As a rough datapoint, I run a consumer targeted e-commerce site. We ran a campaign before Christmas were we were selling a new product that was only marketed on Facebook, we are certain that (almost) all customers found it though that Facebook campaign. Facebook was only able to attribute about 50% of the sales to the ads, it should have been close to 100%. This then meant that Facebooks estimated CPA was effectively double what it actually was.
Important to note about 60% of our customers are on an iOS device, which is a little higher than the global average but matches the market segment we are in in the UK.
The situation improved after about 4 weeks, I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS, but it's somewhat difficult to be sure as by then we had other campaigns running.
So, this will definitely be effecting marketers decision making process of where to allocate spend. It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.
Agreed. For advertisers with larger budgets, marketing mix models are still the only way to understand the relative performance of FB, Google, TV etc. - each of which is a "walled garden" that doesn't exchange data with others.
FB marketing is effective, question is at what price. If those prices drop, ad dollars will flow back. It will take a few quarterly modeling cycles to reflect this though.
The contra-contrarian view is this: FB, Google have an unusual mix of large, medium and small advertisers all bidding for the same inventory. That's what makes FB and Google somewhat immune to large advertiser pricing pressures (and issue of the day spend bans). However, only the larger advertisers have budgets for complicated cross-publisher modeling. If organic FB tools show higher CPAs, it will drive the smaller marketers to other platforms causing some interesting feedback loops.
Exactly, as a small business we are completely dependent on the ad platforms internal attribution tools, if they don't work or can't be trusted we won't use them.
It's unfortunate that the incredably invasive tracking and profile building has become conflated with ad attribution. For us attribution is essential and we have little interest or use for invasive tracking. We just want to know from which ad a customer converted.
Personally we avoid the more invasive remarking tools as I hate it myself when you are chased across the web by a product you have looked at once.
I work in adtech and hear "We don't want to track people, we just want to know what events led to conversion" all the damn time. (Or conversely, from the sell side, "we don't want to track people, we just want to learn/verify our audience's composition.).
Sorry to break it to you, but that's what tracking is.
You're saying you don't want remarking, but - you want to know something that requires marking. "Remarking" is just persistent marking. What you don't want is "retargeting", which is when the user gets to learn someone is building a profile of them. But that's just whether the "marked" profile is used to also "target" - the profile gets built either way.
What do you mean by conflated? The tracking and profile building is how they correlate results with ad impressions. That this data is then also used for training the models and identifying the user coefficients is just a different use of the same correlation data (a website visit is just another type of ad conversion, after all).
We shouldn’t identify the user. We should identify the content. “I want to be shown next to car pictures, because maybe the guy is missing carpets for his car” instead of “We want to be shown to guys 24-30 with interest in cars.” First is tracking the content, second is tracking the user.
Can you not just point the ad at https://your.website.example/item012628?from=facebookad20210... or whatever and save those from parameters in a cookie or something so you can see at checkout what ads were clicked before purchase? How could ATT possible factor in to this?
FB attracts big ad dollars as they will continue to claim to have huge audience reach
>if a user does not have their Facebook and Instagram accounts linked in the company's Account Center, those accounts will be considered as two separate people for ad planning and measurement.
I cant upvote you enough. This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil.
It was about the fact that ads were forced, privacy-invasive (due to customization) and generally were terrible overall (think malware/crypto mining risks, terrible UX - think annoyingly flashy gifs, or those gigantic banners in the middle of a scenic drive), not to mention poorly regulated, leading to lots of "double your money/phallus in 3 days!" type of scams.
There are a few "fair" advertising companies (the name slips me) that I am perfectly happy with. A static, discreet ad need not be bad. Several ads are absolute works of art and passion. The vast majority are not.
What we have is (techy) folks wanting to not have a shitty experience, and the average privacy-conscious user not wanting tracking. Companies do not respect (or care enough) for these which is why you have an anti-ad point of view.
(I should probably write about this.)
Exactly. In the old world, ads were attached to matching content, which gave an incentive to produce insightful pertinent content (and develop a reputation in a certain content subject area). Those ads were not much of a problem.
Today, the ad industry tracks the user, and ads are attached to matching user interest, which gives an incentive to produce arbitrary, but addictive content, with most of the benefit accruing to the ad oligopolies instead of the content producers.
also, while ads were certainly dispersed through magazines and the like, a huge chunk of them were really just in the back and not with the main stuff.
Also, it was unlikely you'd see the same set of five ads on every page of every article. Because such a thing would not just be pointless, but counterproductive.
Today's statistically-driven advertising does not relate to the context and thus has no bridge for engagement. We are all desensitized to them, so they just have to block content, flash more incessantly, and make the dismiss click box smaller (or just start putting fake dismiss boxes to trick people into more engagement).
I think the scammy/dark side of advertising is driven by the cost of impressions being so low. This is because of the pricing disparities allowed by the advertising broker tracking attributions rather than the business themselves. Legitimate products suffer as a result, similar to the effect of spam on email.
Like I wrote in another post, most on HN couldn't understand the difference between placement ad on Google Search Engine and Google Ads Network. And suggested we should ban all "tracking ads". And later all ads. I explicitly ask them and suggest what you just wrote. That there could be good ads, and they, by majority disagree. This isn't just on HN, it is pretty much across the whole tech industry. Benedict Evans wrote a lot about this [1] and on Twitter. We even went to ask people offline to make sure we are not in an online bubble. But so far the results suggest otherwise. Especially with Tracking [2].
I think it's just a reaction to the adtech community's total disinterest in user's objections to tracking. They keep invading our privacy and only really consider our wishes when it starts hurting their bottom line for real.
I'm sure that's what inspired my hard line against ads. I block ads and tracking where I can. And I've become so used to an ad-free web that I don't think I'll go back anymore.
If they'd only listened to us this before things got totally out of hand this could have been avoided.
> This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil.
I still don't understand your point. The only reason Facebook's ability to properly attribute went down drastically is specifically because of the iOS privacy changes that require user opt in to track across different sites.
Fine, I don't doubt there were other HN commenters who were arguing different meanings of "tracking", but that's all a moot point. In this instance, we know exactly why Facebook's ad effectiveness went down - it went down because they could no longer track all your interactions across the majority of the web. Tough shit.
Why does ability to attribute an ad depend on the ability to track individuals?
IIUC, you can do attribution with a very basic ad: <a href="website.com/ad-34" ping="fb.com/my-product/ad-34/ping"><img src="fb.com/my-product/ad-34/img.jpeg" /> Come buy my product, you'll love it!</a>
Then you sum up all the "/ad-34" hits, and figure out how many of those user sessions (which are now on your own site -- single domain, but perhaps leveraging a script supplied by the ad network) went and actually bought something. The ad network can correlate those sessions with the "ping" it receives to determine clicks vs. conversions.
Not all purchases come immediately after clicking through an ad. They may come days later, even. Knowing that "this user who purchased this product saw this version of the ad" and "this user saw the other version" is what attribution is.
Facebook (and other ad networks) want credit if someone clicks on your ad, spends time on your site, but then doesn't actually buy anything until a couple days when they enter the URL directly (i.e. not clicking on an ad). This is the problem generally referred to as attribution. Facebook (and others) do this by tracking everyone all around the web. They track the ad click and then they track you going back to the website the next day, and they know it's the same person.
Ad attribution directly depends on pervasive tracking.
Allow some facebook supplied javascript to set a first party cookie when the user hits website.com/ad-34, and then reference that 1st party cookie the next day when the user returns. Phone home when they buy something. Facebook can now correlate (1) the ping they received to begin with, (2) the user session cookie they initiated on the first visit, and (3) the user session they observed when a purchase was made.
I'm sure things get easier with 3rd party tracking, but fundamentally you can do it without cross-site tracking.
Out of curiosity, does attribution also work if the ad is not clicked?
For example, I bought a product the other day after seeing a Facebook ad, but I didn't click on the ad itself and rather went searching for it on DuckDuckGo, then after reading a bit about it online, bought the product.
I'm curious as to whether that got attributed to the ad impression or not.
So would I, but I’d also not have a job, or at least make a lot less income. Without marketing, advertising and sales, there is very little economic activity.
It’s like the old adage: this job would be great it weren’t for those pesky customers.
Ads synthesize desire and cause people to be unhappy when the ads work. They encourage expending money that could have been saved, or taking on debt. They also create a funding situation where media producers are beholden to corporations.
The implementation of ads is also wildly invasive, creepy, and propagandistic. However, focusing on implementation allows ad salesmen to lessen the sharpness of the criticism by supposing there is some "nice" way this could be done.
Ads aren't inherently trying to make people unhappy (at least the good ones). Ads in the best case, are just informing a person about the existence of a thing. There have been many ads that I've found useful, not because of some evil mind games, but rather because i didn't know of a company providing such a service.
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with expending money for things that are valuable. That kinda seems like the whole point of money.
The idea of an ad is that it says you don't have this thing. Your life will be so much better if only you had this thing. In some cases, that makes sense, but mostly it serves to reset people's expectations and become dissatisfied with what they have.
I think in many cases we should be aiming to do that for social fundamentals that would make all of us live richer and happier lives like healthcare and education, but it has a lot of negative consequences in consumer products which are more individualistic, competitive, and status oriented.
While I hate ads, it's impossible to live in a world without it.
Because even at the most extreme, where there are no ads, even the most minimal difference like location or appearance has value. Consider the simple example of a grocery store - what products do they place at eye level? What products do they place closer to the entrance? What color does P&G make their detergent bottle? What do they call it?
It's all "advertising", and there's no practical way to prevent it.
The alternative is that everything is packaged in the same sized gray box and described in perfectly utilitarian terms.
So advertising will always exist. We just need to know where to draw the line.
Ads are a corruption of organic discovery though. Yes it could help you but say person A hocks product 1 because they are paid, even though product 2 is actually superior for you. Ads corrupt their incentives. Even if product 1 is good for you, product 2 is better. Product 1 ends up succeeding because they decide to play the game of corrupted promotion.
First, it's not "all ads are evil". It's the spying and tracking of ads that most people oppose.
Second, how is this a "balanced ideological fight" counterargumnet. Let's say I oppose Facebook ads as invasion of privacy (and I do). A person on the internet used Facebook ads to make money. Those are contrary why? It's not like I'm sitting here and was like "oh, now that someone made money on the ads, I'm totally in favor of them."
> If you have an income it’s because of economic activity, most likely derived from advertising.
That reasoning can be used to justify any shitty practice.
Concerned about global warming? If you have an income it’s because of economic activity, most likely derived from emitting carbon.
Concerned about human rights in China? If you have an income it’s because of economic activity, most likely derived from trade with China.
Concerned about American workers getting fired for unionizing? If you have an income it’s because of economic activity, most likely derived from interacting with sales behemoths like Walmart and Amazon.
Therefore, I suggest you come up with a better rational for bad things. Or frankly stop trying to justify them. That also works.
> I pay for YouTube Premium to avoid ads because I hate ads. But I also like robust economic activity. So, I’m happy to pay a fee instead of seeing ads.
Yep, and I drastically limited watching YouTube on-site because their advertising became untenably invasive. The last straw was when they tried to get me to pay money to back-track how much they made their product suck, rather than actually providing me value over the out-of-box experience a few years prior.
Likewise - I am not entirely opposed to paying for Google products. I pay for G-Suite, for example (for now). However there is not a hope in hell I will ever pay for YouTube - they go out of their way to disable native OS features like Picture in Picture video, and the experience of ads is so shitty I’ve just added it to Pi-hole and moved on.
There’s some good content on there, but it’s not good enough to subject myself to that, or to reward such behavior with money.
Ads are evil. To work, they play upon human insecurity. In many cases, they create desires or perceived needs that weren't there before, making them wasteful in addition to scammy/conniving. Because they're successfully evil - the tricks work - they often leave a residue on people: beyond just never being able to forget a jingle from a cereal ad you heard when you were 8, a lifetime of very frequent exposure to advertising trains us to suspend our criticality, or hinders us from developing it in the first place. So it leaves people dumber, too, more pliable and dependent. Hilarious in a country like the US, whose national mythos is so obsessive about personal liberty and rugged self-reliance.
We have a family friend, retired now, who had a successful career in marketing and strategy in multi-billion dollar transnational companies. I once asked (probably naively) why [maker of extremely popular product at the time] ran so little advertising. The friend told me "they have a good product. They don't need to spend money haranguing people into buying it or spreading the word about because it's actually good. Word of mouth is free".
Governments are evil. To gain power, they play upon human insecurity. You can say this about anything providing a service. Its a wild oversimplification of the psychology of human buying decisions.
While there are plenty of people annoyed by any ads at all or who believe any form of marketing is inherently evil, that is not at all a majority view. Yet almost everyone hates the way Facebook does it except sellers. The problem isn't the ads. It's the level of surveillance required to make them as effectively targeted as they are. People don't want everything they ever do to be recorded, catalogued, and studied to build a psychological profile of their global purchasing habits.
And that’s the key issue: constant surveillance coupled with machine learning used to identify our desires and appetites.
It’s creepy for one thing. It reminds me of why we sometimes have to let go of a certain kind of relationship: they know too much, and are too effective at getting you to buy into action that is not ultimately in your best interest.
Well no one's arguing that targeted ads are not effective. This is just an example of how well it works, so upvoting it may not be the best way to bolster your side of the fight.
>Well no one's arguing that targeted ads are not effective.
Oh they sure were. All ads are useless. Targeted ads are evil. And Ads should not be targeted were the HN's view, which later became there shouldn't even be any ads, it should all be subscription. That is 2018/19. By 20/21 HN were even targeting those who were working inside the online Ad industry. And this is seen across the tens of thousands of comments. ( Say 50 Thread of 200 comments )
It became such a problem that people working inside Ad industry were even afraid to post their views on HN. And they have to be upvoted to make sure there are still sanity inside the HN community.
Arguing that "ads are evil" is different from calling them ineffective. Most people dislike targeted ads them because of privacy/resource usage issues. Other people dislike ads in general. Some of those want ads to stop existing exactly because of how effective they are.
I don't think I've ever seen someone say this. People hate that they make the internet impossible to use. I have a family friend that runs a small business and all of the revenue comes from ads on the websites they run. I hate using their website because of the ads.
Pop-up that takes up the whole screen asking to subscribe, auto-play video ad, content moving as ads get loaded slowly. It's all just awful to use. The ads are absolutely effective though.
Ublock origin and pihole make the internet a more pleasant experience for me. It has been suggested that I should feel some nagging voice causing guilt that I do not support the sites and apps I use that depend on ad revenue. Perhaps there should be, but there is not. Apple's position on this is just responding to demand. When wifi access points start offering built in enabled pihole by default those access points will sell well. Throw in a vpn to pipe your phone through it from wherever that is easy to use/automatic and "ads are useless" may become truth.
Edit: it would likely just cause a shift to self hosted ads, which is a dramatic improvement imo.
Self-hosted ads COULD be a dramatic improvement, if the companies start vetting these ads in some way
My guess is it'll result in backend web modules that make it easy to automatically dynamically re-host the same virus- and tracker-infested malware ads we all hate
This is a side-effect of media selling advertising through brokers rather than direct, that these brokers then built tools to track impressions, clicks and sales attributions, and then created a disparity between each level of several orders of magnitude.
When advertisers were paying an order of magnitude more for ad impressions, we needed far fewer ads and those ads tended both to be of higher quality and more topically relevant.
At the current CPM, I routinely get ads which aren't spelling or grammar-checked.
I have no problem with targeted ads based on what I specifically told Facebook. It’s when I’m shopping on Amazon and see the same products advertised on FB that there is a problem.
For the longest time I was getting Amazon ads on Instagram that were for products I had recently viewed - even viewed less than an hour before in some cases. Moreover, the Amazon account we use is my wife's, which we pay for Prime on. I would look at something on my phone, which is logged into her account, and then see the ad show up in my Instagram feed that day or a few days later.
Now, I get 90% ads for car parts and car accessories. I don't have a car, I don't drive, I don't have a license, and I don't even like to be in a car, but for whatever reason Amazon (or Instagram?) ads are assuming that what I really want are car parts and car accessories that I don't recognize, can't use, or don't understand.
It feels very stupid to me that those are the "default" ads I'm getting, even though I never tap on them for obvious reasons, but it's reassuring to know that they went from knowing exactly who I am and specifically what I had been looking at to having no clue whatsoever anything about me, or who I am or what I like.
The real world story is that marketing in one channel is a little worse now... I don't feel like that justifies the existence of data-mining to show ads.
> Did you use a Facebook-specific link in the ads?
I do sometimes find it odd that such a thing is insufficient for tracking sources of traffic in and of itself. No doubt there is a complexity that I have missed
That is almost exactly what UTM url parameters are [0]. We use these and via them our other tracking collaborates our theory on Facebooks tracking.
There is actually a real problem with tracking via cookies on Facebook ads when the destination is a website. The ad click will open in a Facebook "In App Browser", any cookie that you (or any analytical service) sets will be within that IAB. If the user then uses the "open in Safari/Chrome" option that tracking can be broken as there is no cookie. Ideally you want your visitor to either complete their transaction within the IAB or to use the "open in Safari" option immediately so that any tracking parameters are copied to the other browser allowing the cookie to be set.
In our case the majority of our customers will have a better experience outside of the IAB and so we have a popup that prompts them to use "open in Safari" before navigating away from the first page view. We actually implemented this after noticing a very high drop out rate for iOS Facebook IAB users during our checkout. What was happening is address/payment card autocomplete isn't available within the Facebook IAB and people were clicking "open in Safari" during the checkout in order to use it, they would then find themselves with an empty shopping cart, hence the drop out.
So not only is the Facebook/Instagram "try to lock users into our own browser to track them" thing user-hostile, but it actually harms companies that are using ads by having them drop in the middle of the funnel?
That's really interesting, I'm going to check our analytics to see if the same thing is happening.
Another way you could potentially get around it is to fingerprint the user and store the basket contents server side and present them to that fingerprint.
This is interesting. Are you saying because some user switch to safari during checkout and tracking lost here? Since cookie will be cleared. But how about these special query param as you mentioned? That still can be maintained for tracking?
UTM parameters can be identifying but not generally considered private - rather the opposite - so while you can link your cookie to UTM parameters and join with other UTM-keyed traffic data for useful results, you can't do the inverse and use knowledge of UTM parameters as sufficient proof to recover a session cookie.
What is the shop? I partly live in the UK, don't run iOS, don't use Facebook and block ads about a billion different ways at once. There's a chance I might be interested in your products.
But then again. If it was an interesting product, Facebook would be the last place on earth where it’s advertised. Don’t know what it is but I’m predicting it sucks.
> I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS
Is that even legal? With AI, you can never concretely prove anything, so you then have Facebook literally making up numbers it pinky swears are legit and billing you accordingly (semi-directly because while you're not paying per click, the landing page analytics are also used to weed out robo clicks and other fraud that you shouldn't be billed for).
I am not sure it's ethical, but I don't think any laws would be broken - if their customers don't like paying for imaginary services, well, they can go elsewhere... or can they?
If you're so certain, it means you already have reliable data for attribution. Why do you need Facebook's tracking to confirm it to you?
I understand it's nice to have fancy reports etc but it sounds like you already know where your customers are coming from. And tracking is very invasive, in this case it doesn't really seem to add much value.
You could also ask your customers "where did you hear about us" for example. Perhaps you already do and that's the source of that 100%. If not you might even discover a way you didn't know of. Eg word of mouth, some obscure forum where your product was mentioned. As well as that it's a method where you respect your users' privacy.
> If you're so certain, it means you already have reliable data for attribution. Why do you need Facebook's tracking to confirm it to you?
We were in unique situation with this one campaign where, quite right, we knew where our conversions were coming from as we were confident there was no other source. Within a few weeks we had other campaigns running and no longer could have the same level of confidence.
The point it outside of this unique situate of a new product only marketed on Facebook the conversion attribution on their platform is broken. This is affecting marketers decision making process and reducing the spend on that platform.
The interesting thing is we were able to see the affect of Apples change quite clearly. Most people are not able to see that.
You attribute 0% of purchases to repeat loyal customers who just check in on what you're selling every now and again without needing to be reminded by a marketing campaign?
I remember when Facebook Platform came out. The super early version where you could embed your app on Facebook and engage with the social graph.
I thought dang, this is smart. They’ll basically own the next level up the stack from the browser: they’ll own the “social chrome” of every application on the web.
Although it devolved into spam, Facebook was a hot spot of weird social games for a while there. And every web dev was learning how to build Facebook apps. We wondered if we’d even really need a domain for much more than a landing page, if 99% of our engagement was going to come through Facebooks.
And then they killed it because they wanted to own the entire experience inside Facebook. It became not a walled garden, but a walled flower pot.
It always seemed short sighted to me. Yes, they lost control allowing third party apps in their frame. But didn’t they want to be a Microsoft and not a WordPerfect?
Looking back, I wonder if it was a missed opportunity. They have to go try to be the metaverse because social never became a platform.
I kind of miss those awful games, honestly. There was one my girlfriend at the time was playing, and I thought it was interesting but kind of tedious, the UI reacted too slow, etc.
So I opened up my editor and wrote a Python client to automate the game; go to forest, attack until your inventory is full, go to town, sell inventory, repeat. I left it run overnight and completely blew past her in progression.
Now everything is an app, and every app uses HTTPS, and every HTTPS connection uses certificate pinning, and I just can't be bothered to do the work anymore to cheat at useless games I don't like.
I'm still playing one, actually: https://www.mousehuntgame.com. They transitioned to just being a web game that runs in a FB frame for users that still wanted to play it there, but I haven't had an FB account for years now, and I can still play right at the URL.
"Interesting but kind of tedious" is absolutely a great descriptor, though. It's basically an incremental game that grows at the slowest possible rate you can imagine.
"Social Chrome" is a base of moving sand, just like Google AMP, it works for a brief while via platform's power but will phase out; web game died out naturally with devices becomes cheaper, and consumers going mobile (and consoles).
Then they lacked the imagination. The Facebook app would have become a web browser where Facebook controls user auth, contacts and then payments. Big $$$
By 2009, Apple and Amazon already had more credit cards on file than any other company in the US if not the world. In Apple’s case because of iTunes, before the App Store and Amazon because Amazon. Why would you use FB for payments when you were probably either shopping on Amazon, Apple or EBay using PayPal?
In this path, people would be interacting with games/content in Facebook "apps" that are effectively mobile web pages. Facebook would have control inside their garden.
As soon as any Facebook app convinced a user to pay, all other facebook apps would have a seamless checkout.
Getting user financials isn't easy but we've seen the rise of Venmo, Robinhood, and Neobanks since then so it's doable.
By 2009, mobile was clearly the future. But the phones were underpowered and didn’t run web pages well. Even today, most of the world is browsing the internet on low end phones where the web provides a sub par experience.
Desktop penetration is lower outside of the US. Aren’t Internet cafes still a thing in much of the world because people don’t have computers at home?
I think internet cafe's are pretty old school everywhere now. Anecdotally, much of the developing world leapfrogged the US on mobile/fintech. People had low end smart phones and banked with their phone carriers 5+ years ago in East Africa.
Latest anecdote (this week) is not seeing internet cafe's in Belize and government PSA's say to contact them on whatsapp.
That said, Facebook makes their money in rich countries.
Peer to peer payments is still not a big deal compared to consumer to business spending. Even if you consider eBay to be P2P, it still mostly went through PayPal.
Not on iOS where that sort of thing is prohibited. Sure they could put a skin over safari, but apple would have banned the entire FB app as soon as they found a developer's app they didn't like.
I always wondered: why is Apple allowing WeChat to exist? Their mini apps seem in direct competition with the app store. Is this a China political thing? Are they worried about losing all access to the market there? It seems clear Apple is not applying their own rules consistently. If that's the case, wouldn't there also be anti-trust implications here?
I can bet if Apple banned WeChat, most people in China would switch to Android. Apple doesn't apply the same privacy rule in all countries as well. It's all about business, never about consistency.
Different audience. People went on the internet for the first time for facebook. A lot of people never leave the facebook ecosystem. Having a phone that didn't have facebook would make it less popular.
A phone not supporting flash might get developers upset. But by that time developers wanted html5 to take over and developer preference doesn't push product.
One can make the case that the most inexperienced with computers person is Apple's ideal customer / most profitable. Not being able to get on facebook would push this demographic to other phones.
Wasn’t FarmVille and applications like them Flash based?
You also have to remember even as late as 2011, Motorola was trying to sell the Xoom tablet as being able to browse “the real internet” because it (belatedly) supported Flash.
But then we still get back to the fact that in 2008, the iPhone 3G had 128MB RAM and couldn’t even fully load a regular web page. When you scrolled to fast, there was a checkerboard while it tried to render the rest of the page. It definitely couldn’t do any complex animation within Safari.
Maybe their desktop traffic wouldn't have tanked so much if they'd kept it a richer experience, and continue to enrich it. Instead they abandoned it completely once traffic patterns tipped towards mobile.
78% of homes have a computer in them. [0] I don't know anyone who does not use a PC for personal use, and my non-work social circles are not at all techie dominated.
Also I'm not talking about 2021: I'm talking about years ago when Facebook moved away from prioritizing the PC platform. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered, I don't know, but when FB became a primary entry point to the internet for many people, and FB then mostly ignored desktop experience, it certainly accelerated any decline already in place. But had they enriched that experience, maybe there'd still be a much stronger following there.
And considering that most people spend 8 hours a day at work, how much personal usage on the web comes from the desktop? How many younger people are using computers for personal use - especially if it a shared family computer.
Heck I am a software developer and my personal computer is just sitting in a corner as a Plex server. I haven’t used it for anything productive in a year and a half and that was for updating my resume.
Besides that, Facebook got more popular because of mobile when everyone had a camera in their pocket with GPS when they csn post the highlights of their life. Not to mention WhatsApp is all about communicating real time and Instagram is about sharing pictures.
So you do no personal development on a desktop? Do you use your work's equipment? Are you using your phone?
I have three desktops on the go all day. Three keyboards in front of me and three mice. I run Windows 7, 10 and ubuntu and another ubuntu under windows 10. Trading that in for my mobile is very limiting.
I develop to trade labor for money. The last thing I want to do when I get off work is more computer work.
If I’m just doing a hobby project proof of concept to learn a new for me technology, I would do that on my work computer. We have a very liberal open source process where we can open source a project under:
That only requires going through a simple process. That also means I have unlimited admin access to multiple dev AWS accounts using our internal tool that we can’t name but almost everyone knows about.
If/when I leave, I can just fork it and continue to work on it if no one else is interested in maintaining it. Otherwise, submit a pull request.
Any outside work I would do would be considered “consulting” - the same thing I do on my $DayJob. That would clearly be a conflict of interest.
I’ve felt the same way for 25 years. I haven’t programmed as a hobbyist since graduating from college in 1996.
BTW, I would never want to be an SDE at Amazon. I don’t do on call. I work in consulting. We are told that we are “in charge of our own calendar”. Meaning that if we are putting in more than 40 hours regularly, we aren’t managing our projects correctly.
On a day to day basis, my actual manager only has a high level idea of what I’m working on. We as consultants guide our project implementations.
Anecdata, but I'm teaching a coding class for 10-12 year olds and most of them don't know their way around a laptop. Most of their work has been done on tablets or maybe phones.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that huge chunks of demographics don't really use desktops or laptops all that much.
Doesn't that make them really inefficient? I couldn't imagine efficiently coding on a phone or even tablet without adding a keyboard, mouse and larger screen (eg Samsung DeX) which will basically make it a laptop or desktop.
Nice how Zuck said $10bn in the analysts call with nothing to back it up, but the whole press jumps on it. Apple is not Facebook's problem, all they did was giving users a choice, which should have happened ages ago. So Facebook just says Apple kills our business without ever thinking that maybe users don't like the way they do business. If they did, they wouldn't opt out…
Yeah, the CEO of a company saying numbers on official communication to investors is pretty compelling evidence on its own, especially if it's bad news. Executives don't generally lie about specifics to their investors, unless they're doing something completely fraudulent. And if you think that's the case for Facebook, you're going to need more evidence then just a gut feeling.
Not to mention supporting data for announcements like these tend to come up in discovery requests for lawsuits so I highly doubt they'd make such a definitive statement w/o the points to back it up.
True, but if the internal attitude of Facebook is to be as pessimistic as possible about the IDFA changes and make them the scapegoat for all problems (which they've advertised via their public stance on the issue), that would show up in the projections even if nobody is "lying".
What would be his motive for saying revenue would be $10B less than previous trends would predict? They posted record revenue again in 2021, so it doesn't look like he's trying to cast a scapegoat for stagnant revenue.
According to what I read (not first hand, of course), he said that 10bn because of Apple's decision. That's a different thing than just saying 10bn, and to pressure Apple to let loose on privacy seems motivation enough to me.
The problem isn't just Apple's action on IDFA. It's that Facebook seems to be so poorly managed on some fronts that its reactions, rather than mitigating problems, has caused further harm. For example - in a rushed effort to get their privacy issues in order, they are deactivating the live facebook integrations of customers based on cursory/mistaken/possibly machine-based readings of their privacy policies.
We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on facebook app ads per month. We can deal with IDFA giving way to more aggregated attribution (we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales). But facebook breaking our app in production because they can't be bothered doing their job properly is very serious. It can't be solved by reducing ad spend, only by removing their SDK from our app.
If this is also happening to many other developers right now, that, more than the Q4 results or the IDFA issue itself, could be causing the drop in the share price.
In fact, if you look at the Q4 results, the earnings miss was more because of growth in G&A (which grew by 3 percentage-points of revenue if I'm not mistaken) than because of a top-line slowdown. And if you read the comments as to what made G&A grow, it's 'legal costs'.
> we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales
well. if your goal isn't tracking individuals, then why are you attaching unique ID's (in cookies) to track individuals on your website?
And I'm not talking about third-party cookies disguised as first-party.
logglytrackingsession (lifetime: session)
notion_experiment_device_id (lifetime: 1 year)
Both are unique to a specific user and are used to identify a single individual. The first one is short-lived, but obviously meant for tracking and the second one can be used for tracking, identifies a single individual and is long-lived.
Yes like the peer reply said that's Notion, not us. But good point, another thing to keep in mind if you try to use the "Share to the web" notion feature.
My real point is, if you use a service to provide your own service, you give them your blessing to do whatever they want with your brand. This includes facebook and their tracking scripts.
Thus we need to audit what our service providers are doing and limit their impact once we've completed the evaluation, making sure they don't alter the deal later.
Also tracking ad conversions is as simple as using a unique parameter per campaign, when buying the add. Just append `?campaign=facebook_campaign-name_202202` to your link and that's enough to measure the ads effectiveness. No need to attach unique ID's to users, sessions etc... Aggregates keep the users anonymous and give you enough actionable insight.
While I agree with the sentiment of your first point, in practice if each small business were expected to audit every one of their inputs, it would be hard to get any business done.
As for your second point, yes, that is precisely what I referred to in my original post - that we could deal with the end of IDFA / that we just want to make sure ads are effective - SKAN which provides aggregated statistics is mostly ok for us.
> in practice if each small business were expected to audit every one of their inputs, it would be hard to get any business done.
While I agree, that a full audit would be difficult for smaller operations, it took me 2-5 minutes to do a quick check on what is being stored client-side and to come to a logical conclusion if individual users are being tracked or not.
It's a decision, one that you can (probably) make. For me, in the EU, it's no longer a choice and I personally think regulation(GDPR) was needed because, without it, no one took user-privacy seriously.
> As for your second point, yes, that is precisely what I referred to in my original post - that we could deal with the end of IDFA / that we just want to make sure ads are effective - SKAN which provides aggregated statistics is mostly ok for us.
GDPR would also apply here. If there's an option to process less data and achieve a similar result, one should use that option and using a more invasive method(identifying individuals) for tracking would be illegal. It's called "the data minimisation principle"
Yes, agree, we wanted to try it out for this because we like it for work and it was quick to write up and publish and we thought it might be more flexible for writing up documentation, linking, etc. But we are not satisfied either: Very slow to load, formatting is fiddly and imperfect. We will have to use something else.
"we don't want to track individuals" --- right, but each ad FB places has a lower conversion rate if they don't know as much about the user, so while your goal may not be tracking per se, tracking does get you the same sales in fewer placements, and Facebook can sell those saved placements to other buyers
the fact that they're cracking down on partner privacy in a hamfisted way surely doesn't help matters but I can't see how angry devs are driving the share price down
I agree with your first point in the sense that having individualised targeting data necessarily improves advertising by some amount vs. merely contextual and aggregate data. For our specific case I'm not convinced that amount is as big as some people imagine it is, but I haven't found a good way to test that precisely given that facebook doesn't really have a "just give me a representative sample of your audience in this region" targeting feature (wish it did) to compare with the targeted alternatives. In our case, app ads that now use SKAN (the Apple solution that provides aggregated attribution) seem to be working well enough - that was my point.
Regarding your second point, yes, I agree - it's not obvious. Assuming this did indeed affect many developers like us and that it happened to everyone at the same time (which may not be the case - that it happened to us and that it coincided with their earnings report may have just been a coincidence - I haven't seen a mass outcry on twitter or anything), I was wondering whether it might be hedge funds that buy/track aggregated ad spend or attribution data, perhaps from MMPs or media buying agencies. I know they buy app download data from the likes of App Annie, but don't know if equivalent data is available and timely for ad spend. In any case, my point is more that this is illustrative of how they make bad situations worse for themselves.
I see this in the thread but I have to say that I disagree a bit. I'm certainly glad Apple gave users a choice, but you have to consider "the tyranny of the default" which is a great phrase I think. Most people will simply use the default option, so Apple's choice of default says something.
I just like the phrase. Tyranny probably brings along a bad assumption, but it really just means that most people will stick with the default. It's something I learned independently, though it had been realized many times before I did. I'm also happy with the outcome in this case.
The default is to ask you with buttons that are the same size. You can specifically go into settings and disable tracking for all apps. But it isn’t the default.
I don't want to be included in something that I never asked to be part of, and then have to put in the effort to get out.
This is one of the things that is so upsetting: most of the industry puts it on the consumer to get out rather than come in. I often look at the list of third-parties when a website says I can opt out. There are often over 300 third parties that I would have to opt out of one at a time.
There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years.
I used to work at a publisher where 80% of their website traffic came from Facebook. They haven't seen audience growth in years and their audience is skewing older and older, which is bad for their advertising business
Businesses like that are going to get steadily squeezed both by Facebook's declining audience share and Facebook's own efforts to change what people see.
Really what you're saying is that there's a whole ecosystem of businesses that depend on unavoidable surveillance.
All Apple have done is allow users to say no.
They haven't even stopped anyone opting into surveillance if they want to. It just turns out that, when given the choice, people don't like being snooped on.
this seems to be the main new data point that is now evident for all to see
I mean it is sort of obvious to anybody not captured and with basic morals but such is the allure of greed that for ages people were cynically and hypocritically pretending otherwise
Good riddance? People will keep finding & buying things they need.
If nobody’s buying anything from these businesses without invasive advertising & tracking then maybe whatever goods they were selling aren’t actually necessary?
Of course there is nuance and edge cases to this, but in general I wouldn’t be surprised if society and the planet was better off once we stop producing useless garbage.
I don't think you've ever started a company with a new product. What if you make the world's best cheese grater. Nobody knows about it. You don't have connections to supermarkets. Smaller stores don't want to carry your niche item. You have $5000 budget to get your cheese grater out. How do you let people know about it?
Online targetted advertising is basically the current established way to find those people who actually would care about your special cheese grater and start to get your business going. If you're looking at alternatives those would be either untargetted online advertising (incredibly inefficient, only people who don't care about cheese graters would see your ads and that's your $5000 down the toilet) or real world advertising like... Door to door salesmen? Or take out fliers in your local newspaper? That's what people used to do
If you feel cheese graters are useless and somehow deserve to remain unbought, then replace it with any other item which does match your bar for utility value.
I think this covers how it's supposed to work, but the reality is far messier and worse. In particular, the hypothetical cheese grater manufacturer would probably be have to pay Google to advertise on their own brand name adword so a generic competitor doesn't steal customers that already know about their great cheese graters. Oh, and about 90% of the people who see your cheese grater ads would be people who just bought one of your cheese graters. Even worse, cheesegraterreviews.com would be paid off by your (larger) competitors to review their cheese graters better and this site has much better SEO than forums.graterenthusiasts.com so they would list higher in organic cheese grater search.
All of this is to say that targeted advertising for niche, high-quality brands is only viable (at least if you're targeting someone like me) in an environment where search isn't beshitted by SEO, Google doesn't run a trademark protection racket, and reviews aren't 90% noise. Unfortunately, that's not the world we find ourselves in. At this point I'm more likely to just go to the kitchen store and physically examine cheese graters to find one I like than relying on the internet.
You are right of course, it's not a perfect situation and, yes, many times may still not be able to get your cheese grater off the ground. My question remains though - if you are not allowed targeted advertising, what practical alternatives do you have to mass market your useful product?
We are not looking at this from the point of view of your personal preference where you would rather the product was in a store already, but from the point of view of a legitimate, useful small business which does not have access to a store and which is trying to match their product to consumers.
I still don't care. My privacy shouldn't be forced to be sacrificed just because you decided to make a cheese grater that's better than every other cheese grater in existence.
>If you feel cheese graters are useless and somehow deserve to remain unbought, then replace it with any other item which does match your bar for utility value.
I am doing this for nearly everything I can think of, and my privacy wins every single time.
This is off topic, I was responding to OP's statement that online ads are always useless
You may well find that any societal usefulness is offset by your own principles, whether that's privacy or aversion to tech or aversion to capitalism or aversion to marketing or aversion to small businesses or what have you. Can't argue with principles, and I won't try. The topic though is whether there is any societal usefulness or not.
In a thread that is broadly about giving users the choice in how their personal data is tracked, analyzed, and utilized for the sake of ads, how is my comment off-topic? I mean, OP posited that perhaps we're better off without companies whose goods rely on targeted/invasive advertising, you provided the perspective of someone who might really rely on that sort of advertising, and I suggested that my right to privacy should not be superseded by someone's "need" (though I think "desire" would be more apt there) to get the word out about their product.
Privacy is incredibly useful to society, as is advertising I suppose, so I'm not quite sure how you can have a conversation about targeted advertising's societal usefulness without also talking about the impact it has to other things that are useful to society, eg privacy, that that advertising depends on.
Societal usefulness is not defined in a vacuum - it’s fundamentally based on the principles of everyone in the society. And judging by the people who chose not to share data with Facebook, society is better off without the targeted ads.
We should advertise cheese graters to people who search “good cheese graters” instead of trying to track people across the web panopticon-style and cross reference if they are a) moving houses b) making a cheese-based dish c) friends with chefs or cooks d) planning a dinner party e) physically located in a kitchen goods store.
What the heck is the world's best cheese grater? Some products are effectively "finished" and the best there is already exists and we don't need your new business.
Traditionally, cookware and kitchenware makers targeted restaurant buyers. If you think you have a great product, go to a restaurant conference. Everyone there has publicly expressed an interest in what you're selling without requiring a global corporate panopticon.
1. I see an ad for some really nice pens. COOL!
2. I go to a website that allows me to opt out of tracking but I'd have to opt out of their 300 affiliates one at a time.
3. The privacy policies that state: we do not honor do-not-track signals because we don't know if it was the user or a browser default.
> There's a whole ecosystem of businesses that rely on Facebook that are going to start hurting a lot over the next few years.
Starting? Did these publishers not learn anything from the whole Facebook Video debacle? [1] Also, who at these companies thinks tying their core business to a single, third party is a good idea?
Video on Facebook is still very big, though. A lot of publishers have taken to recycling TikTok videos and turning them into compilations for Facebook and Instagram. It's all low quality stuff, but it works. It's hugely ironic that some of the most popular content on Facebook's platforms is coming from TikTok.
> But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be tracked. It seems most do not: a study in December by AppsFlyer, an ad-tech company, suggested that 54% of Apple users who saw the prompt opted out.
Hard to believe that nearly half of all people is ok with being tracked...
Also this is 54% of people who saw the prompt. The standard practice for this sort of prompt in products that are trying to _optimise_ acceptance is to pre-ask the user first, almost "If we asked you if we can track you, would you be likely to accept". So that's 54% of users who are probably ok with the idea of personalised ads or however the app pitched it, then go on to say "actually no".
Essentially this number is far lower than the total population.
Everyone does, because a) you get to control the messaging to the user, and b) once they've declined the OS prompt, you can never re-do in your app, whereas if they decline your own prompt, you can ask them again whenever you like, like when you know they've just had a positive experience.
— Most apps nudge you to accept tracking before the dialog comes up. Probably influences some users
- A lot of people probably don’t even read the dialog properly.
- a lot of people who have apps like facebook installed are either unaware of the tracking stuff or don’t care
I believe that most people live relatively uneventful lives, and truly believe that they have nothing to hide from anyone, and resultantly do not value their own privacy whatsoever. The loss of privacy from surveillance capitalism does not bother them at all, and practically it is all upside, because they lost nothing of value to themselves.
It does not enter their minds that mass abandonment of privacy means that it renders privacy harder and harder, or even impossible, for the tiny minority of society that needs it to operate: human rights advocates, investigative journalists, labor organizers, political upstarts, et c.
On the contrary, they do realize that loss of privacy makes life harder for "troublemakers", and they see that as a benefit. Don't make the mistake of assuming that everyone shares your moral code.
The best comeback I've heard to that sentiment is, "would you like a camera in your bathroom?". And then the other night I was talking to my aunt and she mentioned that she has an Alexa in the bathroom so she can listen to music and I realized it might not be as good a retort as I thought.
A better retort might be: "Do you want your health insurance premiums to be set based on which recipes you Google?" This one has the advantage of having a material impact and being almost-real[1].
I agree to an extent, but I think you're grossly oversimplifying the way that the average non-technical user views their privacy online. It's true that many people don't really care about advertisers tracking them, but they do care about other privacy-related aspects of their digital experience such as having their location tracked or the content of their communications monitored. As evidence of the latter, I present the enduring popularity of Signal and the fact that WhatsApp thought E2EE was an important enough feature to roll out across their entire user base.
The small minority of society that needs privacy (we should be honest and say that it includes some really nasty criminals as well as the good guys) really needs that kind of privacy, the kind that the average user is at least somewhat interested in. Ad-tracking isn't a huge concern to your average union organizer.
If you're on Netflix, obviously you'll want at least some of the suggested content to be relevant to you. If you love basketball, of course you'd want to be reminded of The Last Dance documentary. The same goes for any other decision in the marketplace, you want relevant products to be presented to you. And that requires information about you.
Of course there's a limit to this. I'd always want at least some content to be atypical, to let me get exposure to things outside my bubble. But it doesn't change the notion that I mostly want content relevant to me.
Now if you ask me: do you want to see ads? I'd say no, most of the time. Because I don't enjoy being distracted by people trying to sell me things when I'm doing something else, e.g. checking my friends' summer pictures.
But if you're showing me ads anyway, making them more relevant is a net benefit than to be spammed with garbage. And if that runs much of the web otherwise for free, that's great, too.
Everything but food, clothing, and a place to live are things we don't need. There are countless additional luxuries that make life more convenient or enjoyable. I found out about Instant Pots from ads, and when I finally decided to check it out and found it interesting I bought one. It has significantly improved my after-work quality of life multiple times a month with large reductions in food prep time.
I found out about glowforge the same way and added a very useful & revenue generating tool to a small side-business I run.
So I don't mind a little bit of targeted ads. I don't regard them as inherently bad. I do however believe that each individual should have complete control over the process as it relates to their own personal data.
I totally agree. But I don’t think Facebook (or anyone else to my knowledge) gives the user proper control over their data. My fear is that by feeding them this information, they’ll be able to gradually manipulate me in ways I otherwise never would have been interested in. For example I noticed that YouTube gradually started pushing me conservative leaning self improvement videos a la Jordan Peterson and co. I have never knowingly watched that type of video, and now I’m getting “alpha male” ads for supplements and courses.
This mindset is so weird to me. I can't imagine just wanting to buy things for the sake of buying things. I generally only buy things because I have problems I recognize and want to solve. And the more heavily advertised a solution to one of my problems is, the more I inherently distrust it to actually be a quality lasting product/service instead of something that's just desperately trying to program me that it's actually good.
I like to buy things myself, but I generally have a purpose of some sort, or having used similar things, am targeting a very robust thing that I can camp on and use for a decade or two.
A good friend is always buying products, trying them out, gadgets and such. And they spend a lot, but they are always super happy with their new things and frankly, give me a lot of their older things so they can get more new things!
(that's crazy, but they do them, and we are great friends, and I make good use of the stuff falling my way too)
That said, I generally don't gauge off the AD campaigns. Big spends are a rational choice as are modest ones and or guerilla type campaigns, which the latent rebel in me is a sucker for.
What I can say, knowing someone like that, is they are entertained by new things. I'm sometimes that way, but it's rare. Like a great watch might do that, or some cool tech thing I can use with my hobby computing / making. But, my entertainment is more centered on doing stuff, and or hanging with people, maybe doing things with them.
I do hate getting a thing that sucks. Shuts me down for quite a while.
I LOVE a good score, like a thing that is just awesome and I know it will perform for ages.
I'm doing the same as paulcole. If I already want to buy things, like a new table for my living room or new tiles for my bathroom, then I do want to see what's on the market beyond my bubble. That's not because I'm manipulated into buying them[1]. If I see a new ad and I like it, I do check if I can get same product for a cheaper price from a company who's ad budget is not baked into the price.
Basically I can use targeted ads as a free product discovery engine. Seeing an ad doesn't mean I'm going to mindlessly buy it. I know some people do that, but there's a way to make use of the situation.
[1] there might be an evil conspiracy among kitchen table manufacturing companies who teamed up with Hollywood producers to sell me the idea that I want a loft style new kitchen table :)
I guess im talking about something else. You’re talking about being shown ads that are related to your interests which is fine with me.
I’m talking about Facebook radicalizing people and manipulating their viewpoints and selling them on things they otherwise would have never wanted in a million years if they hadn’t used Facebook.
I’m not talking “Facebook showed me a cool pen and I like to collect fountain pens so I bought it”, no issues there. I’m talking “Facebook radicalized and manipulated me and now I am buying extremist books and courses that I otherwise never would have”.
The latter is why I disable targeted ads. Because it just an order of magnitude beyond “showing me relevant products”
If you can be manipulated by ads to be a terrorist I guess you have greater problems than tracking. In this case I'd say it's better for the public if these people are keep getting tracked.
Snap is still somehow up 50% today. Google is similarly doing great. The problem is more on Facebook's end than Apple's. TikTok did way more damage than Apple ever could.
What they need to realize is that there are advantages _and_ responsibilities that come with sheer scale. Their apps are rife with misinformation and gaslighting.
Facebook has become associated with argument, fight and social misery in the minds of their consumers. They need to take some substantial steps to change that. Merely wishing these issues away with posts, launching new products or changing the company name does not cut it.
Facebook's revenue up 35% year over year: -26% (P/E ~16)
Amazon's revenue up 15% year over year: +12% (P/E 60+)
I don't get the stock market. Facebook can simply turn on billions in revenue whenever they want still with WhatsApp, which has north of 2 billion MAU, and has not been monetized at all yet. Facebook is a reverse meme stock.
The current stock price of the company is theoretically the present value of future cashflows. For example, if you had project this revenue growth a year ago, you should have bought Facebook stock and not Amazon and you would have bet correctly. Facebook stock is up 21% from 2/1/2021 to 2/1/2022 whereas Amazon stock is down 9.54% during that same time period.
It's not just about how well they are doing, it's about how well they are doing compared to how well they were expected to be doing. If a bunch of people bought Facebook stock last year based on expectations that revenue would go up 45% year over year, then they probably over-valued the stock.
This. The market is just a bunch of random ppl and robots who are have different motivations and opinions. Some are long term oriented, some just wanna make a quick buck. It’s just a chaotic casino.
WhatsApp has competitors that in Telegram/Signal etc. that are financially stable, offer more features and security, and with the mood of the government right now they would absolutely be prevented from purchasing. They would destroy WhatsApp in weeks if they did that.
Amazon is fine and doesn't need to grow. Facebook is in danger and growth was already priced in. Now it's not.
heck, soms European politicians are calling for a split of WhatsApp from Facebook because Facebook did not honor their end of the deal when they bought WhatsApp.
fb hilariously claims that this would be impossible, which is kind of proving they didn't hold up their end of the bargain.
If I run a Facebook ad campaign for my app and given that Apple already provides the SKAdNetwork attribution mechanism, does enabling IDFA benefit my app, or it benefits only Facebook? Marketing people are trying to convince me IDFA is important for ad efficiency and thus should be enabled (with the spooky ATT popup in the beginning), but something is telling me it's not. I might be wrong and would really like to know.
So if there's SKAdNetwork attribution, why do I need to give the unique device ID to FB or Google in addition to that? They will know which ad led to the install via SKAdNetwork calls anyway, right?
I know IDFA benefits them because they can connect the dots and know which apps are installed on a given device. But does my app's campaign benefit from that so much that I should go for the ATT popup?
> So if there's SKAdNetwork attribution, why do I need to give the unique device ID to FB or Google in addition to that? They will know which ad led to the install via SKAdNetwork calls anyway, right?
Nope, they'll only know that some percentage of impressions of an ad lead to installs. With their SDK, they'll know who installed, and they can then feed this back into their ML models to find more similar people for you.
Thanks. I still doubt it though. Firstly even without the IDFA they can heuristically identify devices in vast majority of cases, in fact even more accurately compared to the IDFA method given the current opt-in rates of 30-50%. Branch does this with deep linking and it's pretty successful despite the tightened privacy on the iOS side (I can imagine how Branch and similar services irritate Apple).
My hypothesis is that Facebook pushes developers to enable IDFA because it saves them some effort: of course it's faster and easier than heuristics. Therefore, apps don't benefit from enabling the IDFA. But I might be terribly wrong and am open to counter-arguments.
Hey man, it's entirely up to you. When you have pretty rare events (like purchase/website conversions) every single one matters, but I feel like you probably have enough information to make an informed decision now.
> For years, Apple helped by offering an “identifier for advertisers” (IDFA), giving advertisers a way to track people’s behaviour on its devices. (...) But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be tracked.
And everyone praised Apple for it. But if Apple really care about privacy, they'd never allowed for IDFA in the first place…
> Google will soon offer most users of Android, its mobile operating system, the ability to opt out of ad tracking.
I'll believe it when they pass some independent audits from EU countries xD
Why does Facebook even need the IDFA? Isn’t your Facebook account UUID also a unique ID that only you have? It’s not like people are browsing Facebook without logging in.
User logs in to the Facebook app, and Facebook ties the user's IDFA to their Facebook account.
User opens non-Facebook app X that uses the Facebook SDK for ads/tracking. App X sends the IDFA to Facebook, who then looks it up in their database and sees it on your account. They can now tie all user activity tracked by app X to the user's Facebook account.
Without IDFA, this kind of cross-app tracking becomes considerably more difficult.
Apple knows where the future of technology is going, and Meta is getting in the way. Meta, appropriately renamed to reflect the trend toward augmented and virtual reality, would eventually become a threat to Apple’s walled garden business model. Apple gives lip service to privacy so long as it attracts users to their platform. However the moment we’re in is when the their invasion of privacy is meant to benefit their vision for keeping a customer totally content from home, to work, to play; they have a service for everything, and the data with which they have determined hidden markets, pain points, and markets of desire is coming at a cost for Facebook/Meta.
In the future, whether that’s 5, 10, or 20 years, the biggest companies will produce their own platforms of walled garden experiences. Meta isn’t there yet and has suffered a setback, but the reports that Meta is trying to poach Apple devs is telling about where this is all headed. The “metaverse” is nascent and mockable, but my kid will probably grow up in it just like I grew up on AIM, chat rooms, and texting.
Do you think the past 2 years of digital-only communications has really enticed kids into the arms of Facebook/the like and their live-your-life-in-a-headset plan?
I get a sense of the opposite.
Bloody cassette tapes and boomboxes are back in style. It's not just a gimmick. Kids are nostalgic for a past they didn't even know—one without such intense and obligatory interconnection—one where they can run around and get dirty and mess up and not have it broadcast to everyone and monetized by international corporations.
Ironically, I think they're looking for (and finding) a life with more interconnection by rejecting one with "such intense and obligatory interconnection" as you put it well.
I guess it's the natural evolution of things:
1. we seek connectedness.
2. we invent a set of reductionist mechanisms for achieving connectedness
3. we discover that the reductionist aspect really matters and the connectedness we've achieved is hollow and fake
4. we (or rather our heirs since we're too stubborn to change) adapt to the new reality and build some degree of real connectedness on top of the old and a warped version of the new.
"warped" meaning either "adapted to actual needs" or "perverted to serve unintended purposes" depending on whether your interests are being served or not.
FB is one of the most developer hostile platforms that I've worked with. For example, their API tokens expire in 60 days, so users of automated reporting tools are constantly having to re-grant. Why? No good reason. And the documentation is garbage. FB can't blame Apple or anyone else for those failings. They should fix the things that are under their own control.
FB has been making their API increasingly useless for a decade now. They don't want you building integrations, they want you in their walled garden using their tools.
I haven't followed the whole apple privacy push and how it impacted advertising. However, isn't everyone always logged into Facebook? If so they already know who is using it and any interaction will tell them exactly who used it. How does the Apple's platform level change effect them? Am I missing something?
It’s not Facebook knowing who used their app, it’s restrictions on what data Facebook can pull from your phone. It’s also making it clear to users how often this data is being fetched, and the option to opt out of data collection is new too.
I think their Metaverse push was actually a great way for rats to escape a sinking ship ... by finding a new ship!
Facebook just could never really capture the whole "facilitating real world interactions" thing, and for most people it became simply a way to maintain an online avatar / identity, argue about politics, comment on cat memes, and otherwise waste time in cyberspace. That's what they're good at, and maybe with the metaverse they can at least make people more productive with that.
Now there are BENEFITS to MetaVerse. Less usage of fossil fuels. Facebook also facilitated conversations between people around the world, that would otherwise not meet. But its centralized nature and limited flexibility held back the whole space.
If you were to physically track someone and catalog everything they do in meatspace, we'd call that stalking. Why is that behavior acceptable when done by software? It should not be okay, its still stalking - no matter your intentions or end goals.
This "privacy push" is only a change with respect to IDFA -- something specifically built by Apple to compete with Google's advertising ID. Opting out system-wide was already possible, but unsurprisingly its existence is not something that's well-known since Apple has established themselves as Goddess of Privacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers.
To me, this is closer to "Apple spying technology becomes opt-in and no one uses it anymore".
I find it sad that Google's response to privacy is FLoC / Topics API instead of just embracing privacy like Apple. I know Google is an ad company. Still, they mostly control both Android and Chrome which means if they followed Apple's example on privacy they wouldn't be losing much of competitive advantage because if both Android and Chrome were privacy oriented that means there'd be no OS where some competitor could track. In other words, it still seems like they'd be #1 if they switched to content based ads and context (search) but zero tracking.
If you think that manipulating people is evil, then ads are evil and hence Meta and Alphabet are evil.
If you think that some manipulation is evil, then it's about how they manipulate and on which issues. Perhaps manipulating people to buy something is ok but manipulating them to harm the society (something which Meta is clearly guilty of) is not. Then these companies could turn good if they just turned down a lot of their profit. Which of course won't happen because as companies their prime directive is to make money.
If you think that all manipulation is ok then your opinion should be dismissed.
I think expecting nothing wrt ethics, aka the "companies are amoral and will never let ethics affect profit making" meme is too cynical. It starts off as a criticism but we then accept and normalize the idea. That benefits the amoral corporations.
There are better outcomes if hold them to society's moral standards and to their own goals and claims they make to the public or shareholders. Those organisations are made up of people that mostly aren't that amoral, after all.
Its 100% because FB/meta is a growth stock and they lost users. This made all the finance projections break and institutions had th liquidate based on their new projections. That is how finance works at scale.
Looks like I jumped on the iPhone bandwagon just in time to cost facebook some money! (got my iphone ~1.5 yrs ago). What I don't get is why iphone needs to scan your phone at all. I mean they literally have a treasure trove of information of most of their users, why do they need to sell that? Why don't they just act use the megatons of info they already have on you from scanning your page and your messages to other users? They should be rolling in ad revenue without needing to spy on data on phones.
It made it considerably more difficult, because there is no legitimate user/device specific identifier that Facebook can use to track usage across different apps that use their SDK, unless the user opts in to IDFA, or logs in with their Facebook account in every app that uses it.
This won't necessarily stop them from using other personally identifying information that you might share with multiple apps (phone number, email address, etc.) Sign In With Apple helps mitigate this to an extent.
Correction: Apple's war on FB/Meta/Zucc cost Meta $10B.
Let's not disingenuously pretend they did it out their own good hearts and for people's privacy: they did not.
Also more people overly attribute this loss of Meta to Apple measure's than general Meta trends.Meta's rebranding, dystopian vision about the future and it's anti-society effects though their business model which promotes less trust in the population is what brings up this number, not entirely Apple, not entirely Android.Then again outlets and people who do these kind of oversimplifications might aswell do it for sensationalism, since we need the same people to be explained the truth when something changes.
As the Dutch say: a cat that is backed into a corner, makes unpredictable jumps. And Zuckerberg is one really smart cat, with a lot of money at his disposal. So I wouldn’t rule him out yet.
Don’t you all see it? Facebook has been declining over the past year and this is a convenient way to blame someone - anyone.
Let’s face it, what are your friends all using now? That’s right - video - YouTube and TikTok.
Facebook had no answer for video and thus lost a lot of eyeballs.
Instagram is a poor clone of TikTok and most people just repost their popular TikTok videos on Instagram reels anyway - hardly any original videos show up there.
As the world transitions to short form video even YouTube is going to feel the pinch.
Don’t you notice every one of your favorite content creators starting “clip” channels which are blowing up with YouTube shorts and reposts to TikTok?
Facebook is beginning its long inevitable decline. Who knows if it will accelerate or just be a slow death?
And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse and so he’s trying to make Facebook be the epicenter of it.
Who knows if it will work. But this has nothing if anything to do with Apple. And everything to do with the long term trends of history… or if you will, psychohistory.
> And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse
Zuckerberg has been a surprisingly good steward of the one successful idea he came across, the social network graph. His acquisitions (Instagram, etc) worked very well to supplement the social network graph and keep it going longer than it otherwise might have gone. But now that no one gives a shit about what anyone else is doing and just wants to see some jokes, that graph is getting less and less complete.
The "metaverse" is an idiotic, last-ditch attempt to lock people back into the grid by turning them into cartoon versions of themselves in a private-sector universe. It's ridiculous. Facebook is flailing.
I joined FB in 2004 as a stanford student. I used it religiously in college because it was the cool new thing at the time, but after that I mostly didn't see the appeal. I really never gave a shit what some guy from high school who I haven't spoken to in 10+ years is posting about. When there is so much more interesting content to consume in the world, why would I bother with the crap someone is posting just because we happened to touch paths at some point in the past? I care about good content, not content just because it comes from someone I know. If it's coming from a close friend, like news about a new job or a baby, I'll find out about it anyway when I see them. So for the last decade or so I sign into Facebook on avg once / month for maybe a minute at a time (only when someone tells me I need to check something), and it always perplexed me how people could spend so much time there. If everyone used Facebook like I did, it probably would have folded long ago. So I am either just a hermit or ahead of the curve, I guess time will tell.
Interesting. I feel the exact opposite. I don't really care about content anymore, it's really just mind numbing drudgery. There's a reason there's a meme about getting addicted to HN and doing "deep work" with "digital minimalism".
In recent times I've cared more and more about what my friends and family are doing, because those are the people I'm connected with in actuality, in real life.
I agree with your position - but I don't think it necessarily means you disagree with the other post.
I've completely stopped using FB because I want to connect with my friends and family. After using the product for many years I realized that idly surfing past pictures of children, weddings, BBQs, etc, that despite FB's loud insistence, that's not connection. Even commenting on friends' posts isn't... really connection?
It was idle voyeurism, or drive-by socialization.
Now I make an active attempt to keep in touch with people by, well, directly talking to them. This isn't some brilliant insight on my part - let's be honest, online socialization has been moving towards this for some time. The group chats I'm a part of, and the virtual/IRL meetings are far more fulfilling to me than any amount of FB feed surfing.
That's true, I have group chats in in as well, but FB and IG serve somewhat of a different purpose for me. See my other comment:
>I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and catch up with them that way.
>It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something. People might also not necessarily want to see what you're sending all the time, so an IG post is an easy way for people to follow you and what you're up to.
>You can almost think of it as RSS for your friends and family.
I prefer direct communication even though the surrounding culture seems to be less comfortable with that these days. While I will still post an update
on FB every few months, I got annoyed with how the algorithm made the feed harder to follow so many years ago. In the early days I was a big proponent of blasting out a post to whoever might see it, but I have too many “friends” and even if I curated that list I’d still miss so much amidst the clutter because the algorithm made it so some important-to-me stuff will never appear in my feed. And so often the people I want to see something don’t see my posts. Hence directly texting and emailing them photos! If there were a social media tool that had my best interests in mind, perhaps I could trust it to show my people the content I want to share. Maybe I’m old school since I appreciate getting email and snail mail letters from people, but now if I want to tell people something I send it to them directly. If there are too many people to email/text/call, maybe I should rethink what I’m doing and why. Some people respond positively to that and I’m guessing others find it too forward, but I don’t feel bad about being too forward. Decades ago we used to knock on front doors without telling them in advance that we were dropping by, so I don’t feel an unsolicited texted photo of my baby is so uncomfortably forward compared to that. :)
I don’t understand why you need Facebook or TikTok or Instagram to stay connected with friends and family. What even is “being connected”? I think people hold on to friends they meet too hard. People come and go. If you don’t maintain a friendship outside of social media then that’s ok. Let them go. Move on.
We run a family Slack group. All the functionality of being connected, none of the bullshit.
I can follow all my friends and family on Instagram and see what they're doing. I don't necessarily need all my friends and family to talk to each other like in a big group chat. It's a one to many relationship (me to them) versus many to many (everyone to everyone else).
I mean content as in what reddit or HN has, articles, posts, videos about a topic etc. Of course on Instagram people need to post stuff, photos and videos, but I don't think that when people say content they mean interpersonal photos and videos.
I see. I definitely think it is content (I wouldn’t draw a distinction between origin), but I can see how you have a different interpretation.
When you use Instagram do you see ads or posts from people who aren’t your friends or family members? I’ve never used it so I’m not sure how the algorithms work.
Personally if someone is my friend and has something worth sharing they’ll tell me about it directly or send me a picture. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I’ve had people I was friends with move and we’ve lost touch and so forth. I don’t see a reason to struggle to try and stop that myself. Been pretty happy this way but that is what works for me.
Ads yes, usually from random B2C companies, but I adblock so I don't see any. People who aren't your friends, no, you only see those who you follow.
I also get messages or pictures from people I'm friends with, but for people who are more acquaintances, I follow them on IG and see what they're doing, and if it's interesting I'll comment on the post or message them, and catch up with them that way.
It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something. People might also not necessarily want to see what you're sending all the time, so an IG post is an easy way for people to follow you and what you're up to.
You can almost think of it as RSS for your friends and family.
> It's also somewhat of a hassle to send messages and photos to people when you want to share it broadly, such as a trip you went on or something.
Again just my perspective but I don’t see value in broadcasting experience to a wide audience. I would view that as “content”. I don’t think it has any positive qualities. The RSS feed is a good way of thinking about it, but I say just don’t post and who cares about your trip ya know? If you don’t care to tell someone in person or over a phone call or some other directed means I think you don’t need to share anything. Again just my perspective on that. Which is why I’ve really only ever used Twitter to complain into the void from time to time.
Again, it's too many people to tell individually, it's easier for me to broadcast it and those who are interested will automatically reach out to me. There's no need on my end to do additional work so to speak, ie I don't have to message every party in the hopes that they might be interested, that's why I liken it to something like a broadcast.
There's an element of having shot themselves in the foot. FB moviled from content driven purely by your friends and what they post to content that FB have decided to feed you.
That worked great in a lot of senses. You never run out of content. FB have a lot more options for their optimisation efforts. It also made them more of a general media company.
But... it also devalued the social network/friends aspect. Now it's just about content and holding user attention. Well... that means competition is everything again. Anyone can post anywhere, or consume content anywhere.
Yeah, whenever I see others scrolling through content at Facebook, I can't help but wonder who would voluntarily subject themselves to so much garbage information. It is similar with Twitter, which I use for "science communication". But the amount of miscellaneous memes and low quality click bait ads that one has to endure is almost physically painful.
Pretty sure some people’s brains are just stuck in an infinite dopamine kick loop. I consider it similar to the opioid epidemic, where people’s brains have been re-wired to compulsively do things they might not want to do. Next time try asking someone you see scrolling Facebook if they’re actually enjoying themselves and I guarantee they will express some form of regret (but then will continue doing it).
Isn't the short answer to "why are people subjecting themselves to this" just dark patterns?
I know it sounds overly reductionist or boogeyman-esque, but they captured a market and refuse to let go, doing every single thing they can to keep and monetize human attention.
> The "metaverse" is an idiotic, last-ditch attempt
Exactly. It's a bet-the-farm move from a company that has a track record of, best I can tell, a big fat zero in terms of in-house innovation. This is like Google deciding to shift the entire company to Google+, except Google+ was just a clone of an existing thing that actually worked. Meta has no precursor. It's an entirely new thing that Facebook is trying to will into existence without even so much as testing the waters first.
I have a feeling Zuckerberg is going to enrage investors enough that he has to flee Facebook in the middle of the night under the cover of darkness with the help of a few loyal toadies providing safe passage, or he's going to start building his Führerbunker and be the last man standing while Facebook turns to rubble. I'm slightly joking, but also... Zuck has to be in the running for the worse tech CEO ever. They paid $16 billion for WhatsApp and then started promoting their own Facebook Messenger which no one used. I feel like their intent was to kill WhatsApp in the crib. But the "crib" turned out to be the entire global population and was, in fact, too big for them to kill and get people to switch to their own garbage chat app.
I concur. At some point I started looking for the best contest over caring about yahoo classmates engaging in political wars. It’s entertainment for them but not for me.
I couldn't agree with you more here. To me, it's a clear sign that he "wears no clothes". The Metaverse presentation was the most idiotic presentation I've ever seen. He must be completely surrounded himself by people that just agree with him.
I wouldn't describe the presentation as idiotic but it was hard to take seriously. The dream of immersive VR experiences showcased in Snow Crash and Ready Player One will be realized.
But it won't be soon, and the ideas shown in the video--like the surfing game--were the kind of ideas that litter the floor of the App Store.
Compelling product experiences, especially on new platforms, are extremely difficult to craft.
The taste of the creators must be exceptionally good and in this case the hardware quality and onboarding experience must bowl over anyone who touches it.
The Facebook video for Meta looked very speculative. I suspect Meta was planned for 2023 or 2024, but was rushed out the door because the brand was getting pummeled.
In that way, changing to Meta was very effective at derailing the negative attention. But not actually having a there, there is a problem when the chicken comes home to roost.
It's realized right now -- as a heavy sweaty low res tech demo not many people would want to for long. I don't doubt something like that will eventually be possible as promised. However, the tech is so far from being there, I don't think it'll happen in our lifetime.
Zuck may had well renamed his company "Flying cars".
Even in my older demographic (i.e. those of us who got in when you still needed edu addresses or shortly thereafter) which is supposedly more the core audience for Facebook this days, I don't see people "rage quitting." But I do see essentially everyone in my circles (including myself) having dialed down usage a lot.
Mid 30's here and I joined right after the .edu requirement was dropped. Everyone in my age group is on Facebook but they rarely post anymore because they are busy! They all have kids and jobs and house projects they are working on and the novelty of updating about everything has worn off so they post very infrequently. When Gen-Zers make jokes about Facebook being for old people, that's us!
The algorithmic feed can't handle the "lack" of new posts though so it keeps inserting lots of ads, videos, and whatever that I don't actually care about. I really like Facebook when it is about interacting with my friends but everything else is a distraction. The level of distraction in Facebook is just too high. It's okay if nothing is going on!
Mid 40's here. I have a single friend that still posts frequently. Everyone else has either dropped off entirely or rarely posts. My wife is on facebook all the time, but it's for her social groups, like Mom, teacher groups.
At least for me, the overheated political posts became a huge turn off. I think many people left after the election.
I agree he’s been a good steward of the graph — even people who hate Facebook and don’t use Facebook are actually using Facebook! — but I suspect he needed Sandberg to turn it into the big money.
It's very unclear to me why Second Life v2 would be of interest to more than a tiny sliver of the population. The last thing I'd want from Facebook is to turn into a more immersive experience.
>Accelerated by the happenings of the last 2 years.
How? A fair number of people prefer to shut off their video on calls. And my observation is that coming out of COVID people want more in-person interactions, not less.
Zuck moved first in “metaverse” with Oculus 7 years ago and what does he have to show for it?
Some decent/good hardware locked behind logging into your Facebook account.
If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
>If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
Probably true but no one else would probably have made it work either.
VR tech isn't really there today but even if it were better, it's still more of a niche use case than its fans would have it be. (Certain types of gaming, maybe virtual tourism...) People don't want things to be immersive most of the time. Ask me to wear a VR headset for a routine work meeting? That will be a big "nope" from me.
>If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.
Did they fail? Most people don't hate Facebook as much as HN and seem not to have a problem with Oculus requiring a Facebook account, given that the Quest 2 is the best selling VR headset by far.
In my account they definitely failed.
As you say, they did a great job with the hardware but the only real software they are even advertising for it is a worse version of vrchat that they took way too long to clone.
I don’t know how to chock it up other than as a failure, they acquired instagram only 2 years earlier. Instagram is now a Snapchat tiktok and a little YouTube wrapped into one.
If this isn't a lie and Apple flipping that switch cost Facebook $10bn, then that tells me my personal information is worth a lot. What I was getting from Facebook in exchange for my data was too little. I use Google a lot more than Facebook and frankly what I get from them in exchange for my data is probably also way too little.
I wish there was some type of consumer union where we could negotiate with these companies as a block.
It's not perfect but you can look at average revenue per user on Facebook. There are huge differences based on the country (note this is quarterly):
Q4 '20
Worldwide: 10.14
US: 53.56
Europe: 16.87
Asia Pacific: 4.05
Rest of world: 2.77
So you're worth just over $200 a year. This has gone up a lot over time and is considerably higher than other social networks. Just a year ago, it was 41.41 (23% less) and a year before that is was 34.86 (15% less).
It's harder to do a comparison to google, but I'm sure you're very valuable to them as well, increasingly so.
Maybe, but I'm not sure a working professional adult is an ad-clicker, and I'm not sure that the ads they click on can con them into doing something they wouldn't normally do very often.
> Maybe, but I'm not sure a working professional adult is an ad-clicker, and I'm not sure that the ads they click on can con them into doing something they wouldn't normally do very often.
As a working professional adult, who has access to many others working professional adults, I assure you, ads work.
You’re simplifying ads to a barebones click to rate exchange. Ads are way more subtle than that.
I don't doubt they work. I doubt the margin of work done by facebook ads on working professional adults over the work of ads that they are exposed to through other means and by word of mouth. And not that that margin doesn't exist and not that it's not worthwhile to advertise on facebook, but the doubt is that as compared to any other demographic being advertised to that it's worth so much more.
Advertising to impulsive spenders is worth more than advertising to less impulsive spenders. Less impulsive spenders are informed by ads, more impulsive spenders are convinced by ads.
Ads are extremely successful for high-ticket offers. If you'll selling a multi-thousand dollar product or service, you can afford a lot of impressions to get just the few clicks that convert for you.
Except the government is a monopoly with its own agenda. In addition it already kind of owns us (well a large percentage), what would it gain if it negotiated this deal for us? I would argue it can gain more power by making a deal with facebook.
So let’s say I’m in CA voting for my two Senators. How much does my vote actually count when 10 other states combined have the same population but 20 Senators?
How much does my vote count even for representatives if I’m in a state that’s heavily gerrymandered?
How do you propose the mayor legislate BigTech? Even on the state level, gerrymandering effects representation. Most of the population in GA (where I live), Florida, and Texas don’t support the state laws. Those three states are passing all kinds of laws to make it harder for people to vote. Especially after the “stolen election” that saw GA turn blue.
And before the whataboutism replies start, I’m sure the same happens on the other side. I just know more about my own state.
Just because it was done by design doesn't mean it's a non-issue. The Senate is an extremely undemocratic organization. The population discrepancy between States is much higher now than when the country was founded.
Nor do the reasons the founders did it this way exist anymore.
People confuse the arguments made out of political expediency for political gospel.
Even though many points made about the constitution were rooted in political theory, and make good sense even today, that doesn’t change the fact that the people involved were politicians who were looking to make the best deal possible within the context of a rapidly failing state under the articles of confederation.
The irony is that always gets brought up as though it was actually meant to represent the value of the slave’s humanity.
The large slaveholding states actually wanted 5/5ths whereas states will small slave populations wanted 0/5ths. Slaves couldn’t vote, their interests were ancillary to the whole discussion. The compromise was about pure political power for those that dominated them.
The repeal of the 3/5ths clause along with the subsequent legal restrictions and terrorism against the black population of the south that followed, gave the south more power, and subsequently made it harder to dislodge Jim Crow.
But your point is still very valid. Somehow people are comfortable compartmentalizing the notion that the constitution is/was perfect, except for that one part that somehow doesn’t count and was “inevitably doomed” anyways.
Simply because something was designed a certain way 250 years ago, doesn’t mean it’s a non issue.
The political problem they were trying to solve at the time (balancing the interests of independent sovereign political entities with respect to land claims and future political power) doesn’t necessarily map onto the problems we have today.
If we assume that Switzerland is probably closest to the ideal of a direct democracy please take note that voters can not directly vote for the executive government (The Bundesrat, or federal council).
They elect members of the two houses, which in turn elects the 7 executives. Usually this is based on the recommendation by the parties and with a specific formula considering party, language and area of the country.
We also can't fire government members this afternoon. It's just like everywhere else. We can just not re-elect them.
You appear to make up your own extreme definition of what the words "direct democracy" should be and what they should mean. But it's not like that. There are ways words and condepts are commonly used. [1]
Looks like I need a new word to describe a system where everyone rules, rather than certain people or organization, since both democracy and direct democracy are apparently taken to describe systems where all people don’t actually rule. Maybe “actual true direct pure democracy” should do.
So many towns where I live put issues on the agenda for town meetings. How this works in practice is that, if there's some issue that someone (like a developer) feels strongly about, they pack the town meeting with allies and push it through because most people probably don't care much and don't even attend the meeting.
You can't have a democracy with 100 IQ idiot majority, because their decisions are governed by whatever gets poured into their poorly working brains that week, so you end up with corporatocracy or fascism, pretending to be a democracy.
I know this isn't the point, but you do realize that the IQ is rearranged to fit a bell curve with 100 being the exact middle average, right? By literally the definition of IQ, 100 IQ is not "an idiot".
Then we need to fix the apparent problem of idiot majority. If you say most people are stupid why would you want them to vote every 4 years. Can you trust their vote? Do you still advocate for the current form of “democracy”? Maybe we should go back to monarchy and have only one glorious ruler rather than one glorious government.
You can fix most people, or you can just abandon one idea because it's incompatible with how most people are.
Tough choice, but I think I'll opt in for the latter.
Uh! Oh! But if not democracy, then what? Then fascism and corporatocracy - what we have had for as long as you've been alive. You just don't know it :)
Your reply is confusing. So you maintain that most people are stupid, and still want to give them voting rights. What is the logic behind that? To clarify, I don’t think most people are stupid, and I advocate for direct democracy.
“ In short, if you're excited about iOS 14, you are more likely to be poor than not”
Why are supposing that all rich people made their money through online advertising? It’s clearly untrue and certainly not a robust enough a conclusion to feel bad about your relative success.
> Why are supposing that all rich people made their money through online advertising
If you replace "all" with "most," which is how I phrased it, then your sentence sounds like this:
> Why are supposing that most rich people made their money through online advertising
Ok now we're onto something interesting, but I can see how you might be still struggling with the phrasing. May I suggest to reformulate as follows:
> Why are supposing that most rich people made their money by selling something for more than they paid for it?
Perfect! So we just have to answer if in the context of most people who became rich, "online advertising" = "selling something for more than they paid for it." I would argue that you can sell things without advertising them, but you certainly have to make people aware that you're selling those things one way or another (and mind you, in the context of rich people, you have to do that at a very large scale). So when answering how MOST rich people attracted attention in 2021, and that AT SCALE, I think the above is not so untrue (you will certainly find many who ALSO used TV and other channels, but very few people with a TV budget had a $0 paid social budget).
How do you know what you are getting from them is too little until the service itself is gone? I suppose you can estimate but I feel like without targeted advertising the web would be a dark place. Personally I don’t pay for much (prime, Netflix, NY Times) and expect a lot. The people I know are the same
This comes up again and again. People will continue creating and posting even without ad money. They will post for art, for study, hobbies, social issues or just to organize events. There are also those who publish free content and make a profit on something related. That's how the good old internet was working back in the day.
The problem with current internet is that everyone is trying to get the ad money so they don't really align their interests with us who want quality content.
The problem is the freeloaders of the internet far outweigh the people that want to pay for services. Until that changes, we will continue to see the internet dominated by targeted advertising. Honestly, it will be interesting to see what happens to services like DDG. I think it will be a true test of what the world wants, an extremely well funded machine like Google or a more lean privacy centric tool. Capitalism is an interesting thing though. Targeted advertising naturally brings in more money (back to the freeloaders point)
Your data are only as valuable to Facebook as your buying power. Obviously that's not the same across all people, and while the average revenue per US user might be in the teens per month, many US consumer are in the single digits. So presumably a consumer union might get you a fraction of that value back - a few bucks per month. Why not - who wouldn't want a free monthly cup of coffee? I suppose the only catch here is the more excited you get about this concept, the less money your union could negotiate on your behalf.
It's more about my privacy being worth a lot more than what Google is willing to pay in the form of services. As an individual, the only thing I can do is stop using Google and Google wouldn't miss me.
Apple is a cartel and Google pays the protection money that Facebook failed to. If Apple really cared about privacy and not money, they'd block Google from the platform too.
A single policy changed wiped 25% of a trillion dollar company's market cap. That's a gravitational wave that shows what kind of overwhelming monopoly power Apple wields.
To be clear, I hate Facebook and ads, but Apple is an incredibly dirty business and is doing massive amounts of harm to startups and our industry as a whole.
Apple owns "America's computer" (50+% of average American's internet usage), and they control it like a dictatorship. High taxes, close inspection of every deploy, arbitrary rulings, forced use of Apple platform pieces, no possible business relationships with your customers.
The DOJ needs to step in and remove the App Store monopoly, its tax, and its arbitrary rules. When you run a device this pervasive and entrenched, it's no longer a platform. It's a common carrier. App installs need to happen over web, where they'd still be just as safely sandboxed, monitored, and remote killswitchable.
To be fair, they didn't block Facebook from their platform. Users now just need to agree that they want to be tracked (spoiler: practically no one wants to be tracked).
I don't disagree with your general take and save for an iPod classic I don't own any Apple gear. But in my book that was one of the better moves that Apple ever pulled.
Yeah. More privacy by getting rid of third-party cookies and having the prompt for apps is a great thing. That it also reduces the revenue of the two monopolists who didn’t even bother to differentiate that revenue (Facebook is 98% ads, Google is at something like 81%) is the cherry on top.
> It would be fair business if the DOJ removed the app store, but Apple removed APIs that allow tracking.
Why is that more fair? I bought an iPhone a month ago (my first) in part because I want their version of the App Store and I want more privacy controls. I actually like that Apple's requirements push developers to make a native app rather than a web app (for example).
I'm certainly sympathetic to the argument that 30% is too large of a cut and it's well past time for payment reform. However, I think consumers would be worse off losing Apple's more tightly controlled app store implementation. If you want more options, go Android. That's what I did for more than a decade.
Because this article is not about developers having to pay 30%
Your problems outside of the 30% (which is valid) is that you want to be able to ship crappy cross platform web apps and know more about your users (which I don’t want).
While I agree with you that Facebook (the app) is in decline and Facebook/Meta are rushing to diversify as the market changes, the premise of the article that Apples change has significantly effected Facebooks revenues is not a lie.
Apples change has fundamentally damaged ad conversion attribution from the Facebook/Instagram apps on iOS, we have seen it it ourselves.
It may be that the exact figure of $10B is inflated, it could even be an underestimate. Meta may have an agenda in how they are spinning it, almost certainly do in fact. However I can assure you that the fundaments of the article and what they are saying is true.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. This privacy change only affects apps on iOS?
I only use the facebook.com website. Ad tracking in that context hasn't changed?
Among my peers where I've observed how they use FB, I think it's an even split. For me, if there's a web site, I skip installing the app. And of course a majority of news and social and commerce web sites now prompt you to install the app.
Personally when I occasionally use Facebook its via the app so that I am not logged in in by browser. Don't want them spying on everything I do online.
Twitter on the other hand I use in the browser as I like to be able to open threads in tabs to come back to.
This seems like post-hoc confirmation of "I knew it! I told you guys so!" like
people who claim a catastrophic recession is around the corner, quarter after next. If you have some special insight that the wider market doesn't and hasn't price in, then the odds and prices are asymmetrically tipped in your favor.
As an example, I spent $13,580 shorting Facebook on Wednesday, which I haven't sold but will probably later today. Yesterday, those short contracts were worth north of $200k. I did it within a Roth IRA, too, which makes it even higher conviction.
Truth is, it was a gamble. No one really knows. If you can truly predict where Facebook will be in 5 years, 2 years, even next quarter, you can be really rich.
Incredibly good bet!!!
Congrats all around.
I made the opposite bet (whoops!) but on a much smaller scale. A tiny 300-270 put spread that lasted 2 days. Then, right before the earning, exactly 7 minutes before 4pm, I kid you not, I had a premonition. Something in my head said "Get out get out get out". So I closed out my spread, pocketed my measly gain of $775 and walked out the door to pick up my kid from school. So I'm back home at 4:30pm, I just login to ib for curiosity sake, just to see what would have happened if I had stuck to my guns. Jesus Mary & Joseph I was so shell shocked...would have lost well over 50K if I hadn't pulled the trigger !!! I was so glad I danced a jig & took my kid out for icecream. He wanted to know why, but explaining all this shit...$775 profit over 2 days for pushing a couple of buy & sell buttons & narrowly avoiding a major, major $50,000 loss. Definite icecream day. I just said Daddy is happy lets buy icecream.
That seems a pretty smart short (in retrospect). I guess you were banking on them releasing concrete numbers on the iOS changes and people panicking from it? Seems really obvious in retrospect and relies on pretty common knowledge so I'm surprised that worked so straightforward. Good job.
I've noticed they stopped showing ads from actual businesses. Instead, it was sponsored posts from individuals self-promoting for purely vain reasons as opposed to some commercial reason.
So you can sell covered puts / calls, or buy puts /calls. Those do not require margin. You cannot sell uncovered calls / puts, which would require margin.
Part of my position was buying $280 weekly puts which were $1.39 each, now $49.5 each ( still haven't sold lol).
On a more general note, anyone know of any good guides/articles describing these sorts of bets? I often have a sense of where a stock price will go but have no idea how to take advantage.
Just note, the poster most probably did not actually 'short' facebook, the poster used options to do this. Its pretty simple for the buy case.
Options have a strike price and an expiration date. You buy a CALL option, with a strike price, that gives you an option to buy that stock for that price. Or you can buy a PUT option, that gives you the option to sell at that strike price.
Example using made up numbers. FB is $240. You look on the options tab and you can see various expiration dates. Lets pick 3 months out. You may see a Call option for a strike of $250 for $20. That means that you have until 3/4/2022 to exercise that option, if FB is trading for > $260, you will make a profit. ($240 + $20). If FB doesn't trade you make nothing.
Puts work similarly. The strike would just be $230. Note, you don't have to exercise, if next week FB goes to $300, your call's value will skyrocket to ~$60-70. You can sell the option any time, you don't have to wait.
You may have noticed the cost of the option is greater than the delta between the exercise price and the value of the share. In my example this is roughly due to the time between now and the exercise date. Over time, this shrinks, this is called beta-decay.
> Let’s face it, what are your friends all using now? That’s right - video - YouTube and TikTok.
I don't think HN reader's friends are Facebooks growth market. You might be looking at a biased sample. This is their growth levels of the last 3 years.
Looking at something from 2 years ago in social media isn't really relevant, trends change FAST. This TikTok trend has taken over the world quite a bit over the last few months.
Also, annual growth worldwide tends to hide one key things. It might mean Facebook is arriving in markets where internet penetration was poor (poor/slow data, etc..), however you have to look at their core market where advertisers spend money. In those markets, have they been gaining users? It's been said that they were losing eyeballs in core markets while expanding in markets that didn't bring much money.
If they lose customers in their core market, that means the service has been going down from their saturation point instead of stabilizing. And a worldwide growth would hide this data.
Honestly it's a really poor experience compared to TikTok - ignoring the whole Chinese State controlled thing - the algorithm on YT just doesn't match TT's ability for content discovery.
I haven't installed the app either but on the odd occasion will doomscroll in a private browser session.
Yeah I guess the only one I can think of is the vscode channel that does some of those ... they're actually kinda 50/50 annoying / helpful. It's a weird thing to do a short on.
The YouTube recommendation algorithm prefers longer videos than that. It is specifically trained to optimize for “watch minutes,” and longer videos seem more effective than extremely short ones.
Youtube has recently started recommending short videos too, varying from 10 sec to 1 min, but that depends on your viewing habits. They even have a "#shorts" feature to compete with TikTok.
> I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago
The only way the Metaverse would be a viable replacement for Facebook would be if Occulus (or similar VR headset) adoption was to rise to the level of iPhone adoption, and subsequent integration into nearly every aspect of daily life. This seems to be incredibly unlikely to me.
I have an Occulus quest. The first week I had it I thought it was the most amazing device I ever owned. A month later I used it less, and now, a few years later, it's gathering dust on a shelf. VR is great, but it takes a fair amount of energy, space and time to use. Even from solely the perspective of gaming, the low-power, light weight Switch has had a much bigger impact on my life than the Quest. I can play BotW for 4 hours without fatigue if I have time, with VR more than an hour and I start to feel very tired of the experience.
Now compare the Quest with the iphone, I'm looking at my iphone as I type this on my laptop. I use my iphone to order food, find directions around town, communicate with my family, check up on work. 8 or so years back I tried going back to a "dumb" phone and ultimately went back. I switched to android for a few years and still went back to the iphone since it has so many services nicely integrated.
I simply can't imagine any world where the "metaverse" comes anywhere near the adoption of facebook, even if Meta mailed an occulus to everyone on the planet for free.
> And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse and so he’s trying to make Facebook be the epicenter of it.
Facebook videos are super annoying. Simple bait stretched out just long enough to get ads in the middle. Even if a video looks interesting I have to first ask myself if it’s worth 2.5 minutes of fluff and a 10 second ad for only a few seconds of payoff. Facebook has incentivized this behavior to the point I now simply refuse to click on their videos.
It's the same thing the marvelverse is... a way of referring to all of facebook's products. They're just trying to generate some hype and make their products look more forward thinking.. even though they're exactly the same as always.
It's a concept originally popularized in Snowcrash, that Facebook is attempting to latch on to as a marketing campaign to make their products seem future looking, but in reality havent changed one bit. To further this marketing effort, they created a VR chat that is a trash product that no one will ever use.
I don't think it's a (complete) lie. In the short term I think it is very much the truth: 2021 once again saw record revenue for them [0] so, absent a specific threat like Apple, there is no reason to project a $10B loss over expected revenue gains during the short 1-year term at issue during the call.
On the other hand, Apple's actions are part of an overall trend that represents an existential threat, for the exact reasons you mention and others. The main issue is probably something like the innovators dilemma: they've become reactive, and slow in those reactions. Their largest successes in recent year haven't come from their own creations, but from acquisitions. NYT has a pretty good analysis of some of its systemic flaws [1]
YouTube already saw this with Vines, though. TikTok is just a thousand times better than Vine. But ultimately the access to long-form content is going to help YouTube more because of the inherent access to more advertising. From what I know, people on TikTok make almost nothing from view counts. YouTube going to shorts is going to start eating away at those creators.
TikTok users in the West skew young (ie poor) and it's all short form video, which fb calls out as harder to monetize, so I can't see how TikTok is a threat to soak up the ad spend. We'll see what happens when they try to pivot from growth to profit. For reference, with similar userbase, ig brings in 6x the ad revenue of TikTok.
The markets are unreasonably obsessed with growth imo.
"Don’t you notice every one of your favorite content creators@
NO! Because I don't care about stupid content creators.
Facebook was never really about content creators, youtube and tiktok are all about that. It's a different thing. Not that I am a Facebook fan either but yes eyeballs are going to youtube and tiktok and other content creators but it's a different business and that is why Facebook is stuck versus these.
I'd guess that desperate-to-stay-employed journalists feel far more need to suck up to Zuck than to suck up to Cook. And the "why Apple is in the right" case takes a whole lot more & longer words and concepts to explain. Vs. "Big meanie Apple took $10B from every's-favorite-site Facebook".
Facebook failed to pay the big money to Apple that they should have been paying for years.
If Zuck had been handing Apple $5,000,000,000 per year as google does, then Apple would never have kneecapped Facebook.
Larry and Sergei know how the protection racket works. You pay your dues to the local mob, you get to do business in their street corners.
What do google pay Apple $5b for? Ummm… to be in the search of Safari. Yeah right. They all know google simply pays Apple because they don’t want no trouble, so they say “Safari”, write a huge cheque, and google gets to keep doing business in Apple devices.
Tim is The Godfather. He who owns the platform owns the city. Everyone must respect and pay their dues, if they want to do business in this city.
Apple has sent Facebook to sleep with the fishes because zuck didn’t show no respect and didn’t pay no dues.
1. All Apple did was giving users a choice (and they should've done that ages ago). If users didn't mind being tracked, or liked the "more relevant adverts" tracking provides, they would not have opted out.
2. Google is subject to exactly the same rules as Facebook is. Their apps have to ask for permission to track as Facebook's do, and Safari (which enforces privacy in many ways, too) is the same for google.com as for facebook.com.
They pay Apple for being search provider in Safari and Siri the same way they pay Mozilla, because searches mean data and displayed adverts.
Part of the issue is the language. Apple used the “ask no to track language”, but when it came to their own services chose “turn off personalized ads”:
Is the issue the language? It's not clear from the language or the article that Apple's version disables any tracking at all. It seems like two different things.
Why would disabling personalized ads necessarily disable tracking? [EDIT] Consider: toggling the display of something does not necessarily change the underlying data, or data collection, behavior.
Why would all data used to personalize ads have to be tracking? It could also be things like purchase data from the very service that's advertising to you. Halting collection—not use for ad personalization, but collection—of that would go beyond what even I would consider tracking (and I think most of what goes on in the ad world today should simply be illegal). It would be possible to personalize ads only based on this kind of thing—in fact, that's what the article seems to imply is going on, at least in part.
So there are at least two ways that setting might mean something different from one that disables tracking.
Sort of. Again, it's possible to personalize ads without tracking, unless tracking means "collecting literally any data, including order history for a logged-in user" or things like selecting ads based on geography for an address that you provided, not even GPS tracking or something like that.
It is entirely possible that the settings do totally different things, so the different language isn't some kind of trick. I think it's likely that picking either of those phrases and using it for both would result in the description of the respective settings being less accurate.
Swap the one that applies to applications to "disable personalized ads", rather than "disable tracking".
But it doesn't do that—does it? It disables (a certain kind of) tracking. The tracking may not even be used for ads. Apple has no way to guarantee that. You may still see personalized ads based on other data.
Make the Apple one "disable tracking" rather than "disable personalized ads". But the setting might not do that at all, while still disabling personalization. In fact, the ad personalization may not have been based on tracking in the first place, and even if it were, disabling personalization could very well leave the tracking in place.
The accusation was that Apple's describing the same thing two ways to give themselves an advantage, but I'd say the settings very likely do not do the same thing.
No you don’t need tracking for personalized ads. Apple defines tracking as sharing information about the user between distinct 3rd parties, while it personalizes ads based on your behavior within Apple’s own services.
Oh, cool, like you're a hunter or in animal control or something? Trekking all over the wilds, keen eye for detail, grand adventures, lots of mud and amazing stories?
"No, I manage a zoo. I track the zoo animals in a spreadsheet. I sit in an office."
>>>
AFAIK Apple means the hunting kind, when they write "tracking". As in following a user around and watching them while they use services & apps that you don't operate.
That's definitely not why they pay Mozilla. Being the default search engine in a browser that a minuscule percentage of the market uses, and then the vast majority of those only use because they're hostile to Google, isn't worth shit.
If I go to my bodega once a month to spend $80 on sticks of $2 incense, it's because I'm buying drugs.
Not counting gmail, calendar, or the docs/drive suite, Google has >12 applications on the app store. Apple's "search" is pretty crappy WRT seeing what a dev has released (or at least the Google LLC "dev"), hence the range.
I didn't say they had no apps. I said they don't really have apps and they don't. Their main product is search and it's accessed through the browser.
If what FB is saying is true then the move by Apple helps Google. There's more or less two options for online advertising. So if companies spend less on FB then they're probably going to spend those dollars with Google
Google search, in an iOS app. Not everyone uses it, sure, but has over 341k reviews. Facebook, as a point of comparison, only has about 4x more reviews at 1.2M. 4x is a lot, but it's also a lot less than I'd expect over something primarily used in the browser.
> 1. All Apple did was giving users a choice (and they should've done that ages ago). If users didn't mind being tracked, or liked the "more relevant adverts" tracking provides, they would not have opted out.
The choice existed for a long time. What Apple did was make that choice front and centre for everyone, as opposed to being buried in a settings menu for privacy-conscious people to hunt down.
There is an enormous deference between Search Ads (such as those in Google search results) and display advertising such as Facebook and Googles Display Network.
I assure you Google are paying Apple to be the default search engine exactly because it's basically a licence to print money.
It has nothing to do with display ads.
If Facebook had a search engine they would bid against Google for that role, but as it appears to be the case there is a Google/Facebook gentlemens agreement to not compete in that area.
Well yeah, Google tried to build a social network (actually several) and failed; Facebook didn't try to build a search engine - that wouldn't fit into their business model of sucking you in and driving you to sign up to Facebook. I mean, after they bought Oculus, they even started requiring a FB account to use the device, but they couldn't have done that for a search engine, nobody would have used it. But lots of others did, and failed (or at least couldn't compete with Google).
So we can conclude that neither building a successful social network nor building a successful search engine is easy :)
but fb does have a search engine? Admittedly it only searches for content on their own site, but as you note the strategy has been to make the walled garden so expansive that users would never want to leave (or be able to --- see India). Building a general purpose web search engine would be to give up on the "own everything" strategy.
Yet Google tries really hard to get you to log in, to the point where if you log into the browser to be able to sync your bookmarks and settings, you will be logged into your Google search as well.
>There is an enormous deference between Search Ads (such as those in Google search results) and display advertising such as Facebook and Googles Display Network.
I assure you HN does not understand anything about Ads. Ever since I realise HN had some deep misunderstanding with Online ads, I have been stating this difference for over 3 years. The only thing I got on HN was all ads are evil. Targeting Ads, Tracking Ads, Search Ads, or the latest buzzword surveillance capitalism.
>FB could surely muster the engineering resources to create a search engine that matches what Google has today.
I wouldn't be so sure. Bing is an excellent counter example to that statement. And not just because (from my experience) it doesn't produce the same quality of results. It's also about user adoption. MS built a reasonable, if not clearly superior alternative to Google and spend enormous sums of money marketing it, making it the default option on the default browser installed on millions of new PC's each year, and is has single-digit market share.
Facebook doesn't have those inroads on the PC market to leverage. They'd have to build something so much better than Google that it would make Google look like Yahoo when Google first arrived on the scene. At which point Google could probably stop sandbagging their own search efforts that favor ads space over results and make up any lost ground pretty quickly.
I'm also not confident in Facebook's ability to create high quality new products anymore. The most recent big successes have come from acquisitions. I suppose they might be able to buy DDG, but they'd almost immediately lose all of its users. And unless the still wanted to build their own actual engine, they'd have to rely on the goodwill of MS to continue getting most results via Bing's engine.
Since I detect sarcasm, I'm not sure how to respond.
As someone who chooses Apple partly because of the comparative privacy versus Android I'm actually quite happy that they bargain with other parties? It reminiscent of the working of efficient markets. I have a choice. No privacy (Google, Facebook), or a tidbit (Apple, G/F via Apple) or a lot (custom ROM options, drop all G/F/A). For a tidbit of privacy I pay more, but how much I pay more is lowered by the incoming cashflow at Apple due to these arrangements. So there is a cafateria model with a powerful party bargaining on my behalf and in line with my preferences. For me, that's glass half full.
You don't have a choice with Apple, and that's at the crux of the definition of privacy. What you're doing is justifying a specific choice that you've made, by assuming good faith and bad faith with certain companies - take a few minutes to read up on recent news and you can easily see that they do make anti-privacy choices. Their aim is not user privacy, but user lock-in. But convincing us that it's in our best interest is what's called marketing. There is no 'bargaining' going on, there is no cafetaria, nor are your best interests in anyone's minds. It's simply a gray area in which your data is the currency.
Privacy is not achieved through brand loyalty, it can only be achieved through understanding what you've got and taking control of it. It dismays me to see attitudes like this so prevalent in today's privacy conversations, I feel it will be 10 years too late before we collectively realize what a mistake we're making.
How does good privacy engineering at the platform level have any effect on lock-in?
It is abundantly clear that Apple loves locking people in, and also clear that they love taunting their advantages over their competitors. But I just don’t see how the better engineered platform protections for privacy have anything to do with the lock-in (no network effects, no switching costs)
My favorite example of this is the Find My network: did they totally screw Tile in their own competitive interests? Absolutely. Does their end-to end-encrypted Find My network have state of the art cryptographic design to minimize data collection? Absolutely.
Privacy also has concrete value for Apple. Apple made a fair argument that the Health app is HIPAA compliant because while the backend is nothing special, the syncing is end to end encrypted.
They do make mistakes, and they are a large self-interested corrupt terrible bad corporation, but I am happy that they are pushing the industry forward.
It's really interesting to see certain Apple users justify how Apple's choices are always the right one (even when they are diametrically opposite to Apple's choice from a few months ago, at which point they also defended the Apple choice as the right one).
And I say this as a long time Apple user, both on macs and iPhones.
Opinions aside, Google are paying for a thing, not just donating money. What would Facebook pay for? I'm not sure that them being a search engine makes sense, I don't think Apple would give up the position of iMessage in favour of Messenger.
(Disclaimer, I work at Google, but don't have any inside info or opinion on the Apple/Google relationship.)
> I'm not sure that them being a search engine makes sense
It really does. Want to search for a local house cleaner or children's entertainer, include Facebook pages with web results. Want to search for things to do in a particular town, include Facebook events with web results about museums and such like.
This is just scratching the surface too. There are lots of possibilities here so I'd be very surprised if Facebook haven't explored this idea.
Please stop creating accounts to post unsubstantive comments and flamebait. It destroys what this place is supposed to be for, and will eventually get your main account banned as well.
I'm not sure if you're shitposting or actually replying. Alphabet pays Apple to be the default search-engine in Safari. Thats it, Google are not exempt from Apples privacy policies. Google dragged their feed after the iOS 15 privacy changes, but in the end had to cave.
Right, like as without those 5B Apple would screw up its products by handing over all search to some guy with a Bing scraping Perl script cosplaying as a search engine.
Probably what OP is suggesting is that in return for that $5B, Apple will call up Google and say "hey we're adding these new privacy protections, will that be a problem?" and Google will have time in advance to get around them
For Apple, which has a market cap of over $3 trillion, the $10B from Google is the equivalent of sofa cushion money.
Apple isn’t going do any favors for Google for a measly $10B.
It’s much more meaningful for Google and Google knows it. For them, it’s a bargain, as it gives its advertisers access to customers who actually spend money.
Google has an easier time providing targeted ads via search keywords. Facebook users spend most of their time in their feeds which is a relatively weak signal for monetization.
Note that google appears to be acting as though they are effected, you can see this in their push for FLOC/topics (but the impetus for this could be coming from android moreso than search)
This suggests Google should charge FB a few billion per year, lest they implement the same feature in Android. They could spin it as a research partnership to investigate the social effects of platform tracking. As long as partners keep paying, the research can continue, but once they stop paying it's time to act on the research results...
Thing is on Android, hardly anyone pays for everything. No money from iOS, no money...
Many people i know say that Facebook ads simply stopped working. You pour in $100K and... nothing happens.
But Google are much, much less dependent on apps because they get all that sweet juicy search data from each iPhone (which they can then use to track you across their apps, potentially (this is possible to implement, I have no idea if they do it)).
A tiny bit with their in App revenue split which Facebook tries to avoid. Although I doubt paying for it make much difference. You can tell Tim Cook and Apple, just like HN hate Facebook and Ads ( Which they have to backtrack and state they dont hate ads ). It is an ideology crash.
No, it is not an ideology crash. Apple is perfectly fine serving their own ads for which they are building a targeting profile.
It is an incentive crash. Apple tried iAds before and it didn't work as they couldn't do good personalised ads, this is them keeping the advantage just for them and getting good PR.
Apple is not a saint in this, not even a single bit.
dang can you please enforce the rules more? In the last weeks hn is getting overrun with spammy troll accounts splattering conspiracy theories left and right.
Something isn't a conspiracy theory just because it's an opinion that you do not like. I personally found the OPs take interesting, though obviously written a little tongue-in-cheek.
The relationship between Google and Apple is outrageous, criminal even. Yet for some reason it hasn't dawned on the Economist. Maybe some clear spoken shitposts on a popular tech site is what it takes.
How about a bit of critical thinking before yelling "Conspiracy!"? Concerning "sources", if Apple and Google are engaged in joint anti-competitive behavior, they'd probably not write press releases about it. But of course there is well-documented precedence of them doing exactly that, being caught and getting a mild slap on the wrist, so it's not a completely outlandish notion to entertain.
As for the officially stated reason: do you really think that there is an alternative search engine provider that Apple would switch to if Google didn't pay them 10 figures a year? If so, which one(s)? If not, what are they actually paying for? To mitigate the risk of a second Apple Maps? But is the case for entering the search engine market really remotely as compelling as entering the mapping space?
I'm not saying it's an open and shut case, but the idea that Google essentially pays Apple money a) as a "good-will gesture" b) to give regulators the impression that the search engine market is more competitive than it is seems possible to me. Whereas one of the alternative scenarios proposed here, that Apple would pick duckduckgo otherwise, really does not.
Personally, if I were Sundar, I'd be way more worried about anti-trust or Apple siding too much with the privacy of their users or stepping otherwise on my toes than say duckduckduckgo becoming a serious competitor because Apple anointed them default search provider after I failed to fork over enough money. I'd probably even do my best to keep a bunch of minimally viable competitors around -- not viable enough to ever pose a threat, but viable enough to keep anti-trust at bay for a bit longer. And both duckduckgo and firefox seem to fit that bill perfectly.
You are speculating as much as the op does. It's just not based in truthful statements. Ofc everything you and op are rhyming together can be true but at least don't state it as fact like op did.
> A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable.
It is because you can't validate it how is it that hard to distinguish between true statements and speculations. The same goes for your sources claims brought up in court are not true statements until they are proven to be factually correct.
You’re basically saying every comment here is a conspiracy theory, since (essentially) nobody here provides sources and everybody is convinced they’re spewing the unadulterated truth.
By your definition, it’s a conspiracy theory for me to say, “I’m sure JFK was shot!” Because I’m saying it as fact without source. But then it’s also a conspiracy theory to say, “I’m sure JFK was shot by aliens.”
The what is essential in defining a conspiracy theory.
It's about how not what at least follow the discussion you are answering. And nobody cares about your definition of conspiracy theories or your assumption of mine, normal human beings open for discourse care about the definition of the term in the general public. You can easily find it in a dictionary of your choice.
> E-commerce was an area where we saw a meaningful slowdown in growth in Q4. And similarly, we've seen other areas like gaming to be challenged. But on e-commerce, it's quite noticeable -- notable that Google called out, seeing strength in that very same vertical. And so given that we know that e-commerce is one of the most impacted verticals from iOS restrictions, it makes sense that those restrictions are probably part of the explanation for the difference between what they were seeing and what we were seeing.
> ... we believe those restrictions from Apple are designed in a way that carves out browsers from the tracking prompts Apple requires for apps. And so what that means is that search ads could have access to far more third-party data for measurement and optimization purposes than app-based ad platforms like ours.
> So when it comes to using data, you can think of it that it's not really apples-to-apples for us. And as a result, we believe Google Search ad business could have benefited relative to services like ours is based a different set of restrictions from Apple. And given that Apple continue to take billions of dollars a year from Google Search ads, the incentive clearly exists for this policy discrepancy to continue.
Facebook CFO on iOS change effects: advertising business is being driven to Google since they are mostly unaffected by the changes. This is the statement the article would be based on, but with most of the interesting parts left out.
Eh, the picture in the article seems to actually be a better picture of him than a lot of articles use. That being said, I think the biggest issue is his eye brows are very thin and fair, which combined with his pale skin, lips, and no facial hair gives his face very few defining features.
It’s tough to have sympathy for him, but if I’d built a website to rate women at my uni for a laugh, then accidentally found myself in charge of one of the world’s most powerful companies that’s destroying society from the inside out - and personally one of the world’s most hated people, I’d look pretty haunted too.
I doubt it. Even with universal ad blocking on their platforms, iPhones are the minority worldwide and Macs even more so.
Websites would just make sites painful to use for Apple users and force them into exceptionally expensive subscriptions (which most people won’t pay for) or onto cheap devices that allow endless ads.
Average iPhone users may be more valuable to the average advertiser when compared to the average Andoid user, but there are plenty of markets where I'd say there are plenty of advertisers who'd benefit from targetting the lower end of the income spectrum.
They could obviously forbid apps to show ads and implement a powerful, default-enabled adblocker into Safari.
But why would they?
The outfall would likely see many important developers pull their apps at least temporarily. Of the Top 10 Downloaded Apps of 2021 (https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/02/apple-most-downloaded-a...) only a single one doesn't have ads.
This could be Pyrrhic victory for Apple.
It would most likely also seal the deal on sideloading regulation.
I'm fed up with their ads to subscribe to their services in macOS/iOS: the App Store, on Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Fitness+... I'm getting tired of clicking "no thank you".
Don’t confuse advertising with tracking. I believe that the true advertising business and the people who really understand marketing is going to have a lot of success in the coming years.
The business that will hurt are those who only know how to click around in Google AdWords or Facebooks Ads. Those business but all their eggs in a rather small basket. Facebook isn’t going away anytime soon, but it will fail more quickly that some expect. If 50% or more of your business is coming from Facebook, start making plans for the future now.
I think FB is understating the cost (the drop in revenue growth is more and Google's revenue growth hints on what it could have been); maybe because they are negotiating a deal with Apple.
Important to note about 60% of our customers are on an iOS device, which is a little higher than the global average but matches the market segment we are in in the UK.
The situation improved after about 4 weeks, I believe Facebook now uses some "AI" to help with attribution on iOS, but it's somewhat difficult to be sure as by then we had other campaigns running.
So, this will definitely be effecting marketers decision making process of where to allocate spend. It certainly made us more courteous about spending on Facebook.