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Comment by fridder | Hacker News Reader

Didn’t he famously trash folks over 30 years back? He has really done nothing innovative outside of ads.

and even that is mostly attributable to Sandberg

What’s innovative about ads?

I dunno if it’s exclusively his innovation, but Zuckerberg’s insight was that you could actually lie to your users by presenting yourself as trustworthy, while having malicious intent to violate their privacy by selling their data to advertisers, and there are no business repercussions for doing so.

That's literally just a con. People have been doing this since the dawn of history. The only unique bit is the sheer scale it's happening at now

Zuckerberg influenced people to hand over their personal data.

His team then enabled lots of people to become influencers. Those influencers influence their followers to buy products (aka generate ad-revenue).

And that is the pure essence of the business model.

Something something even Apple wants 10s of billion$ a year from it… building the big money machine is an innovation of a kind when only a few entities can really do it.

Well, I was trying to be a little charitable

Instagram ads are the most consistently interesting ads I see online, and by an enormous margin. Ads suck, and I resent that their inherent purpose is to manipulate me, but they accomplish their goal better than any other ads I've ever seen.

> Instagram ads are the most consistently interesting ads I see online

The credit for that belongs to the advertisers not Instagram.

I don't mean it in a "super bowl commercial" way; the products in Instagram ads are the consistently interesting part. It seems like a safe assumption that the advertisers for plenty of uninteresting products are trying to buy ads on Instagram, and that the advertisers for plenty of interesting products are trying to buy ads elsewhere. That means that Instagram's targeting is the differentiating factor.

I guess my argument is that it's not innovative or "hard" to sell ads to people who have given you massive amounts of personal and demographic information (voluntarily!)

Both Google and Amazon know a great deal about me and my purchasing habits. Neither shows me ads that feel very relevant.

Meta’s ad product is incredibly innovative. Just look at the fallout from ATT to see an obvious example

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