because in it he lays bare several fundamental structural issues about facebook which 99% people don't realize. Well worth the watch.
Unless fb changes drastically, it will die a surprisingly fast death.
Quote:
I didn't realize the answer till later, after I went to work at Yahoo. It was neither of my guesses. The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If they merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less.
Hard as it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads. Advertisers were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for banner ads. So Yahoo's sales force had evolved to exploit this source of revenue. Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions.
The prices seemed cheap compared to print, which was what advertisers, for lack of any other reference, compared them to. But they were expensive compared to what they were worth. So these big, dumb companies were a dangerous source of revenue to depend on. But there was another source even more dangerous: other Internet startups.
That way, they don't have to conflate the incentives of the different parties involved as much as they are doing now.
I'm asking to see posts from something I've explicitly stated an interest in; I'm not asking them to pick and choose a subset that I get to see beyond that.
The issue is that most of don't want to click like, like, like on everything we "like", just to see that content.
I don't need to like HN; it's implicit in every visit I make to the site.
I'm there to see what's happening IRL with my friends, not to see pictures of stuff that I saw a few days ago while on the toilet.
For context, I'm a 19 year old student going into my third year at uni, so that puts me right in Facebook's original target demographic. It's disappointing that a service so useful for staying in touch with friends has degraded into little more than an IM service because the rest of it's been spammed to hell.