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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

Facebook likes to demonstrate how useful they are by showing traffic/revenue of people who advertise through them vs people who don't, and then say "look! The people who do it are making way more money!" Ignoring the fact that they intentionally suppress businesses who don't pay them.

It's like if the mafia came by your business every week to collect their $1000 to not break your kneecaps and say "look at all the happy businesses who pay us walking around, and the people who don't do business with us dragging themselves across the floor with their hands. We're an important factor in keeping people walking!"

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Except now you have to pay Apple for the privilege of protecting your app store rankings.

If someone decides to purchase ads for "HBN App" searches, you're out of luck on your own trademark. You have to pay for ads too.

Let me count the ways that we're now beholden to app store mafias:

- Downloads are no longer free to distribute

- You have to obey draconian and arbitrary rules, and your engineering team has to jump through the hoops constantly

- You can't deploy on your own time. No emergency hot fixes.

- You can't leverage JIT engines and dynamic code (WTF!?) to solve for a bunch of headaches.

- You have to learn multiple platforms

- You're taxed (15+%!) for the privilege

The whole concept of app stores and walled garden downloads is so inherently broken that the DOJ needs to break up the party wholesale for all of the major players.

While I'm happy Apple removed tracking, I also want the government to prohibit Apple, Google and the rest from doing these other godawful things.

This is harming innovation and productivity massively. This is bad for small, medium, and even large businesses. Startup founders, engineers, and business people alike should be up in arms.

We live in the crazy times Stallman warned us about. And as a capitalist, I couldn't agree more with Stallman.

How do they suppress businesses that don’t pay? By not advertising for them for free? That’s a stretch to compare it to the mafia…

If I have a page for my business and people explicitly follow my page to get updates, Facebook will still not surface content from my page as frequently to my followers without paying them.

The mafia metaphor seems pretty on the nose to me. If you have a page, its posts will not regularly appear in followers' feeds — that is, the feeds of people who've explicitly signaled that they want to see your content — unless you give Facebook their vig.

Most people probably subscribe to more pages (and therefore more posts) than they can actually consume the content of. It seems pragmatic that something should help the user surface more meaningful content. Suppressing commercial pages for friends content seems reasonable, and business v business is a decision where there will always be a loser.

Just a quick fyi - On the nose means something different.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/on_the_nose

Above, I’m using it to mean “appropriate”.

You can look at many accounts from the mid 2010s but the one I can recall the most clearly was FB updated to the algorithm and everything was fine. They then began actively suppressed people who were posting YouTube links a few months later. They told at least Phillip Defranco that the reason was they should advertise. They then came back months later and instead said why not post your videos here. This failed policy years later re-emerged as the video push for news organizations where FB intentionally deceived them into pushing into video to on the platform only for them to later update to honest video view tracking and make all of the media companies realize there was much less viewership than they were initially told was there.

At some point they decided to basically stop showing updates to your own followers. Affected pages reported a drop of 90%+ in feed views, and the only way to reach your audience again was to boost your own posts, which is a paid service.

I run a business. Our reach per post , on FB, is 30-40% of our followers.

The reason for this is we don’t just post 24-7 about how amazing we are.

We post 1-2x a week, and our followers genuinely like us and are fans of the business.

So… the changes on FB haven’t impacted all businesses in such a negative way.

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