From the article: ``The company reported 1.47 billion daily active users, while Wall Street expected 1.49 billion; it logged 2.23 billion monthly active users, as analysts expected 2.25 billion.''
It doesn't feel like the results justify the 20% drop.
I presume the dollar value of a US or European user to advertisers is greater than that of an Indian or African user. European user count going down is problematic.
But the problem with these after hours sessions is that they don't have much liquidity and that you can easily have a market squeeze due to people covering their position. This is what happened with the VIX ETNs.
Everyone but most retail investors can trade during AH, while the liquidity may be lower - I'd say the participating agents are more logical and have enough capital to drive big moves.
From their last quarterly report, quarterly ARPU is 25.91 for US/Canada users, 8.76 for European users, 2.62 for APAC users, and 1.91 for the rest of the world.
It's likely that European and US/Canada user count growth is flat or nearly so, and their gains recently have been out of getting more dollars per user through increasing advertising revenue as opposed to getting more users. It could be (or not) that they can grow those revenues even more.
“Our total revenue growth rates will continue to decelerate in the second half of 2018, and we expect our revenue growth rates to decline by high single-digit percentages from prior quarters sequentially in both Q3 and Q4."
The numbers have been growing continuously since the beginning, until this quarter[1]. Traders are reacting to the idea of "peak Facebook" -- that is, an end to growth -- and not just a 1.4% drop in DAU.
I think it's more about their revenue miss and some concern about their scandals impacting revenue.
> The company’s top line was $13.04 billion, weaker than $13.34 billion analysts expected, suggesting that the world’s largest social network has begun to feel some of the effects of the controversies that have battered it during the quarter.
I can see the decline in Europe being unsettling, but I'm not really surprised about US/Canada. ~185 million is about 52% of the population of US/Canada [3]. If we assume 35% of the population is simply too young to use it (20% under 14 [2]) or too old to be drawn to it (15% is over 65 [1]), that leaves only 13% of US/Canada's population which are feasible MAUs no being MAU, which is crazy.
Yes, and that's a massive problem. They reached probably what is close to their peak capacity and need to find ways to extract more money out of their existing MAUs because those numbers are stagnant or dropping.
Is it safe to say they're now tied to economic growth in developing nations? I'm sure they'll find ways to make more money out of rich countries for the sake of short-term growth, but if India alone is over 1 billion people, it's interesting to think that over the long term their revenue will depend on the increase of purchasing power in that and other developing nations.
Of course if they're still dominant when this happens.
Long-term, yes, that's basically the only thing they can do. Short-term the imbalance in ARPU between regions is massive and they can't really invest that much in developing nations when there's a magnitude of difference or more in between revenue, regardless of the potential user base.
I wonder how much of the European decline was driven by GDPR rules, especially opt-in requirements. GDPR-like laws are being debated on and passed here in the US by individual states. Probably a tough environment to expand on MAU right now.
It doesn't feel like the results justify the 20% drop.
You have to remember one main way analysts estimate what a share is worth today - they model out time-discounted earnings in perpetuity. A company that is expected to grow in the future is worth much more today than a company that isn't expected to grow at all.
The stock didn't drop because they missed this quarter alone, it's because all the analysts models are now assuming future earnings will grow much more slowly into the foreseeable future.
Markets tend to over-optimize. That's why I warned caution when many were saying the Cambridge Analytica scandal didn't harm Facebook, even though it was obvious FB was being quite misleading about what was actually impacted at the time and about the fact that their good results were actually given by the stuff that had happened before Cambridge Analytica.
Over-optimization means that even when a string of bad news hit, the stock may not change much because of the previous string of good news still having inertia and the market "not really believing" the new bad stories. But eventually the market sentiment changes, and then it all comes crashing down, and now the bad news are over-optimized, and the good news become irrelevant. And the cycle repeats itself.
This is harder to see with stock because it tends to happen over a multi-year span, but it's much easier to see with cryptocurrencies where this happens over a several months period.
The issue isn't that Facebook isn't doing fine, it's that they missed their forecasts. Wall Street wants predictability and if you can't predictably forecast your next quarter/fiscal year, then you become a liability.
You could have a bad quarter and not get punished (too much) for it, assuming that your forecast was correct.
> It doesn't feel like the results justify the 20% drop.
Neither does it for me.
FB is still the only real GOOGL competitor in the ad market. It's revenue and market share is growing. All it has to do is extracting more money from its huge user base, which at least with instagram it hasn't really tried for now.
Employing content reviewers won't come cheap, but that investment is going to be faced by all social media platforms and in turn will be sector neutral. Facing regulatory burdens with measures like this helps the big ones manifest their oligopol.
While I can echo most HNers sentiment (I too decreased my FB usage before and after the CA scandal) I think we are not precisely the best socio-economic group to serve as indicator for what drives people or doesn't: Most people are happy to share on social media platforms (no matter how repugnant I feel about it) and there is no social media real estate like FB or IG around.
Fundamentally it's still cheaper than GOOGL in terms of P/E and just costs half of what GOOGL costs for every $ of FCF.
> Wehner also said Facebook still expects expenses to grow 50% to 60% from last year
> “But as I’ve said on past calls, we’re investing so much in security that it will significantly impact our profitability,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re starting to see that this quarter.”
That sounds like a big 1-year jump. From what I can tell, the big Facebook scandals (fake news, Cambridge Analytica) came from faults in company policies rather than security glitches.
I wonder if labeling it "security" is a PR thing as their web ads all focus on FB taking active steps to make sure those types of scandals don't happen again.
To be fair, security is an amazing amount of policy. I took and passed the CISSP, and that exam must be at least 30%, maybe 40% policy. Things like knowing how does the Commerce Department’s rule of Safe Harbor apply to US companies doing business in EU. Stuff like that.
That being said, it made me way better at my job. No matter how many technical justifications I have for why we should implement X, the second I brought up a small to medium legal thing everyone would fix it immediately.
They're about to break the brains of 1000s of people subjecting them to aweful content. This will also have consequences. What was it "move fast and break things"!
Evidently it's not employees, but contractors (via Accenture, etc). Rumour around these parts is a content mod killed themselves at work a couple months ago. Wouldn't want to put that on actual employees of course!
You should have seen how much harder life got at our company when we discontinued a common root password across the back office. Things that used to take 5 minutes to fix by self-service now take a ticket to the owner of a system, which can take days.
If one bought into "the security story", one would expect your company after this policy change to have seen fewer random regressions due to random people rooting around in systems for which they were not responsible. Did you find that to be the case?
It's about reducing exposure to risk more than actual occurrences. You only need to regress once for it to permanently damage your business. Just because it never happened until now doesn't mean that it won't in the future.
ISTM typically there would have to be more going wrong for "permanent damage"? Not that it would be surprising for a shared-root organization e.g. to have poor backup skills...
Real security is almost all technical and implementation. There's a very significant danger to security that policies be some kind of front line of defense, or be implemented over sound engineering practices.
In almost every work environment, I've seen the policies working directly against security: if not by contradicting it, ignoring the details where the real security decisions live, or by striking the wrong balances between prescriptiveness and generality - then by out-prioritizing security decision making. (I've worked at mostly 100,000+ person companies).
It's much better to have technical security controls >80-90% of the actual security. It's just expensive and harder to teach/learn/implement.
That said, there's some real security gained by policy. It comes from:
- Ability to communicate expectations ("adopt technical solution X")
- Ability to exercise legitimized (instanciated/codified) authority
Most of the rest of the value of policy comes in as business enablement value (policies are easier to communicate to auditors than security control implementations are).
Policy can also be a useful placeholder for real security in the sense it will satisfy many external parties who might otherwise reprioritize/randomize security investments.
Policy is not a substitute for reasonable technical controls. But it’s also not a concern that can be wished away by saying “well we just do our security the real way, in code.” Any security control implementation enforces some conceptual policy, even if that policy isn’t documented elsewhere. In some places that’s fine; in others with more robust needs, that’s insufficient. Part of what auditors audit is that policy implementations (whether in code or in human practice) match the specification.
As an example, I’m glad that browser vendors require CAs to document their policies for issuing certificates. Let’s Encrypt does a great job of making much of this process automatic, but there’s still pieces that must be done by humans, and there’s still written policies in place for all of their operations.
At some point in any security process, human judgment comes into play. Striking the wrong balance between technical controls and allowing for human judgment can also lead to absurd outcomes, like this recent article/discussion[0].
If your system is doing "all the right security stuff" and then nobody knows about it - sure, you're secure - but nobody knows that or how you are secure. And that's a very significant problem both to a bureaucracy and to its customers. It's also an issue in terms of maintaining those controls over time between changes to staff and business direction.
There's a whole "secondary market" (within an organization) for security assurance, and it tends to be much more measurable than security posture.
Policies and summaries of those policies go a long way toward feeding that "assurance feeling" secondary market without draining resources from ongoing investments actual posture.
Essentially the way it works is that you develop security controls toward an ideal end state/direction and describe your direction as your policy. Any gaps auditors or your company find then become fuel for making actual changes to the underlying security posture at a technical level.
The danger of not having your policy really be disguised summaries of your actual implementation is that the various security staff become free to debate over fictional security and can convince themselves that if they mandate some changes on paper to the policy (with there being nothing technical associated whatsoever) that this has or should have some kind of real affect.
It's more dangerous still if the internal security assurance program uses its own policies or some measure of "adherence to the policies" to then measure security. What happens is that the compliance operation becomes authoritarian about adherence to policies that don't exist outside of (otherwise non-discoverable) mandate, and the company and its auditors are able to "measure" their posture by their policies and convince themselves they are secure.
The worst version of this is where its done on purpose for fraud.
A lot of their security/policy work is hiring tons of humans to fix things. For example they are hiring an additional 10,000 content moderators. That will obviously impact profitability.
I don't think neither companies ever denied that AI won't get 100% of the cases, they just say that you can't moderate billions of posts with human moderation alone, you need AI to take care of the 99%, and humans for ambiguous cases.
I was directly involved in one of those 'incidents' several years back where FB gave our app a special API that others did not have. This was because it was easier for us to build the 'FB experience' for their users, than it was for FB themselves. It was clean, legit, above board and secure.
It's astonishing how different the 'media narrative' is from reality, and it confirms my belief that the press runs on such narratives (i.e. building up, crashing down) because in both directions the truth is inflated for dramatic, i.e. click-bait reasons.
Our large company built a very good FB app that effectively was 'FB' on our platform. It was FB branded - for users, it was effectively the 'real' (and only) FB. Obviously that app had to have special APIs.
Everyone involved from top to bottom was pro. We didn't store data, nor did we want or need to. The way the tech was setup (data goes to app), we didn't really have the option. Users logged into their own accounts and retrieved their data, it's not like we could just access data arbitrarily.
Everything was pro and above bar - and nobody in the equation - a lot of us regular, conscientious people - thought for a second that anything was wrong or irregular in any context.
In fact - the whole situation could be described as: "FB hired 3rd parties to develop some code", which surely they do in some circumstances.
Nobody was harmed in any way, and there really wasn't risk of anyone being harmed.
I understand that with 2018 hindsight, we might look at things a little differently, but in reality, I think we'd have still done it. Perhaps there would have been more checks and assurances (i.e. FB takes ownership of code and actually publishes the app), but in reality it was (and would still be) fine.
As far as the Cambridge story - this is also misleading because the API's that were used there were available to the entire world and everyone knew exactly what they were. Were there tech people screaming foul? The press? Not really, they seemed reasonable, until it seemed that some bad agents were getting a little unscrupulous, and so FB did the right thing and altered the APIs to make them more secure. Security polices change all the time, in this case they tightened up given some field data. That's it.
It's really a story about Cambridge's scammy behaviour, and possibly lies to FB on where that data was, not about FB.
I don't like Facebook, I don't use it, I don't like being 'productized' etc. etc. - but I don't feel that the information in these scenarios has been properly handled by the media.
Because there are legitimate issues with privacy in the new world order in 2018 that are finally coming to bear, and we definitely want to re-evaluate our situation with FB, basically, we go and dig up 'something that happened 10 years ago in which nobody was harmed' to build a 'kind of misleading narrative' around the the 'legitimate issue'.
FWIW - Every time I have has personal knowledge of IT issue that made news, it made me lose faith in news. I'm not talking the minor, regular and downright stereotypical "Journalists don't understand technology", but major spins of context, impact, background and history. I'm currently on a system that's been making front pages in my country, and while the factual details of impact are largely accurate, what causes them, background, what can and should be done about it are wildly inaccurate (and not in the "reasonable people can disagree / many technical solutions have merit" sense; in the "what are you smoking / why does anybody think or believe that" sense :P )
> the Gell-Mann amnesia effect defines the idea that "I believe everything the media tells me except for anything for which I have direct personal knowledge, which they always get wrong."
Also, the news media doesn't report facts in so much that it creates narratives. Facebook was caught up in the anti-Cambridge Analytica narrative, just one skirmish in the anti-Trump campaign.
Everyone I've met that's been interviewed about a controversial topic has been critical of the press. I haven't been sure if it's because they think their view is the only correct one or the media are truly that sloppy.
My intuition says the latter because time is money and journalists are rarely experts in the fields they cover.
I was once something of a journalist and noticed something interesting. When I interviewed someone about something controversial, they were significantly more likely to become defensive when I checked facts and quotes with them.
They should as it's a great tool to both guarantee accuracy, and ensure you're being fair. But, running an interview, getting people off their script, and still constantly checking and validating are all tough. I could see people forgetting it or just not being comfortable. I've also been interviewed by journalists so skilled I didn't realize they were doing it until later.
Sometimes the defensiveness arises because of our offensive media atmosphere... the feeling is some of the journalist's quotes/"facts" may be mis-attributed, taken out of context, or straight up lies hoping to get a response that can be quoted out of context.
Even supportive facts/quotes can cause concern. Subject matter experts have a reputation on the line, while the journalist is often just looking for a story.
It's interesting because the act of constantly checking facts and quotes actually helps prevent words from being taken out of context. Good interviews can get away from both parties and solid questioning and verification ensures that the listener applies the correct context to the words.
I'd guess this happens because a journalist starting to fact check is often a giveaway that they are about to write something you'd want to challenge later.
Nobody ever called me, my boss or my friends to verify this summer has been extremely hot or what my favourite food is.
Also: just getting the words correct doesn't help if you cut the part where I explained what happened.
I suspect you don't have a strong understanding of how journalism works. A journalist fact-checking a story is more often a giveaway they are a conscientious journalist working for a legitimate organization. Getting the story right is a sacred thing for real journalists who know that not doing so opens them up to being called out in the public sphere for spreading untruth. Extensive fact-checking is not only critical to maintaining a reputation, it probably provides some kind of legal cover.
The problem is both good journalists and bad journalists call to do fact checks, -good journalists to verify they got the facts correct, bad journalists to provide legal cover before they quote you out of context to build the case they want to build anyway.
So, when someone call you and want to verify what you said I'll recommend being very sure that you get it exactly right and so clear that they cannot misunderstand you.
Defending yourself against a journalist might easily become a case of "have you stopped beating your wife? How hard can this be, yes or no?"
If you want to guarantee positive coverage, pay for it. Otherwise, stay away. If you go into an interview with such a defensive attitude, it's likely not going to end well for you.
When people get defensive with me for being conscientious, my instinct is always to dig deeper. I'm sure that holds true for many others.
But then what do you do when some media outlets gave a history of attacking you?
You might get them to publish a retraction (since it wasn't true) but hasn't the damage already been done?
What when those same papers write stuff that is technically true (but leave out why it was done)?: "founder sends millions to foreign bank account." "Founder declines to comment." ?
I'm sorry, but you really don't understand how working with the media works. You seem stuck on this idea that earned media has to be positive. It doesn't have to be, and it won't always be. If you expect it all to be positive, you will be disappointed and burn many bridges with journalists.
When you get negative coverage, accept it as the other side of the earned media coin. It is more effective than advertising because it has the potential to be negative. If there was never negative coverage, earned media wouldn't be worth pursuing. And, if you dig into the negative coverage, you'll often learn a lot from it. So, when you get negative coverage, email the journalist, thank them for writing about you, reaffirm that you're always available to talk, and then ignore it.
If an outlet has a history of attacking you, consider why they are attacking you and if the attacks have merit. If it's because you've been difficult in the past, you need to find a good PR person and get some media training in a hurry. You specifically want a PR person who entered the field through journalism, not marketing. Your PR person will be to work with the initial storm. If you caused the mess, you likely need to be hands off during this stage. And then, you need media training so that you don't offend a media outlet again.
It sounds like you have a rough time with media. Do you use the word 'exclusive'? If so, are you sure that you know what it means? Aside from lying, or being evasive, the best way to offend an outlet is to misuse the word.
Retractions don't happen very often, and unless you have very serious evidence, they aren't even worth going for. In the absence of serious evidence, a crafty editor will use your quest for a retraction as an excuse to keep writing about you. The goal is always to get them to stop writing, not give them reason to write more.
And frankly, publications will always write things that are technically true without adding any context. Never assume that this is because of malice because truth is, they likely don't care enough to be malicious. The sooner you get over this idea of a big, bad malicious media, the sooner you will learn how to work with them.
> I'm sorry, but you really don't understand how working with the media works. You seem stuck on this idea that earned media has to be positive.
That is quite a misunderstanding of my position. What do you take me for?
They don't need to be all positive at all. My point just shouldn't be actively lying or misleading.
> If an outlet has a history of attacking you, consider why they are attacking you and if the attacks have merit.
Done. (And it is not about me, and I'm in a position where it would be useful for me to know if there was something.)
> It sounds like you have a rough time with media.
Personally? Not at all.
> And frankly, publications will always write things that are technically true without adding any context. Never assume that this is because of malice because truth is, they likely don't care enough to be malicious. The sooner you get over this idea of a big, bad malicious media, the sooner you will learn how to work with them.
My question is rather: how long should we accept this (i.e. baseless smear campaigns agains companies and/or individuals)?
Mostly media does a great job and I respect and actively (i.e. by donating or keeping subscriptions I don't need) support great journalism even if I don't agree with everything they write.
But sometimes some journalists are really destructive. It is those cases I'm talking about. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then at some point, shouldn't the abuse of a weaponized pen be punishable? That bar should be high, yes, but at some point (inciting hatred against nations or ethnicities using made up allegations should be a good example) I think most people would agree that society should have some way to correct it. The question is just exactly where that bar should be.
And again no, this isn't about me. Personally I never had problems with media going after me, this just happens to have bothered me over years as I've seen certain journalists go after other people for what turns out to be no good reason. I'm luckily not aware of many cases though, but what I've seen has made me hesitant to talk to media (and Gell Mann amnesia also isn't as strong as it used to be anymore either).
Be sure to investigate the journalist's background, and the article's audience. Articles written for laymen by a general-purpose news source often just pawn off IT stories on their most tech-literate writer. Don't put your trust in filler.
News is still good. The HN front page surfaces good tech news, while reputable newspapers are still reputable in their area of expertise. Don't confuse the Gell-Mann [1] effect with Dunning-Kruger [2]
I get your point, but most of your post could be reduced to "we didn't do it, so it doesn't happen".
Facebook giving out privileged API's willy-nilly without verifying who the people operating them really are is the issue. If a bank gave the keys to their vault to some shady people then you blame the bank.
That really makes it worse. If there were some set of cut-and-dried rules (even one that changed occasionally, because of course Facebook is always changing the rules), outsiders could evaluate those rules and have some idea what's going on. If every data release involves armies of NDA-bound lawyers, there's no way to know anything about Facebook data releases in general. It's completely possible that the Cantabrigians negotiated everything they did beforehand, due to some combination of Facebook lawyer variability and the CA lawyers being more aggressive than your firm's lawyers.
Except to say that there were "instances of Facebook releasing data" makes it sound you misunderstand the technical details of what happened, and if so, why would that be? Because despite the media writing half a forest worth on the subject, actually information that would help us understand what took place was exceedingly rare.
I didn't use that phrase. Anyway, don't just make cryptic accusations of ignorance. If anyone had used that phrase, how would it be wrong? Should we say "instance" rather than "instances", because CA was the only party that ever received data? Should we use a different verb, not "releasing"? Help us to understand, rather than complain about the media. We all know about Gell-Mann amnesia.
It was a mistake to put that in quotes; I didn't mean to cite you. I meant to emphasize that the the phrase "every data release" sounds like there were individual, distinct cases where Facebook agreed to release data.
When it comes to the GP that talked about his experience - this was about platform vendors such as Apple or Blackberry having supposed "special access". But Facebook just did not release any data here. It just allowed third parties to write a Facebook app. For the most part, those apps where client-side, so the data did not leave the users device.
Now in the spirit of argument, there are a lot of aspects that can be debated: Is there a meaningful difference between code written by a contractor, but published by Facebook, an app published by a third party, but making it look like it belongs to Facebook, or a third party app without the blessing of Facebook. How does that relate to our ideas about the freedom of the internet (should anyone be allowed to create a Facebook app, without Facebook's blessing, which is certainly a technical possibility? What is the implication of Facebook's support for such an app, or lack of taking legal action against it?). What is the responsibility of companies like Facebook when having an API of the sort that they do, which prima facie allows users to decide which data to share? So about if I agree to share data, but that data is something my friend shared with me? Does Facebook have a responsibility to prevent this? Is is problem the sheer amount of data on Facebook? If I have a small online community forum, can I offer that sort of access, letting my users share their friends list with third party apps? What about apps like Twitter, Telegram asking for your permission to access your phone book. Courts in Germany have said the users agreeing to this are the ones breaking the law. What if I agree to share my contact book with an app, but that app does not upload this data to a server? How does that compare to Facebook asking a third party to provide a Facebook app, but data does not go to a third party server?
It's all interesting stuff. And I don't even ask the media to discuss it in that level of detail. They can give the 5-or-however-many foot view. But don't misrepresent that.
Gell-Mann amnesia doesn't defend the media here, right? The idea is that it is strange that you trust it after their incompetence has been proven to you.
Look, I am not a Trumpian Fake-Newser. I think it's good we have journalists. I am sure the journalists working on those Facebook stories did their best, given limited time, the breath of technical details involved, the pressures of creating content that brings in clicks, and yes, the personal vanity of wanting to uncover a big story. We are all human, after all.
CA is even one thing. But regarding the platform integrations - what GP tells from personal experience is the same thing I got from reading the reporting. It was simply misleading.
Who are you trying to convince? I certainly don't trust "the media" (or as I typically call them "the war media") as anyone on HN who follows my copious commenting can tell you. At this point, I trust Facebook less than the newspapers, just based on my (very) occasional use and actually listening to what Facebook themselves say.
All that is beside the point. The point is that if as 'sonnyblarney indicated there a custom negotiation for every new organization that gets to peak behind the curtain, then the process is not standardized. Normal online firms have TOS and APIs, and it's possible to characterize what user data they release. For Facebook, apparently that characterization is not possible.
I known a few people who gamed facebook's add system to "color" people's profile data into cookies, and also a couple of "quiz" app developers who had access to everything they could ask for at the time, and then some.
> the API's that were used there were available to the entire world and everyone knew exactly what they were. Were there tech people screaming foul? The press? Not really,
Yeah they were, and that's why the APIs were eventually shuttered. FB even secured a promise from CA that they retroactively deleted the data.
The overfocus on Facebook hides the much more important and sobering point — if you tell someone exactly what they want to hear, they can be induced to vote for you, which calls into question the real long-term value of democracy as a politics architecture.
I think it's the narrowcasting that is a danger to democracy. When you have to blast your message across popular broadcast media your message has to appeal to a wide cross-section of the public. The ability to secretly target individuals you can craft messages that would be repulsive to a larger audience. That's why Facebook's political ad transparency is an important first step against this new attack on democracy.
This is so true. Also compounding the problem is how we're so isolated into our own interests and beliefs, so even if you share your personalized propaganda it's likely to be with other like-minded people. It's like we're all living in our own dream worlds.
Alice, Bob, and Carol all hate each other. A politician of yesteryear had to forge some compromise between them to get the support of any two. Today, you can tell Alice that you'll kill Bob and Carol, Bob that you'll kill Alice and Carol, and Carol that you'll kill Alice and Bob, and get all three of their votes.
How about the fact that Zuckerberg was summoned to Washington to testify before Congress and failed to disclose the ongoing data-sharing agreements FB has with 60 or so device manufacturers?[1]
In addition to willfully misleading Congress it also likely violates their 2011 FTC consent decree[2]. Is this also just part of the 'media narrative' you claim is different from reality? I think these revelations amount to pretty "scammy behavior" as well, to borrow your terminology.
It's exactly what the parent seems to be writing about. What they are saying is that the WSJ article is highly misrepresentative, that rather than there being a "data sharing" agreement, it would be more correct to say that Facebook hired them to program an app; and that app, installed on the device of the users, communicates directly with the Facebook servers, thus sharing no data with anyone.
You're basically saying, "nobody cared about their material security weakness until someone did something bad with it"
How is that not true of every single security/privacy incident, ever? If the situation was, "everyone knew 23andMe was storing non-deidentified genomic data on an unsecured S3 bucket, and this was fine until [insert villian] took it" it would be the same, and people would be justifiably pissed off. This feels like a completely correctly handled story in the media, your personal anecdote about working with Facebook notwithstanding.
You can’t recast HN’s comment system as a material security weakness just because you learn that people who disagree with you can also read your public comments.
> You can’t recast HN’s comment system as a material security weakness just because you learn that people who disagree with you can also read your public comments
This is a false equivalence. Hacker News comments are public. (HN also doesn't sell ads.) Facebook messages and private content usually aren't.
Just because "the API's that were used there were available to the entire world" doesn't mean "everyone knew exactly what they were." Everyone didn't know what they were capable of. A very small section of the technologically literate did, and most of them were profiting off the status quo.
>Facebook messages and private content usually aren't.
Sure, that's not the same as public access, but it's equally blown out of proportion.
Users must be empowered to delegate access to the software of their choosing. Facebook offering read_mailbox as an option on its OAuth consent screen is exactly as evil as Fastmail offering IMAP.
> As far as the Cambridge story - this is also misleading because the API's that were used there were available to the entire world and everyone knew exactly what they were
That was actually the entire point. That Facebook had these overly... generous APIs for anyone to use. That's not a good thing.
APIs used by apps that required explicit opt in and permission granting by the end user.
Calling them “overly generous” is such a disingenuous statement because it connotes such a clearly wrong historical perspective that the whole statement is a falsehood.
Facebook’s APIs at the time were considered too stingy at the time! So much so it was constantly fending off accusations of being a walled garden taking advantage of an open web. The less than adequate APIs were their attempts at fending off that narrative.
There's a lot of truth to this statement. The web started out a lot more open. Email addressss were generally public, commands like finger existed, etc etc etc
It's worth noting that the context around privacy of generic life information of the kind you post on social media has radically changed in the last 10-20 years.
Back then, the Facebook API gave out personal details of not use the end user, but all the end user's 'friends'. I never gave the explicit opt in for that.
You chose to be friends with someone on Facebook which means you very explicitly chose to share your personal details with that person for them to consume or view it in whatever way they saw fit. It was very much clear from context at the time that they would consume it from multiple different sources: the website, phone-specific apps, shared games, etc.
Once someone knows something about you, it's no longer yours; it's that person's to do with as they please.
>Were there tech people screaming foul? Not really
Yes. Really.
>Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach.
Parakilas, whose job was to investigate data breaches by developers similar to the one later suspected of Global Science Research, which harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles and provided the data to Cambridge Analytica, said the slew of recent disclosures had left him disappointed with his superiors for not heeding his warnings.
“It has been painful watching,” he said, “because I know that they could have prevented it.”
Parakilas said he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for Facebook data that had been passed to external developers. However, he said that when he told other executives the company should proactively “audit developers directly and see what’s going on with the data” he was discouraged from the approach.
He said one Facebook executive advised him against looking too deeply at how the data was being used, warning him: “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?”
Your description of writing an app for your platform sounds fine...but in that same era they were throwing Instant Personalization out there. Which was profoundly fucked up; I was involved with the deployment of it at a large site, hated it the entire time, and the creepy behavior of it was a fairly big reason why I left that company.
I don’t disagree with your view on the media, but as a banker I say to tech people: welcome to the club. Welcome to a world where the media will pick a fraud somewhere in a large organisation and generalise it to all employees or to the whole industry, will twist facts to the limit of honesty to make a point, will call outrageous some technical and inocuous business practices, and will run months long campaigns on a single incident. Welcome to a world where the media hate you.
> somewhere in a large organisation and generalise it to all employees or to the whole industry
I don't know if its different in the US but here in Europe that seems to sum up the "sexist" nature of our industry. Its true that there aren't many females in IT but when I have worked with them they have always been treated fairly and as equals to men. Their sex never seemed to enter into the equation at all.
In fairness to the people slating the entire banking industry, no other industry (that I'm aware of) has so consistently and repeatedly been responsible for financial crash after financial crash in the way your industry has.
It displays a hubris and greed that makes the lives of millions of innocent people worse, time after time. Then the tax payer bails them out when that greed backfires, as it does every single time.
It seems like most of the major banks were guilty of obviously dodgy lending and deliberately overly-omplicated financial instruments in the run up to the last recession, and they seem to be back at it again with car loans.
> Were there tech people screaming foul? The press? Not really, they seemed reasonable, until it seemed that some bad agents were getting a little unscrupulous, and so FB did the right thing and altered the APIs to make them more secure. Security polices change all the time, in this case they tightened up given some field data. That's it.
Others quoted about screaming foul from within facebook. I was involved with RTB ad exchanges at the time, and everyone knew that the data is available to whomever wants it, with facebook's tacit approval.
Gabriel Weinberg (yegg) founder of duck duck go had a story on his blog about how he targeted his own wife with a facebook ad, and about how easy it is profile/get everyone's FB data, and he wasn't the only one.
Your experience may have been different; it looks to me like you'd rather look at the world through rose tinted glasses and give FB an undeserved benefit of the doubt -- but I'll accept that this was your experience. However, I have about 20:1 anecdata about "improper FB" than "proper FB", so I tend to believe the latter.
If there was one story of patents done right, does that indicate there are no patent trolls and it's all blown out of proportion?
I travel a bit. Facebook, the company, has a disproportionately vocal base of support in Silicon Valley. (This is also where the principal economic beneficiaries of Facebook's status quo live.)
The famous upton sinclair quote comes to mind:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Thanks for commenting and sharing your insight but I don't think the average person knows or cares what that meant. The problem with CA was that an app developer was allowed to sell user data without the users knowledge.
Security isn't just "people can't get inside our servers", it's a much broader topic than that — anything that looks like "people didn't something that, in hindsight, we'd rather they couldn't have" falls under that purview, really. I'd certainly qualify working on preventing the next Cambridge Analytica, or preventing the next micro-targeted political propaganda campaign, as "security work" without even blinking.
Well, the stock dropped a bit after the report, but then it fell off a cliff during the call. It must be the forecast and not the results that is really spooking people.
The guidance is nice. It resets expectation, especially amongst the analyst community. Makes it easier for FB to beat expectations the next time around.
The closing auction signifies the end of regular trading hours (where more rules are in effect) but not the end of all trading. US stocks now trade 24/5 on at least one market, and well beyond 4pm ET on many more.
>"and at the same time, it was encouraging to see the vast majority of people affirm that though want us to use context, including from web sites this they visit, to make our ads more relevant and improve their overall product experience.”
I assume the vast majority clicked 'Agree' or similar on prompts about updated policies, but it's funny to phrase it this way. Obviously if asked directly, the vast majority would't actually affirm that.
The market has expected this for years. Look at Facebook's declining P/E ratio.[1] 81 in 2005. 22 now. Successful established companies have P/E ratios in the 10-20 range. Facebook is coming in for a landing as an established company, ending its growth company phase. This is a normal part of the corporate life cycle.
You cannot say a 20% drop AH is "expected" by investors. If this was truly "expected" then the slowing growth would've been long accounted for in the price.
I think you* have unreasonable expectations for precision in valuation. 20% is not a large fluctuation in the context of the unlimited future of a company. Something truly unexpected would make an order of magnitude difference.
That 20% drop brought its stock value back to where it was a year ago, which was an all-time high for it then. Investors that have held it for longer than a year can still sell it at a profit.
But no one is talking about investors holding stocks for more than a year in this comment chain. That's tangential to this comment chain, sorry.
And to your point, investors could have sold for over 25% of profit as well if they had sold it earlier today. So I still stand by saying that this is huge change. Besides, this thread is not about long term, just invest in index funds so I just fail to see the point.
I was coming from the perspective that there is really no such thing as a short term investor, because when you sell, you are dependent on what people think the long term prospects of the stock are.
Without getting into any theory about how much stocks should vary, if you choose a bunch of random stocks and track them for a few months, I think you would find out that 20% is not a lot.
Stock prices should come with uncertainty bars, like scientific quantities, but there is of course no standard way to calculate and denote that.
That's not what I mean. Options tell you something about what people expect to happen to prices in a given timeframe, but that's not the same as the uncertainty in the underlying value. For example, say I have an early stage biotech company that's losing money. The value is somewhere between zero (if they go out of business before becoming profitable) to a fairly large number if everything goes perfectly. Options have an expiration date, and probably the longest dated ones on a lot of stocks are under 2 years. That's a pretty short time period. I just looked at an example, and the at-the-money calls and puts were about 40% of the price of the stock with expiration around 1.5 years out. That's not at all where I would put an uncertainty range, because at any time the stock can suddenly reflect prospects beyond 1.5 years in the future.
Options are one of the best tools we have to price uncertainty in the value of publicly traded companies. The option prices allow you, using Black Scholes, to calculate an implied volatility that can be used quite similarly to the error bars on a measurement.
The EMH would say that a company's stock price accurately reflects all current knowledge about a stock's underlying value. So from the point of view of an investor in publicly traded companies, a stock's price and its underlying value are the same thing.
Options have an expiration date because as the further you go out the more uncertain things are, and the harder it becomes to make a market in options in a way that (a) won't result in a high chance of losses and (b) will have someone actually willing to buy them. That's why you don't see 10, 20 or 50 year options.
That doesn't hurt their value for pricing uncertainty because as options expire, new ones are minted. Therefore, you can always use them to price the uncertainty of the price to the next quarter, the next 6 months or the next year.
Two years of days where implied volatility is 100%. That is not an everyday level of implied volatility.
A single day move of twenty percent is rare even in small caps. Facebook moving that much means the market did not except even the risk of something this big.
For comparison when Nissan announced a recall of over a million cars their stock moved less than three percent. Single day moves are rarely so large, and almost never this large for a single company.
Don’t bother stressing over after hours drops like this. Right now FB is still a buy and when the market opens in the morning it could quickly rise up several percent again, and probably be back in the 200s soon to enough.
Market would be expecting the direction, but underestimated how fast it would be. Or the revenue growth numbers are about on expectation but the size of the margin decline is unexpected.
The P/E ratio is backward-looking, because it considers past earnings, not future earnings. AMZN has a P/E of 293. AAPL has 18. TWTR has 90. This is not a terribly meaningful metric for tech names with huge growth potential.
Yhis was all after the bell as was the earnings announcement, and the quoted stock drop was in the after hours trading market, so it could be less tomorrow in the standard market.
It's funny to suggest that after hours trading means less. The people trading during the regular session were literally just gambling, whereas the people trading in the after are trading on new fundamental information.
What I'd really like to know about today's regular session is why seven billion dollars worth of shares changed hands on the last tick.
What happened before they whiffed on earnings doesn't matter, new information came out and the market ran away from Facebook like it was contagious. 32,725,304 FB shares have traded after the bell, that is a "real market". The 10-day average daily volume is ~17.5m so this is hugely significant.
The pessimistic guidance dovetails well with Zuckerberg's recent, wide-ranging interview with Kara Swisher[1]. FB has been the darling of tech and general media, until the last 2 years--turning a great brand to an increasingly toxic one. By Zuckerberg's own estimation, FB's "retooling" needs 3 years, and they are about 1 1/2 years in, so the guidance reflects that timeline. If they deliver on that timeline, a rough 2nd half of 2018 and all of 2019 is to be expected.
I think the stock price is finally catching up to reality and public perception. I've noticed a huge resistance to using Facebook in recent years within my social sphere. Professionally, I'm one of the few that I know that still use the service; I think it's FOMO keeping me on, but I find it extremely difficult to add content to my profile and find myself mostly acting as a passive consumer of others' content.
Install Newsfeed eradicator and then remove the app from your phone. Brought me down to maybe check the site once every couple weeks for notifications.
Pretty much anyone who has a brand that targets millennials advertises on IG. I see dozens of Kickstarter products and re-targeting from e-commerce around the web.
They have over a billion daily active users. That is more than the EU and the US COMBINED! Any personal opinions about a product are practically useless when your customer base is that freaking large and diverse.
Edit: I avoid facebook like what seems like most other people here on hacker news but my point is that hacker news is in no way shape or form representative of the global population.
* There are 4.16 billion Internet users worldwide.[a]
* 26.3% of the world's population is under 14 years old, close to Facebook's minimum age of 13.[b] This means 73.7% of the world's population is at least 14 years old.
* If we assume the population of Internet users has a similar age distribution as the world's population, that means there are around 4.16 * 73.7% = 3.07 billion Internet users who are at least 14 years old. This is a rough estimate of the maximum possible number of people who can have an account with Facebook today, i.e., the size of the company's addressable market (in users, not dollars).
* The true size of Facebook's addressable market could be higher (for example, if the age distribution of Internet users is different)... but it could also be significantly lower (for example, if a substantial number of Internet users cannot or will not join Facebook due to religious, cultural, or governmental restrictions, or due to the availability of established regional alternatives).
* Facebook just reported monthly active users of 2.23 billion, up only 11% from 2.01 billion a year ago.[c] This isn't exactly stellar user growth. The company now has around 73% penetration of every person in the planet who can join Facebook today. Again, this is a rough estimate.
* The company's CFO disclosed in today's quarterly earnings call that the company expects a "deceleration" in growth.[d]
EDITS: I updated the global Internet usage figures based on dooglius's comment below (the Wikipedia page is outdated). I also expanded significantly on my original post to make my facts and reasoning as clear as possible to others here.
From what I can tell (those sources are pretty vague), they include china where American tech companies are effectively banned and thus there population is not really relevant.
>If we assume the population of Internet users has a similar age distribution as the world's population
Well, this certainly isn't true.
And in any case, the people making these predictions are factoring in things like this, they didn't just slap down a linear regression line and call it a day.
It depends on how those estimates of the world's Internet population are calculated -- e.g., from census and other household data. Is an African village of 47 with a dial-up connection counted as part of the world's Internet population? I don't know. Do you?
> And in any case, the people making these predictions are factoring in things like this, they didn't just slap down a linear regression line and call it a day.
One would hope so, yet many are acting... surprised. As a headline put it, "Facebook’s forecast for the future looks suddenly bleak."[a]
Your calculation doesn't make sense. You assume that the percentage of people below 14 that use the internet is the same as the percentage of people above 14 that do so
Why would we assume that just because Facebook has a minimum age of 13, there are no 12-year-olds on Facebook? I, personally, would go pretty much the opposite way and assume that if a kid wants to be on Facebook, they will be, completely without regard to an official minimum age, and that therefore the minimum age is absolutely irrelevant to theoretical user count.
And I'm arguing that part of it is grossly unmotivated. If you break down an estimate, it should be broken down into things that plausibly matter, not total irrelevancies.
This is interesting. I would consider the number of maximum possible people who can have a Facebook account is probably closer to 3.07 billion - 772 million internet users in China [1], which means closer to 2.3 billion.
I doubt Facebook, at 2.23 billion users is that close to making all possible users MAUs (96.95% penetration? Yikes!), which makes me believe the age distribution of Internet users is different.
Counting bots, this moves to (2.23 billion - 270 million [2]) / 2.3 billion = ~85.22%. This is still very high, but interestingly closer to the number at which Facebook users maybe have stabilized in the US/Canada region. I wrote a comment on another thread about this (sources referenced are on the original comment):
"I can see the decline in Europe being unsettling, but I'm not really surprised about US/Canada. ~185 million is about 52% of the population of US/Canada. If we assume 35% of the population is simply too young to use it (20% under 14) or too old to be drawn to it (15% is over 65), that leaves only 13% of US/Canada's population which are feasible MAUs no being MAU, which is crazy." [3]
I'm guessing here that Facebook has reached 87% of possible users in the region, based on age as an approximation for internet/Facebook use. I wonder how far off these quick calculations are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
You’re assuming each MAU is a unique person, which is obviously incorrect.
MAU is a bad stat anyway. DAU broken down into precise categories, with compensation for duplicate accounts, would be a great stat.
I don’t use Facebook for any serious time but there will probably be at least one time per month when I log in to look something up. I’m on the site for a few minutes at most.
If I did one google search per month would you care about it as a google investor?
The day my Mum told me that she had “decided to use Facebook less” due to their shitty behaviour was the day I decided Facebook were screwed.
What I’m fascinated by is what the endgame is for Facebook. It’s still useful in some sense, the world probably needs a Facebook. If it died it would be replaced by something else. So I think the most likely outcome is it will sit at some level where it’s hard for a competitor to dislodge it, but it doesn’t get used much and it doesn’t make much money.
I mean, they reported 42 percent year-over-year growth in ad revenue and 11 percent year-over-year growth in monthly and daily active users.
I don't know enough to tell if this is the start of the end game, but in spite of missing the (very) high expectations Wall Street had for them it I'd say it's inaccurate to say "it doesn’t get used much and it doesn’t make much money".
Interesting to note that this is currently #2 on HN, while a discussion about fake news/free speech on Facebook was immediately flagged off the home page as soon as it arrived:
Because the thread you mentioned is about politics. Political discussion may be allowed on HN, but most people don't like them, as they're completely non-productive and just get everyone angry at each other.
Seems silly to think that politics goes away if you just don't talk about it. Facebook recently had an entire ad campaign around reducing the toxicity on the platform - surely a discussion of that has a place when talking about earnings or lack thereof.
I'm very aware of what it means. Most political discourse in the US is currently propaganda being exchanged by both sides with no intent of actually giving consideration of what the other side is saying.
Go look at a comment thread on reddit on a news article about Trump if you'd like an example.
What an absurd perspective. Talking about the toxicity that exists on Facebook's platform is "poltical activism", now? Or wait, sorry, "propaganda".
If you haven't heard anyone you know complaining about the crap they see on Facebook then you're living in a bubble. FB even launched an entire ad campaign trying to apologize to users for it. Any conversation about Facebook's performance is incomplete without discussing it, whether or not you wish to shut it down by labelling it "propaganda".
So is spending your time ( paid or not ) spamming facebook propaganda.
> Talking about the toxicity that exists on Facebook's platform is "poltical activism", now? Or wait, sorry, "propaganda".
No. Talking about it is one thing. Spamming social media and prosletyizing about it is another.
> If you haven't heard anyone you know complaining about the crap they see on Facebook then you're living in a bubble.
Did you read my comment? I clearly stated that I have.
"We've had nearly an entire year of that nonsense and I think most of us have grown tired of it already. Go to reddit if you enjoy propaganda."
We've had facebook propaganda ( mostly anti ) spammed on HN for a year. Most of us are sick of it. Go to reddit if you want propaganda.
> Any conversation about Facebook's performance is incomplete without discussing it, whether or not you wish to shut it down by labelling it "propaganda".
Then discuss here? Why do we need an entire post dedicated specifically to that? Or are you just interested in spamming HN with anti-facebook posts?
I'm glad the mods are filtering out facebook nonsense. It's been a long time coming. I don't want to go back to the time where half of HN was facebook propaganda. It was ridiculous.
If you want to talk about FB performance, this is a fine post to do it in. Not sure why we need two posts on HN for the same discussion. Other than propaganda that is.
IMHO it's big news signifying a possible end of an era. We reached peak FB. What's next? Is it going to implode as fast as it exploded, or is it going to be another tech dinosaur dying slowly?
The financial consequences will also be big. A lot of people have invested in FB, probably you too, through your 401k. Also imagine what will mean for the SF Bay Area a FB that is laying off or cutting down on expenses/compensation.
Reddit maybe since they have been exploding in growth.
To me, it seems as though network effects are not as important as they seem as the businesses that rely most on them where fellow users provide all the content (myspace, facebook, twitter, snapchat, reddit...) rise and fall faster than any other company.
I love reddit but they have banned many subreddits.
Nobody has pure free speech not even the US (you cannot say bomb on an airplane nor threaten someone among many other things).
Granted, we do have more free speech than most countries but not pure free speech (which I think is fare as my former 2 examples were cases that bring negative externalities upon others).
I know we've been over this on HN many times but "free speech" is more about freedom of the press than freedom to be a dick to other people or break the law. The banned subreddits I know of were either hate groups or pedophilia.
What's App, Instagram, Messenger, and VR all of which Facebook either own outright or are significantly invested in to win. IGTV is a shot across the bow at Youtube. Frankly I spoke with a VP at Facebook 3 years ago and he said they were looking away from "Big Blue" as the future then. This is a temporary at best setback. IMHO they're still the most dynamic tech company and they'll easily bounce back. I'm happy to buy some Facebook stock right now.
He literally teaches his students how to make psychologically addictive products and is proud of it (and rich). His disciples are the priests of "engagement".
Reading his website makes him seem less like a master of anything serious and more a master at self aggrandizing douche baggery.
B=MAP reads much like any self helpy gimmick, something so obvious and so useless you somehow feel smart for having had your obvious thoughts on a topic reworded and handed back to you in corny new configuration you can share with your vapid fake friend group.
But surely they're not the only villains. It began with pop-up ads in the old days, evolving to that interstitial nightmare. Mobile notifications of almost anything, combined with a snaring in of people's attention using human weaknesses: need for attention and validation, frailty with regards to gossip, need to find a way to procrastinate during difficult times (work) and much more that I'm missing. It's time for some serious scholarship in the psychological arena in this direction.
I agree but Google has this with its news, and perhaps (I'm guessing because it's hard to imagine otherwise) Instagram. What makes Facebook vile is the news feed.
But everyone is selling customer data. And my words are coming from the very unusual coincidence that I'm in a bar in Brooklyn and two data scientists are discussing 10 years of customer data needing to be parsed (and I heard the word verticalization). I'm not making this up (it's live).
> They have consciously destroyed a generation attention span using psychological tricks.
They did the same thing CNN, MTV and all media does. They do the same thing movies, music, tv, news, etc does. They do the same thing Google does, Twitter does, reddit does, snapchat does, like everyone does. What's with the organized and targeted hate towards facebook?
I'll make a bet with anyone here. Once FB gives in to the mob like google did, like twitter did or reddit did, I guarantee you the outrage will magically disappear like it did for google, twitter and reddit.
> the US implement something similar to GDPR.
You want free speech curtailed in the US? You want more regulation of the internet? That's last thing you'd expect in a "hacker" news site. But like most social media, it's less tech people on tech forums and more political people with an axe to grind it seems.
MTV was not watching you interactively. There was no data "dance" between your usage pattern and what shows MTV showed you. There was no Feedback Loop. This is much more sinister than passive consumption of media.
There was a dance but it was broad, clumsy and tailored towards demographics that were themselves broadly and clumsily lumped together. And the feedback loop was glacial. But comparing that to what they do today is like comparing cavemen banging stones together to an industrial laser cutter.
I think it's crazy how the same narrative changes so much.
I remember the internet and social media used to be so much better than TV. TV was controlled by big corporations who wanted to brainwash everyone. 1/3 of the time was ads that only stupefied you, and the rest were shows that did the same. They would do anything for ratings-- CNN was a bastion of treachery dividing the country by presenting politics as sports for the sake of viewership. People were glad Crossfire got canceled (now all of CNN is essentially Crossfire).
But social media? What a tool for free speech and change! It was the breath of fresh air that fought away big corporations, that gave us the Arab Spring, that let anyone with something to say become famous and have a voice and an audience, for free! It provided a platform for critical thinking instead of passive consumption! This data "dance" was the 8th wonder of the world and news articles were being written about how clever Obama's campaign had been to use analytics and "research" to get the edge on the campaign.
I'm not saying any one view is right and the other wrong but something I've noticed about Americans is that they are a very scared people and are very quick at painting things black or white (: The world is not so scary, and most things lie somewhere on a grayscale.
>something I've noticed about Americans is that they are a very scared people and are very quick at painting things black or white
This can be seen a lot and it seems quite like the Christian narrative has deep roots in some parts of the world even among non-believers. The idea that everybody is looking at the world through a good-vs-evil lens explains a lot. Mythology is a powerful force, it can't just be dumped, it needs updating.
There absolutely was. You think MTV didn't use focus groups and Neilson ratings and all manner of data to target and 'optimize' for maximum effect on their desired audience? It doesn't have to be 'you' specifically, you're not that unique. Things that are effective on your population are effective on you. If you were in a different population you had to change the channel, but it is not really all that different. Maybe marginally more efficient now.
MTV did its damage on the youth who are now all adults and totally different from the generation that preceded them. There is no telling in what ways minds have changed. If only someone were to do a research study on this.
But without it, it is difficult to say that damage did or didn't happen.
My point has been the "X is ruining the children's attention" is a constant across history for several new X each generation for as long as there has been civilization.
You could certainly do a study of some metric and X's effect on it and find a few that were affected negatively, call that 'damage', and write blog posts about it. X would continue to thrive, adults would continue to complain about it, and the next generation would find a new X to use, abuse, and irritate their parents.
Philosophically, 'damage' is more like 'change' and there are a lot of people who like complaining about it because they have forgotten or misremembered what it was like to be young and have limited capacity to empathize with a different generation. If there are things about the change which are right and wrong, they probably aren't the ones being discussed or even understood until enough time has passed to see the change with the perspective of time and by then whatever problems have likely resolved themselves anyway.
This argument proves too much. If some new actually-bad youth trend were to arise, e.g. the youths were to be convinced that lithium batteries are a better source of nutrients than real food, this logic would still ignore the problem, since "the old folks never understand". It's more illuminating to seriously consider the unforeseen effects of new things.
Some day that will probably happen. Somebody will figure out how to make some cybernetic implant that will plug in and provide an alternative to eating. "old folks" will go about complaining about wholesome food and techies will ignore them.
Over time I have grown increasingly irritated by the talk about things being "bad for you". At this point if you don't have a decades long history of studies holding up to meta-analysis backed up by a philosophy of life and what is good and bad for it, I really think what is being said is nonsense. I'll believe hyper-specific cause-and-effect data, but I just don't care about the latest opinion about if something is bad for me.
Until you can show me a study proving that listening to that sort of constant what-I-call-nonsense leads to quantifiable improvements I can be convinced to care about, I'd rather people spend their energy doing something other than complaining about change and/or the status quo. It holds the same status, in me, as celebrity gossip.
>"The MTV Generation," Lazin said, directly addresses the pros and cons of MTV, which has been criticized for everything from placing too much emphasis on image to promoting short attention spans and the need for constant entertainment in its audience.
Why can't they both be right. They placed too much emphasis on image and FB/IG are even worse. There is certainly no shortage of people claiming that our society is vapid and shallow.
Drug dealer is way too much of an exageration in my opinion. Nicotine vaping is a better analogy I think.
While there have been some studies on the negatives of social media like nicotine vaping, it is not that bad as what we currently give people the choice to consume and I think we should swing even further towards more freedom of choice even if it negatively effects people long term.
They have people who's sole job is to make sure Facebook users are on the platform for as long as humanly possible. The company goes out of its way to subvert your desires to make it hard to leave (such as changing sorting by most recent so that you have no idea what content you've seen before). That's as close as you can get to being a pusher.
Although, the whole "They have people who's sole job is to make sure Facebook users are on the platform for as long as humanly possible" part makes me the most skeptical.
That sounds like a job that you would find at pretty much any mobile gaming company with a free-to-play model. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook has had some pretty gross practices over the years, but it doesn’t exactly rot your teeth and make you steal from your mother.
And it's a job that has existed way before Facebook too-- Disneyland is designed to be lovable and make you spend money. TV shows are designed to keep you hooked and on the edge for the next episode. Movie theatres are designed to make you crave soda and popcorn. Candy and soft drinks are designed to be sugary so people keep wanting more.
I think all this is terrible-- the world ends up becoming landmine after landmine of companies trying to pull you in and get your money-- but lets keep in mind it's nothing new or unique. Just standard business in an free market economy.
Facebook can take a hard ethical stance against allowing teens on the platform. Or, they could add a simple "if" statement on age, and not allow teens to be targeted for advertising.
Instead, they chose to implement the minimum legal requirements of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which prevents companies from collecting certain information from kids under 13, and kids who are under 13 just lie about their age. Facebook has really good data, collected for advertising, to know that kids are signing in, and do not make an effort to stop it, beyond a stern "Don't lie to us" phrasing in their TOS.
I think the point made here, especially with Disneyland, Candy, and Television is that children are targeted and manipulated for profiteering. And that's surprisingly legal.
But it is not ethical. Each company has a choice. I hope public opinion will see FB as unethical and unforgivable in the future.
CocaCola can take a hard ethical stance against diabetes. It is one of the deadliest diseases in the world. They could add a disclaimer to their bottles the way tobacco companies are obliged to warn about the effects of long-term smoking.
Instead, they chose to implement the minimum legal requirements set by the FDA with a tiny number on tucked-away table. CocaCola has really good data on how much sugar their drinks have and they do not make an effort to really surface it to people assuming they are acting in their own interest, will read the label, and that will be enough to deter them from drinking a third can.
And the same can be said about pretty much any other company. They all implement "the bare minimum" required by law if it potentially affects their numbers.
> I think the point made here, especially with Disneyland, Candy, and Television is that children are targeted and manipulated for profiteering. And that's surprisingly legal.
Yes, but is it that surprising? We can't expect companies to regulate themselves.
> But it is not ethical. Each company has a choice. I hope public opinion will see FB as unethical and unforgivable in the future.
I agree, though I also think Facebook is a much lesser concern than other companies out there. That's not to say it should be put to the side or nothing can be done before something is done about big Tobacco, big Pharma or even big Sugar. I just think comparing it to a drug company is disingenuous, and lessens the urgency of dealing with companies dealing with proven, dangerous physical addiction.
Facebook and mobile gaming companies are both taking their playbook from gambling companies. Casino addiction doesn't root your teeth, but it certainly does convince a lot of people to steal from their mother. It's a very unethical business model.
Eh, I think psychology is the root subject here but gambling companies tend to be the best at it. What do you propose though since you seem to find business models that play to psychology unethical?
If Facebook is making a better product, one that people want to use more, with the intention of keeping users on the platform, how can we fault them?
Do we blame TV makers for wanting to sell additional techniques?
Facebook seems to conduct its business in a relatively ethical way, it certainly doesn't seem to go out of its way to make it addictive, they're preocupied with making it more functional - they're adding features constantly.
To say that we should leave everything to simple choice is ignoring the realities of what groupthink has on a broader society. I.e. everyone smokes so it's fine and I should do it too.
I'm not saying we should make these sorts of things illegal, but to require the industry to display proper warnings, to actively give money to organizations that work against them (such as how tobacco companies must pay for anti smoking commercials), seems like a logical step forward.
To me that award goes to Twitter, not Facebook. Facebook is actually useful to stay in touch with friends and family in a private fashion. Twitter on the other hand is constant pettiness, aggressiveness and bickering 24/7 from people looking for validation and internet points. The worst internet mobs came out of Twitter and my statement doesn't discriminate between political sides.
Twitter is just a platform for idiots to yell at each other and marketers to sell their books/wares. However I haven't noticed people spend HOURS on twitter, like I have with facebook. Facebook is much much more insidious and poisonous.
At least messages are still E2E encrypted. If you avoid all other facebook systems and restrict the apps permissions I think the damage can be contained to a decent level.
Rather than "afraid", I'm mildly annoyed by the regular posting to HN of various error messages that Europeans get when visiting various sites that DGAFAGDPR. Why don't they send those errors to the European regulators instead? Those people seem better-placed to do something about the errors.
From what I have read here on HN is that companies are forced to have users opt in to targeted advertising business models which will make almost all advertising business models unprofitable.
Unsurprisingly, companies are deciding that EU users are not profitable customers without targeted advertising and thus not worth serving these users causing them to block all EU users even if some EU users would accept the previously agreed upon terms of targeted advertising in exchange for the content they wish to receive.
This is a terrible precedence of anti-choice in my opinion since the EU has forced upon all EU people the inability to accept a business model of targeted advertising in exchange for content and thus causing many companies to leave the EU altogether.
> companies are forced to have users opt in to targeted advertising
Well, that sounds good to me. If user wants targeted advertising, he should show that desire, i.e. opt in. It's privacy by default.
> EU users are not profitable customers without targeted advertising
So, they can't find profitable business model without stealing users' data? Well, then let them fall. And yes, I do mean stealing, if it is done without users' explicit consent.
> the EU has forced upon all EU people the inability to accept a business model of targeted advertising
It's not the EU that forced this, but rather companies which don't care even enough to provide basics of privacy.
Btw, I also don't think companies blocked EU users, because the targeted advertising model became unprofitable; rather it's because they don't want to spend time and resources to figure out what they would need to change.
The part of GDPR that I find unreasonable is the requirement to appoint an EU representative. It makes small companies with no presence in the EU Hire someone in the EU if they want to comply, which could be necessary if they sell to companies that do have an EU presence. Granted, a single person can act as a representative for a few companies, but the estimate is still around 20,000 Europeans that need to be hired for this strictly unnecessary position. It's wasteful and stupid.
Every incorporated entity in the US is required to have a registered agent physically located within the entity's state of incorporation as well. It's a pretty low bar to meet.
> It makes small companies with no presence in the EU Hire someone in the EU if they want to comply, which could be necessary if they sell to companies that do have an EU presence.
It simply does not.
Paragraph one of the Article 27 which states the requirement for a representative is followed by
Paragraph 2:
The obligation laid down in paragraph 1 of this Article shall not apply to:
a) processing which is occasional, does not include, on a large scale, processing of special categories of data as referred to in Article 9(1).
If you're wondering what is "special categories of data", they're reasonably sensitive data,
Art 27. 1: Processing of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person’s sex life or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.
Which is again, exempt, under Paragraph 2 of the same Article, which states:
2.
a) Paragraph 1 shall not apply if one of the following applies:
the data subject has given explicit consent to the processing of those personal data for one or more specified purposes.
It's not at all that simple [0]. In particular, it's not at all clear what occasional means, since GDPR doesn't define it clearly and a simple dictionary definition would mean that something as simple as an Apache log would not qualify as occasional and would require an EU representative.
Judgmental much? Who are you to speak on behalf of everyone, a whole generation? I personally have enjoyed using FB and Instagram. If you don't like it, don't use it. And don't tell me and other users that we are stupid or drug addicts.
Trouble is, every moral panic since the days of Aristotle has been accompanied by mountains of "harmful effects research." Video gaming, comic books, novels, TV, movies, any number of musical genres and trends... how much of this "research" ever pans out in the long run?
Just like the opioid crisis, there is a point at which individual choices collectively impact society. I'm personally fine with someone shooting up in the privacy of their own home, but clearly something must be done when entire communities are affected.
Facebook has shown a willingness to provide my country's adversaries a powerful tool to subvert the foundations of its society. Fomenting racial strife and spreading pernicious rumors is just the start of it.
The country and the world would be a better place without Facebook.
Honest question;
Why is _facebook_ the powerful tool, and not our populations inability to recognize the threat (misdirection, targeted messages, biased sources, etc) within it/think critically about it? To dismiss the nonsense like most people used to dismiss tabloids. Facebook obviously scales this up, but that is the nature of a modern connected world, whether we like it or not, and I'd rather give people the tools to navigate that than try to build a padded room, since there will _always_ be another Facebook. (And to fully undermine my own point, I _don't know if it's possible_ to give enough people these skills, but from a philosophy of personal empowerment and freedoms, the alternatives seem far less preferable)
It sounds a lot like the drug war. The approach that DRUGS are the problem, as opposed to situations that lead users to abuse them in destructive ways, has lead to a very demonstrable half-century of ineffectual policy and violent/sad outcomes.
I have not so entirely given up on ones ability to tread a path through this insanity, and am more worried of an escalating trend to put that responsibility in the hands of some gatekeeper as opposed to ones own agency as a sentient human. I don't even disagree with your final statement; I'd just want to see it come from rejection by the individual than mandate from on high.
> Honest question; Why is _facebook_ the powerful tool, and not our populations inability to recognize the threat (misdirection, targeted messages, biased sources, etc) within it/think critically about it?
> It sounds a lot like the drug war. The approach that DRUGS are the problem,
That's fair, there is some line beyond which personal choices affects the entire society so much that being judgmental is reasonable. (That said, not everyone in the world agrees that personal drug use is past that line - but that's besides the point.)
But you draw your line way too aggressively. If merely using an online community like FB is something that you should decide for other people, there's very little personal choice left. I, for one, certainly wouldn't want to live in a society so judgmental over individual choice.
I don't even mention the fact that FB is far less damaging, in any sense, then bad diet, lack of exercise, getting news from tabloids, trusting politicians, and arguably watching most the TV programs in this country.
Now, if you told me you only discourage your own family or close friends from using FB, I'd think you're very reasonable -- just like you can discourage them from eating junk food and spending weekends on the couch. But by imposing your judgment on billions of people, you present a greater evil, IMHO, than the worst of the FB misdeeds.
I think the issue with the "don't like it, don't use it" is that it's specifically designed to be addicting. It's hard to say they aren't complicit in the harm when they designed it to be harmful (being addicted to Facebook isn't the worst thing to be addicted to but it's still harmful).
Completely anecdotal but I enjoy hating on facebook -
I created an account so I could create ads for my new business.. I have no idea what's going on but the only page it ever serves me is "sorry something went wrong."
so clearly they're missing out on my $5/day ad budget.
The ad creation tool is working fine. It's the "Page" I created. Can't view it, modify it, publish it, etc, i just get the error page. And because of that I can't launch an ad campaign.
When Facebook posted good returns and stock didn't drop right after Cambridge Analytica many were gloating about how that is "proof" that the privacy scandal didn't affect Facebook and that no privacy scandal will ever affect Facebook.
But they were simply not looking closely enough. And as I said back then, you need to give this sort of things time to see the real effects, like at least until the end of the year. Because I believe the worst is still ahead of Facebook. Facebook is now on a downwards path, and it's irreversible.
Facebook is now officially Blackberry. And just like with Blackberry before, many dismissed the fundamental issues of the company while blindly following the "record quarters" Blackberry kept having until 2009.
If they had just looked closely enough, they would've seen that BB's core North American market was on a steep decline path and it was also obvious that its phones were nowhere near as good as iPhones or Android phones.
Just look at what's happening to Facebook engagement. Ignore Facebook's sugarcoating. Look how the people around you are using Facebook and what they say about it.
> When Facebook posted good returns and stock didn't drop right after Cambridge Analytica many were gloating about how that is "proof" that the privacy scandal didn't affect Facebook and that no privacy scandal will ever affect Facebook.
> But they were simply not looking closely enough. And as I said back then, you need to give this sort of things time to see the real effects, like at least until the end of the year.
I agree.
> Because I believe the worst is still ahead of Facebook. Facebook is now on a downwards path, and it's irreversible.
I don't think I agree. Facebook still has many opportunities for user and revenue growth in Instagram and WhatsApp. As far as being irreversible, Microsoft was in a very dire position too and now it's having record-breaking quarters. It'll largely depend on leadership and direction.
> Facebook is now officially Blackberry. And just like with Blackberry before, many dismissed the fundamental issues of the company while blindly following the "record quarters" Blackberry kept having until 2009.
If they had just looked closely enough, they would've seen that BB's core North American market was on a steep decline path and it was also obvious that its phones were nowhere near as good as iPhones or Android phones.
One bad quarter doesn't make a company "officially Blackberry". IIRC, Blackberry didn't release it first touch-screen phone until 2013 (5 years after the iPhone) and it's first Android phone until 2015 (8 years after the iPhone). It was their stubbornness quarter after quarter, year after year that sank them-- they weren't dead the minute the iPhone was released just like Samsung wasn't. They should've just played smart and embraced Android/touchscreens from the get-go.
Will Facebook remain stubborn or will it gain trust back? I don't know. Calling it dead already is a huge oversimplification though.
> Just look at what's happening to Facebook engagement. Ignore Facebook's sugarcoating. Look how the people around you are using Facebook and what they say about it.
The people around me are not an accurate sample of all Facebook users around the world. In my case, I see a lot of people using Facebook for Events and Marketplace. I see everyone on Instagram. The real data is in the numbers. Facebook's website falling behind Reddit is telling, but Instagram and WhatsApp surpassing Snapchat's stories also is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Wehner said a combination of currency headwinds, new privacy controls, and new experiences like Stories will contribute to the deceleration
I remember the day Chambers Saif Cisco hit an air pocket. Since then it has only been layoffs, cuts and austerity for Cisco. Never really recovered. Is it the same day for FB?
> Cisco on Wednesday reported healthy profit and sales gains for its fiscal first quarter, in line with Wall Street expectations. But a host of challenges -- including losses in public sector accounts and in specific product areas like set-top boxes -- coupled with a less-than-invigorating sales forecast for the current quarter, were enough to send Cisco's shares tumbling.
> Cisco CEO John Chambers, on Cisco's Q1 conference call, described the challenges as hitting an "air pocket," and was bullish on many of the areas in which Cisco excelled. But he set a subdued tone for the call, especially with the forecast that second quarter revenues would increase only about 3 to 5 percent, and a forecast that revenue growth for fiscal 2011 overall would be 9 to 12 percent, well below both the 13 percent for Q2 and the 13.1 percent for FY11 predicted by analysts.
> Specifically, said Chambers, orders came in over $500 million below Cisco's initial Q1 sales forecast.
408 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 6237 ms ] threadIt doesn't feel like the results justify the 20% drop.
But the problem with these after hours sessions is that they don't have much liquidity and that you can easily have a market squeeze due to people covering their position. This is what happened with the VIX ETNs.
It's likely that European and US/Canada user count growth is flat or nearly so, and their gains recently have been out of getting more dollars per user through increasing advertising revenue as opposed to getting more users. It could be (or not) that they can grow those revenues even more.
“Our total revenue growth rates will continue to decelerate in the second half of 2018, and we expect our revenue growth rates to decline by high single-digit percentages from prior quarters sequentially in both Q3 and Q4."
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...
> The company’s top line was $13.04 billion, weaker than $13.34 billion analysts expected, suggesting that the world’s largest social network has begun to feel some of the effects of the controversies that have battered it during the quarter.
It declined in Europe.
Expect total expense growth to exceed revenue growth in 2019.
Also expect revenue growth rates to decline by high single digit percentages from prior quarters sequentially in Q3 and Q4.
They painted a rough road ahead compared to how the stock had been valued in many people’s models.
[1]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/facts-for-features/2017/cb17...
[2]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.0014.TO.ZS
[3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=185+million+people+%2F...
Of course if they're still dominant when this happens.
You have to remember one main way analysts estimate what a share is worth today - they model out time-discounted earnings in perpetuity. A company that is expected to grow in the future is worth much more today than a company that isn't expected to grow at all.
The stock didn't drop because they missed this quarter alone, it's because all the analysts models are now assuming future earnings will grow much more slowly into the foreseeable future.
Over-optimization means that even when a string of bad news hit, the stock may not change much because of the previous string of good news still having inertia and the market "not really believing" the new bad stories. But eventually the market sentiment changes, and then it all comes crashing down, and now the bad news are over-optimized, and the good news become irrelevant. And the cycle repeats itself.
This is harder to see with stock because it tends to happen over a multi-year span, but it's much easier to see with cryptocurrencies where this happens over a several months period.
You could have a bad quarter and not get punished (too much) for it, assuming that your forecast was correct.
Neither does it for me.
FB is still the only real GOOGL competitor in the ad market. It's revenue and market share is growing. All it has to do is extracting more money from its huge user base, which at least with instagram it hasn't really tried for now.
Employing content reviewers won't come cheap, but that investment is going to be faced by all social media platforms and in turn will be sector neutral. Facing regulatory burdens with measures like this helps the big ones manifest their oligopol.
While I can echo most HNers sentiment (I too decreased my FB usage before and after the CA scandal) I think we are not precisely the best socio-economic group to serve as indicator for what drives people or doesn't: Most people are happy to share on social media platforms (no matter how repugnant I feel about it) and there is no social media real estate like FB or IG around.
Fundamentally it's still cheaper than GOOGL in terms of P/E and just costs half of what GOOGL costs for every $ of FCF.
> “But as I’ve said on past calls, we’re investing so much in security that it will significantly impact our profitability,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re starting to see that this quarter.”
That sounds like a big 1-year jump. From what I can tell, the big Facebook scandals (fake news, Cambridge Analytica) came from faults in company policies rather than security glitches.
I wonder if labeling it "security" is a PR thing as their web ads all focus on FB taking active steps to make sure those types of scandals don't happen again.
That being said, it made me way better at my job. No matter how many technical justifications I have for why we should implement X, the second I brought up a small to medium legal thing everyone would fix it immediately.
EG: Adding something as simple as a privilege expiration (generic example) and propagating it through the org and various teams itself will take time.
Anyone who's worked at a large company can tell you how incredibly complex and expensive this can get if your systems aren't designed for this.
It would be difficult to incur a 50% increase in expenses without massive policy shift.
In almost every work environment, I've seen the policies working directly against security: if not by contradicting it, ignoring the details where the real security decisions live, or by striking the wrong balances between prescriptiveness and generality - then by out-prioritizing security decision making. (I've worked at mostly 100,000+ person companies).
It's much better to have technical security controls >80-90% of the actual security. It's just expensive and harder to teach/learn/implement.
That said, there's some real security gained by policy. It comes from: - Ability to communicate expectations ("adopt technical solution X") - Ability to exercise legitimized (instanciated/codified) authority
Most of the rest of the value of policy comes in as business enablement value (policies are easier to communicate to auditors than security control implementations are).
Policy can also be a useful placeholder for real security in the sense it will satisfy many external parties who might otherwise reprioritize/randomize security investments.
As an example, I’m glad that browser vendors require CAs to document their policies for issuing certificates. Let’s Encrypt does a great job of making much of this process automatic, but there’s still pieces that must be done by humans, and there’s still written policies in place for all of their operations.
At some point in any security process, human judgment comes into play. Striking the wrong balance between technical controls and allowing for human judgment can also lead to absurd outcomes, like this recent article/discussion[0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645
If your system is doing "all the right security stuff" and then nobody knows about it - sure, you're secure - but nobody knows that or how you are secure. And that's a very significant problem both to a bureaucracy and to its customers. It's also an issue in terms of maintaining those controls over time between changes to staff and business direction.
There's a whole "secondary market" (within an organization) for security assurance, and it tends to be much more measurable than security posture.
Policies and summaries of those policies go a long way toward feeding that "assurance feeling" secondary market without draining resources from ongoing investments actual posture.
Essentially the way it works is that you develop security controls toward an ideal end state/direction and describe your direction as your policy. Any gaps auditors or your company find then become fuel for making actual changes to the underlying security posture at a technical level.
The danger of not having your policy really be disguised summaries of your actual implementation is that the various security staff become free to debate over fictional security and can convince themselves that if they mandate some changes on paper to the policy (with there being nothing technical associated whatsoever) that this has or should have some kind of real affect.
It's more dangerous still if the internal security assurance program uses its own policies or some measure of "adherence to the policies" to then measure security. What happens is that the compliance operation becomes authoritarian about adherence to policies that don't exist outside of (otherwise non-discoverable) mandate, and the company and its auditors are able to "measure" their posture by their policies and convince themselves they are secure.
The worst version of this is where its done on purpose for fraud.
It's astonishing how different the 'media narrative' is from reality, and it confirms my belief that the press runs on such narratives (i.e. building up, crashing down) because in both directions the truth is inflated for dramatic, i.e. click-bait reasons.
Our large company built a very good FB app that effectively was 'FB' on our platform. It was FB branded - for users, it was effectively the 'real' (and only) FB. Obviously that app had to have special APIs.
Everyone involved from top to bottom was pro. We didn't store data, nor did we want or need to. The way the tech was setup (data goes to app), we didn't really have the option. Users logged into their own accounts and retrieved their data, it's not like we could just access data arbitrarily.
Everything was pro and above bar - and nobody in the equation - a lot of us regular, conscientious people - thought for a second that anything was wrong or irregular in any context.
In fact - the whole situation could be described as: "FB hired 3rd parties to develop some code", which surely they do in some circumstances.
Nobody was harmed in any way, and there really wasn't risk of anyone being harmed.
I understand that with 2018 hindsight, we might look at things a little differently, but in reality, I think we'd have still done it. Perhaps there would have been more checks and assurances (i.e. FB takes ownership of code and actually publishes the app), but in reality it was (and would still be) fine.
As far as the Cambridge story - this is also misleading because the API's that were used there were available to the entire world and everyone knew exactly what they were. Were there tech people screaming foul? The press? Not really, they seemed reasonable, until it seemed that some bad agents were getting a little unscrupulous, and so FB did the right thing and altered the APIs to make them more secure. Security polices change all the time, in this case they tightened up given some field data. That's it.
It's really a story about Cambridge's scammy behaviour, and possibly lies to FB on where that data was, not about FB.
I don't like Facebook, I don't use it, I don't like being 'productized' etc. etc. - but I don't feel that the information in these scenarios has been properly handled by the media.
Because there are legitimate issues with privacy in the new world order in 2018 that are finally coming to bear, and we definitely want to re-evaluate our situation with FB, basically, we go and dig up 'something that happened 10 years ago in which nobody was harmed' to build a 'kind of misleading narrative' around the the 'legitimate issue'.
> the Gell-Mann amnesia effect defines the idea that "I believe everything the media tells me except for anything for which I have direct personal knowledge, which they always get wrong."
My intuition says the latter because time is money and journalists are rarely experts in the fields they cover.
This sounds interesting :) any stories you're able to share on this?
Even supportive facts/quotes can cause concern. Subject matter experts have a reputation on the line, while the journalist is often just looking for a story.
I wrote, "they were significantly more likely to become defensive when I checked facts and quotes with them."
We check facts and quotes to ensure that we are being accurate and fair.
Would you prefer being misquoted? Or would you prefer having improper contact assigned to your words?
Nobody ever called me, my boss or my friends to verify this summer has been extremely hot or what my favourite food is.
Also: just getting the words correct doesn't help if you cut the part where I explained what happened.
Exactly. I'm very aware of that.
The problem is both good journalists and bad journalists call to do fact checks, -good journalists to verify they got the facts correct, bad journalists to provide legal cover before they quote you out of context to build the case they want to build anyway.
So, when someone call you and want to verify what you said I'll recommend being very sure that you get it exactly right and so clear that they cannot misunderstand you.
Defending yourself against a journalist might easily become a case of "have you stopped beating your wife? How hard can this be, yes or no?"
When people get defensive with me for being conscientious, my instinct is always to dig deeper. I'm sure that holds true for many others.
You might get them to publish a retraction (since it wasn't true) but hasn't the damage already been done?
What when those same papers write stuff that is technically true (but leave out why it was done)?: "founder sends millions to foreign bank account." "Founder declines to comment." ?
When you get negative coverage, accept it as the other side of the earned media coin. It is more effective than advertising because it has the potential to be negative. If there was never negative coverage, earned media wouldn't be worth pursuing. And, if you dig into the negative coverage, you'll often learn a lot from it. So, when you get negative coverage, email the journalist, thank them for writing about you, reaffirm that you're always available to talk, and then ignore it.
If an outlet has a history of attacking you, consider why they are attacking you and if the attacks have merit. If it's because you've been difficult in the past, you need to find a good PR person and get some media training in a hurry. You specifically want a PR person who entered the field through journalism, not marketing. Your PR person will be to work with the initial storm. If you caused the mess, you likely need to be hands off during this stage. And then, you need media training so that you don't offend a media outlet again.
It sounds like you have a rough time with media. Do you use the word 'exclusive'? If so, are you sure that you know what it means? Aside from lying, or being evasive, the best way to offend an outlet is to misuse the word.
Retractions don't happen very often, and unless you have very serious evidence, they aren't even worth going for. In the absence of serious evidence, a crafty editor will use your quest for a retraction as an excuse to keep writing about you. The goal is always to get them to stop writing, not give them reason to write more.
And frankly, publications will always write things that are technically true without adding any context. Never assume that this is because of malice because truth is, they likely don't care enough to be malicious. The sooner you get over this idea of a big, bad malicious media, the sooner you will learn how to work with them.
That is quite a misunderstanding of my position. What do you take me for?
They don't need to be all positive at all. My point just shouldn't be actively lying or misleading.
> If an outlet has a history of attacking you, consider why they are attacking you and if the attacks have merit.
Done. (And it is not about me, and I'm in a position where it would be useful for me to know if there was something.)
> It sounds like you have a rough time with media.
Personally? Not at all.
> And frankly, publications will always write things that are technically true without adding any context. Never assume that this is because of malice because truth is, they likely don't care enough to be malicious. The sooner you get over this idea of a big, bad malicious media, the sooner you will learn how to work with them.
My question is rather: how long should we accept this (i.e. baseless smear campaigns agains companies and/or individuals)?
Mostly media does a great job and I respect and actively (i.e. by donating or keeping subscriptions I don't need) support great journalism even if I don't agree with everything they write.
But sometimes some journalists are really destructive. It is those cases I'm talking about. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then at some point, shouldn't the abuse of a weaponized pen be punishable? That bar should be high, yes, but at some point (inciting hatred against nations or ethnicities using made up allegations should be a good example) I think most people would agree that society should have some way to correct it. The question is just exactly where that bar should be.
And again no, this isn't about me. Personally I never had problems with media going after me, this just happens to have bothered me over years as I've seen certain journalists go after other people for what turns out to be no good reason. I'm luckily not aware of many cases though, but what I've seen has made me hesitant to talk to media (and Gell Mann amnesia also isn't as strong as it used to be anymore either).
News is still good. The HN front page surfaces good tech news, while reputable newspapers are still reputable in their area of expertise. Don't confuse the Gell-Mann [1] effect with Dunning-Kruger [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Facebook giving out privileged API's willy-nilly without verifying who the people operating them really are is the issue. If a bank gave the keys to their vault to some shady people then you blame the bank.
My god man, armies of lawyers involved.
When it comes to the GP that talked about his experience - this was about platform vendors such as Apple or Blackberry having supposed "special access". But Facebook just did not release any data here. It just allowed third parties to write a Facebook app. For the most part, those apps where client-side, so the data did not leave the users device.
Now in the spirit of argument, there are a lot of aspects that can be debated: Is there a meaningful difference between code written by a contractor, but published by Facebook, an app published by a third party, but making it look like it belongs to Facebook, or a third party app without the blessing of Facebook. How does that relate to our ideas about the freedom of the internet (should anyone be allowed to create a Facebook app, without Facebook's blessing, which is certainly a technical possibility? What is the implication of Facebook's support for such an app, or lack of taking legal action against it?). What is the responsibility of companies like Facebook when having an API of the sort that they do, which prima facie allows users to decide which data to share? So about if I agree to share data, but that data is something my friend shared with me? Does Facebook have a responsibility to prevent this? Is is problem the sheer amount of data on Facebook? If I have a small online community forum, can I offer that sort of access, letting my users share their friends list with third party apps? What about apps like Twitter, Telegram asking for your permission to access your phone book. Courts in Germany have said the users agreeing to this are the ones breaking the law. What if I agree to share my contact book with an app, but that app does not upload this data to a server? How does that compare to Facebook asking a third party to provide a Facebook app, but data does not go to a third party server?
It's all interesting stuff. And I don't even ask the media to discuss it in that level of detail. They can give the 5-or-however-many foot view. But don't misrepresent that.
Gell-Mann amnesia doesn't defend the media here, right? The idea is that it is strange that you trust it after their incompetence has been proven to you.
Look, I am not a Trumpian Fake-Newser. I think it's good we have journalists. I am sure the journalists working on those Facebook stories did their best, given limited time, the breath of technical details involved, the pressures of creating content that brings in clicks, and yes, the personal vanity of wanting to uncover a big story. We are all human, after all.
CA is even one thing. But regarding the platform integrations - what GP tells from personal experience is the same thing I got from reading the reporting. It was simply misleading.
All that is beside the point. The point is that if as 'sonnyblarney indicated there a custom negotiation for every new organization that gets to peak behind the curtain, then the process is not standardized. Normal online firms have TOS and APIs, and it's possible to characterize what user data they release. For Facebook, apparently that characterization is not possible.
Not a single lawyer involved in either.
Yeah they were, and that's why the APIs were eventually shuttered. FB even secured a promise from CA that they retroactively deleted the data.
In addition to willfully misleading Congress it also likely violates their 2011 FTC consent decree[2]. Is this also just part of the 'media narrative' you claim is different from reality? I think these revelations amount to pretty "scammy behavior" as well, to borrow your terminology.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-gave-some-companies-ac...
[2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/11/faceb...
How is that not true of every single security/privacy incident, ever? If the situation was, "everyone knew 23andMe was storing non-deidentified genomic data on an unsecured S3 bucket, and this was fine until [insert villian] took it" it would be the same, and people would be justifiably pissed off. This feels like a completely correctly handled story in the media, your personal anecdote about working with Facebook notwithstanding.
This is a false equivalence. Hacker News comments are public. (HN also doesn't sell ads.) Facebook messages and private content usually aren't.
Just because "the API's that were used there were available to the entire world" doesn't mean "everyone knew exactly what they were." Everyone didn't know what they were capable of. A very small section of the technologically literate did, and most of them were profiting off the status quo.
Sure, that's not the same as public access, but it's equally blown out of proportion.
Users must be empowered to delegate access to the software of their choosing. Facebook offering read_mailbox as an option on its OAuth consent screen is exactly as evil as Fastmail offering IMAP.
That was actually the entire point. That Facebook had these overly... generous APIs for anyone to use. That's not a good thing.
Calling them “overly generous” is such a disingenuous statement because it connotes such a clearly wrong historical perspective that the whole statement is a falsehood.
Facebook’s APIs at the time were considered too stingy at the time! So much so it was constantly fending off accusations of being a walled garden taking advantage of an open web. The less than adequate APIs were their attempts at fending off that narrative.
It's worth noting that the context around privacy of generic life information of the kind you post on social media has radically changed in the last 10-20 years.
Back then, the Facebook API gave out personal details of not use the end user, but all the end user's 'friends'. I never gave the explicit opt in for that.
Once someone knows something about you, it's no longer yours; it's that person's to do with as they please.
APIs that allow a user to delegate his access to the software he chooses are essential to the open internet. The evil behavior is not providing them.
Yes. Really.
>Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach.
Parakilas, whose job was to investigate data breaches by developers similar to the one later suspected of Global Science Research, which harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles and provided the data to Cambridge Analytica, said the slew of recent disclosures had left him disappointed with his superiors for not heeding his warnings.
“It has been painful watching,” he said, “because I know that they could have prevented it.”
Parakilas said he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for Facebook data that had been passed to external developers. However, he said that when he told other executives the company should proactively “audit developers directly and see what’s going on with the data” he was discouraged from the approach.
He said one Facebook executive advised him against looking too deeply at how the data was being used, warning him: “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/20/facebook-data-c...
That seems a common way of thinking. I have seen people argue against pentesting because they didn't want to know about vulnerabilities.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-instant-personalizati...
I don't know if its different in the US but here in Europe that seems to sum up the "sexist" nature of our industry. Its true that there aren't many females in IT but when I have worked with them they have always been treated fairly and as equals to men. Their sex never seemed to enter into the equation at all.
It displays a hubris and greed that makes the lives of millions of innocent people worse, time after time. Then the tax payer bails them out when that greed backfires, as it does every single time.
It seems like most of the major banks were guilty of obviously dodgy lending and deliberately overly-omplicated financial instruments in the run up to the last recession, and they seem to be back at it again with car loans.
Animosity is to be expected I think.
Others quoted about screaming foul from within facebook. I was involved with RTB ad exchanges at the time, and everyone knew that the data is available to whomever wants it, with facebook's tacit approval.
Gabriel Weinberg (yegg) founder of duck duck go had a story on his blog about how he targeted his own wife with a facebook ad, and about how easy it is profile/get everyone's FB data, and he wasn't the only one.
Your experience may have been different; it looks to me like you'd rather look at the world through rose tinted glasses and give FB an undeserved benefit of the doubt -- but I'll accept that this was your experience. However, I have about 20:1 anecdata about "improper FB" than "proper FB", so I tend to believe the latter.
If there was one story of patents done right, does that indicate there are no patent trolls and it's all blown out of proportion?
I travel a bit. Facebook, the company, has a disproportionately vocal base of support in Silicon Valley. (This is also where the principal economic beneficiaries of Facebook's status quo live.)
That’s the problem. It only takes one bad actor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization_(international_...
I assume the vast majority clicked 'Agree' or similar on prompts about updated policies, but it's funny to phrase it this way. Obviously if asked directly, the vast majority would't actually affirm that.
[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/pe-ratio
*but you're not alone.
And to your point, investors could have sold for over 25% of profit as well if they had sold it earlier today. So I still stand by saying that this is huge change. Besides, this thread is not about long term, just invest in index funds so I just fail to see the point.
Stock prices should come with uncertainty bars, like scientific quantities, but there is of course no standard way to calculate and denote that.
The EMH would say that a company's stock price accurately reflects all current knowledge about a stock's underlying value. So from the point of view of an investor in publicly traded companies, a stock's price and its underlying value are the same thing.
Options have an expiration date because as the further you go out the more uncertain things are, and the harder it becomes to make a market in options in a way that (a) won't result in a high chance of losses and (b) will have someone actually willing to buy them. That's why you don't see 10, 20 or 50 year options.
That doesn't hurt their value for pricing uncertainty because as options expire, new ones are minted. Therefore, you can always use them to price the uncertainty of the price to the next quarter, the next 6 months or the next year.
Put another way, "don't get high on your own supply."
A 20% drop in 2 trading days has around a 1/700 chance of happening under a Black-Scholes model.
So yes, this does happen in the market, but it's a reasonably rare event.
(As another data point on how rare this was, $190 puts were being sold for $0.3/share. Those are now worth $17, a 50x return)
Sources:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FB/options?p=FB
https://www.hoadley.net/options/barrierprobs.aspx
A single day move of twenty percent is rare even in small caps. Facebook moving that much means the market did not except even the risk of something this big.
For comparison when Nissan announced a recall of over a million cars their stock moved less than three percent. Single day moves are rarely so large, and almost never this large for a single company.
Think that was OP's point. That facebook has matured and is no longer a growth company.
What I'd really like to know about today's regular session is why seven billion dollars worth of shares changed hands on the last tick.
Not all trades are reported real-time; Dark pool executions are often bulk reported prior to end of day settlement.
[1] https://www.recode.net/2018/7/18/17575156/mark-zuckerberg-in...
Edit: I avoid facebook like what seems like most other people here on hacker news but my point is that hacker news is in no way shape or form representative of the global population.
Source? From two quick Google searches it seems like the EU and the US Z combined make more than 1bn users.
EU population: 508 million people
US population: 325.7 million people
* There are 4.16 billion Internet users worldwide.[a]
* 26.3% of the world's population is under 14 years old, close to Facebook's minimum age of 13.[b] This means 73.7% of the world's population is at least 14 years old.
* If we assume the population of Internet users has a similar age distribution as the world's population, that means there are around 4.16 * 73.7% = 3.07 billion Internet users who are at least 14 years old. This is a rough estimate of the maximum possible number of people who can have an account with Facebook today, i.e., the size of the company's addressable market (in users, not dollars).
* The true size of Facebook's addressable market could be higher (for example, if the age distribution of Internet users is different)... but it could also be significantly lower (for example, if a substantial number of Internet users cannot or will not join Facebook due to religious, cultural, or governmental restrictions, or due to the availability of established regional alternatives).
* Facebook just reported monthly active users of 2.23 billion, up only 11% from 2.01 billion a year ago.[c] This isn't exactly stellar user growth. The company now has around 73% penetration of every person in the planet who can join Facebook today. Again, this is a rough estimate.
* The company's CFO disclosed in today's quarterly earnings call that the company expects a "deceleration" in growth.[d]
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage#Internet...
[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_world#Age_...
[c] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
[d] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/facebook-warns-investors-of-...
--
EDITS: I updated the global Internet usage figures based on dooglius's comment below (the Wikipedia page is outdated). I also expanded significantly on my original post to make my facts and reasoning as clear as possible to others here.
[0] https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Well, this certainly isn't true.
And in any case, the people making these predictions are factoring in things like this, they didn't just slap down a linear regression line and call it a day.
It depends on how those estimates of the world's Internet population are calculated -- e.g., from census and other household data. Is an African village of 47 with a dial-up connection counted as part of the world's Internet population? I don't know. Do you?
> And in any case, the people making these predictions are factoring in things like this, they didn't just slap down a linear regression line and call it a day.
One would hope so, yet many are acting... surprised. As a headline put it, "Facebook’s forecast for the future looks suddenly bleak."[a]
[a] https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17615330/facebook-earning...
I doubt Facebook, at 2.23 billion users is that close to making all possible users MAUs (96.95% penetration? Yikes!), which makes me believe the age distribution of Internet users is different.
Counting bots, this moves to (2.23 billion - 270 million [2]) / 2.3 billion = ~85.22%. This is still very high, but interestingly closer to the number at which Facebook users maybe have stabilized in the US/Canada region. I wrote a comment on another thread about this (sources referenced are on the original comment):
"I can see the decline in Europe being unsettling, but I'm not really surprised about US/Canada. ~185 million is about 52% of the population of US/Canada. If we assume 35% of the population is simply too young to use it (20% under 14) or too old to be drawn to it (15% is over 65), that leaves only 13% of US/Canada's population which are feasible MAUs no being MAU, which is crazy." [3]
I'm guessing here that Facebook has reached 87% of possible users in the region, based on age as an approximation for internet/Facebook use. I wonder how far off these quick calculations are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265140/number-of-interne... [2]: https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/facebook-phony-accounts-admi... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614830
MAU is a bad stat anyway. DAU broken down into precise categories, with compensation for duplicate accounts, would be a great stat.
I don’t use Facebook for any serious time but there will probably be at least one time per month when I log in to look something up. I’m on the site for a few minutes at most.
If I did one google search per month would you care about it as a google investor?
The day my Mum told me that she had “decided to use Facebook less” due to their shitty behaviour was the day I decided Facebook were screwed.
What I’m fascinated by is what the endgame is for Facebook. It’s still useful in some sense, the world probably needs a Facebook. If it died it would be replaced by something else. So I think the most likely outcome is it will sit at some level where it’s hard for a competitor to dislodge it, but it doesn’t get used much and it doesn’t make much money.
I don't know enough to tell if this is the start of the end game, but in spite of missing the (very) high expectations Wall Street had for them it I'd say it's inaccurate to say "it doesn’t get used much and it doesn’t make much money".
Maybe it wasn't clear from my post, but this was a prediction for the future and not a statement about the present.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613810
I'd be curious to hear from those who flagged that Facebook story and not this one: why is that one inappropriate for HN and this one fine?
They go away from this platform, which is what matters.
There are a million other platforms for everyone to share their shitty political propaganda, let's at least try to keep this one clean.
Go look at a comment thread on reddit on a news article about Trump if you'd like an example.
We've had nearly an entire year of that nonsense and I think most of us have grown tired of it already. Go to reddit if you enjoy propaganda.
I hope we don't go back to the time where half of HN is facebook nonsense pushed by god knows whom.
If you haven't heard anyone you know complaining about the crap they see on Facebook then you're living in a bubble. FB even launched an entire ad campaign trying to apologize to users for it. Any conversation about Facebook's performance is incomplete without discussing it, whether or not you wish to shut it down by labelling it "propaganda".
So is spending your time ( paid or not ) spamming facebook propaganda.
> Talking about the toxicity that exists on Facebook's platform is "poltical activism", now? Or wait, sorry, "propaganda".
No. Talking about it is one thing. Spamming social media and prosletyizing about it is another.
> If you haven't heard anyone you know complaining about the crap they see on Facebook then you're living in a bubble.
Did you read my comment? I clearly stated that I have.
"We've had nearly an entire year of that nonsense and I think most of us have grown tired of it already. Go to reddit if you enjoy propaganda."
We've had facebook propaganda ( mostly anti ) spammed on HN for a year. Most of us are sick of it. Go to reddit if you want propaganda.
> Any conversation about Facebook's performance is incomplete without discussing it, whether or not you wish to shut it down by labelling it "propaganda".
Then discuss here? Why do we need an entire post dedicated specifically to that? Or are you just interested in spamming HN with anti-facebook posts?
I'm glad the mods are filtering out facebook nonsense. It's been a long time coming. I don't want to go back to the time where half of HN was facebook propaganda. It was ridiculous.
If you want to talk about FB performance, this is a fine post to do it in. Not sure why we need two posts on HN for the same discussion. Other than propaganda that is.
The financial consequences will also be big. A lot of people have invested in FB, probably you too, through your 401k. Also imagine what will mean for the SF Bay Area a FB that is laying off or cutting down on expenses/compensation.
Reddit maybe since they have been exploding in growth.
To me, it seems as though network effects are not as important as they seem as the businesses that rely most on them where fellow users provide all the content (myspace, facebook, twitter, snapchat, reddit...) rise and fall faster than any other company.
Nobody has pure free speech not even the US (you cannot say bomb on an airplane nor threaten someone among many other things).
Granted, we do have more free speech than most countries but not pure free speech (which I think is fare as my former 2 examples were cases that bring negative externalities upon others).
Hoping they start losing some of the good talent + the US implement something similar to GDPR.
https://www.bjfogg.com/
He literally teaches his students how to make psychologically addictive products and is proud of it (and rich). His disciples are the priests of "engagement".
B=MAP reads much like any self helpy gimmick, something so obvious and so useless you somehow feel smart for having had your obvious thoughts on a topic reworded and handed back to you in corny new configuration you can share with your vapid fake friend group.
Sounds like 90% of the "business" books I've read
Or I can create a special dose for you based upon your data that get you most high.
But everyone is selling customer data. And my words are coming from the very unusual coincidence that I'm in a bar in Brooklyn and two data scientists are discussing 10 years of customer data needing to be parsed (and I heard the word verticalization). I'm not making this up (it's live).
They did the same thing CNN, MTV and all media does. They do the same thing movies, music, tv, news, etc does. They do the same thing Google does, Twitter does, reddit does, snapchat does, like everyone does. What's with the organized and targeted hate towards facebook?
I'll make a bet with anyone here. Once FB gives in to the mob like google did, like twitter did or reddit did, I guarantee you the outrage will magically disappear like it did for google, twitter and reddit.
> the US implement something similar to GDPR.
You want free speech curtailed in the US? You want more regulation of the internet? That's last thing you'd expect in a "hacker" news site. But like most social media, it's less tech people on tech forums and more political people with an axe to grind it seems.
I remember the internet and social media used to be so much better than TV. TV was controlled by big corporations who wanted to brainwash everyone. 1/3 of the time was ads that only stupefied you, and the rest were shows that did the same. They would do anything for ratings-- CNN was a bastion of treachery dividing the country by presenting politics as sports for the sake of viewership. People were glad Crossfire got canceled (now all of CNN is essentially Crossfire).
But social media? What a tool for free speech and change! It was the breath of fresh air that fought away big corporations, that gave us the Arab Spring, that let anyone with something to say become famous and have a voice and an audience, for free! It provided a platform for critical thinking instead of passive consumption! This data "dance" was the 8th wonder of the world and news articles were being written about how clever Obama's campaign had been to use analytics and "research" to get the edge on the campaign.
I'm not saying any one view is right and the other wrong but something I've noticed about Americans is that they are a very scared people and are very quick at painting things black or white (: The world is not so scary, and most things lie somewhere on a grayscale.
This can be seen a lot and it seems quite like the Christian narrative has deep roots in some parts of the world even among non-believers. The idea that everybody is looking at the world through a good-vs-evil lens explains a lot. Mythology is a powerful force, it can't just be dumped, it needs updating.
But without it, it is difficult to say that damage did or didn't happen.
You could certainly do a study of some metric and X's effect on it and find a few that were affected negatively, call that 'damage', and write blog posts about it. X would continue to thrive, adults would continue to complain about it, and the next generation would find a new X to use, abuse, and irritate their parents.
Philosophically, 'damage' is more like 'change' and there are a lot of people who like complaining about it because they have forgotten or misremembered what it was like to be young and have limited capacity to empathize with a different generation. If there are things about the change which are right and wrong, they probably aren't the ones being discussed or even understood until enough time has passed to see the change with the perspective of time and by then whatever problems have likely resolved themselves anyway.
Over time I have grown increasingly irritated by the talk about things being "bad for you". At this point if you don't have a decades long history of studies holding up to meta-analysis backed up by a philosophy of life and what is good and bad for it, I really think what is being said is nonsense. I'll believe hyper-specific cause-and-effect data, but I just don't care about the latest opinion about if something is bad for me.
Until you can show me a study proving that listening to that sort of constant what-I-call-nonsense leads to quantifiable improvements I can be convinced to care about, I'd rather people spend their energy doing something other than complaining about change and/or the status quo. It holds the same status, in me, as celebrity gossip.
>"The MTV Generation," Lazin said, directly addresses the pros and cons of MTV, which has been criticized for everything from placing too much emphasis on image to promoting short attention spans and the need for constant entertainment in its audience.
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-11-10/news/tv-1845_1_mtv-ge...
That sounds EXACTLY like a criticism you'd hear about facebook. s/MTV/Facebook/ and you couldn't tell if that was written in 1991 or 2018.
>"They have consciously destroyed a generation attention span using psychological tricks"
MTV at the height of music videos in 1980s and 1990s was never accused of using "psychological tricks."
While there have been some studies on the negatives of social media like nicotine vaping, it is not that bad as what we currently give people the choice to consume and I think we should swing even further towards more freedom of choice even if it negatively effects people long term.
Although, the whole "They have people who's sole job is to make sure Facebook users are on the platform for as long as humanly possible" part makes me the most skeptical.
Psychologists running studies on users: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...
Then of course there's this guy: https://theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/18/facebook-cambridge-...
I think all this is terrible-- the world ends up becoming landmine after landmine of companies trying to pull you in and get your money-- but lets keep in mind it's nothing new or unique. Just standard business in an free market economy.
Instead, they chose to implement the minimum legal requirements of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which prevents companies from collecting certain information from kids under 13, and kids who are under 13 just lie about their age. Facebook has really good data, collected for advertising, to know that kids are signing in, and do not make an effort to stop it, beyond a stern "Don't lie to us" phrasing in their TOS.
I think the point made here, especially with Disneyland, Candy, and Television is that children are targeted and manipulated for profiteering. And that's surprisingly legal.
But it is not ethical. Each company has a choice. I hope public opinion will see FB as unethical and unforgivable in the future.
Instead, they chose to implement the minimum legal requirements set by the FDA with a tiny number on tucked-away table. CocaCola has really good data on how much sugar their drinks have and they do not make an effort to really surface it to people assuming they are acting in their own interest, will read the label, and that will be enough to deter them from drinking a third can.
And the same can be said about pretty much any other company. They all implement "the bare minimum" required by law if it potentially affects their numbers.
> I think the point made here, especially with Disneyland, Candy, and Television is that children are targeted and manipulated for profiteering. And that's surprisingly legal.
Yes, but is it that surprising? We can't expect companies to regulate themselves.
> But it is not ethical. Each company has a choice. I hope public opinion will see FB as unethical and unforgivable in the future.
I agree, though I also think Facebook is a much lesser concern than other companies out there. That's not to say it should be put to the side or nothing can be done before something is done about big Tobacco, big Pharma or even big Sugar. I just think comparing it to a drug company is disingenuous, and lessens the urgency of dealing with companies dealing with proven, dangerous physical addiction.
Do we blame TV makers for wanting to sell additional techniques?
Facebook seems to conduct its business in a relatively ethical way, it certainly doesn't seem to go out of its way to make it addictive, they're preocupied with making it more functional - they're adding features constantly.
I'm not saying we should make these sorts of things illegal, but to require the industry to display proper warnings, to actively give money to organizations that work against them (such as how tobacco companies must pay for anti smoking commercials), seems like a logical step forward.
I hope they go down. Social networks were a net negative on the world at the end of the day.
But their business models depend upon getting people hooked up like a drug addict.
My comment is subjective, but yours is too, so what gives here it goes: I doubt this is the case. I think I just see people post "more" on Twitter.
If I'm looking for quality content from experts I'd go to StackExchange, indpenendet websites/blogs or just go buy Nature magazine.
Edit: We'll pass a law that protects your privacy while we ourselves don't abide by it.
Oh, did you interpret the law wrong? We'll take the greater of 20 million or 4% revenue kthanksbye.
Unsurprisingly, companies are deciding that EU users are not profitable customers without targeted advertising and thus not worth serving these users causing them to block all EU users even if some EU users would accept the previously agreed upon terms of targeted advertising in exchange for the content they wish to receive.
This is a terrible precedence of anti-choice in my opinion since the EU has forced upon all EU people the inability to accept a business model of targeted advertising in exchange for content and thus causing many companies to leave the EU altogether.
Well, that sounds good to me. If user wants targeted advertising, he should show that desire, i.e. opt in. It's privacy by default.
> EU users are not profitable customers without targeted advertising
So, they can't find profitable business model without stealing users' data? Well, then let them fall. And yes, I do mean stealing, if it is done without users' explicit consent.
> the EU has forced upon all EU people the inability to accept a business model of targeted advertising
It's not the EU that forced this, but rather companies which don't care even enough to provide basics of privacy.
Btw, I also don't think companies blocked EU users, because the targeted advertising model became unprofitable; rather it's because they don't want to spend time and resources to figure out what they would need to change.
It simply does not.
Paragraph one of the Article 27 which states the requirement for a representative is followed by
Paragraph 2: The obligation laid down in paragraph 1 of this Article shall not apply to:
a) processing which is occasional, does not include, on a large scale, processing of special categories of data as referred to in Article 9(1).
If you're wondering what is "special categories of data", they're reasonably sensitive data,
Art 27. 1: Processing of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person’s sex life or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.
Which is again, exempt, under Paragraph 2 of the same Article, which states:
2. a) Paragraph 1 shall not apply if one of the following applies:
So basically, responsibility and transparency.
[0] https://www.dpr.eu.com/do-gdpr-art-27-apply
You could Google “Facebook harmful effects research” for several pages of citations.
Facebook has shown a willingness to provide my country's adversaries a powerful tool to subvert the foundations of its society. Fomenting racial strife and spreading pernicious rumors is just the start of it.
The country and the world would be a better place without Facebook.
It sounds a lot like the drug war. The approach that DRUGS are the problem, as opposed to situations that lead users to abuse them in destructive ways, has lead to a very demonstrable half-century of ineffectual policy and violent/sad outcomes.
I have not so entirely given up on ones ability to tread a path through this insanity, and am more worried of an escalating trend to put that responsibility in the hands of some gatekeeper as opposed to ones own agency as a sentient human. I don't even disagree with your final statement; I'd just want to see it come from rejection by the individual than mandate from on high.
> It sounds a lot like the drug war. The approach that DRUGS are the problem,
"facebook" is not the drug; "http://facebook.com" is the drug, and that's not he problem. "Facebook Inc" is the problem, much like purdue pharma is a significant cause of the current heroin epidemic. And not, purdue has not been addressed either. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/health/purdue-opioids-oxy...
But you draw your line way too aggressively. If merely using an online community like FB is something that you should decide for other people, there's very little personal choice left. I, for one, certainly wouldn't want to live in a society so judgmental over individual choice.
I don't even mention the fact that FB is far less damaging, in any sense, then bad diet, lack of exercise, getting news from tabloids, trusting politicians, and arguably watching most the TV programs in this country.
Now, if you told me you only discourage your own family or close friends from using FB, I'd think you're very reasonable -- just like you can discourage them from eating junk food and spending weekends on the couch. But by imposing your judgment on billions of people, you present a greater evil, IMHO, than the worst of the FB misdeeds.
Not trying to justify Facebook's behaviour here but are you familiar with the tabloid press? Facebook certainly didn't invent this concept.
You are an addict, you just don't realize it.
Then today or yesterday their permission to do so was yanked by Chinese authorities.
EDIT: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-25/just-hours-after-a... summary of stories from NYT, Reuters, etc. on this matter
I just wish India would take a similar stand and then game over for Facebook.
I created an account so I could create ads for my new business.. I have no idea what's going on but the only page it ever serves me is "sorry something went wrong." so clearly they're missing out on my $5/day ad budget.
But they were simply not looking closely enough. And as I said back then, you need to give this sort of things time to see the real effects, like at least until the end of the year. Because I believe the worst is still ahead of Facebook. Facebook is now on a downwards path, and it's irreversible.
Facebook is now officially Blackberry. And just like with Blackberry before, many dismissed the fundamental issues of the company while blindly following the "record quarters" Blackberry kept having until 2009.
If they had just looked closely enough, they would've seen that BB's core North American market was on a steep decline path and it was also obvious that its phones were nowhere near as good as iPhones or Android phones.
Just look at what's happening to Facebook engagement. Ignore Facebook's sugarcoating. Look how the people around you are using Facebook and what they say about it.
> But they were simply not looking closely enough. And as I said back then, you need to give this sort of things time to see the real effects, like at least until the end of the year.
I agree.
> Because I believe the worst is still ahead of Facebook. Facebook is now on a downwards path, and it's irreversible.
I don't think I agree. Facebook still has many opportunities for user and revenue growth in Instagram and WhatsApp. As far as being irreversible, Microsoft was in a very dire position too and now it's having record-breaking quarters. It'll largely depend on leadership and direction.
> Facebook is now officially Blackberry. And just like with Blackberry before, many dismissed the fundamental issues of the company while blindly following the "record quarters" Blackberry kept having until 2009.
If they had just looked closely enough, they would've seen that BB's core North American market was on a steep decline path and it was also obvious that its phones were nowhere near as good as iPhones or Android phones.
One bad quarter doesn't make a company "officially Blackberry". IIRC, Blackberry didn't release it first touch-screen phone until 2013 (5 years after the iPhone) and it's first Android phone until 2015 (8 years after the iPhone). It was their stubbornness quarter after quarter, year after year that sank them-- they weren't dead the minute the iPhone was released just like Samsung wasn't. They should've just played smart and embraced Android/touchscreens from the get-go.
Will Facebook remain stubborn or will it gain trust back? I don't know. Calling it dead already is a huge oversimplification though.
> Just look at what's happening to Facebook engagement. Ignore Facebook's sugarcoating. Look how the people around you are using Facebook and what they say about it.
The people around me are not an accurate sample of all Facebook users around the world. In my case, I see a lot of people using Facebook for Events and Marketplace. I see everyone on Instagram. The real data is in the numbers. Facebook's website falling behind Reddit is telling, but Instagram and WhatsApp surpassing Snapchat's stories also is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I remember the day Chambers Saif Cisco hit an air pocket. Since then it has only been layoffs, cuts and austerity for Cisco. Never really recovered. Is it the same day for FB?
> Cisco on Wednesday reported healthy profit and sales gains for its fiscal first quarter, in line with Wall Street expectations. But a host of challenges -- including losses in public sector accounts and in specific product areas like set-top boxes -- coupled with a less-than-invigorating sales forecast for the current quarter, were enough to send Cisco's shares tumbling.
> Cisco CEO John Chambers, on Cisco's Q1 conference call, described the challenges as hitting an "air pocket," and was bullish on many of the areas in which Cisco excelled. But he set a subdued tone for the call, especially with the forecast that second quarter revenues would increase only about 3 to 5 percent, and a forecast that revenue growth for fiscal 2011 overall would be 9 to 12 percent, well below both the 13 percent for Q2 and the 13.1 percent for FY11 predicted by analysts.
> Specifically, said Chambers, orders came in over $500 million below Cisco's initial Q1 sales forecast.