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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Here is the crux of the problem, in my mind: Does Facebook have more of a prerogative to help people in Africa or to maximize profits/value for shareholders (primary among them, Zuckerberg)? And the answer is complicated.

In an actual free-market system, Facebook would want to reduce costs because it wants to reduce prices to stay ahead of competition. But Facebook doesn't have much competition, or monetary prices. And so Facebook doesn't act like a competitive company, it acts like a monopoly maximizing its exploitation of a resource it controls.

If Facebook were acting competitively, it would be reducing its price (fewer ads) when it reduces costs. But it actually does the opposite.

Which takes me back to the original question: When Facebook is in this market-power position, is it really it's prerogative just to make as much money as possible?

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Yet another dark side of the “free”, or “user is the product”.

This could be prevented by changing the law so that it treats any large enough social platform as a communication service provider, requiring it to provide open API with complete feature coverage. This would facilitate native feature-complete third-party cross-platform clients that don’t show any ads, and platforms would have to charge users because no one will be stupid enough not to use a client like that.

And once service is no longer free and cross-platform clients exist, the space will finally start resembling an actual free market—honest competitors will stand a chance, and actual end users will be able to vote with their wallet.

>no one will be stupid enough not to use a client like that.

Twitter allows exactly that (or used to, unsure if the API is still up): an API for third parties to use it's content and make alternative front-ends, like Nitter. How many people use them? I don't know, but I'd bet my liver (non-binding offer) it's a minuscule fraction of it's users.

Browsers allow to purge just about every ad from your Internet in a handful of clicks. How many people use them? A mere 27% in the US [0]

Non-Chrome mobile browsers allow extensions to purge ads too (savvy Google killed the Chrome store as they couldn't just kill adblockers, yet managed to stay dominant.. power of brands). How many people use them on Android? A laughable 14% [1]. Of which a fraction will be ad-blocking.

People are not idiots, but it's just not as simple as "offer an ad-free/superior alternative and people will flock to it". People are creatures of habits, if they learned to go to twitter.com or facebook.com, it doesn't matter how much better your alt-front-end is; even if you don't have to compete with the network effect as you'd share the backbone, it will be a steep, steep uphill battle to gain traction.

0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...

1: https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx

I think that is exactly the point: they all used to offer full APIs to attract users, and they do not do it anytime not because no one is using it but for the opposite reason.

And if you think the arms race to hide ads on the Web as a whole is somehow similar you are missing the point. Yes sure, the more people use the extension the less ad money, but guess what—platforms find ways to work around that, lobby for new browser specs, etc.

If it remains the main revenue stream, money will find a way, so that root cause should be eliminated.

And the outcome could be a unified single interface that can tie together your social communications across different platforms—if it were possible, would you not use it?

I replied to a very specific part of their comment, I have not been rooting against the proposition of opening up walled garden.

If "I" would use it is entirely irrelevant, all I meant to point out is people don't flock to better alternatives just because they exist. I think that most of them not even be bothered (or knowing to) de-clutter their Internet browsers is a good example of that point.

What if Apple literally seamlessly integrates all those platforms into a single messaging center? No ads, no apps.

Because this is the kind of thing the open API would enable.

No, Twitter API nowadays is extremely limited and getting an API key is nearly impossible. And even if you do, it lacks functionality. Spaces aren't exposed via API. And also there's a hardcoded request limit.

The EU is working on such a law, it's part of the Digital Markets Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...

That’s promising, and I like that it explicitly applies to large online platforms. That said,

> allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations

With “certain specific situations” presumably they are trying to make it viable for a monopoly to innovate, but as is it’s open to interpretation and may just result in platforms innovating specifically to maintain monopoly and the double-market scenario where they sell to advertisers and only care about users insofar as their eyeballs don’t leave en masse.

IMO a good law would specifically aim to make it infeasible to operate as a double-sided market and pretend to offer a free product to the users while actually being supported by advertisers. I suspect this can only be achieved by an all-encompassing interoperation requirement (a.k.a. open API). In this document, however, “interoperability” seems to mean hardware and OS (?).

Yes, I'm not sure what "specific sutations" refers to, but I don't think they mean hardware and OS. It remains to be seen if and it what specific form this proposed act will come to pass.

I looked at the document and interoperability is only mentioned with hardware and OS.

If you take this to its logical conclusion then you're essentially describing the paperclip maximizer from Bostrom's book about the dangers of artificially intelligent systems that destroy humanity at the expense of maximizing their own operation. Contemporary corporations are essentially paperclip maximizers.

> If Facebook were acting competitively, it would be reducing its price (fewer ads) when it reduces costs.

This doesn't track for me. Let's assume there are 2-3 other competitive social networks that FB has to compete against. FB figures out how to do $thing that reduces its costs by 10%.

Why does it follow that FB is going to show fewer ads now?

If prices were in terms of money, then a company should want to undercut its competitors. This would overall be a net-win for it, as customers would move more to use its services than the competition. This would force the competition to ALSO find ways to reduce costs.

The end winner is the consumer in such a scenario as prices keep dropping.

But here, the price we pay is ads, and it's hard to even evaluate where you saw more ads. People don't pick a social network by the number of ads (short of there being so many it gets in the way), they pick social networks by where their friends already are. The bigger a network is, the more likely someone is to use it.

Facebook's economics exploit this network effect. They don't need to make the 'price' better (ads) because that isn't what drives consumers to it.

Personally I don't see how the choice between helping people and making money for shareholders could be any simpler.

> Does Facebook have more of a prerogative to help people in Africa or to maximize profits/value for shareholders (primary among them, Zuckerberg)? And the answer is complicated.

Flip that question around.

Given that we know from various leakers, that facebook doesn't have very much capacity for anything that isn't english, do you think they have the expertise to recruit, train and verify people at scale in kenya?

I mean _they should_ but they clearly dont.

Facebook doesn’t have a lot of completion? Tiktok is destroying FB. Then there’s snap, telegram, Twitter, etc.

Regulation is obviously needed

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