
The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history - jkuria
https://www.economist.com/business/2018/11/24/facebook-should-heed-the-lessons-of-internet-history
======
dkrich
This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone
recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular
product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s
rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool
for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about
that?

Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated. They weren’t the only ones. Lots
of highly successful search engines got their lunch eaten by Google. Yahoo
also suffered from a lack of leadership and some very poorly conceived
acquisitions.

I don’t see any of that with Facebook. In fact it’s the opposite- people are
uneasy with how effectively they’ve acquired users and their data and
monetized it.

Further, they’ve pretty much only made incredibly savvy acquisitions and
managed their integration into the Facebook ecosystem masterfully. Instagram
not only exists today but has quickly become arguably the most valuable
property. What about Tumblr? Flickr?

Say what you will about the ethics of the company but Facebook has
demonstrated they have vision and the ability to execute and adapt. Yahoo
didn’t. Most companies don’t. They have their existing business and customers
and exist as long as the winds don’t change.

~~~
nolok
> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated

The worst part is that Yahoo innovated a lot ... In incubators, side projects,
etc ... But they failed to bring their innovations to their main products, or
to turn their side things into full blown products.

They had no plan, neither overall or per product.

Take emails for exemple, for the longest time (and still now, although not as
dominating) THE key to user identity on the internet. Google had a plan to
leverage their Gmail userbase and integrated it, Microsoft took its time but
they ultimately had a plan to leverage their hotmail userbase, but Yahoo sat
on yahoo mails (one of the "big three" of emails basically) for the longest
time and did ... Nothing.

Same with flickr, they had people who loved the platform and begged them to
take their money and move the product forward as a paid product and instead
they let it rot for years. Lots of yahoo properties are like that. It's not
that they tried something crazy and it failed, it's not that they got beat by
a new comer, they just let their stuff die on their own. Pictures is now even
more relevant than ever, and Yahoo should have been at the forefront and yet
they let themselves be sidelined by doing nothing.

The best non-yahoo similarity I can find is what Google is doing with Blogger.

~~~
wybiral
> The best non-yahoo similarity I can find is what Google is doing with
> Blogger.

That's a good point. But to be fair everything "social" that Google has
touched has died with the exception of YouTube.

In fact Google really hasn't done a great job holding onto many other arenas
than their main ones. Blogger has been blasted by Medium. Knol was outlasted
by Quora. Google Code was beat by Github. Their "shopping" attempts have
always been eclipsed by Amazon. They can't get an edge with Google Cloud
compared to Azure and AWS.

Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and Android are all success stories. But if you look at
their "social" products YT is really the only success story.

EDIT: I use and love Google Photos but I can't remember the last time I heard
someone talking about it. Instagram did it with a social spin.

~~~
ksec
The problem with Google is exactly the same as Microsoft in the 90s.

They just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. What that means is, I
don't mean it in a small way but in a big way.

\- Steve Jobs.

~~~
kbutler
Skeumorphism: "Steve pushed very hard to have everything–the felt-cloth table,
the game chips–look like they would in real life,” says another former Apple
designer. [https://www.fastcompany.com/1670760/will-apples-tacky-
softwa...](https://www.fastcompany.com/1670760/will-apples-tacky-software-
design-philosophy-cause-a-revolt)

(of a big phone) "you can't get your hand around it...no one's going to buy
that." \-- Steve Jobs

[http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/jobs-no-ones-going-to-
buy...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/jobs-no-ones-going-to-buy-a-big-
phone/)

Maybe it's better to have strong opinions, even if some are wrong, than to
just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

Or maybe Jobs got really lucky that some of his taste resonated really well.

Hard to tease out the effects of survivorship bias.

~~~
ethbro
_> Maybe it's better to have strong opinions, even if some are wrong, than to
just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks._

I had an epiphany the other day that the secret of life is being able to
simultaneously hold-believe-do contradictory ideas -- micro-applying whichever
is apt for the immediate task.

Apple / Jobs history isn't something I'd consider myself well-versed in, but
both of your points seemed to be present and required.

Having a maniacal dedication to a product during development (ie strong
opinions), while also being willing to amortize risk over many project and
ultimately call a failure in consumer acceptance a failure (ie see what
sticks), seems as apt a description of the "secret sauce" as anything.

Google's problem is that they seem to fundamental believe there's a RIGHT way
to do something (as engineers do). When for many things, there are a lot of
right ways and its intangibles that cause a product to succeed or fail in the
market place (aka taste, as artists do).

Obviously generalizing over a company as large as Google, but you see it when
the market pushes back against their offerings. It seems like there's a core
cognitive dissonance (eg with the Chrome UI simplification) because they're
damn sure they built it "right."

Facebook, for all their cool tech, seems to be suffering from the Soviet
problem. Reward by the numbers, and teams reporting up to you will come up
with numbers.

I'm surprised the article attributes to top-down dictates (skew the ad numbers
in Facebook's favor) what the Soviet Union learned in the 70s and 80s -- ask
an impossible or overly difficult thing, and there will be bottom-up metric
fabrication in response.

~~~
dragonwriter
I think your thesis is wrong, simply because Google is far more willing to
amortize risk over many projects (even multiple different approaches in the
same space!) and “ultimately call a failure in consumer acceptance a failure”
than companies you suggest are better at that, like Apple; it's kind of why
people attack them all the time for killing things.

It's true that they are prone to thinking that there is one right way, like
engineers; they are equally, however, prone to thinking that empirical testing
is the best way to discover the one right way, and to accept that their
hypotheses about the right way will sometimes be wrong.

~~~
ethbro
I'd phrase it that Google trials _end user facing_ products more like Yahoo
and Microsoft, and less like Apple and Amazon. Which is to say, with less than
full corporate dedication.

In the engineering / GCP space, their open-beta -> GA flow seems to work
sanely.

But I don't think anyone on the consumer side would have said G+ felt, at any
point, like a corporate priority.

What I was trying to capture was the dedication and faith to push things with
full effort... right up until you decide to pull the plug. A la iTunes, Apple
Watch, Amazon Echo, or FBA.

------
JumpCrisscross
> _A senior marketer for a large American bank says Facebook has made mistakes
> on measuring engagement, reach, views and other data for no fewer than 43
> products. All of the mistakes, he notes, worked in the social-networking
> giant’s favour. “If these were true errors, wouldn’t you expect at least
> half to benefit marketers?” he asks. He expects to reduce how much his firm
> spends on Facebook and predicts that other marketers will as well next
> year._

I chuckle at how repeatedly human nature leads to surprise when “our son of a
bitch” [1] turns out to be its own son of a bitch.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasio_Somoza_Garc%C3%ADa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasio_Somoza_Garc%C3%ADa)

~~~
colordrops
This is like bank errors, which always seem to be in favor of the bank...

~~~
celrod
I found this article fascinating:

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130.2186&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

The jist is, people are extremely bad at basic logic. Unless it's really in
their best interest within the context of the story (ie, catching someone
cheating you) to be good at them. It makes the difference between <50% of
people getting the question right, vs >90%.

Presumably, everyone wants to get these logic puzzles correct. It just so
happens that we're conveniently hard-of-reasoning except when it suits us.

For reference, the "logic puzzle" is Wason's selection task: which pieces of
information do you need to test "if A then B"? The choices (choose exactly as
many as needed):

(1) A => ?, (2) !A => ?, (3) ? => B, (4) ? => !B?

~~~
nefitty
You can try this logic game here:
[https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/wason/Default.aspx](https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/wason/Default.aspx)

~~~
gnicholas
An interesting test — thanks for posting! They really need to mix up the order
of correct answers though.

For me (spoiler alert), all of the questions had the exact same correct
answers. Given the number of permutations, it seems highly unlikely that the
test is randomized and I just happened to get this arrangement.

~~~
function_seven
Mine didn’t. Correct answers for me on Q1 we’re different than Q2&3\. I think
they put the “A” sides on the left and the “B” sides on the right, and only
randomize between each pair.

~~~
gnicholas
Thanks for weighing in. I thought it was pretty silly that (for me) the
answers were selections 2 and 4 straight through.

------
kilroy123
From reading some of the stuff Yahoo put out back in their prime. I always got
the sense that they thought they would never fall and were maybe a bit
invincible.

I think Zuckerberg and Facebook in general, are very aware that Facebook is on
the decline, they need to diversify. That's why they bought Instagram and used
it to flight Snap. That's why they spent such an insane amount on WhatsApp.

Zuckerberg knows they need to create or acquire the next big thing to make it
in the long term. At least, that's what it seems like to me. I have a feeling
they aren't going anywhere soon because of this.

~~~
tokai
>Zuckerberg knows they need to create or acquire the next big thing to make it
in the long

Isn't that exactly what yahoo did?

~~~
cenal
They turned down buying Google.

Zuck smartly buys his competitors.

~~~
throwaway2048
Yahoo bought plenty of other "next big things" Geocities, tumblr, flikr,
viaweb, Broadcast.com, del.icio.us, zimbra, and hundreds of others besides.

It wasn't clear at the time Google would be any kind of success, you are
looking at things with hindsight.

~~~
jpatokal
Yahoo's acquisition track record goes beyond unlucky picking, it shows that
they can't maintain or grow the services they bought either.

Compare with Google: Maps (Where2), Earth (Keyhole), Waze, YouTube,
DoubleClick were all acquisitions they grew to be far larger under Google than
they were before.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, although I have nothing to do with
acquisitions.

~~~
rubyfan
At what point did Yahoo’s core business start to shrink or get the stench of
being a loser? I have to imagine that Yahoo! acquiring them was a stinker for
their users. Did anyone think of Yahoo as bringing strategic value to the
services they were acquiring? By the time they bought delicious and tumblr
they had a track record with flickr and any of the users of those services saw
the acquisition as a negative.

------
jillesvangurp
It's easy to predict that companies will fail, because most do in the end.
It's very rare for companies to survive for long periods of time. Just look at
the fortune 500 over time. It changes, massively, from decade to decade. If
anything that trend is accelerating: companies grow faster and disappear
faster as well. So, predicting that neither e.g. Google nor Facebook will be
around a decade or two from now is not that unimaginable. Maybe they'll find a
way to survive. Maybe they won't.

My bet would be Facebook might disappear and Google has more of a chance of
diversifying their business enough that they may survive. The reason is that
ad driven business models are long term problematic for both but Google at
least has alternate revenue streams (e.g. cloud infrastructure revenue, mobile
phone revenue, content subscriptions, b2b sales for analytics, development
tooling, etc). They have a much more diverse portfolio of products and
services than Facebook. And that's discounting the stuff they do under the
Alphabet umbrella. Facebook has just ads. Ads on Facebook, Instagram,
Whatsapp, ....

The odds are stacked against pure ad driven business models. It's a race to
the bottom. There's privacy legislation, browsers are being upgraded to
counter tracking, and users are slowly getting a clue about it being kind of
scary that big companies know a lot of shit about them. Add to that the stream
of negative news about them and you are looking at serious challenges to what
is the only business model Facebook ever had: create addictive engagement
driven properties and claim as much time of their users as possible on it so
they can measure what they do and feed them ads, fake news, sponsored content,
and other stuff 24x7.

Facebook needs to diversify their revenue streams and not just their user
facing properties. If they fail to do that, they'll peak and eventually
decline.

My guess is that the pressure on Mark Zuckerberg to resign will keep on
building until he eventually resigns. Then if they fail to change course under
a new CEO, they could suffer the exact same fate as Yahoo where shareholders
milk the existing business dry and eventually sell whatever remains for
scraps. In the case of Yahoo, this only took a decade or so.

~~~
dkrich
> Google has more of a chance of diversifying their business enough that they
> may survive.

Had to laugh a little at this. Alphabet made $9 billion in profit in three
months.

~~~
jillesvangurp
Yep, most of it from ads.

------
titzer
Personally I haven't been able to muster empathy for people who amassed a
thousand lifetimes' worth of personal wealth and then are suddenly threatened
with the potential of being left with...only a few hundred lifetimes' worth.

~~~
tasuki
Well, perhaps you'd like to try harder? Or do you think they don't deserve
your empathy? In the end, people with infinite money have to deal with many of
the same issues we deal with: relationship/personal issues, health problems,
death of close ones, etc.

~~~
grigjd3
I somehow doubt Mark Zuckerberg is worried about how to pay for his kids'
college tuition (if he has kids, I really don't know).

------
fabricexpert
I know of a few people turning off IG and FB due to the volume of ads, when
WhatsApp is monetized lots will do the same. Competitors can offer a similar
experience to IG, WA and FB with less ads, because the margins are so massive
for FB now, and their products are relatively easily replicated. It's VERY
easy for user to switch to a competitor compared with other industries. The
scale of the network is hard to achieve but we've seen this done a few times
before so I don't see why it won't happen again.

I predict that FB will continue to push ads for short term profitability,
slowly leak active users and find that a bunch of competitors will beat them
by accepting a lower margin than FB are willing to accept.

The main hope for FB is that they can identify and acquire these competitors
before they get a large enough network to take them out.

~~~
typon
> It's VERY easy for user to switch to a competitor compared with other
> industries

Not FOR WhatsApp it isn't. I don't know of an app that all my family/friends
would switch to if WhatsApp decided to put ads on it. Switching chat apps with
your entire contacts list is very cumbersome.

~~~
2sk21
It's not as hard you might think. Other messaging services like Telegram and
Signal also use phone numbers as the identifiers so it would be relatively
easy to switch.

~~~
typon
I tried my friends to switch to Signal and it failed miserably. Their friends
and family are on WhatsApp, so why would they switch? It's very annoying for
people to deal with multiple chat apps for multiple groups, especially if some
members of those groups are overlapping. I've personally settled with chatting
with my SO on Signal and everyone else deleted Signal and moved back to
WhatsApp

~~~
visarga
Maybe we need laws against abusing the network effect, which is akin to
monopoly. The networks should be split in multiple segments and they should be
forced to implement a public protocol to communicate between them, and with
other networks. Moving from one network to another should be like porting your
cell phone number to a different operator. It's ridiculous that we imposed
such strict rules on phone networks when people use SMS and voice calls less
and less by the day, but not on internet based services that offer similar
functionality (communication). It's a public interest issue, just like in the
case of net neutrality and eminent domain.

------
iMark
Yahoo failed, in part, because its competitors were better.

Being better than Facebook doesn't mean just replicating its technology, it
means having a better social graph.

That's a hard problem to solve.

~~~
agumonkey
Facebook is one vision of ~modern life. Social networks are massively
overrated in term of human value IMO. I think whatsapp is probably closer to
what would be useful and not toxic. I don't believe people need profiles and
graphs and whatever.

~~~
myspy
Absolutely agree to your assessment.

~~~
agumonkey
I just came back from an island, we barely used computers. Never been so
happy. People use whatsapp a lot, but it's just a modern reincarnation of
phones. Send a little text, a little voice message, a little video. Nothing
more. There it seems it's just right fulfilling the need to chat. The rest was
a fantasy.

~~~
ams6110
So (never used WhatsApp), how is it better than email or SMS for those things?

~~~
agumonkey
Just integrated and smartphone friendly. Think cellphone usage++ without the
cruft.

------
TheSpiceIsLife
_Being compared to the tobacco giants is one of the business world’s more
toxic insults, but it is not the only unflattering analogy circulating. A
lower blow is the suggestion that Facebook may become like Yahoo, the once
high-flying internet firm that plunged._

The article is by The Economists, but I tend think the societal costs outweigh
the financial to shareholders and employees.

~~~
simonh
If you look at TE's content and editorial agenda, they take a very much larger
view of their remit and the role of economics in society than just finance.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
True.

------
pavlov
Facebook is not Yahoo — it's much more like Windows. It's ubiquitous, everyone
has their pet peeves, and the actual user communities are wildly heterogenous
yet tech commentators tend to assume they themselves represent the only kind
of user that matters.

~~~
nothis
Windows doesn’t have true competition. Facebook has. Even if they’re clever
and buying lots of it. Still, Instagram has nowhere near the amount of neatly
categorized personal data as Facebook which is interesting.

~~~
pavlov
_> Windows doesn’t have true competition. Facebook has._

Care to elaborate? I can't think of anyone.

~~~
wild_preference
This is usually where someone confirms your original point by saying Mastodon.

------
ccozan
There is obviously in human nature to communicate with others, and share
whatever they think is good, while maintaining a certain level of privacy. In
real life, this is already happening and it works.

However, this must not be captured by an entity who's sole target is profit,
neither a state owned entity. Both will hamper the communication at some
point, either by manipulating or censoring information.

My only hope is that a benevolent AI will coordinate this, having prime
directives not to harm humans ( by the means of interfering with the
communication ).

EDIT: some typos, and also mentioning that the affirmations from above should
be read in the perspective of Facebook disappearing/dying and being replaced
by something else.

~~~
cyborgx7
>However, this must not be captured by an entity who's sole target is profit,
neither a state owned entity.

>My only hope is that a benevolent AI will coordinate this, having prime
directives not to harm humans ( by the means of interfering with the
communication ).

It would have to be some kind of public infrastructure, if you want to avoid
the profit motivation. I don't see how an AI would solve this.

------
eruci
FB keeps pestering me with messages about boosting past posts (Unlike before,
I rarely post, last one is from a week ago). This pestering has intensified
lately. I'm sure this gossip board will one day die, if it not dying already.

------
jamisteven
Im not seeing much correlation between these two companies besides industry.
FB is getting bad press sure, but this is nothing like the beginning of
Yahoo's downfall, which started with its cluster-F of a homepage and lack of
grit or sense of cool in literally any of its products, and ended with super
shit management. Yahoo made complicated the tech that needed to be simple. FB
has entirely different problems, one could argue they are good problems to
have and that bad press is better than no press at all.

------
sys_64738
FB is failing because it’s old now and no hip millennial wants to be seen
using the same social media web page as their mom. That’s why FB is falling as
he core demographic for nativity that advertisers need to manipulate it has
left. All FB needs to do is follow the millennials and buy up the services
they decant to.

~~~
malvosenior
Millennials are 30-40 years old. If FB wants to be hip they need to go after
gen z and beyond.

------
Animats
_Now ads are around one-fifth of all posts that users see on Instagram, which
is probably double what it was a year ago._

That's called "pulling a Myspace".

Facebook has reached the point that nothing above the fold is about my
friends. Remember, sharing is spamming.

------
Lordarminius
Facebook is dead. It's just taking a long time for this to become apparent.

~~~
King-Aaron
There's around 2.23 billion active users you might want to pass that message
on to.

~~~
MagnaEterna
They are all old. Facebook will probably still be functioning for the next 40
years until it's users finally die and then it's over.

~~~
bennyelv
But Instagram users aren't, and there's nothing stopping Facebook from buying
whatever the next generation of youth start using to replace Instagram when
its time comes.

The question is can they make enough cash to make the model perpetual.

~~~
AlexandrB
> there's nothing stopping Facebook from buying whatever the next generation
> of youth start using to replace Instagram when its time comes.

Hopefully antitrust law will stop them, because with a behemoth like Facebook
buying up every new, exciting social network real innovation, especially in
monetization, will continue to be a myth.

------
rblion
I've been telling people for years that FB is the next AOL or Yahoo. The
writing has been on the wall for most of this decade to be honest. In fact,
some of my first posts on HN were about this. I should apply to YC...got
nothing to lose, everything to gain.

------
ec109685
> Facebook could end up paying dearly for mediocre employees to stay on (as
> its share price falls, it has to hand out more in stock-based compensation
> to keep people).

Does this passage make sense? With a high flying stock, Facebook would be
paying more for mediocre employees while the rsu’s vest than if their stock is
lower. If Facebook increases rsu’s to even out the employee’s comp, then the
net cost to Facebook will be the same at the lower stock price.

Their only risk is if Facebook’s stock starts appreciating again and they are
on the hook for more rsu’s at the higher price.

~~~
RhodesianHunter
I think it does, because with many of these companies you're granted X shares
vesting over 4 years and if the share price causes you to drop below your
total "target comp" they issue you more shares to make up for it, so it's an
additional grant out of FBs pocket.

~~~
ec109685
But Facebook takes the expense when the rsu’s vest.

------
akeck
Plausible or not, it was a little surreal seeing Facebook advertising on
television this year. I mean, isn't Facebook, and social media in general,
supposed to be "post-television"? ;-)

------
resters
It's remarkable that Sandberg is being thrown under the bus for not doing
_enough_ to stop Donald Trump from being elected.

What she is (in hindsight) expected to have done is to have insisted that
Facebook's news feed algorithm be used as a content filter to suppress stories
promoted by politically marginalized groups.

This is much the same way China's government uses its Great Firewall to
control which information reaches the people.

During the civil rights era, the Soviets supported the work of Martin Luther
King. In the modern world, Russia supports certain third party views and anti-
establishment perspectives, for obvious reasons, just as the US supports pro-
Ukraine groups and other fringe political groups that are in close orbit to
Russia.

So we are being told that Sandberg _failed_ to utilize the firewall
capabilities of Facebook to suppress anti-establishment content. We are told
this is a big deal because Russia-linked entities spent money to promote some
of the ads. Keep in mind the total spend by Russian-linked entities (could be
NGOs, private citizens, oligarch-funded research institutes, etc.) was a
miniscule $150K in an election with total funding approaching $2B.

Yet Sandberg may be relieved of her position because she _failed_ to
anticipate how such a small spend could dramatically influence the outcome of
the 2016 election.

News flash: It didn't. There are a lot of reasons to be concerned about some
aspects of Facebook -- my #1 concern is the extensive use of dark patterns
designed to make people over-share -- but the "not doing enough" critique is
complete bunk.

It is 100% motivated by political partisans in the US who unfortunately have a
great deal of influence in possible regulation of Facebook and have made it
very clear that they plan to use all of their power to force Facebook to act
like the well behaved Great Firewall they want.

To be very clear, politicians _want_ Facebook to be used at their bidding as a
Great Firewall and they very much want to see certain views suppressed and
others amplified. They also want to (and already do) use the massive amounts
of metadata held by Facebook, Google, etc., to supplement whatever data they
have when investigating Americans, who may or may not have committed a crime.
It is, essentially, a transparent social credit system for US officials to use
at their whim.

So the only difference between Facebook as politicians want it to be used and
China's Great Firewall is that Facebook exists a bit higher up the protocol
stack and its censorship/suppression is much more laser-focused and harder to
detect.

~~~
le_clochard
$85,000 on Facebook ads. Surprisingly small amount, that.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/10/w...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/10/what-
data-on-more-than-3500-russian-facebook-ads-reveals-about-the-interference-
effort/)

~~~
resters
Thanks for the correction.

------
lurcio
Article is quite wrong: the FB is an ad platform with at least the longevity
potential of mainstream TV channel's.

------
bunsenhoneydew
I hope so. I hope FB fades into oblivion too.

------
sytelus
In all likelyhood this is a “submarine” article crafted by a PR firm like
Definers for a hit job on Facebook:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511963)

There are plenty of short sellers who would benefit from FB’s plummeting
stock. In reality, FB’s DAU/MAU are largely unchanged. The stories that young
people “deleted Facebook” were downright falsehood. There is simply no viable
competition for Facebook in market right now like what Yahoo had in terms of
Google.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _there are plenty of short sellers who would benefit from FB’s plummeting
> stock_

This is a weird meme that’s cropped up in tech circles over the past few
years. It’s misleading and incorrect.

No short selling fund sells short and then secretly seeds negative PR pieces.
If you’re short, your argument is always strengthened by disclosing you put
your money behind your words. Short sellers hire private investigators,
commission research and occasionally take out ads against companies. They do
not put out hit pieces—it is too inefficient and expensive.

~~~
gomox
How can you be sure about this?

Disclosing the existence of a short makes people doubt the bias in every piece
of information you bring up.

Keeping a position secret might be more effective than disclosing. I know when
I watched that Herbalife documentary I assumed the whole thing was paid for by
Ackman and therefore of dubious credibility.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _How can you be sure about this?_

It’s not a hard and fast rule. Just one enforced by economic interests.

> _when I watched that Herbalife documentary I assumed the whole thing was
> paid for by Ackman and therefore of dubious credibility_

You aren’t the target. Current shareholders are. Short-seller messaging is
almost always primarily aimed at current long holders. (Since short sellers
depend on long holders as a source for borrowed shares, a relationship which
isn’t reciprocated in long holders needing short interest to make their
investments work, inducing more shorts isn’t a feasible strategy.) The message
shows bias from the position, but as an investor, someone betting on their
message is more material than the bias. They decided, after all, to bet on the
message before they themselves were biased.

(When long holders aren’t the target, regulators are. This was the Herbalife
strategy. In those cases, too, a broad PR strategy is too expensive relative
to the desired results.)

------
liftbigweights
Because someone writing for the economist would know more about internet
history than zuckerburg and the people running facebook.

Why is there so many facebook propaganda crap everywhere now?

Everyday without fail, you can expect a few here. If we had real journalists
in this world rather than propagandists, that would be an interesting
investigation and article.

Why is the entire media/propaganda apparatus from the nytimes to the economist
spanning both sides of the atlantic spamming non-stop propaganda about
facebook?

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djohnston
because they're being slaughtered by new media like fb and google that takes
their ad revenue.

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mymythisisthis
I find it funny how people treat companies. To me the Yellow Pages, Yahoo, and
Facebook are all almost the same 'thing' for a lack of a better word.

