Remember when people kept claiming Facebook buying Instagram wasn't a bad thing because "they're not ruining it" "They're just leaving it as the same old Instagram".
Uh that's what they've done. The article is about Instagram becoming like Facebook in the sense that this is a massive property on the scale of the core Facebook product. 700 million users vs Facebook's 2 billion.
Facebook has definitely not left it as the "same old Instagram". They've changed the home feed algorithm to basically the same as the Facebook home feed algorithm, and there's been a lot of content creators negatively impacted by it (I know this because of the industry my wife works in, which is having major issues now, where engagement has basically halved among anybody except the top maybe 5% of content creators).
So here's the thing: Facebook said they'd leave Instagram to be Instagram. But saying Facebook isn't holding that promise because things have changed isn't necessarily accurate.
The people in charge of Instagram may have used more and more of Facebook's tools, looked at better analytics, tweaked, used lessons learned from Facebook, etc.
While I agree it's unlikely that Facebook left them entirely alone I don't think it's necessarily fair to say they meddled just because things have changed. Nothing stays the same especially in the tech industry.
I agree with this. I a sure there were changes for the better and worse do to the acquisition; but Systrom said that Instagram retained a lot of autonomy. I am not a user of FB or IG but certainly over several years the platform would change; all good tech products evolve.
Contrasting this with Oculus; I think IG was given a lot less hands on MGMT.
In 5 years we have the short-message Facebook (Twitter), the image Facebook (Instagram), the news Facebook (Facebook), the video Facebook (Youtube), maybe also the source code Facebook (Github [1]). That must be the market-driven diversity that my economics teachers loved to tell me all about.
[1] That one is a bit of a stretch, but you can already "follow people" and they market themselves as a social network, so...
Organising content by what is relevant or interesting to you as an individual is hardly specific to Facebook or Instagram. Many companies are doing something the same thing e.g. Pinterest, Netflix, YouTube.
Even companies like banks are using individual Next Best Action models to determine what marketing decision is right specifically for you rather than something generic to your demographic.
Not at all. The article focuses on how Instagram has continually evolved itself despite the tendency of loyal users to decry change, specifically mentioning the ranked newsfeed and Snapchat-style stories.
Having said that, I don't think it's "Facebook" doing this. This has probably been Instagram's approach to product from day one.
What exactly is the end goal of these advertising platforms, exactly?
Ads in my mind are zero sum, so I'm pretty clueless on this front.
One thing I find interesting is the simultaneous popularity of these newfound distractions and task/project management software. Are we solving problems that were intentionally created and calling that progress?
Ads over time extract profit margins from all other industries. For example at least 50% of all profits from mobile games are spent on acquiring users from ads.
Do a thought experiment and you'll find a nugget of truth to the idea. Imagine two competitors who are otherwise identical. What would their AdWords buying strategy be?
Hmm, not sure if "extracts profit margins" is the right terminology. In mobile games, you could have a lifetime value of a user that is higher than their acquisition cost. This generates a model where you can spend money to make money.
In this instance, advertising is fuelling user acquisition which fuels profit.
The question is whether the whole mobile game industry makes more money by advertising, or whether those games that advertise just make more money at the expense of others.
Imagine that in a world without ads, game revenue is: Game A: 600, Game B: 600, Game C: 600
But then A spends 300 on ads: Game A: 1200 (-300), Game B: 300, Game C: 300
In this case, game A "spent money to make money", but the overall industry's revenue was the same, and part of the profits now went to ads.
And it makes sense: advertising doesn't give consumers more money to spend, so the size of the pie is fixed, all they can do it redistribute it, extracting a slice in the process.
You're assuming perfect market saturation: every consumer has a max spending budget for this good that they're constantly up against and it's just how they distribute it that matters. This seems unlikely to me based on personal experience (if there's no game I like I play no games) but if you have better data than I do then I suppose you're right.
For instance, my younger brother is a fan of the Darksiders game series. I saw an advertisement for the new instance of the game. I told him about it. When it reaches a price he wants he'll buy it. But until it does, he's not going to sit around buying other games just to fill up the budget.
Do you, really? For most of the people I know, our entertainment budget is fairly flexible. If I'd spend £100 on something and if I wanted it, I'm probably not going to spend £100 on my second choice thing. In fact, I may not spend anything at all and just choose to spend my time on things I've already spent money on like going out to skate or something.
Mostly the cash budget is substantially higher than the time budget so people aren't going to buy a thing they don't like just to fill the time.
If ads help with allocation closer to people's real preferences, they're a good thing.
This is not restricted to the entertainment budget, the claim was that ads extract from all other industries. Unless you're burning the £100 you're not spending, that's still true.
If ads help with allocation closer to people's real preferences, they're a good thing.
Maybe, but is there any evidence that they actually do?
Ah. Clearly I misunderstood. If you take everything (including the savings account industry) then yes, advertisements just lead to reallocation. But that's just what money is for: it's to allocate to things you want. If that's the claim, then I'm going to bow out of this discussion because I think it's unproductive since the purpose of practically all things one does is the allocation of resources.
Since it's not a distinguishing feature of advertisements, I think it's a pointless discussion.
> If ads help with allocation closer to people's real preferences, they're a good thing.
Except that's not what ads are about. Ads are about selling stuff. People smoked cigarettes to be sexy, and then got cancer. Maybe they did get some extra sex, but I doubt it.
Advertising in the real world is unquestionably negative. Almost all advertising works by creating a sense of lack where none previously existed, or co-opting your decision making process by creating gratuitous associations. Advertising that accurately reflects the merits of a product in an unbiased way doesn't "work".
I am not opposed to the idea of advertising, but what we have now is really a form of manipulation rather than information.
> If ads help with allocation closer to people's real preferences, they're a good thing.
I can name a lot of things fulfilling this role, but none of them are ads. When I built a PC, do you honestly think I looked at advertisements for components? Hell no. My primary source were subreddits like /r/BuildAPC that have guides on what to watch out for when shopping for PC components, and price comparison sites, particularly those that have a ton of filters. Those resources are either run by a devoted community, or they earn a commission when directing me to an online shop where I can buy the product of my choosing. But they're not manipulating my choice in the way that ads are designed to do.
Hmm it is entirely possible to attract new users and access more disposable income (bigger pie). This is backed up with empirical data; aggregate mobile game and app store revenues are growing every year.
So while advertising doesn't give consumers more money to spend, it can persuade them to spend higher portions of their entertainment budget on games.
I don't understand what that "overall" point is anymore. I thought the point was "whether the whole mobile game industry makes more money by advertising, or whether those games that advertise just make more money at the expense of others."
Effective advertising isn't information, it's manipulation. Ads "work" by creating a sense of lack that didn't exist previously, or by co-opting your decision making process with gratuitous associations.
On top of that, advertising is effectively forced on people. Given that many people actively try to avoid advertising, it seems clear that this is a negative point.
If advertising was objective and unbiased, and it was only presented to people actively seeking information about products, it would be a net benefit to society. As it stands, I believe it is a net detriment.
The end goal is as simple as it looks: support a new medium.
First it was newspapers and magazines and mail, then the radio, next television, and finally we've landed on the web. And in the future there will probably be another new medium that ad dollars shift to.
The strategy is simple -- rip market share away from the competitors. And it's working. Why? Because you can more aggressively target intent, track results easier, and garner more impressions since the inventory is both cheaper and plentiful on the web.
There are things out there, great things, just struggling to be the next whatever. There should be a way to look past the eclipse of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.
I have to say that Duck Duck Go feels a lot more like early Google than Google does now(it feels more like querying a database than asking a machine a question). I could see them taking lots of the 'pro' search traffic, especially with their bangs and the way they still just use Stack Overflow answers/Wikipedia articles for their preferred results instead of attempting to remix them.
DDG is my default because the majority of my searches are specifically coding-related (as in, type the name of api and class and function or some such) and fact-based stuff (wiki, scientific articles whatever). But more often than not, for the more fuzzier queries I get the most useless results and have to manually go over to Google
Google has never had to buy a competitor as its revenue, scientific and technology value is orders of magnitude greater than facebook et al. I'm looking for the next Google not the next facebook/myspace/snapchat/instagram.
Granted, none of these were very high-profile, and Google hasn't acquired any other web search engines either, but to say "Google has never had to buy a competitor" is naive.
They've also spent a lot of money acquiring competing companies that aren't related to their core business. YouTube competed with Google Video before they were acquired. DoubleClick competed with AdSense (and arguably, Google stole DoubleClick's model). Waze competed (and still competes) with Google Maps.
Those were never direct competitors and never a threat to Google. Unlike easy-to-duplicate and fleeting social networking companies. Keep trying and keep in mind the DNA of Google in terms of being founded based on algorithmic technology as opposed to cut, copying and pasting text entry boxes for vicariously spying on girls (while also calling users "dumb f*cks" is much different than a core algorithmic search engine. This is evident by Google's revenue and breadth in hardware (TPUs etc) and true AI. Add the fact that Google controls more popular properties and products in terms of user adoption and revenue.
Might as well add to that, that Google's entire core business model was intentionally and directly swiped from GoTo.com (which they of course settled over). $90 billion in search ad sales built on a business concept they had to go outside of their own company for. Further deflates the parent's premise.
It's disappointing that tech journalists don't go a bit harder at the founders when writing pieces like these. Sure, it's interesting to find out about Instagram's internal processes and their projections, but Facebook is becoming increasingly regarded as being the main contributor to a new kind of social malaise. Therefore, if Instagram is aspiring to that level of adoption, how can questions like this not be put to the founders?
Maybe it's just me, but for once I'd love to see a journalist be a bit more frank with these siloed cyber-utopionists and ask some hard questions about what social value they're actually creating - rather than chewing over sign-up metrics and scaling strategies. Anecdotally, I've never seen one interview with Zuckerberg where a journalist actually calls him out on his "we're just connecting people" poppycock.
When you are interviewing the entity that can throttle visits to your articles, it's a bit more complicated than that. Coincidentally, many of the "fake news" links they knocked down were sites that also criticized Facebook.
They are also one of the only big news organizations that regularly criticizes Facebook, so I guess the answer to the original question of why more people don't criticize Facebook is that the only demographic that are interested in that kind of thing are conspiracy theorists.
Infowars isn't a news organization, Alex Jones is a self-professed performance artist, and the performance pieces he publishes are created solely to incite outrage in a certain demographic, not to spread actual facts.
Perhaps. But using it in a discussion about fake news is good. I don't want to live in a world where info wars gets censored just because I despise the guy. I want to live in a world where Internet is used to its full potential where I can easily find sources to articles and weed out the fake news myself...
Perhaps the solution is technical. Tweak page rank to not only consider hyperlinks but also their credibility (by means of Web of trust). Buy it is probably also a social problem. We need to educate our children how to read an digest news. And how to think critically.
Censoring The Independent, breitbart and info wars isn't gonna help us. Just fuel the problem. Instead, we need to find a way to reward credibility. We need to fix journalism or it will die soon.
Infowars and Alex Jones regularly criticized organizations such as Google and Facebook that collect massive amounts of information capital from people well before the elections and the fake news headlines.
And you expected us to know that? I certainly wouldn't have assumed it, considering the three "share on Facebook" buttons on that page, plus the fact that the article author linked to his FB page at the end.
In any case, Infowars is just one site, and the article only claimed they blocked three mere links.
...The conflict of interest is apparent even in the URL you linked, but in case that doesn't do it for you:
> The social networking giant recently launched a new feature in which users could flag content as “spam” or “fake news” – a system that allows huge numbers of organized users to flag content simply because they disagree with it or it offends them
They cite this, then go on to make the completely unsubstantiated claim that that's somehow 'proof' of FB censoring them - and with such obvious slipshod "reporting" I honestly don't see what the problem is with FB blocking them as a "news" source and relegating them to being an opinion blog.
You make it sound as if facebook didn't know exactly who the kinds of sites that would end up being flagged would turn out to be, and the only claim that I made was that, coincidentally, they also happen to be sites that criticize Facebook.
As far as I can tell there's equal opportunity for abuse; flagging systems have been used to shut down accounts of of people on all parts of the political spectrum, since there's always a large enough mob of people incensed at someone else's views and willing to click whatever button they've been told will silence that person.
The social value they're creating is that people like me are able to have a common medium through which I can maintain at least some semblance of socialization with a multitude of people who don't all share common interest other than being people I've communicated with at some point.
You're here on HN and not on some mailing list or phpBB forum. Clearly you derive value from this rather different medium. Well, Instagram users derive value from that other medium.
Email and text message have a different feel and offer different features.
I agree with this post: features like realtime chats, comments, posts, etc are various ways of interacting people on different platforms. Facebook has done a good job at becoming a nearly ubiquitous hub for people to reach out and connect on, without having to feel shy. (of course we were perhaps less shy to ask for numbers when they were given out more often)
I totally disagree with the things parts of Facebook is doing, and I wish they gave half a damn about where they are driving us.
Well, not exactly. While email and text messages are great at helping you keep in contact with people you know, I find Facebook is best at keeping me in contact with people I once knew or don't know very well.
For example, just last week I had an acquaintance who was potentially taking an internship in the city I moved to after I graduated college. This is an acquaintance that I haven't seen in over five years, and was never close with. The kind of person you'd be 100% never seeing again, since we had basically lost touch, minus the whole "we're Facebook friends" aspect.
Granted, I know one of the major gripes about Facebook on HN is that having a lot of friends on Facebook facilitates a lot of useless spam about people you don't quite care about. I totally understand this view.
But on the other hand, I learned that this acquaintance of mine might be stopping in the city I'm in, so far away from our hometown, and being the adult that I am and getting older and older by the minute, knowing just how hard it is to make and maintain friendships as you get older, I decided to give this acquaintance a call (on Facebook of course!) to see if they were free to meetup.
It's about enabling a different type of relationship where you are sharing your life with people you don't necessarily want to have a constant conversation with.
Actually, it reflects what Facebook wants you to see. They might take your interests into account in order to maximize the potential for ad exposure, but you're definitely not in charge.
Facebook wants you to see whatever keeps you coming back to Facebook to see more of, ie what you want to see. That's exactly how it maximizes its ad potential.
It might have a hypocrisy problem. People will typically claim to like certain things (high-status cultural artifacts) while mostly consuming other things (trash TV, fast food etc). However, it doesn't benefit from driving people away.
I don't think it is a hypocrisy problem, so much as an issue of conflicting desires. A junkie who is trying to quit heroin wants to get clean, but he also really wants a fix. Of course it is more profitable for the dealer to continue selling heroin.
The junkie. And that particular phrasing hinges on strawman since the point is not that you want to see photos of your nephew, but rather that you're using a tool that is explicitly designed to maximize your desire for coming back to it.
You know the scene in The Big Short where the WSJ guy isn't willing to go ask the hard questions to the bank contacts he has because he spent years building those relationships? That's what it reminds me of.
> ask some hard questions about what social value they're actually creating
What does this mean exactly? Facebook is providing tremendous value to me personally as a way of keeping in touch with family and friends but I guess you're asking from a higher perspective.
That is probably the best aspect of facebook, and what they should have stuck with IMO. The "let's be the place where people can see only news & opinions that they agree with" is more questionable.
Yes, I agree. I would love a Facebook focusing just on friends and family. No link sharing, no non-sense. One part I do like that is outside of that though is the different artists (music) I follow. What's interesting however is that even though artists are the only pages I like, posts from them get magically filtered out to leave room for links, funny videos and opinions. Or at least that's how it feels.
> Anecdotally, I've never seen one interview with Zuckerberg where a journalist actually calls him out on his "we're just connecting people" poppycock.
I have no doubt that intentions can be good. But I find it very hard to believe that tech founders never consider both good and bad consequences of a more connected world. Fake news is one, but then there are others like the rapid decrease of our attention span, higher appetite for instant gratification, higher addiction to the net, lower self-esteem (or the opposite!) and so on. All of this has a profound effect on us as individuals and as a society.
I'm glad that we now can have a conversation like this without the risk of being labelled "Luddite". (And yes, HN was also like this a while back.)
Technology is a special case; it's changing so rapidly that there isn't time to academically study its full-scale impact. But the impact of social media on self esteem, especially on vulnerable people, is well-studied.
I attended a conference where a speaker was someone from FB. One of the slides that stood out for me was a pic of 3 teens sitting in the most picturesque environment on a picnic blanket. All of them with their noses stuck in phones.
This is what FB and instagram is about, getting you on the mouse wheel of usage so they can sell your attention.
and is that so bad? As in, this is like how our parents used to say "you are glued to the TV" and that's exactly what TV channels wanted...to sell your attention.
Well sure, but eventually you'd get kicked out of the house and have to go outside, away from TV. Now TV is in your pocket, wherever you go. They can kick today's kids out of the house, they go to the nearest spot out of sight and....watch ads all day.
I don't understand how google is so incompetent and just left facebook this field entirely to themselves. Why couldn't there be a Youtube Stills app for example?
Google had its own social network: Orkut. It was launched at the same time as Facebook and was initially much more popular. (Facebook membership was restricted to a few US universities.)
Google also produced a knock-off of Facebook -- Google Plus -- which is still going but ultimately failed.
In both cases, Google got the technology wrong. However, getting the technology right is still no guarantee of success. There's more to it than that....
I immediately thought of this Stratechery post when reading the NYT piece.
https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopo...
At least the NYT photo of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger is hilarious, the rest of piece as others have noted the usual softballs to our technology overlords...
> More precisely, it feels the way Facebook did from 2009 to 2012, when it silently crossed over from one of those tech things that some people sometimes did to one of those tech things that everyone you know does every day.
Ubiquity is an interesting thought - there are very few apps that an average person uses on a daily basis that _aren't_ owned by Facebook. Four of the most used apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp) are owned by the same parent company.
In China, we see an analogous example - to an even greater extent - WeChat is practically the de facto mobile OS. Where do we go from here? Hardware? WeChat seems most likely to do this, from my perspective. What happens when Tencent acquires Xiaomi and creates WeChatOS phones? What happens when Facebook does similar and Mark Zuckerberg controls nearly every waking moment of most Americans? Who is the Apple to the United States v. Facebook monopoly?
> What happens when Facebook does similar and Mark Zuckerberg controls nearly every waking moment of most Americans? Who is the Apple to the United States v. Facebook monopoly?
That's called jumping the shark. In this context, the point in time where people get so concerned about a powerful company, that a form of outlandish and irrational fear starts to set in. See: IBM 1970s, early 1980s; Microsoft late 1990s; Google today; Amazon soon; Facebook tomorrow. In most historical instances of monopoly or near monopoly, by the time the fear got really extreme, the company's power was already near a peak or in decline.
I wish I could call it a mere exaggeration, the notion of Zuckerberg 'controlling nearly every waking moment for Americans' - but it's far beyond that.
That's not called jumping the shark. Jumping the shark is when something formerly cool/great (originally, Fonzie in TV sitcom Happy Days) does something so blatantly stupid (originally, jumping over a shark on water skis) that it becomes painfully obvious that they've lost all credibility.
I also heard an interview somewhere/sometime where he indicated the same thing: Although popular in our lexicon, the show actually did not go into a death spiral after that episode. It was hugely successful. Nevertheless, the term remains.
I know a ton of Users who are not on Facebook. Yeah Facebook had a ton of users, I'm not sure how many of them are real and how engaged Facebook keeps them.
So many ads you can slap in someone's face before they get put off.
Yep. What were App Annie's numbers? 35% of SC's daily average users in the U.S. don't use or can't be found on Facebook on any given day. 46% can't be reached on IG and 58% on Messenger. Snapchat is killing in the moment engaged posts. However, Snapchat, like Facebook, is fundamentally an ad tech platform too. SC will probably get worse along the way. Discover is click bait news and Stories have sneaky ads that everyone just skips. Maybe if Signal integrated a Bitmoji-like and filter experience, it would potentially become the best social experience.
Recently they're using snapchat? Check again. Instagram rolled out snapchat-comparable features in the last couple months. Im 23, but most of my friends have moved to instagram for stories.
I've been on Instagram for a year, and I still don't get it.
I've gotten to a 1000 followers by regularly adding photos from my travels. I get a few hundred likes per photo and a couple of dozen of generic comments.And the occasional DM.
Is this it ? Even by the standards of social media, it feels very superificial to me.
I suppose it makes more sense if you have business to promote, or are one of those people trying to be become "influencers" and sell access to their account.
Everyone uses social media differently I guess, but in my case I almost exclusively follow and am followed by people who I know. I intentionally don't tag my posts. I love it this way. I get to see what my friends are up to, and share bits of my life with them as well. I am not happy with the non linear ordering change as it seems to prefer showing me things I've already seen above stuff I haven't, but even so Instagram is much more conducive to sharing photos and viewing them than FB ever was.
I've tried and failed (9.9x out of 10) to use the site for discovery...of anything interesting. For a site with so much content (media), it seems so void of content (significance, meaning).
I don't get it either. I can only assume it's either a generational thing, or me not understanding things most people like. I've gone back, looked at, and tried to understand it several times, and I just can't see why I'd want to look at it or use it.
I don't know that I would state it so strongly, but regardless, most of life isn't about raising awareness of meaningful things, and probably shouldn't be.
That illustrates what I'm getting at, because I can't see the similarity. When I read a comment, I can become informed about something or be challenged. When I see someone's photo of just about anything ... that's where I draw a blank. It would be a different story perhaps if I took the time to curate a follow-list that was all computer graphicists and mathematicians, but that's what I use Twitter for.
Building a list of interesting people to follow is the biggest part. Keep in mind that this is visual communication, so there will definitely be a bias towards photographers, artists, journalists.. Not everyone is able to communicate visually well either, and the format prevents long textual explanations and favours a more emotional response.
National Geographic has a few accounts (natgeo, natgeocreative..), NASA shares interesting tidbits about current missions, Magnum photography has interesting pieces of visual journalism, many unknown journalists use it to explore projects that do not always resonate with current trends in the media/their workplace.. There's decent content on Instagram, although it isn't easy to find.
You're not engaging deeply. I find myself in these insane microcosms of things I'm interested in, where people are deeply engaged in creating new and interesting content. I follow artists, designers, fashion, extreme sports, my friends, brands, everything. It's a photo blog in a Twitter style rapid fire format, where everyone is an equal because we all have to create good and interesting comment. There's no way to hide behind words, your content has to be good. And people notice. I've learned so much just from videos of artisans and artists posting how-to and process clips. It's the one thing Twitter should have done but never could have. It's short form blogging in visual form, for me, it just works and I get a lot out of it every damn day.
Facebook is (generally speaking) for people in their mid 20s and up who have become adults. Instagram is for artsy people who share photos, but is primarily used by teens - early 20s.
But Facebook is a good enough platform, so why? Teens will always seek out places where they can be their usual obnoxious selves without the prying eyes of judgmental adults. Instagram isn't the destination for teens, it's just a waypoint until the Instagram users grow up, and then there'll be a new network that everyone will flock to.
In the end, Facebook will still win. Ignoring the fact that Facebook owns instagram, the Instagram users will get married and have kids, and they'll want to share those moments with their parents and grandparents on Facebook. It's still the most widely used AND most robust of the social networks.
From both consumer and designer perspectives, Instagram is my favourite social media. It strikes a beautiful balance overall: quick to post; very low commitment if I choose to; a gold mine of info, inspiration and talent if you know where to look; and even the advert model is done very well - I find myself clicking on some, while others can be easily skipped with a scroll. And here's the intriguing bit: I don't find myself "tied" to Instagram like I've experienced with other social media, and neither did it cost my social life. This is how social media should be like!
Granted, I'm biased by the virtue of being more practiced in reigning in addiction :)
Im worryed of facebook and google how much they dominate the social media. Worryed about they behavier and actions to violate privacy, modify opinions and force they way in technology. Why people follow these violators ? Why advertisers put money on this ?
Sorry, facebook and google are for me big no no. I can't understand why people use these platforms. Why not to use alternatives ?
I hope people would think before using these services more.
I only have second hand experience with Instagram, but it feels they got product placement right. I regularly see people asking where they could buy the dresses/accessories/gifts featured in the photos, actively following brands instead of blocking what ads shovel in their face.
I wonder how many users are actually aware that Instagram is owned by Facebook and then think about what that knowledge would do to public opinion and uptake.
A portion of users enjoy using Instagram because they consider it a FB "alternative", and that they're privacy is at less risk by diversifying social media platforms.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadThe people in charge of Instagram may have used more and more of Facebook's tools, looked at better analytics, tweaked, used lessons learned from Facebook, etc.
While I agree it's unlikely that Facebook left them entirely alone I don't think it's necessarily fair to say they meddled just because things have changed. Nothing stays the same especially in the tech industry.
Contrasting this with Oculus; I think IG was given a lot less hands on MGMT.
[1] That one is a bit of a stretch, but you can already "follow people" and they market themselves as a social network, so...
Even companies like banks are using individual Next Best Action models to determine what marketing decision is right specifically for you rather than something generic to your demographic.
Having said that, I don't think it's "Facebook" doing this. This has probably been Instagram's approach to product from day one.
Ads in my mind are zero sum, so I'm pretty clueless on this front.
One thing I find interesting is the simultaneous popularity of these newfound distractions and task/project management software. Are we solving problems that were intentionally created and calling that progress?
Do a thought experiment and you'll find a nugget of truth to the idea. Imagine two competitors who are otherwise identical. What would their AdWords buying strategy be?
In this instance, advertising is fuelling user acquisition which fuels profit.
Imagine that in a world without ads, game revenue is: Game A: 600, Game B: 600, Game C: 600
But then A spends 300 on ads: Game A: 1200 (-300), Game B: 300, Game C: 300
In this case, game A "spent money to make money", but the overall industry's revenue was the same, and part of the profits now went to ads.
And it makes sense: advertising doesn't give consumers more money to spend, so the size of the pie is fixed, all they can do it redistribute it, extracting a slice in the process.
For instance, my younger brother is a fan of the Darksiders game series. I saw an advertisement for the new instance of the game. I told him about it. When it reaches a price he wants he'll buy it. But until it does, he's not going to sit around buying other games just to fill up the budget.
Mostly the cash budget is substantially higher than the time budget so people aren't going to buy a thing they don't like just to fill the time.
If ads help with allocation closer to people's real preferences, they're a good thing.
If ads help with allocation closer to people's real preferences, they're a good thing.
Maybe, but is there any evidence that they actually do?
Since it's not a distinguishing feature of advertisements, I think it's a pointless discussion.
Except that's not what ads are about. Ads are about selling stuff. People smoked cigarettes to be sexy, and then got cancer. Maybe they did get some extra sex, but I doubt it.
I am not opposed to the idea of advertising, but what we have now is really a form of manipulation rather than information.
> If ads help with allocation closer to people's real preferences, they're a good thing.
I can name a lot of things fulfilling this role, but none of them are ads. When I built a PC, do you honestly think I looked at advertisements for components? Hell no. My primary source were subreddits like /r/BuildAPC that have guides on what to watch out for when shopping for PC components, and price comparison sites, particularly those that have a ton of filters. Those resources are either run by a devoted community, or they earn a commission when directing me to an online shop where I can buy the product of my choosing. But they're not manipulating my choice in the way that ads are designed to do.
So while advertising doesn't give consumers more money to spend, it can persuade them to spend higher portions of their entertainment budget on games.
The mobile gaming industry was used as an example, but even if they grow their pie by reducing some other industry's, the claim is still true.
You can think of them as improved communication that connects people who are useful to each other.
Ads are an incredibly shitty solution to the as-yet-unsolved problem of discovery.
On top of that, advertising is effectively forced on people. Given that many people actively try to avoid advertising, it seems clear that this is a negative point.
If advertising was objective and unbiased, and it was only presented to people actively seeking information about products, it would be a net benefit to society. As it stands, I believe it is a net detriment.
The end goal is as simple as it looks: support a new medium.
First it was newspapers and magazines and mail, then the radio, next television, and finally we've landed on the web. And in the future there will probably be another new medium that ad dollars shift to.
The strategy is simple -- rip market share away from the competitors. And it's working. Why? Because you can more aggressively target intent, track results easier, and garner more impressions since the inventory is both cheaper and plentiful on the web.
[1] Source for zero-sum as industry claim: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisi... (TL;DR ad spending as % of U.S. GDP has remained relatively constant since the 1920s)
Web search engines:
- Outride (2001)
- Kaltix (2003)
- Akwan Information Technologies (2005)
- Orion (2006)
- Aardvark (2010)
- PlinkArt (2010)
- Metaweb (2010)
- Like.com (2010)
- Apture (2011)
Granted, none of these were very high-profile, and Google hasn't acquired any other web search engines either, but to say "Google has never had to buy a competitor" is naive.
They've also spent a lot of money acquiring competing companies that aren't related to their core business. YouTube competed with Google Video before they were acquired. DoubleClick competed with AdSense (and arguably, Google stole DoubleClick's model). Waze competed (and still competes) with Google Maps.
Acquisitions aren't a sign of weakness.
YouTube competed hard in video; think about search w/o the "video" tab. Waze improved maps.
> I'm looking for the next Google
I mean, who isn't? The "next Google" can look a lot different than Google depending on what you mean by that
Maybe it's just me, but for once I'd love to see a journalist be a bit more frank with these siloed cyber-utopionists and ask some hard questions about what social value they're actually creating - rather than chewing over sign-up metrics and scaling strategies. Anecdotally, I've never seen one interview with Zuckerberg where a journalist actually calls him out on his "we're just connecting people" poppycock.
Citation needed.
Infowars is to legitimate news organizations as Mackeeper is to virus scanners.
Perhaps the solution is technical. Tweak page rank to not only consider hyperlinks but also their credibility (by means of Web of trust). Buy it is probably also a social problem. We need to educate our children how to read an digest news. And how to think critically.
Censoring The Independent, breitbart and info wars isn't gonna help us. Just fuel the problem. Instead, we need to find a way to reward credibility. We need to fix journalism or it will die soon.
In any case, Infowars is just one site, and the article only claimed they blocked three mere links.
> The social networking giant recently launched a new feature in which users could flag content as “spam” or “fake news” – a system that allows huge numbers of organized users to flag content simply because they disagree with it or it offends them
They cite this, then go on to make the completely unsubstantiated claim that that's somehow 'proof' of FB censoring them - and with such obvious slipshod "reporting" I honestly don't see what the problem is with FB blocking them as a "news" source and relegating them to being an opinion blog.
Email and text message have a different feel and offer different features.
I totally disagree with the things parts of Facebook is doing, and I wish they gave half a damn about where they are driving us.
For example, just last week I had an acquaintance who was potentially taking an internship in the city I moved to after I graduated college. This is an acquaintance that I haven't seen in over five years, and was never close with. The kind of person you'd be 100% never seeing again, since we had basically lost touch, minus the whole "we're Facebook friends" aspect.
Granted, I know one of the major gripes about Facebook on HN is that having a lot of friends on Facebook facilitates a lot of useless spam about people you don't quite care about. I totally understand this view.
But on the other hand, I learned that this acquaintance of mine might be stopping in the city I'm in, so far away from our hometown, and being the adult that I am and getting older and older by the minute, knowing just how hard it is to make and maintain friendships as you get older, I decided to give this acquaintance a call (on Facebook of course!) to see if they were free to meetup.
It's about enabling a different type of relationship where you are sharing your life with people you don't necessarily want to have a constant conversation with.
Email and text messages both suffer from the problem that they are controlled by the sender.
Facebook flips this. The wall reflects what I want to see.
It might have a hypocrisy problem. People will typically claim to like certain things (high-status cultural artifacts) while mostly consuming other things (trash TV, fast food etc). However, it doesn't benefit from driving people away.
"a tool that is explicitly designed to maximize your desire for coming back to it"
WTF! They want to serve me well? Those bastards!
You know what keeps me coming back? My sister calling me to tell me that there's photos and a video on her Facebook page.
What does this mean exactly? Facebook is providing tremendous value to me personally as a way of keeping in touch with family and friends but I guess you're asking from a higher perspective.
I have no doubt that intentions can be good. But I find it very hard to believe that tech founders never consider both good and bad consequences of a more connected world. Fake news is one, but then there are others like the rapid decrease of our attention span, higher appetite for instant gratification, higher addiction to the net, lower self-esteem (or the opposite!) and so on. All of this has a profound effect on us as individuals and as a society.
I'm glad that we now can have a conversation like this without the risk of being labelled "Luddite". (And yes, HN was also like this a while back.)
Attention span (as in the idea we have one, not just Facebook's connection to it), at the very least, is a myth: https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/07/25/another-mo...
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=social+media+self+est...
Facebook isn't the only player of course.
Regarding attention span - sorry I defined it as the amount of quality attention spent on something - I draw my experiences as an educator.
This is what FB and instagram is about, getting you on the mouse wheel of usage so they can sell your attention.
@kaorduaoishiho, at it's core, google has never understood ^social^.
Google also produced a knock-off of Facebook -- Google Plus -- which is still going but ultimately failed.
In both cases, Google got the technology wrong. However, getting the technology right is still no guarantee of success. There's more to it than that....
Ubiquity is an interesting thought - there are very few apps that an average person uses on a daily basis that _aren't_ owned by Facebook. Four of the most used apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp) are owned by the same parent company.
In China, we see an analogous example - to an even greater extent - WeChat is practically the de facto mobile OS. Where do we go from here? Hardware? WeChat seems most likely to do this, from my perspective. What happens when Tencent acquires Xiaomi and creates WeChatOS phones? What happens when Facebook does similar and Mark Zuckerberg controls nearly every waking moment of most Americans? Who is the Apple to the United States v. Facebook monopoly?
That's called jumping the shark. In this context, the point in time where people get so concerned about a powerful company, that a form of outlandish and irrational fear starts to set in. See: IBM 1970s, early 1980s; Microsoft late 1990s; Google today; Amazon soon; Facebook tomorrow. In most historical instances of monopoly or near monopoly, by the time the fear got really extreme, the company's power was already near a peak or in decline.
I wish I could call it a mere exaggeration, the notion of Zuckerberg 'controlling nearly every waking moment for Americans' - but it's far beyond that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/03/entertainment/la-et-...
I also heard an interview somewhere/sometime where he indicated the same thing: Although popular in our lexicon, the show actually did not go into a death spiral after that episode. It was hugely successful. Nevertheless, the term remains.
So many ads you can slap in someone's face before they get put off.
When I was active on Facebook, most people I knew had dozens of fake accounts.
Keep in mind that inside of AOL, we thought of GNN as "AOL2000". Yeah, that worked out real good. ;)
I've gotten to a 1000 followers by regularly adding photos from my travels. I get a few hundred likes per photo and a couple of dozen of generic comments.And the occasional DM. Is this it ? Even by the standards of social media, it feels very superificial to me.
Facebook 10 years ago was much more exciting.
"I want everybody to see this photo I took"
"Cheers, I have seen your photo"
I guess that's extremely compelling to folks.
"Cheers, I have read your comment."
National Geographic has a few accounts (natgeo, natgeocreative..), NASA shares interesting tidbits about current missions, Magnum photography has interesting pieces of visual journalism, many unknown journalists use it to explore projects that do not always resonate with current trends in the media/their workplace.. There's decent content on Instagram, although it isn't easy to find.
Me: are you on Facebook? Cousin: no, it's for old people. I'm on instagram.
But Facebook is a good enough platform, so why? Teens will always seek out places where they can be their usual obnoxious selves without the prying eyes of judgmental adults. Instagram isn't the destination for teens, it's just a waypoint until the Instagram users grow up, and then there'll be a new network that everyone will flock to.
In the end, Facebook will still win. Ignoring the fact that Facebook owns instagram, the Instagram users will get married and have kids, and they'll want to share those moments with their parents and grandparents on Facebook. It's still the most widely used AND most robust of the social networks.
- "Look how much beer I can chug in one go while half naked in the snow" -"That's nice love, are you coming for dinner? Love, Mum"
Granted, I'm biased by the virtue of being more practiced in reigning in addiction :)
Sorry, facebook and google are for me big no no. I can't understand why people use these platforms. Why not to use alternatives ?
I hope people would think before using these services more.
And for whatever reason, most people don't care that much about the things you listed as big dangers.
A portion of users enjoy using Instagram because they consider it a FB "alternative", and that they're privacy is at less risk by diversifying social media platforms.