product50

Stop making strawman arguments around billionaires and trillion $$ companies. The only company which can take on Apple is another large company with passionate user following. Small developers like you and me just come here on Hacker News and argue. But it leads to nothing as Apple simply ignores us.

I actually think you are Chinese. Why lie to make your point?

Whoever the author is, I hope that he doesn't have a Uighur relative in Xinjiang in jail trying to get reformed and a friend in Hong Kong trying to free the country.

If you were in China, you couldn't even write an article criticizing Tiktok like here the author here is writing an article criticizing SV. Have some perspective.

You are talking as if somehow non-Americans have access to more liberties across non-government entities in their lives. If anything, Americans treasure and enjoy the most freedoms across the widest gamut of institutions vs. non Americans.

If you are ignorant it is not on everyone else to bring you upto speed. There have been several articles on this already. Here is something you should try. Next time, goto a tourist hotspot such as Iceland or Venice and ask the locals there - which country citizens do they like the most. And they will tell you straight.

This is just a matter of time. Almost all countries actually want US citizens to come there, for tourism purposes, due to their high spend potential (relative to other countries).

As a user I am totally happy with Amazon's service. They shouldn't change their entire setup and make things a lot more expensive for everyone based on these infrequent use cases.

And Amazon customer support is awesome. Your bullet 2 is false.

I hope you realize that in your definition of "us" it is just you and a small grp of your European friends. Rest of Europe are busy searching on Google and sharing photos on Instagram.

Wow - such great companies. I am flattered. Please be real. US has FB, Google, MSFT, Apple. China has Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance. And look at the list you have come up for Europe.

Where is the Europe's alternate to US's or Chinese companies? Please give examples to support your cases vs. just calling out your biases. It is so unfortunate that Europe has just allowed itself to be so dominated by US' and Chinese (in the case of Huawei) companies.

What a joke of a company. They literally have done nothing in terms of building innovative products in the past 7 yrs since IPO and their monthly active users is static. And then, to distract away from their poor product roadmap, they take controversial political stands - but which don't result in any major impact given mostly bots and celebrities use that platform. And now this.

Keep in mind, some 4k employees work in this jungle. Don't know what they do apart from just tweeting #lovewhereyouwork

I hope you realize that apps like these kill the ecosystem for content creators who are paid based on ads. If you don't like YT ads, pay for the premium version. But suggesting that this app is great is not right. Anyways, I trust if this becomes big, YT will kill them anyways.

YT API requires keys and they know exactly what is going on here and can shut it down in a heartbeat if they want to. This is exactly what happened to apps built on top of Twitter APIs back in the day.

You can always opt out ad tracking in iPhone, even today, by using Limit Ad Tracking option in Settings.

How do I read this article? Looks like it is behind a paywall.

If ever there was a one sided article, it was this. Doesn't even talk about the nuances of the problems. Journalists are like how dare tech people are criticizing us - but it is totally ok to do it the other way round. The difference now though is, because of social media, prominent tech personalities have much bigger audiences.

Sometimes I am thankful like services like Twitter and Facebook exists since these types of biases are for everyone to see and make independent calls on. Before, it would have been like whatever NYTimes said would be taken as the truth as there would have been no platform available to present your pov.

You are right. It is becoming too difficult for me to control myself when I read something written by someone being ignorant. Maybe, I should do a better job letting it go vs. attacking. I have been working on it - but I do hope that you are noticing that the frequency of my tirades are going down.

You have no idea what you are saying. You need to go deep to have sane arguments.

If FB loses 100M users in US, they are actually going to lose their shit vs. them losing 100M users in APAC. Get real. The fact of the matter is no user in US (where almost all the uproar is) is leaving

ALso, most people knew about FB having majority of its spend from large advertisers. The stock fell because Wall St felt that the boycott will go deeper (or will impact usage numbers) but it just fizzled out with some big brands. And that doesn't matter. So it is back up again.

400 advertisers, who are the largest brands, have already boycotted Facebook. And the stock is near all time high (it recovered the losses this week) and Zuckerberg is pretty much saying he won't change nothing. So there you have it. Very likely this will hurt advertisers more (since they now have lower ROI) vs. Facebook whose large base of performance driven and small advertisers (who don't have much brand to speak of) will take over.

Only thing which matters in the end is whether users continue engaging with Facebook. Money will flow thereafter. If users don't engage, even if the money is coming in for the time being, it will raise red flags across the board. This is why Twitter is such a shoddy stock to own - since their user numbers have been stagnant since 2013 regardless of how strong their ad business is.

This is social media 101.

You are absolutely wrong on both counts.

THe only real change will come from users. If Facebook users start boycotting (and to be clear no users are doing this), that is what will hurt them. So while you and I continue to be outraged, a lot of users don't care enough and just goto Facebook to see what their friends are doing and clicking on that ad. And the wheel keeps on turning around.

Employee activism won't matter much for Facebook. Unlike Google, Zuckerberg holds all the keys and he is firm/unwavering to his principles. Also, the core set of employees stick with him. Check out how Chris Cox just rejoined Facebook.

Last 10 things I bought from FB ads. All arrived and our family loves it.

Anecdotes are just that - one off instances. What matters is the trend. And a lot of users buy from Facebook Ads and are happy with it. That is why Facebook revenue keeps growing at 25% yoy on a massive base of $70B.

For a lot of folks, especially those at Hacker News, that is totally fine. It is interesting how people's perspectives change when it comes to defending their choice. So in this case, yeah Android seems secure but what happens after 2yrs - even though that point doesn't apply to them. Call out what is important to you vs. just talking about averages.

I hope you realize that for the uninformed, like me, your response is as dubious as OPs. All you are saying that this is false and it has been proven by empirical evidence - trust me.

America will literally fuck with you if you start doing this at scale. India can ban Chinese app since India can do this. China needed to understand this before escalating the border tensions with India.

And why should we believe you vs. Plato?

Doesn't matter. That money will be replaced by performance advertisers. Top 100 Fortune brands make up 6% of FB ad revenue. This is why all these boycott FB ads doesn't make any sense. THe only thing which will hurt FB is users boycotting - not advertisers. There are always opportunistic advertisers who will want to gain access to cheap(er) inventory to reduce their acquisition costs.

Haha. Good luck. You have no idea how these platforms make money. Starbucks, Coca Cola don't spend much on these platforms anyways. They are just using this as an opportunity to gain brownie points without incurring much harm anyways. Performance advertisers are their bed and butter. For example, that app install ad or that ad from Direct to Consumer advertiser (for example Allbirds) are the ones who cherish FB. They must be really happy since their CAC just went down as brand advertisers are running away! THey will literally double down spending on FB/Twitter.

I feel so lucky that I live in an area with fiber internet and 1000mbps speeds. I remember when we were house hunting, this was one of my criteria. While leads to my point - if enough people want fast internet speeds, they should/could plan their house buying/renting strategies accordingly. Nothing like incenting local municipalities to take action based on a community of people motivated by money.

This is the problem with Chinese apps. You just can't rely on them. They simply don't have the same principles of privacy like US companies do. Even Facebook won't do something like this.

what bad behavior? providing a 6mo heads up that you don't need to come back is pretty reasonable. while you are at criticizing these companies, do know that a lot of smaller companies are requiring their employees to come to work in lots of places.

Wow. You really need to find a better place to work if you are in an environment which makes you feel like this.