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Comment by frenchmajesty | Hacker News Reader

Very impressive but not surprising coming from Meta. They have an history of doing this kind of things.

Back in the early 2010s, they found a way to spy on HTTPS traffic on the iOS App Store to monitor which apps were getting popular. That's what allowed them to know WhatsApp and Instagram were good acquisition targets.

At this point, I think the race for Zuckerberg is, can Meta survive long enough for the next platform shift (AR or VR) where they will own one of the major platforms and won't need to abide by any reasonable rules before their "internet tentacles" that sustain the Ad Machine are cut off.

My bet is they will make it. Though I don't wish it, they're on track.

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Companies have been trying to make AR/VR the next platform shift but I'm not super convinced that people actually want or desire this outside of a few niche games. To me it feels like it has about as much staying power as 3D glasses in movies.

The window of opportunity already closed for AR/VR. AI dealt the death blow.

What do you mean? AI will enable better AR/VR experiences, or AI will obsolete them?

Simpler than that: AI co-opted the hype machine and the buzzword gurus, and therefore the investor money.

wait for AI generated virtual worlds. On a blockchain.

I cant wait for the rug pull

Pretty much, and it's a shame because AR has so much potential. Our company has started using a AR product in our quality control. It really doesn't take using it for long to realize the potential, being able to overlay a CAD model over the physical finished project is incredible and offers a lot of time savings. Unfortunately the most advanced AR device on the market is over 5 years old so you can really feel the software brush up against the hardware limitations.

Yeah, but working in those glasses for any length of time is a mindf*ck. It's disorienting.

VR is the sizzle, AR is the steak.

Making VR a viable new entertainment channel promises selling a headset to 85% of the broad consumer market, then trying to own the content shops for it in perpetuity. It's the trillion-dollar new market that the investor class clamours for.

Making AR work is a much shallower lift -- you usually aren't dealing with the same issues of nausea, massive movement tracking and room management, and high performance immersivity. But you're going to only sell it as largely islandified turnkey systems-- each customer is going to buy a few hundred or thousand headsets and a bespoke software package for it.

idk, I would absolutely jump on AR glasses that offered reasonable hands free interaction (even via a smartwatch or something) and didn't look awful. AI might enable that, actually, but we'll see.

For gaming and media consumption, VR is here to stay. The meta raybans have also been successful.

As far as replacing your smartphone with AR glasses that remains to be seen

I think the world is progressing away from headsets or screens.

We will just have an AI that will do everything, we just ask. "Book a flight, order a pizza and reply to my emails" boom, done.

Possibly, but the issue with chat interfaces is you often don't know what options are even available, and you still need the ability to browse information, so I think some screen will still be needed.

"Here to stay" doesn't say much. VR is as of now an extreme nieche and the reasons for that is more the space requirements and simply that having to wear a device sucks - those reasons are inherent and will not change with new tech.

> "Here to stay" doesn't say much. VR is as of now an extreme nieche

If we're comparing to 3d glasses for movies like the parent comment said then that is a huge difference. samsung is releasing an android headset this year this long into VR which they didn't do for 3dtv. this generation of VR has already lasted longer than 3D-tv 6 years.

There are space requirements for base stations, but it can be played for many hours in a chair or in bed. Not every experience requires a large room. Newer headsets are self-tracked so that's already been solved by new tech.

The bigscreen beyond 2 is 107g and can be worn for hours. Struggling to see how portability and versatility won't improve with new tech.

That's why Apple is releasing their "glass" interface. AR/VR flopped badly so they are trying to normalize the look to bridge the transition.

> Back in the early 2010s, they found a way to spy on HTTPS traffic on the iOS App Store to monitor which apps were getting popular.

They had people install a VPN app using enterprise certificate so it was never in the App Store and they monitored all the traffic that the VPN sent.

Unlike this case, it required users to jump through a number of hoops/scary iOS warnings. Many still did, for a gift card or less.

> Back in the early 2010s, they found a way to spy on HTTPS traffic on the iOS App Store to monitor which apps were getting popular. That's what allowed them to know WhatsApp and Instagram were good acquisition targets.

Incorrect. An Israeli startup (Onavo) had pivoted into selling data acquired from their VPN got acquired by Facebook. Importantly, they used statistics to estimate population prevalence which is how FB knew that Whatsapp (specifically, this was all post IG acquisition) was super popular outside the US.

> They had people install a VPN app using enterprise certificate so it was never in the App Store and they monitored all the traffic that the VPN sent.

This was (sadly) an entirely different scandal.

Honestly, I generally defend Meta/targeted advertising in these threads, but this one is such incredible, total, absolute bullshit that I can't even begin to comprehend how one could defend this.

I do remember when I joined FB in 2013, how surprised I was that most of the company didn't care about ads/making money (apart from the sales org). That ship has clearly sailed.

Ahh, I knew about the Onavo acquisition history but I had had "context crunched" it down and skipped over the time when it was on the App Store before they rebranded it as (internally) "Project Atlas" and externally Facebook Research which was distributed through enterprise distribution. Thank you for the clarification.

Yeah, they were different and happened at different times. I can kinda justify Onavo (personally I think that they could've been the Neilsen of mobile if they hadn't gotten acquired) but the whole enterprise cert thing was super, super shady.

> Honestly, I generally defend Meta/targeted advertising in these threads

These kinds of things now point me in a direction where I consider advertising alone to be immoral and want it banned. I should have to request information when I want it, rather than being exposed to it at all times on every available surface.

There are only three ways this can go: 1) more frequent and more spookily relevant ads, increasing the number of people who feel that ads should be illegal because of the law breaking required to make it happen. 2) ads don’t change and everyone quickly learns to ignore them. 3) ads go away, replaced by an easy to use marketing information delivery system where only adults can request information unsupervised.

Meta do #1 because #2 and #3 mean the capitalist line doesn’t go up and the end of Meta, respectively. Meta view both of those as the same thing: the end of Meta.

“What about all the businesses which need advertising to survive?”

If they need advertising to survive they’ve been on borrowed time long enough already.

Advertisements encourage the shit Meta is doing. What kinds of similar things are they doing that we haven’t discovered, yet?

> These kinds of things now point me in a direction where I consider advertising alone to be immoral and want it banned.

I (personally) think that's going too far. Targeted advertising has been really, really good for small businesses, and given that local newspapers are basically dead and TV/radio are expensive, these business kinda have to use Meta/Google et al.

And that's fine (IMO obviously). The actual problem here is the insatiable drive for growth from public companies/the markets, coupled with wide-scale equity ownership within the companies concerned leads to people doing mental stuff like the OP to drive those numbers up.

A bunch of this is fixable by massive, massive fines (on the part of the EU). The better solution would be for the US to introduce GDPR/DMA like regulation, as US based companies are more likely to follow their home countries laws, but that's not gonna happen any time soon.

The structural problems are harder to resolve, maybe lengthen vesting schedules and/or move back towards dividends to encourage longer-term thinking and approaches.

Targeted advertising has been good for small business in the same way that the mob is good to small business that pay up. The main reason businesses need to rely on advertising to reach people is because people are already being bombarded by competitors.

Sorry what? Like, basically all businesses need to advertise, and unknown ones (i.e. small and new businesses) need to do this much more.

Coke will be fine if they stop buying TV spots (for a while, at least) but I'm pretty sure Linear/Datadog etc wouldn't be the size they are now without advertising.

> The main reason businesses need to rely on advertising to reach people is because people are already being bombarded by competitors.

Fundamentally, advertising is a way to tell potential customers you exist. Most people don't seek out new products, how do you think small businesses would grow in a world with no advertising?

This is a valuable thread to pull thank you: how about differentiating targeted, sticky advertising vs context based advertising. On my local paper website, I value being shown local stuff (to your point on small business). On security websites, show me security products. On HN, Show me tech and science.

The ADD incidence rate being 10x for adults since 2005 (not to even mention kids), we'd all appreciate relevance to what we're exploring/thinking about/learning, rather than the genuine nuisance of nagging for something out of context because we're tracked all around the web.

Public ads should be illegal and customers should go to a catalog when they want to see ads.

> They have an history of doing this kind of things.

They have a history because the punishment has never dissuaded anyone from being repeat offender.

I disagree that they're on track to make it. Their platform, Quest VR, has sold around 20 million headsets. Any company would be over the moon but we're talking Facebook here. They need way more users than that, which can only be achieved with explosive growth.

So maybe they're growing fast? Nope. Their better selling product, at 14 million of those 20 million is the Quest 2 which has been discontinued for 9 months. Doesn't sound like explosive growth to me when your best selling product is not your current product.

The quest 2 was considerably cheaper, I believe it sold at a loss initially, and most of its sales lifetime was during a pandemic. It's hard to directly compare the two.

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