific link in the ads?
True. However in this case we are confident, based on our own internal tracking and metrics, that this is correct.
I'm really curious what you sell now. Can you tell us?
If not, can the rest of HN create fun speculations?
Human armpit-scented cat toys.
I do sometimes find it odd that such a thing is insufficient for tracking sources of traffic in and of itself. No doubt there is a complexity that I have missed
There is actually a real problem with tracking via cookies on Facebook ads when the destination is a website. The ad click will open in a Facebook "In App Browser", any cookie that you (or any analytical service) sets will be within that IAB. If the user then uses the "open in Safari/Chrome" option that tracking can be broken as there is no cookie. Ideally you want your visitor to either complete their transaction within the IAB or to use the "open in Safari" option immediately so that any tracking parameters are copied to the other browser allowing the cookie to be set.
In our case the majority of our customers will have a better experience outside of the IAB and so we have a popup that prompts them to use "open in Safari" before navigating away from the first page view. We actually implemented this after noticing a very high drop out rate for iOS Facebook IAB users during our checkout. What was happening is address/payment card autocomplete isn't available within the Facebook IAB and people were clicking "open in Safari" during the checkout in order to use it, they would then find themselves with an empty shopping cart, hence the drop out.
Another way you could potentially get around it is to fingerprint the user and store the basket contents server side and present them to that fingerprint.
We also considered placing the session id in the url for the checkout, but again decided against due to security concerns.
Actually I suppose this may have changed since the introduction of safari extensions on ios? I haven't looked into this since that released
Oh they sure were. All ads are useless. Targeted ads are evil. And Ads should not be targeted were the HN's view, which later became there shouldn't even be any ads, it should all be subscription. That is 2018/19. By 20/21 HN were even targeting those who were working inside the online Ad industry. And this is seen across the tens of thousands of comments. ( Say 50 Thread of 200 comments )
It became such a problem that people working inside Ad industry were even afraid to post their views on HN. And they have to be upvoted to make sure there are still sanity inside the HN community.
I don't think I've ever seen someone say this. People hate that they make the internet impossible to use. I have a family friend that runs a small business and all of the revenue comes from ads on the websites they run. I hate using their website because of the ads.
Pop-up that takes up the whole screen asking to subscribe, auto-play video ad, content moving as ads get loaded slowly. It's all just awful to use. The ads are absolutely effective though.
Edit: it would likely just cause a shift to self hosted ads, which is a dramatic improvement imo.
My guess is it'll result in backend web modules that make it easy to automatically dynamically re-host the same virus- and tracker-infested malware ads we all hate
This is a side-effect of media selling advertising through brokers rather than direct, that these brokers then built tools to track impressions, clicks and sales attributions, and then created a disparity between each level of several orders of magnitude.
When advertisers were paying an order of magnitude more for ad impressions, we needed far fewer ads and those ads tended both to be of higher quality and more topically relevant.
At the current CPM, I routinely get ads which aren't spelling or grammar-checked.
Now, I get 90% ads for car parts and car accessories. I don't have a car, I don't drive, I don't have a license, and I don't even like to be in a car, but for whatever reason Amazon (or Instagram?) ads are assuming that what I really want are car parts and car accessories that I don't recognize, can't use, or don't understand.
It feels very stupid to me that those are the "default" ads I'm getting, even though I never tap on them for obvious reasons, but it's reassuring to know that they went from knowing exactly who I am and specifically what I had been looking at to having no clue whatsoever anything about me, or who I am or what I like.
The problem is the tracking itself, whether you notice it or not. At least that's my opinion.
Just like I doubt that people mind that Netflix gives you recommendations based on what you watched on Netflix.
The problem was never about the ads.
It was about the fact that ads were forced, privacy-invasive (due to customization) and generally were terrible overall (think malware/crypto mining risks, terrible UX - think annoyingly flashy gifs, or those gigantic banners in the middle of a scenic drive), not to mention poorly regulated, leading to lots of "double your money/phallus in 3 days!" type of scams.
There are a few "fair" advertising companies (the name slips me) that I am perfectly happy with. A static, discreet ad need not be bad. Several ads are absolute works of art and passion. The vast majority are not.
What we have is (techy) folks wanting to not have a shitty experience, and the average privacy-conscious user not wanting tracking. Companies do not respect (or care enough) for these which is why you have an anti-ad point of view. (I should probably write about this.)
Today, the ad industry tracks the user, and ads are attached to matching user interest, which gives an incentive to produce arbitrary, but addictive content, with most of the benefit accruing to the ad oligopolies instead of the content producers.
Today's statistically-driven advertising does not relate to the context and thus has no bridge for engagement. We are all desensitized to them, so they just have to block content, flash more incessantly, and make the dismiss click box smaller (or just start putting fake dismiss boxes to trick people into more engagement).
I think the scammy/dark side of advertising is driven by the cost of impressions being so low. This is because of the pricing disparities allowed by the advertising broker tracking attributions rather than the business themselves. Legitimate products suffer as a result, similar to the effect of spam on email.
I dont think we disagree.
Like I wrote in another post, most on HN couldn't understand the difference between placement ad on Google Search Engine and Google Ads Network. And suggested we should ban all "tracking ads". And later all ads. I explicitly ask them and suggest what you just wrote. That there could be good ads, and they, by majority disagree. This isn't just on HN, it is pretty much across the whole tech industry. Benedict Evans wrote a lot about this [1] and on Twitter. We even went to ask people offline to make sure we are not in an online bubble. But so far the results suggest otherwise. Especially with Tracking [2].
[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/5/13/apples-ads...
[2] https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1387414650443141120...
I still don't understand your point. The only reason Facebook's ability to properly attribute went down drastically is specifically because of the iOS privacy changes that require user opt in to track across different sites.
Fine, I don't doubt there were other HN commenters who were arguing different meanings of "tracking", but that's all a moot point. In this instance, we know exactly why Facebook's ad effectiveness went down - it went down because they could no longer track all your interactions across the majority of the web. Tough shit.
IIUC, you can do attribution with a very basic ad: <a href="website.com/ad-34" ping="fb.com/my-product/ad-34/ping"><img src="fb.com/my-product/ad-34/img.jpeg" /> Come buy my product, you'll love it!</a>
Then you sum up all the "/ad-34" hits, and figure out how many of those user sessions (which are now on your own site -- single domain, but perhaps leveraging a script supplied by the ad network) went and actually bought something. The ad network can correlate those sessions with the "ping" it receives to determine clicks vs. conversions.
Facebook (and other ad networks) want credit if someone clicks on your ad, spends time on your site, but then doesn't actually buy anything until a couple days when they enter the URL directly (i.e. not clicking on an ad). This is the problem generally referred to as attribution. Facebook (and others) do this by tracking everyone all around the web. They track the ad click and then they track you going back to the website the next day, and they know it's the same person.
Ad attribution directly depends on pervasive tracking.
For example, I bought a product the other day after seeing a Facebook ad, but I didn't click on the ad itself and rather went searching for it on DuckDuckGo, then after reading a bit about it online, bought the product.
I'm curious as to whether that got attributed to the ad impression or not.
Allow some facebook supplied javascript to set a first party cookie when the user hits website.com/ad-34, and then reference that 1st party cookie the next day when the user returns. Phone home when they buy something. Facebook can now correlate (1) the ping they received to begin with, (2) the user session cookie they initiated on the first visit, and (3) the user session they observed when a purchase was made.
I'm sure things get easier with 3rd party tracking, but fundamentally you can do it without cross-site tracking.
I'm sure that's what inspired my hard line against ads. I block ads and tracking where I can. And I've become so used to an ad-free web that I don't think I'll go back anymore.
If they'd only listened to us this before things got totally out of hand this could have been avoided.
zero traction in the real world for this. people will click on whatever you show them.
A) Advertising was considered so extremely gauche that no one did it B) No revenue from advertising existed C) Ad-supported services went away
I would be a very happy man.
It’s like the old adage: this job would be great it weren’t for those pesky customers.
The implementation of ads is also wildly invasive, creepy, and propagandistic. However, focusing on implementation allows ad salesmen to lessen the sharpness of the criticism by supposing there is some "nice" way this could be done.
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with expending money for things that are valuable. That kinda seems like the whole point of money.
I think in many cases we should be aiming to do that for social fundamentals that would make all of us live richer and happier lives like healthcare and education, but it has a lot of negative consequences in consumer products which are more individualistic, competitive, and status oriented.
Because even at the most extreme, where there are no ads, even the most minimal difference like location or appearance has value. Consider the simple example of a grocery store - what products do they place at eye level? What products do they place closer to the entrance? What color does P&G make their detergent bottle? What do they call it?
It's all "advertising", and there's no practical way to prevent it.
The alternative is that everything is packaged in the same sized gray box and described in perfectly utilitarian terms.
So advertising will always exist. We just need to know where to draw the line.
We have a family friend, retired now, who had a successful career in marketing and strategy in multi-billion dollar transnational companies. I once asked (probably naively) why [maker of extremely popular product at the time] ran so little advertising. The friend told me "they have a good product. They don't need to spend money haranguing people into buying it or spreading the word about because it's actually good. Word of mouth is free".
At least half of your polemic needs citations.
It’s creepy for one thing. It reminds me of why we sometimes have to let go of a certain kind of relationship: they know too much, and are too effective at getting you to buy into action that is not ultimately in your best interest.
Second, how is this a "balanced ideological fight" counterargumnet. Let's say I oppose Facebook ads as invasion of privacy (and I do). A person on the internet used Facebook ads to make money. Those are contrary why? It's not like I'm sitting here and was like "oh, now that someone made money on the ads, I'm totally in favor of them."
I pay for YouTube Premium to avoid ads because I hate ads. But I also like robust economic activity. So, I’m happy to pay a fee instead of seeing ads.
Yep, and I drastically limited watching YouTube on-site because their advertising became untenably invasive. The last straw was when they tried to get me to pay money to back-track how much they made their product suck, rather than actually providing me value over the out-of-box experience a few years prior.
There’s some good content on there, but it’s not good enough to subject myself to that, or to reward such behavior with money.
That reasoning can be used to justify any shitty practice.
Concerned about global warming? If you have an income it’s because of economic activity, most likely derived from emitting carbon.
Concerned about human rights in China? If you have an income it’s because of economic activity, most likely derived from trade with China.
Concerned about American workers getting fired for unionizing? If you have an income it’s because of economic activity, most likely derived from interacting with sales behemoths like Walmart and Amazon.
Therefore, I suggest you come up with a better rational for bad things. Or frankly stop trying to justify them. That also works.
FB marketing is effective, question is at what price. If those prices drop, ad dollars will flow back. It will take a few quarterly modeling cycles to reflect this though.
The contra-contrarian view is this: FB, Google have an unusual mix of large, medium and small advertisers all bidding for the same inventory. That's what makes FB and Google somewhat immune to large advertiser pricing pressures (and issue of the day spend bans). However, only the larger advertisers have budgets for complicated cross-publisher modeling. If organic FB tools show higher CPAs, it will drive the smaller marketers to other platforms causing some interesting feedback loops.
It's unfortunate that the incredably invasive tracking and profile building has become conflated with ad attribution. For us attribution is essential and we have little interest or use for invasive tracking. We just want to know from which ad a customer converted.
Personally we avoid the more invasive remarking tools as I hate it myself when you are chased across the web by a product you have looked at once.
Sorry to break it to you, but that's what tracking is.
You're saying you don't want remarking, but - you want to know something that requires marking. "Remarking" is just persistent marking. What you don't want is "retargeting", which is when the user gets to learn someone is building a profile of them. But that's just whether the "marked" profile is used to also "target" - the profile gets built either way.
Plus it’s supper useful to feed that attribution data back into the ad platforms management tools.
>if a user does not have their Facebook and Instagram accounts linked in the company's Account Center, those accounts will be considered as two separate people for ad planning and measurement.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211031105427/https://adage.com...
Affecting, not effecting.
>It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.
We assume you meant "cautious" and not "courteous".
Is that even legal? With AI, you can never concretely prove anything, so you then have Facebook literally making up numbers it pinky swears are legit and billing you accordingly (semi-directly because while you're not paying per click, the landing page analytics are also used to weed out robo clicks and other fraud that you shouldn't be billed for).
I understand it's nice to have fancy reports etc but it sounds like you already know where your customers are coming from. And tracking is very invasive, in this case it doesn't really seem to add much value.
You could also ask your customers "where did you hear about us" for example. Perhaps you already do and that's the source of that 100%. If not you might even discover a way you didn't know of. Eg word of mouth, some obscure forum where your product was mentioned. As well as that it's a method where you respect your users' privacy.
We were in unique situation with this one campaign where, quite right, we knew where our conversions were coming from as we were confident there was no other source. Within a few weeks we had other campaigns running and no longer could have the same level of confidence.
The point it outside of this unique situate of a new product only marketed on Facebook the conversion attribution on their platform is broken. This is affecting marketers decision making process and reducing the spend on that platform.
The interesting thing is we were able to see the affect of Apples change quite clearly. Most people are not able to see that.
I thought dang, this is smart. They’ll basically own the next level up the stack from the browser: they’ll own the “social chrome” of every application on the web.
Although it devolved into spam, Facebook was a hot spot of weird social games for a while there. And every web dev was learning how to build Facebook apps. We wondered if we’d even really need a domain for much more than a landing page, if 99% of our engagement was going to come through Facebooks.
And then they killed it because they wanted to own the entire experience inside Facebook. It became not a walled garden, but a walled flower pot.
It always seemed short sighted to me. Yes, they lost control allowing third party apps in their frame. But didn’t they want to be a Microsoft and not a WordPerfect?
Looking back, I wonder if it was a missed opportunity. They have to go try to be the metaverse because social never became a platform.
Also I'm not talking about 2021: I'm talking about years ago when Facebook moved away from prioritizing the PC platform. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered, I don't know, but when FB became a primary entry point to the internet for many people, and FB then mostly ignored desktop experience, it certainly accelerated any decline already in place. But had they enriched that experience, maybe there'd still be a much stronger following there.
[0]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-...
And considering that most people spend 8 hours a day at work, how much personal usage on the web comes from the desktop? How many younger people are using computers for personal use - especially if it a shared family computer.
Heck I am a software developer and my personal computer is just sitting in a corner as a Plex server. I haven’t used it for anything productive in a year and a half and that was for updating my resume.
Besides that, Facebook got more popular because of mobile when everyone had a camera in their pocket with GPS when they csn post the highlights of their life. Not to mention WhatsApp is all about communicating real time and Instagram is about sharing pictures.
I have three desktops on the go all day. Three keyboards in front of me and three mice. I run Windows 7, 10 and ubuntu and another ubuntu under windows 10. Trading that in for my mobile is very limiting.
If I’m just doing a hobby project proof of concept to learn a new for me technology, I would do that on my work computer. We have a very liberal open source process where we can open source a project under:
https://github.com/aws-samples
That only requires going through a simple process. That also means I have unlimited admin access to multiple dev AWS accounts using our internal tool that we can’t name but almost everyone knows about.
If/when I leave, I can just fork it and continue to work on it if no one else is interested in maintaining it. Otherwise, submit a pull request.
Any outside work I would do would be considered “consulting” - the same thing I do on my $DayJob. That would clearly be a conflict of interest.
BTW, I would never want to be an SDE at Amazon. I don’t do on call. I work in consulting. We are told that we are “in charge of our own calendar”. Meaning that if we are putting in more than 40 hours regularly, we aren’t managing our projects correctly.
On a day to day basis, my actual manager only has a high level idea of what I’m working on. We as consultants guide our project implementations.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/683082/share-of-website-...
It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that huge chunks of demographics don't really use desktops or laptops all that much.
As soon as any Facebook app convinced a user to pay, all other facebook apps would have a seamless checkout.
Getting user financials isn't easy but we've seen the rise of Venmo, Robinhood, and Neobanks since then so it's doable.
Desktop penetration is lower outside of the US. Aren’t Internet cafes still a thing in much of the world because people don’t have computers at home?
Latest anecdote (this week) is not seeing internet cafe's in Belize and government PSA's say to contact them on whatsapp.
That said, Facebook makes their money in rich countries.
Not on iOS where that sort of thing is prohibited. Sure they could put a skin over safari, but apple would have banned the entire FB app as soon as they found a developer's app they didn't like.
Yes.
A phone not supporting flash might get developers upset. But by that time developers wanted html5 to take over and developer preference doesn't push product.
One can make the case that the most inexperienced with computers person is Apple's ideal customer / most profitable. Not being able to get on facebook would push this demographic to other phones.
You also have to remember even as late as 2011, Motorola was trying to sell the Xoom tablet as being able to browse “the real internet” because it (belatedly) supported Flash.
But then we still get back to the fact that in 2008, the iPhone 3G had 128MB RAM and couldn’t even fully load a regular web page. When you scrolled to fast, there was a checkerboard while it tried to render the rest of the page. It definitely couldn’t do any complex animation within Safari.
So I opened up my editor and wrote a Python client to automate the game; go to forest, attack until your inventory is full, go to town, sell inventory, repeat. I left it run overnight and completely blew past her in progression.
Now everything is an app, and every app uses HTTPS, and every HTTPS connection uses certificate pinning, and I just can't be bothered to do the work anymore to cheat at useless games I don't like.
"Interesting but kind of tedious" is absolutely a great descriptor, though. It's basically an incremental game that grows at the slowest possible rate you can imagine.
If Zuck knowingly gave investors bad guidance, I don't think that would go over well with the SEC:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5#Forward-looking...
They did that to us yesterday: https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Facebook-is-Breaking-A...
We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on facebook app ads per month. We can deal with IDFA giving way to more aggregated attribution (we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales). But facebook breaking our app in production because they can't be bothered doing their job properly is very serious. It can't be solved by reducing ad spend, only by removing their SDK from our app.
If this is also happening to many other developers right now, that, more than the Q4 results or the IDFA issue itself, could be causing the drop in the share price.
In fact, if you look at the Q4 results, the earnings miss was more because of growth in G&A (which grew by 3 percentage-points of revenue if I'm not mistaken) than because of a top-line slowdown. And if you read the comments as to what made G&A grow, it's 'legal costs'.
the fact that they're cracking down on partner privacy in a hamfisted way surely doesn't help matters but I can't see how angry devs are driving the share price down
Regarding your second point, yes, I agree - it's not obvious. Assuming this did indeed affect many developers like us and that it happened to everyone at the same time (which may not be the case - that it happened to us and that it coincided with their earnings report may have just been a coincidence - I haven't seen a mass outcry on twitter or anything), I was wondering whether it might be hedge funds that buy/track aggregated ad spend or attribution data, perhaps from MMPs or media buying agencies. I know they buy app download data from the likes of App Annie, but don't know if equivalent data is available and timely for ad spend. In any case, my point is more that this is illustrative of how they make bad situations worse for themselves.
well. if your goal isn't tracking individuals, then why are you attaching unique ID's (in cookies) to track individuals on your website?
And I'm not talking about third-party cookies disguised as first-party.
logglytrackingsession (lifetime: session)
notion_experiment_device_id (lifetime: 1 year)
Both are unique to a specific user and are used to identify a single individual. The first one is short-lived, but obviously meant for tracking and the second one can be used for tracking, identifies a single individual and is long-lived.
edit: turning off my adblocker, some more appear.
_ga, _ga_4GMCF7E1GC, intercom-id-gpfdrxfd, notion_browser_id, amp_af43d4
none of these are listed or explained in your privacy policy.[1]
[1] - https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Sticky-Privacy-Policy-...
My real point is, if you use a service to provide your own service, you give them your blessing to do whatever they want with your brand. This includes facebook and their tracking scripts.
Thus we need to audit what our service providers are doing and limit their impact once we've completed the evaluation, making sure they don't alter the deal later.
Also tracking ad conversions is as simple as using a unique parameter per campaign, when buying the add. Just append `?campaign=facebook_campaign-name_202202` to your link and that's enough to measure the ads effectiveness. No need to attach unique ID's to users, sessions etc... Aggregates keep the users anonymous and give you enough actionable insight.
As for your second point, yes, that is precisely what I referred to in my original post - that we could deal with the end of IDFA / that we just want to make sure ads are effective - SKAN which provides aggregated statistics is mostly ok for us.
While I agree, that a full audit would be difficult for smaller operations, it took me 2-5 minutes to do a quick check on what is being stored client-side and to come to a logical conclusion if individual users are being tracked or not.
It's a decision, one that you can (probably) make. For me, in the EU, it's no longer a choice and I personally think regulation(GDPR) was needed because, without it, no one took user-privacy seriously.
> As for your second point, yes, that is precisely what I referred to in my original post - that we could deal with the end of IDFA / that we just want to make sure ads are effective - SKAN which provides aggregated statistics is mostly ok for us.
GDPR would also apply here. If there's an option to process less data and achieve a similar result, one should use that option and using a more invasive method(identifying individuals) for tracking would be illegal. It's called "the data minimisation principle"
I don't want to be included in something that I never asked to be part of, and then have to put in the effort to get out.
This is one of the things that is so upsetting: most of the industry puts it on the consumer to get out rather than come in. I often look at the list of third-parties when a website says I can opt out. There are often over 300 third parties that I would have to opt out of one at a time.
That's just plain abusive.
Apple blocked access to the hardware address of the device and moved to a random identifier that could be turned completely off back at iOS 10.
Android eventually followed suit.
I used to work at a publisher where 80% of their website traffic came from Facebook. They haven't seen audience growth in years and their audience is skewing older and older, which is bad for their advertising business
Businesses like that are going to get steadily squeezed both by Facebook's declining audience share and Facebook's own efforts to change what people see.
If nobody’s buying anything from these businesses without invasive advertising & tracking then maybe whatever goods they were selling aren’t actually necessary?
Of course there is nuance and edge cases to this, but in general I wouldn’t be surprised if society and the planet was better off once we stop producing useless garbage.
Life would be pretty boring if we all only bought what we need.
1. I see an ad for some really nice pens. COOL! 2. I go to a website that allows me to opt out of tracking but I'd have to opt out of their 300 affiliates one at a time. 3. The privacy policies that state: we do not honor do-not-track signals because we don't know if it was the user or a browser default.
For me: not worth the tradeoff.
Neither feeling is invalid.
Online targetted advertising is basically the current established way to find those people who actually would care about your special cheese grater and start to get your business going. If you're looking at alternatives those would be either untargetted online advertising (incredibly inefficient, only people who don't care about cheese graters would see your ads and that's your $5000 down the toilet) or real world advertising like... Door to door salesmen? Or take out fliers in your local newspaper? That's what people used to do
If you feel cheese graters are useless and somehow deserve to remain unbought, then replace it with any other item which does match your bar for utility value.
All of this is to say that targeted advertising for niche, high-quality brands is only viable (at least if you're targeting someone like me) in an environment where search isn't beshitted by SEO, Google doesn't run a trademark protection racket, and reviews aren't 90% noise. Unfortunately, that's not the world we find ourselves in. At this point I'm more likely to just go to the kitchen store and physically examine cheese graters to find one I like than relying on the internet.
We are not looking at this from the point of view of your personal preference where you would rather the product was in a store already, but from the point of view of a legitimate, useful small business which does not have access to a store and which is trying to match their product to consumers.
Contextual advertising.
>If you feel cheese graters are useless and somehow deserve to remain unbought, then replace it with any other item which does match your bar for utility value.
I am doing this for nearly everything I can think of, and my privacy wins every single time.
You may well find that any societal usefulness is offset by your own principles, whether that's privacy or aversion to tech or aversion to capitalism or aversion to marketing or aversion to small businesses or what have you. Can't argue with principles, and I won't try. The topic though is whether there is any societal usefulness or not.
Privacy is incredibly useful to society, as is advertising I suppose, so I'm not quite sure how you can have a conversation about targeted advertising's societal usefulness without also talking about the impact it has to other things that are useful to society, eg privacy, that that advertising depends on.
Traditionally, cookware and kitchenware makers targeted restaurant buyers. If you think you have a great product, go to a restaurant conference. Everyone there has publicly expressed an interest in what you're selling without requiring a global corporate panopticon.
All Apple have done is allow users to say no.
They haven't even stopped anyone opting into surveillance if they want to. It just turns out that, when given the choice, people don't like being snooped on.
I mean it is sort of obvious to anybody not captured and with basic morals but such is the allure of greed that for ages people were cynically and hypocritically pretending otherwise
Snooping is a one off or occassional thing whereas continual obsessive profile building is actually stalking.
Good riddance, what a bunch of bottom feeders.
Starting? Did these publishers not learn anything from the whole Facebook Video debacle? [1] Also, who at these companies thinks tying their core business to a single, third party is a good idea?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...
Older people have more money to spend and are therefore worth more to advertisers.
Been reading that facebook is out of fashion for the young uns for several years, way before any privacy changes on part of anyone.
Also, question: how do they know their audience's average age? From invasive tracking?
Hard to believe that nearly half of all people is ok with being tracked...
It does not enter their minds that mass abandonment of privacy means that it renders privacy harder and harder, or even impossible, for the tiny minority of society that needs it to operate: human rights advocates, investigative journalists, labor organizers, political upstarts, et c.
The small minority of society that needs privacy (we should be honest and say that it includes some really nasty criminals as well as the good guys) really needs that kind of privacy, the kind that the average user is at least somewhat interested in. Ad-tracking isn't a huge concern to your average union organizer.
[1] https://www.coverage.com/insurance/status-update-your-social...
— Most apps nudge you to accept tracking before the dialog comes up. Probably influences some users - A lot of people probably don’t even read the dialog properly. - a lot of people who have apps like facebook installed are either unaware of the tracking stuff or don’t care
Essentially this number is far lower than the total population.
1. I get to use products and services I like without paying money from my wallet. I have plenty of data to share that’s effectively worthless to me.
2. I get exposed to new products and services (through ads) that I’d like to buy. I like buying things!
I found out about glowforge the same way and added a very useful & revenue generating tool to a small side-business I run.
So I don't mind a little bit of targeted ads. I don't regard them as inherently bad. I do however believe that each individual should have complete control over the process as it relates to their own personal data.
Basically I can use targeted ads as a free product discovery engine. Seeing an ad doesn't mean I'm going to mindlessly buy it. I know some people do that, but there's a way to make use of the situation.
[1] there might be an evil conspiracy among kitchen table manufacturing companies who teamed up with Hollywood producers to sell me the idea that I want a loft style new kitchen table :)
I like to buy things myself, but I generally have a purpose of some sort, or having used similar things, am targeting a very robust thing that I can camp on and use for a decade or two.
A good friend is always buying products, trying them out, gadgets and such. And they spend a lot, but they are always super happy with their new things and frankly, give me a lot of their older things so they can get more new things!
(that's crazy, but they do them, and we are great friends, and I make good use of the stuff falling my way too)
That said, I generally don't gauge off the AD campaigns. Big spends are a rational choice as are modest ones and or guerilla type campaigns, which the latent rebel in me is a sucker for.
What I can say, knowing someone like that, is they are entertained by new things. I'm sometimes that way, but it's rare. Like a great watch might do that, or some cool tech thing I can use with my hobby computing / making. But, my entertainment is more centered on doing stuff, and or hanging with people, maybe doing things with them.
I do hate getting a thing that sucks. Shuts me down for quite a while.
I LOVE a good score, like a thing that is just awesome and I know it will perform for ages.
I’m talking about Facebook radicalizing people and manipulating their viewpoints and selling them on things they otherwise would have never wanted in a million years if they hadn’t used Facebook.
I’m not talking “Facebook showed me a cool pen and I like to collect fountain pens so I bought it”, no issues there. I’m talking “Facebook radicalized and manipulated me and now I am buying extremist books and courses that I otherwise never would have”.
The latter is why I disable targeted ads. Because it just an order of magnitude beyond “showing me relevant products”
it doesn't matter though
If you're on Netflix, obviously you'll want at least some of the suggested content to be relevant to you. If you love basketball, of course you'd want to be reminded of The Last Dance documentary. The same goes for any other decision in the marketplace, you want relevant products to be presented to you. And that requires information about you.
Of course there's a limit to this. I'd always want at least some content to be atypical, to let me get exposure to things outside my bubble. But it doesn't change the notion that I mostly want content relevant to me.
Now if you ask me: do you want to see ads? I'd say no, most of the time. Because I don't enjoy being distracted by people trying to sell me things when I'm doing something else, e.g. checking my friends' summer pictures.
But if you're showing me ads anyway, making them more relevant is a net benefit than to be spammed with garbage. And if that runs much of the web otherwise for free, that's great, too.
Facebook has become associated with argument, fight and social misery in the minds of their consumers. They need to take some substantial steps to change that. Merely wishing these issues away with posts, launching new products or changing the company name does not cut it.
Amazon's revenue up 15% year over year: +12% (P/E 60+)
I don't get the stock market. Facebook can simply turn on billions in revenue whenever they want still with WhatsApp, which has north of 2 billion MAU, and has not been monetized at all yet. Facebook is a reverse meme stock.
There's nothing to get, it's just gambling for rich people.
Amazon is fine and doesn't need to grow. Facebook is in danger and growth was already priced in. Now it's not.
fb hilariously claims that this would be impossible, which is kind of proving they didn't hold up their end of the bargain.
If I run a Facebook ad campaign for my app and given that Apple already provides the SKAdNetwork attribution mechanism, does enabling IDFA benefit my app, or it benefits only Facebook? Marketing people are trying to convince me IDFA is important for ad efficiency and thus should be enabled (with the spooky ATT popup in the beginning), but something is telling me it's not. I might be wrong and would really like to know.
More generally, if you want to be able to track your own users and where they come from, it matters.
If all of your traffic is organic, then it's irrelevant.
I know IDFA benefits them because they can connect the dots and know which apps are installed on a given device. But does my app's campaign benefit from that so much that I should go for the ATT popup?
Nope, they'll only know that some percentage of impressions of an ad lead to installs. With their SDK, they'll know who installed, and they can then feed this back into their ML models to find more similar people for you.
My hypothesis is that Facebook pushes developers to enable IDFA because it saves them some effort: of course it's faster and easier than heuristics. Therefore, apps don't benefit from enabling the IDFA. But I might be terribly wrong and am open to counter-arguments.
And everyone praised Apple for it. But if Apple really care about privacy, they'd never allowed for IDFA in the first place…
> Google will soon offer most users of Android, its mobile operating system, the ability to opt out of ad tracking.
I'll believe it when they pass some independent audits from EU countries xD
But of course they did anyway, Apple's ability to control those systems increased, and so it was time to stop providing it so easily.
User logs in to the Facebook app, and Facebook ties the user's IDFA to their Facebook account.
User opens non-Facebook app X that uses the Facebook SDK for ads/tracking. App X sends the IDFA to Facebook, who then looks it up in their database and sees it on your account. They can now tie all user activity tracked by app X to the user's Facebook account.
Without IDFA, this kind of cross-app tracking becomes considerably more difficult.
In the future, whether that’s 5, 10, or 20 years, the biggest companies will produce their own platforms of walled garden experiences. Meta isn’t there yet and has suffered a setback, but the reports that Meta is trying to poach Apple devs is telling about where this is all headed. The “metaverse” is nascent and mockable, but my kid will probably grow up in it just like I grew up on AIM, chat rooms, and texting.
I get a sense of the opposite.
Bloody cassette tapes and boomboxes are back in style. It's not just a gimmick. Kids are nostalgic for a past they didn't even know—one without such intense and obligatory interconnection—one where they can run around and get dirty and mess up and not have it broadcast to everyone and monetized by international corporations.
I don't blame them.
I guess it's the natural evolution of things:
1. we seek connectedness. 2. we invent a set of reductionist mechanisms for achieving connectedness 3. we discover that the reductionist aspect really matters and the connectedness we've achieved is hollow and fake 4. we (or rather our heirs since we're too stubborn to change) adapt to the new reality and build some degree of real connectedness on top of the old and a warped version of the new.
"warped" meaning either "adapted to actual needs" or "perverted to serve unintended purposes" depending on whether your interests are being served or not.
Have you done development on Apple platforms? That might push FB into second place....
Facebook just could never really capture the whole "facilitating real world interactions" thing, and for most people it became simply a way to maintain an online avatar / identity, argue about politics, comment on cat memes, and otherwise waste time in cyberspace. That's what they're good at, and maybe with the metaverse they can at least make people more productive with that.
Now there are BENEFITS to MetaVerse. Less usage of fossil fuels. Facebook also facilitated conversations between people around the world, that would otherwise not meet. But its centralized nature and limited flexibility held back the whole space.
But when it comes to making plans in real life, forming relationships, deal flow etc. you need open source software like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
To me, this is closer to "Apple spying technology becomes opt-in and no one uses it anymore".
If you think that some manipulation is evil, then it's about how they manipulate and on which issues. Perhaps manipulating people to buy something is ok but manipulating them to harm the society (something which Meta is clearly guilty of) is not. Then these companies could turn good if they just turned down a lot of their profit. Which of course won't happen because as companies their prime directive is to make money.
If you think that all manipulation is ok then your opinion should be dismissed.
There are better outcomes if hold them to society's moral standards and to their own goals and claims they make to the public or shareholders. Those organisations are made up of people that mostly aren't that amoral, after all.
Kevin Roose: Can't imagine why this platform is shrinking
Facebook top ten: The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from:
1. Breitbart 2. Ben Shapiro 3. Dan Bongino 4. NPR 5. Ben Shapiro 6. Ben Shapiro 7. Ben Shapiro 8. Steven Crowder 9. Ben Shapiro 10. Franklin Graham
I won't touch the platform anymore. It's so out of touch.
This won't necessarily stop them from using other personally identifying information that you might share with multiple apps (phone number, email address, etc.) Sign In With Apple helps mitigate this to an extent.
"POP-UP NOTIFICATIONS are often annoying."
and then got punched in the face by a huge cookie popup from Economist
It's a false narrative that Facebook is pushing out: "It' snot us that are bad, it's this big bad Apple who are hurting our poor business".
Let's not disingenuously pretend they did it out their own good hearts and for people's privacy: they did not. Also more people overly attribute this loss of Meta to Apple measure's than general Meta trends.Meta's rebranding, dystopian vision about the future and it's anti-society effects though their business model which promotes less trust in the population is what brings up this number, not entirely Apple, not entirely Android.Then again outlets and people who do these kind of oversimplifications might aswell do it for sensationalism, since we need the same people to be explained the truth when something changes.
Don’t you all see it? Facebook has been declining over the past year and this is a convenient way to blame someone - anyone.
Let’s face it, what are your friends all using now? That’s right - video - YouTube and TikTok.
Facebook had no answer for video and thus lost a lot of eyeballs.
Instagram is a poor clone of TikTok and most people just repost their popular TikTok videos on Instagram reels anyway - hardly any original videos show up there.
As the world transitions to short form video even YouTube is going to feel the pinch.
Don’t you notice every one of your favorite content creators starting “clip” channels which are blowing up with YouTube shorts and reposts to TikTok?
Facebook is beginning its long inevitable decline. Who knows if it will accelerate or just be a slow death?
And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse and so he’s trying to make Facebook be the epicenter of it.
Who knows if it will work. But this has nothing if anything to do with Apple. And everything to do with the long term trends of history… or if you will, psychohistory.
It's an online VR based world that is very cool and fun and most people spend there times there instead of the real world.
Agreed with everything in this comment up until that point.
s/knows/hopes/
I wish there was some type of consumer union where we could negotiate with these companies as a block.
You can't have a democracy with 100 IQ idiot majority, because their decisions are governed by whatever gets poured into their poorly working brains that week, so you end up with corporatocracy or fascism, pretending to be a democracy.
Tough choice, but I think I'll opt in for the latter.
Uh! Oh! But if not democracy, then what? Then fascism and corporatocracy - what we have had for as long as you've been alive. You just don't know it :)
How much does my vote count even for representatives if I’m in a state that’s heavily gerrymandered?
Still, the best proportional representation for you is local. So mayor, state rep, governor.
And before the whataboutism replies start, I’m sure the same happens on the other side. I just know more about my own state.
Proportional representation occurs in the House.
The political problem they were trying to solve at the time (balancing the interests of independent sovereign political entities with respect to land claims and future political power) doesn’t necessarily map onto the problems we have today.
Nor do the reasons the founders did it this way exist anymore.
Even though many points made about the constitution were rooted in political theory, and make good sense even today, that doesn’t change the fact that the people involved were politicians who were looking to make the best deal possible within the context of a rapidly failing state under the articles of confederation.
The large slaveholding states actually wanted 5/5ths whereas states will small slave populations wanted 0/5ths. Slaves couldn’t vote, their interests were ancillary to the whole discussion. The compromise was about pure political power for those that dominated them.
The repeal of the 3/5ths clause along with the subsequent legal restrictions and terrorism against the black population of the south that followed, gave the south more power, and subsequently made it harder to dislodge Jim Crow.
But your point is still very valid. Somehow people are comfortable compartmentalizing the notion that the constitution is/was perfect, except for that one part that somehow doesn’t count and was “inevitably doomed” anyways.
This is exactly why the Senate was designed this way.
> Nor do the reasons the founders did it this way exist anymore.
Federalism still exists even if you don’t see it.
https://www.fairvote.org/votes_vs_seats_in_the_people_s_hous...
Is this sarcasm? The web is a dark place because of targeted advertisement. I’d rather pay than be tracked and my data sold through bidding processes.
The problem with current internet is that everyone is trying to get the ad money so they don't really align their interests with us who want quality content.
Q4 '20
Worldwide: 10.14
US: 53.56
Europe: 16.87
Asia Pacific: 4.05
Rest of world: 2.77
So you're worth just over $200 a year. This has gone up a lot over time and is considerably higher than other social networks. Just a year ago, it was 41.41 (23% less) and a year before that is was 34.86 (15% less).
It's harder to do a comparison to google, but I'm sure you're very valuable to them as well, increasingly so.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
As a working professional adult, who has access to many others working professional adults, I assure you, ads work.
You’re simplifying ads to a barebones click to rate exchange. Ads are way more subtle than that.
Advertising to impulsive spenders is worth more than advertising to less impulsive spenders. Less impulsive spenders are informed by ads, more impulsive spenders are convinced by ads.
Certain ads being seen by certain people might be a lot more valuable than average? It might be interesting to know who these people are.
https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_presentations/2022...
Apple is a cartel and Google pays the protection money that Facebook failed to. If Apple really cared about privacy and not money, they'd block Google from the platform too.
A single policy changed wiped 25% of a trillion dollar company's market cap. That's a gravitational wave that shows what kind of overwhelming monopoly power Apple wields.
To be clear, I hate Facebook and ads, but Apple is an incredibly dirty business and is doing massive amounts of harm to startups and our industry as a whole.
Apple owns "America's computer" (50+% of average American's internet usage), and they control it like a dictatorship. High taxes, close inspection of every deploy, arbitrary rulings, forced use of Apple platform pieces, no possible business relationships with your customers.
The DOJ needs to step in and remove the App Store monopoly, its tax, and its arbitrary rules. When you run a device this pervasive and entrenched, it's no longer a platform. It's a common carrier. App installs need to happen over web, where they'd still be just as safely sandboxed, monitored, and remote killswitchable.
To be fair, they didn't block Facebook from their platform. Users now just need to agree that they want to be tracked (spoiler: practically no one wants to be tracked).
I don't disagree with your general take and save for an iPod classic I don't own any Apple gear. But in my book that was one of the better moves that Apple ever pulled.
I've already enumerated my problems with Apple here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30196852
I would be fine if Apple removed tracking if the DOJ removed their app store.
Your problems outside of the 30% (which is valid) is that you want to be able to ship crappy cross platform web apps and know more about your users (which I don’t want).
If Apple didn't give their users tools to control tracking, wouldn't that be more dictatorial?
I would be fully on board with that. 100% pro-consumer, pro-small business.
Apple needs to protect its consumers, but the US government needs to protect businesses against the Apple monopoly.
Why is that more fair? I bought an iPhone a month ago (my first) in part because I want their version of the App Store and I want more privacy controls. I actually like that Apple's requirements push developers to make a native app rather than a web app (for example).
I'm certainly sympathetic to the argument that 30% is too large of a cut and it's well past time for payment reform. However, I think consumers would be worse off losing Apple's more tightly controlled app store implementation. If you want more options, go Android. That's what I did for more than a decade.
Granted I'm also not going out of my way to watch it so not a big win for YT.
I haven't installed the app either but on the odd occasion will doomscroll in a private browser session.
I suspect youtube is trying to do both at the same time and... doesn't work.
But for me and a rando one off clip, I'd rather see it on youtube.
I don't see it on any of the news or review channels but more common on the food, instructional etc ones.
Apples change has fundamentally damaged ad conversion attribution from the Facebook/Instagram apps on iOS, we have seen it it ourselves.
It may be that the exact figure of $10B is inflated, it could even be an underestimate. Meta may have an agenda in how they are spinning it, almost certainly do in fact. However I can assure you that the fundaments of the article and what they are saying is true.
Twitter on the other hand I use in the browser as I like to be able to open threads in tabs to come back to.
Presumably this is because they can gather much more data via a mobile app.
80% of Facebook users exclusively use mobile, and iOS has the largest market share in Facebook's largest market by revenue.
As an example, I spent $13,580 shorting Facebook on Wednesday, which I haven't sold but will probably later today. Yesterday, those short contracts were worth north of $200k. I did it within a Roth IRA, too, which makes it even higher conviction.
Truth is, it was a gamble. No one really knows. If you can truly predict where Facebook will be in 5 years, 2 years, even next quarter, you can be really rich.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10311...
So you can sell covered puts / calls, or buy puts /calls. Those do not require margin. You cannot sell uncovered calls / puts, which would require margin.
Part of my position was buying $280 weekly puts which were $1.39 each, now $49.5 each ( still haven't sold lol).
Options have a strike price and an expiration date. You buy a CALL option, with a strike price, that gives you an option to buy that stock for that price. Or you can buy a PUT option, that gives you the option to sell at that strike price.
Example using made up numbers. FB is $240. You look on the options tab and you can see various expiration dates. Lets pick 3 months out. You may see a Call option for a strike of $250 for $20. That means that you have until 3/4/2022 to exercise that option, if FB is trading for > $260, you will make a profit. ($240 + $20). If FB doesn't trade you make nothing.
Puts work similarly. The strike would just be $230. Note, you don't have to exercise, if next week FB goes to $300, your call's value will skyrocket to ~$60-70. You can sell the option any time, you don't have to wait.
You may have noticed the cost of the option is greater than the delta between the exercise price and the value of the share. In my example this is roughly due to the time between now and the exercise date. Over time, this shrinks, this is called beta-decay.
I think you mean theta decay. Theta is the time factor of an option's value.
Beta is, roughly, a comparison of a security's (or portfolio's) volatility versus market vol.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/beta.asp
Beta decay is studied in a completely different industry.
I don't think HN reader's friends are Facebooks growth market. You might be looking at a biased sample. This is their growth levels of the last 3 years.
Quarter Year MAU Q Growth A growth
Q4 2021 2.912 0.07% 4.11%
Q3 2021 2.91 0.52% 6.20%
Q2 2021 2.895 1.47% 7.22%
Q1 2021 2.853 2.00% 9.60%
Q4 2020 2.797 2.08% 11.97%
Q3 2020 2.74 1.48% 11.88%
Q2 2020 2.7 3.73% 11.85%
Q1 2020 2.603 4.20% 9.60%
Q4 2019 2.498 2.00%
Q3 2019 2.449 1.45%
Q2 2019 2.414 1.64%
Q1 2019 2.375
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
Also, annual growth worldwide tends to hide one key things. It might mean Facebook is arriving in markets where internet penetration was poor (poor/slow data, etc..), however you have to look at their core market where advertisers spend money. In those markets, have they been gaining users? It's been said that they were losing eyeballs in core markets while expanding in markets that didn't bring much money.
If they lose customers in their core market, that means the service has been going down from their saturation point instead of stabilizing. And a worldwide growth would hide this data.
NO! Because I don't care about stupid content creators.
Facebook was never really about content creators, youtube and tiktok are all about that. It's a different thing. Not that I am a Facebook fan either but yes eyeballs are going to youtube and tiktok and other content creators but it's a different business and that is why Facebook is stuck versus these.
> And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse
Zuckerberg has been a surprisingly good steward of the one successful idea he came across, the social network graph. His acquisitions (Instagram, etc) worked very well to supplement the social network graph and keep it going longer than it otherwise might have gone. But now that no one gives a shit about what anyone else is doing and just wants to see some jokes, that graph is getting less and less complete.
The "metaverse" is an idiotic, last-ditch attempt to lock people back into the grid by turning them into cartoon versions of themselves in a private-sector universe. It's ridiculous. Facebook is flailing.
That worked great in a lot of senses. You never run out of content. FB have a lot more options for their optimisation efforts. It also made them more of a general media company.
But... it also devalued the social network/friends aspect. Now it's just about content and holding user attention. Well... that means competition is everything again. Anyone can post anywhere, or consume content anywhere.
I know it sounds overly reductionist or boogeyman-esque, but they captured a market and refuse to let go, doing every single thing they can to keep and monetize human attention.
The Metaverse is the obvious next evolution of online. Accelerated by the happenings of the last 2 years.
>Accelerated by the happenings of the last 2 years.
How? A fair number of people prefer to shut off their video on calls. And my observation is that coming out of COVID people want more in-person interactions, not less.
Some decent/good hardware locked behind logging into your Facebook account.
If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
Did they fail? Most people don't hate Facebook as much as HN and seem not to have a problem with Oculus requiring a Facebook account, given that the Quest 2 is the best selling VR headset by far.
Probably true but no one else would probably have made it work either.
VR tech isn't really there today but even if it were better, it's still more of a niche use case than its fans would have it be. (Certain types of gaming, maybe virtual tourism...) People don't want things to be immersive most of the time. Ask me to wear a VR headset for a routine work meeting? That will be a big "nope" from me.
The algorithmic feed can't handle the "lack" of new posts though so it keeps inserting lots of ads, videos, and whatever that I don't actually care about. I really like Facebook when it is about interacting with my friends but everything else is a distraction. The level of distraction in Facebook is just too high. It's okay if nothing is going on!
At least for me, the overheated political posts became a huge turn off. I think many people left after the election.
In recent times I've cared more and more about what my friends and family are doing, because those are the people I'm connected with in actuality, in real life.
We run a family Slack group. All the functionality of being connected, none of the bullshit.
How do they express what they are doing without content using Instagram? Can you walk me through this?
When you use Instagram do you see ads or posts from people who aren’t your friends or family members? I’ve never used it so I’m not sure how the algorithms work.
Personally if someone is my friend and has something worth sharing they’ll tell me about it directly or send me a picture. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I’ve had people I was friends with move and we’ve lost touch and so forth. I don’t see a reason to struggle to try and stop that myself. Been pretty happy this way but that is what works for me.
I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and catch up with them that way.
It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something. People might also not necessarily want to see what you're sending all the time, so an IG post is an easy way for people to follow you and what you're up to.
You can almost think of it as RSS for your friends and family.
Again just my perspective but I don’t see value in broadcasting experience to a wide audience. I would view that as “content”. I don’t think it has any positive qualities. The RSS feed is a good way of thinking about it, but I say just don’t post and who cares about your trip ya know? If you don’t care to tell someone in person or over a phone call or some other directed means I think you don’t need to share anything. Again just my perspective on that. Which is why I’ve really only ever used Twitter to complain into the void from time to time.
I've completely stopped using FB because I want to connect with my friends and family. After using the product for many years I realized that idly surfing past pictures of children, weddings, BBQs, etc, that despite FB's loud insistence, that's not connection. Even commenting on friends' posts isn't... really connection?
It was idle voyeurism, or drive-by socialization.
Now I make an active attempt to keep in touch with people by, well, directly talking to them. This isn't some brilliant insight on my part - let's be honest, online socialization has been moving towards this for some time. The group chats I'm a part of, and the virtual/IRL meetings are far more fulfilling to me than any amount of FB feed surfing.
>I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and catch up with them that way.
>It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something. People might also not necessarily want to see what you're sending all the time, so an IG post is an easy way for people to follow you and what you're up to.
>You can almost think of it as RSS for your friends and family.
It reminds me of this clip from Silicon Valley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAeEpbtHDPw
But it won't be soon, and the ideas shown in the video--like the surfing game--were the kind of ideas that litter the floor of the App Store.
Compelling product experiences, especially on new platforms, are extremely difficult to craft.
The taste of the creators must be exceptionally good and in this case the hardware quality and onboarding experience must bowl over anyone who touches it.
The Facebook video for Meta looked very speculative. I suspect Meta was planned for 2023 or 2024, but was rushed out the door because the brand was getting pummeled.
In that way, changing to Meta was very effective at derailing the negative attention. But not actually having a there, there is a problem when the chicken comes home to roost.
Zuck may had well renamed his company "Flying cars".
Exactly. It's a bet-the-farm move from a company that has a track record of, best I can tell, a big fat zero in terms of in-house innovation. This is like Google deciding to shift the entire company to Google+, except Google+ was just a clone of an existing thing that actually worked. Meta has no precursor. It's an entirely new thing that Facebook is trying to will into existence without even so much as testing the waters first.
I have a feeling Zuckerberg is going to enrage investors enough that he has to flee Facebook in the middle of the night under the cover of darkness with the help of a few loyal toadies providing safe passage, or he's going to start building his Führerbunker and be the last man standing while Facebook turns to rubble. I'm slightly joking, but also... Zuck has to be in the running for the worse tech CEO ever. They paid $16 billion for WhatsApp and then started promoting their own Facebook Messenger which no one used. I feel like their intent was to kill WhatsApp in the crib. But the "crib" turned out to be the entire global population and was, in fact, too big for them to kill and get people to switch to their own garbage chat app.
On the other hand, Apple's actions are part of an overall trend that represents an existential threat, for the exact reasons you mention and others. The main issue is probably something like the innovators dilemma: they've become reactive, and slow in those reactions. Their largest successes in recent year haven't come from their own creations, but from acquisitions. NYT has a pretty good analysis of some of its systemic flaws [1]
[0] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-files...
The only way the Metaverse would be a viable replacement for Facebook would be if Occulus (or similar VR headset) adoption was to rise to the level of iPhone adoption, and subsequent integration into nearly every aspect of daily life. This seems to be incredibly unlikely to me.
I have an Occulus quest. The first week I had it I thought it was the most amazing device I ever owned. A month later I used it less, and now, a few years later, it's gathering dust on a shelf. VR is great, but it takes a fair amount of energy, space and time to use. Even from solely the perspective of gaming, the low-power, light weight Switch has had a much bigger impact on my life than the Quest. I can play BotW for 4 hours without fatigue if I have time, with VR more than an hour and I start to feel very tired of the experience.
Now compare the Quest with the iphone, I'm looking at my iphone as I type this on my laptop. I use my iphone to order food, find directions around town, communicate with my family, check up on work. 8 or so years back I tried going back to a "dumb" phone and ultimately went back. I switched to android for a few years and still went back to the iphone since it has so many services nicely integrated.
I simply can't imagine any world where the "metaverse" comes anywhere near the adoption of facebook, even if Meta mailed an occulus to everyone on the planet for free.
Imagine believing this
TikTok users in the West skew young (ie poor) and it's all short form video, which fb calls out as harder to monetize, so I can't see how TikTok is a threat to soak up the ad spend. We'll see what happens when they try to pivot from growth to profit. For reference, with similar userbase, ig brings in 6x the ad revenue of TikTok.
The markets are unreasonably obsessed with growth imo.
If Zuck had been handing Apple $5,000,000,000 per year as google does, then Apple would never have kneecapped Facebook.
Larry and Sergei know how the protection racket works. You pay your dues to the local mob, you get to do business in their street corners.
What do google pay Apple $5b for? Ummm… to be in the search of Safari. Yeah right. They all know google simply pays Apple because they don’t want no trouble, so they say “Safari”, write a huge cheque, and google gets to keep doing business in Apple devices.
Tim is The Godfather. He who owns the platform owns the city. Everyone must respect and pay their dues, if they want to do business in this city.
Apple has sent Facebook to sleep with the fishes because zuck didn’t show no respect and didn’t pay no dues.
Safari hides so much info from google search by default. The money google pays apple is strictly for marketing purposes.
Opinions aside, Google are paying for a thing, not just donating money. What would Facebook pay for? I'm not sure that them being a search engine makes sense, I don't think Apple would give up the position of iMessage in favour of Messenger.
(Disclaimer, I work at Google, but don't have any inside info or opinion on the Apple/Google relationship.)
To live.
This is Tim’s town and if you think you’re doing business and cutting Tim out then you’ve got $10b concrete boots coming.
How is that just an excuse to hand over money?
Do think that putting DuckDuckGo as default in Safari will not have any influence in either DuckDuckGo or Google market share?
ATM only Apple can stop Apple from deciding they want no tracking done by search engine providers in iOS apps.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/understanding-facebook-integrati...
It really does. Want to search for a local house cleaner or children's entertainer, include Facebook pages with web results. Want to search for things to do in a particular town, include Facebook events with web results about museums and such like.
This is just scratching the surface too. There are lots of possibilities here so I'd be very surprised if Facebook haven't explored this idea.
I assure you Google are paying Apple to be the default search engine exactly because it's basically a licence to print money.
It has nothing to do with display ads.
If Facebook had a search engine they would bid against Google for that role, but as it appears to be the case there is a Google/Facebook gentlemens agreement to not compete in that area.
So we can conclude that neither building a successful social network nor building a successful search engine is easy :)
I think OP is right, it is pride that is holding Zuck back.
I wouldn't be so sure. Bing is an excellent counter example to that statement. And not just because (from my experience) it doesn't produce the same quality of results. It's also about user adoption. MS built a reasonable, if not clearly superior alternative to Google and spend enormous sums of money marketing it, making it the default option on the default browser installed on millions of new PC's each year, and is has single-digit market share.
Facebook doesn't have those inroads on the PC market to leverage. They'd have to build something so much better than Google that it would make Google look like Yahoo when Google first arrived on the scene. At which point Google could probably stop sandbagging their own search efforts that favor ads space over results and make up any lost ground pretty quickly.
I'm also not confident in Facebook's ability to create high quality new products anymore. The most recent big successes have come from acquisitions. I suppose they might be able to buy DDG, but they'd almost immediately lose all of its users. And unless the still wanted to build their own actual engine, they'd have to rely on the goodwill of MS to continue getting most results via Bing's engine.
I assure you HN does not understand anything about Ads. Ever since I realise HN had some deep misunderstanding with Online ads, I have been stating this difference for over 3 years. The only thing I got on HN was all ads are evil. Targeting Ads, Tracking Ads, Search Ads, or the latest buzzword surveillance capitalism.
As someone who chooses Apple partly because of the comparative privacy versus Android I'm actually quite happy that they bargain with other parties? It reminiscent of the working of efficient markets. I have a choice. No privacy (Google, Facebook), or a tidbit (Apple, G/F via Apple) or a lot (custom ROM options, drop all G/F/A). For a tidbit of privacy I pay more, but how much I pay more is lowered by the incoming cashflow at Apple due to these arrangements. So there is a cafateria model with a powerful party bargaining on my behalf and in line with my preferences. For me, that's glass half full.
Privacy is not achieved through brand loyalty, it can only be achieved through understanding what you've got and taking control of it. It dismays me to see attitudes like this so prevalent in today's privacy conversations, I feel it will be 10 years too late before we collectively realize what a mistake we're making.
A choice about what? Your privacy? Privacy is not a choice, it's a right, so if that's what you mean I don't really understand.
It is abundantly clear that Apple loves locking people in, and also clear that they love taunting their advantages over their competitors. But I just don’t see how the better engineered platform protections for privacy have anything to do with the lock-in (no network effects, no switching costs)
My favorite example of this is the Find My network: did they totally screw Tile in their own competitive interests? Absolutely. Does their end-to end-encrypted Find My network have state of the art cryptographic design to minimize data collection? Absolutely.
Privacy also has concrete value for Apple. Apple made a fair argument that the Health app is HIPAA compliant because while the backend is nothing special, the syncing is end to end encrypted.
They do make mistakes, and they are a large self-interested corrupt terrible bad corporation, but I am happy that they are pushing the industry forward.
And I say this as a long time Apple user, both on macs and iPhones.
Probably what OP is suggesting is that in return for that $5B, Apple will call up Google and say "hey we're adding these new privacy protections, will that be a problem?" and Google will have time in advance to get around them
Apple isn’t going do any favors for Google for a measly $10B.
It’s much more meaningful for Google and Google knows it. For them, it’s a bargain, as it gives its advertisers access to customers who actually spend money.
Note that google appears to be acting as though they are effected, you can see this in their push for FLOC/topics (but the impetus for this could be coming from android moreso than search)
https://wikiless.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory?lang=en
It's not a conspiracy when we know that GAFA works together: https://gizmodo.com/google-paid-apple-to-stay-out-of-the-sea...
By your definition, it’s a conspiracy theory for me to say, “I’m sure JFK was shot!” Because I’m saying it as fact without source. But then it’s also a conspiracy theory to say, “I’m sure JFK was shot by aliens.”
The what is essential in defining a conspiracy theory.
Google the definition of conspiracy, before presenting your wrong opinion as fact.
Do you even get the irony of what you've just done and I'm sure have been doing for years? Probably not.
As for the officially stated reason: do you really think that there is an alternative search engine provider that Apple would switch to if Google didn't pay them 10 figures a year? If so, which one(s)? If not, what are they actually paying for? To mitigate the risk of a second Apple Maps? But is the case for entering the search engine market really remotely as compelling as entering the mapping space?
I'm not saying it's an open and shut case, but the idea that Google essentially pays Apple money a) as a "good-will gesture" b) to give regulators the impression that the search engine market is more competitive than it is seems possible to me. Whereas one of the alternative scenarios proposed here, that Apple would pick duckduckgo otherwise, really does not.
Personally, if I were Sundar, I'd be way more worried about anti-trust or Apple siding too much with the privacy of their users or stepping otherwise on my toes than say duckduckduckgo becoming a serious competitor because Apple anointed them default search provider after I failed to fork over enough money. I'd probably even do my best to keep a bunch of minimally viable competitors around -- not viable enough to ever pose a threat, but viable enough to keep anti-trust at bay for a bit longer. And both duckduckgo and firefox seem to fit that bill perfectly.
> ... we believe those restrictions from Apple are designed in a way that carves out browsers from the tracking prompts Apple requires for apps. And so what that means is that search ads could have access to far more third-party data for measurement and optimization purposes than app-based ad platforms like ours.
> So when it comes to using data, you can think of it that it's not really apples-to-apples for us. And as a result, we believe Google Search ad business could have benefited relative to services like ours is based a different set of restrictions from Apple. And given that Apple continue to take billions of dollars a year from Google Search ads, the incentive clearly exists for this policy discrepancy to continue.
Facebook CFO on iOS change effects: advertising business is being driven to Google since they are mostly unaffected by the changes. This is the statement the article would be based on, but with most of the interesting parts left out.
How much does Facebook pay Apple?
It is an incentive crash. Apple tried iAds before and it didn't work as they couldn't do good personalised ads, this is them keeping the advantage just for them and getting good PR.
Apple is not a saint in this, not even a single bit.
1. All Apple did was giving users a choice (and they should've done that ages ago). If users didn't mind being tracked, or liked the "more relevant adverts" tracking provides, they would not have opted out.
2. Google is subject to exactly the same rules as Facebook is. Their apps have to ask for permission to track as Facebook's do, and Safari (which enforces privacy in many ways, too) is the same for google.com as for facebook.com.
They pay Apple for being search provider in Safari and Siri the same way they pay Mozilla, because searches mean data and displayed adverts.
The choice existed for a long time. What Apple did was make that choice front and centre for everyone, as opposed to being buried in a settings menu for privacy-conscious people to hunt down.
And ads definitely show up in YouTube and such.
Click on the dev's name and it shows everything that dev has published.
If what FB is saying is true then the move by Apple helps Google. There's more or less two options for online advertising. So if companies spend less on FB then they're probably going to spend those dollars with Google
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google/id284815942
Google search, in an iOS app. Not everyone uses it, sure, but has over 341k reviews. Facebook, as a point of comparison, only has about 4x more reviews at 1.2M. 4x is a lot, but it's also a lot less than I'd expect over something primarily used in the browser.
Google has 17 apps for Apple devices.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-one/id1451784328
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/screenwise-meter/id1455562397
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google/id284815942
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notable-women-ar/id1425071635
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/just-a-line-draw-in-ar/id13672...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-tasks-get-things-done/i...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/looker-mobile/id1533498070
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-podcasts/id1398000105
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-stadia/id1471900213
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-fit-activity-tracker/id...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-fi/id1413936031
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grasshopper-learn-to-code/id13...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-music/id1017492454
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-keep-notes-and-lists/id...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-maps/id585027354
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-tv/id1193350206
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-kids/id936971630
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-watch-listen-stream/id...
https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/02/apple-personalized-ads-target...
Not saying tracking shouldn’t be stopped. But remember Apple is much less privacy aware when it’s their wallet.
Why would all data used to personalize ads have to be tracking? It could also be things like purchase data from the very service that's advertising to you. Halting collection—not use for ad personalization, but collection—of that would go beyond what even I would consider tracking (and I think most of what goes on in the ad world today should simply be illegal). It would be possible to personalize ads only based on this kind of thing—in fact, that's what the article seems to imply is going on, at least in part.
So there are at least two ways that setting might mean something different from one that disables tracking.
>>>
What do you do for a living?
"I track animals."
Oh, cool, like you're a hunter or in animal control or something? Trekking all over the wilds, keen eye for detail, grand adventures, lots of mud and amazing stories?
"No, I manage a zoo. I track the zoo animals in a spreadsheet. I sit in an office."
>>>
AFAIK Apple means the hunting kind, when they write "tracking". As in following a user around and watching them while they use services & apps that you don't operate.
It is entirely possible that the settings do totally different things, so the different language isn't some kind of trick. I think it's likely that picking either of those phrases and using it for both would result in the description of the respective settings being less accurate.
Swap the one that applies to applications to "disable personalized ads", rather than "disable tracking".
But it doesn't do that—does it? It disables (a certain kind of) tracking. The tracking may not even be used for ads. Apple has no way to guarantee that. You may still see personalized ads based on other data.
Make the Apple one "disable tracking" rather than "disable personalized ads". But the setting might not do that at all, while still disabling personalization. In fact, the ad personalization may not have been based on tracking in the first place, and even if it were, disabling personalization could very well leave the tracking in place.
The accusation was that Apple's describing the same thing two ways to give themselves an advantage, but I'd say the settings very likely do not do the same thing.
If I go to my bodega once a month to spend $80 on sticks of $2 incense, it's because I'm buying drugs.
Websites would just make sites painful to use for Apple users and force them into exceptionally expensive subscriptions (which most people won’t pay for) or onto cheap devices that allow endless ads.
Android Users spend similar amounts as iOS users on everything besides apps.
Even in-app purchases for games isn't "many many times more" - it's close to 2x.
It's ~40% more: https://www.comscore.com/ita/Public-Relations/Infographics/i....
I think you just described AdBlock, YouTube, Netflix, Washington Post, NyTimes, Spotify, and Amazon services, with of paid apps on the side.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...
I'm fed up with their ads to subscribe to their services in macOS/iOS: the App Store, on Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Fitness+... I'm getting tired of clicking "no thank you".
The business that will hurt are those who only know how to click around in Google AdWords or Facebooks Ads. Those business but all their eggs in a rather small basket. Facebook isn’t going away anytime soon, but it will fail more quickly that some expect. If 50% or more of your business is coming from Facebook, start making plans for the future now.