That’s what I don’t understand. Everyone I know has migrated away from facebook a long time ago. And a few years ago I heard stories suggesting this was a broad movement. People organising their birthday on facebook and no one showing up, etc. Kids today aren’t using facebook either. But facebook’s results suggest they are growing their active user base. So if those numbers are real, their user base must shift. At least away from european+educated users.
But then I read stuff about Oculus and how hard it is to create new accounts. If that is true the user base growing would be strange... Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle...
I click on the ads of products I dislike so that the company gets charged for the ad. If you wanted to inflict the maximum damage, then click on the ad and install the app. Uninstall it later. I think the ad gets charged more as a "conversion".
Sadly with Facebook,you can't be sure they won't install a backdoor application that will reinstall it after you uninstall it. That may just be some phones with Facebook and Messenger preloaded though.
It would have to be something preloaded, and with unusual privileges. Otherwise, it isn't installing anything silently on Android. I don't think this would happen at all on iOS.
If it's a company as big as Facebook, I think those charges are drops in the ocean of their entire revenue, so you waste more of your time and nerves on doing that than the money they lose.
While you're technically correct, you're also making a conversion right there, which increases your ad relevancy score on most auction driven platforms including Google and — ironically — Facebook, which in turn leads to this ad actually getting _cheaper_ to run for the advertiser on other customers coming after you.
I'm not in deep enough to tell you whether that's a net loss or benefit, but it's probably close enough to zero...
> While you're technically correct, you're also making a conversion right there, which increases your ad relevancy score on most auction driven platforms including Google and — ironically — Facebook, which in turn leads to this ad actually getting _cheaper_ to run for the advertiser on other customers coming after you.
But you're always going to see an ad regardless, right? If that's the case I don't see any advantage in making yourself more expensive.
I find this to be a bit strange from a marketing perspective and the cost to run this campaign has to be non-trivial. If someone searches for Signal, what is the likelihood they don't already know what Facebook Messenger is? What is this ad supposed to convince someone of? Like you see the ad after searching for Signal and go "oh I have Facebook Messenger"?
I guess maybe there might be some who don't know about Facebook Messenger and so they heard about this new Signal app and now they see a new chat app that works with Facebook.
I'm sure there's analytics and testing behind the decision to support it.
Cynically I'm guessing it's for potential new users who have heard of Signal vaguely and inducing brand confusion. "Oh, Signal is part of Facebook Messenger, cool, already have that."
I was curious about this from a trademark angle (it seems against the spirit of the law if not the letter) and apparently it's generally permitted to show ads based on a brand keyword as long as the ad itself does not contain any trademarked terms or images. I don't personally agree with that but it supposedly been tested in a few courts.
I miss the old Google layout where it was crystal clear what is an ad. Nowadays, you can't even blame normal people that they don't notice the tiny "Ad"
Do Signal buy ads against their own name in the App Store though? Despite adding Google-like search ads, Apple haven’t broken search and they’re always the first organic result for their name, so I don’t see why they would want to.
What’s really annoying is searching for an app and it shows up in the search suggestions but doesn’t exist. For example, search “Red Robin” in the App Store and there’s a suggestion for it. But what shows up... Robinhood (with a DoorDash ad above it). Turns out Red Robin doesn’t have an app. But then why is it a search suggestion?
I wonder if there's automated ad purchasing going on here, bidding against the keywords of the top app names in relevant categories?
It seems that Facebook bidding on Signal keywords is unlikely to gain them much, as those searching for signal right now are very likely going there expressly to escape from Facebook, and are searching for a specific brand name already.
Facebook has the cash to burn, even if it's a less-than-stellar marketing decision. My guess is this is a short-lived advertising campaign to protect the moat during this heated moment.
Deep down, I hope this has nothing to do with a "marketing decision", and is just a hail-mark "Fuck, look at all the people fleeing WhatsApp since we announced the privacy changes? We have to do _something!_ What're we gonna tell Zuck?".
(Sadly, in spite of the noise in my personal social bubble, I suspect the number of users departing WhatsApp over that is so small it's completely indiscernible from regular churn...)
Judging from what I'm seeing personally, it would be hard to explain the sudden increase in the number of my contacts that installed Signal as regular churn. Though I acknowledge that the choice of my contacts is probably not representative of the whole population.
I'm guessing that for the app store team everything except the ad revenue is in essence a cost center. The company makes money from it but it's not tied back to the app store team or not tied back directly enough. Ad revenue however is tied back directly. So they optimize the KPI they are measured on.
> everything except the ad revenue is in essence a cost center
Really?
Seems a very strange thing to think, particularly in a thread mentioning Epic games, who've chosen to allow Fortnite to be delisted from the app store in protest over the 30% commission the store takes on their sales...
My suspicion is that ad revenue in Apple's app store is insignificant compared to revenue from paid app commissions. (I do have nothing except gut feel and some probably obly vaguely informed opinion to base that on...)
I said app store team not Apple overall. To Apple its revenue, to the team running the store app its a cost center. Or maybe a better way to say it is that the gains from improving user experience do not trickle down to them enough. After all, many many teams will claim credit and take a slice of that pie. However, only a few teams can claim credit for ad revenue. Within a large company the goals of the company and the goals of individual teams are rarely fully aligned.
App Store Ads are genuinely awful. I have yet to find any that have been anything but spam apps or companies buying their competitor's keywords. They quite definitely make the App Store worse.
I'm getting slightly fatigued with this point of view ("X is a private company and can do what it wants").
If a company reaches a certain size and has a quasi-monopolistic position so that other people or companies depend on it, it starts to have some degree of responsibility towards society that's beyond value maximization for shareholders.
As an idealists who repeats the "private companies can do what they want" perspective, I agree fully. But this is the legal situation, and asking companies to take any kind of moral stance is going to be an uphill battle.
Whatever future we want, we are going to have to push for it legally. Because right now management can be replaced if shareholders don't like what they're doing, given that shareholders are their only legal obligation here.
Assuming you are referring to the current wave of private censorship in the wake of the storming of the US capitol, I think it’s a false equivalence.
Here people are arguing this looks like monopolistic behavior (that the law attempts to make illegal); and there people were arguing for allowing de-platforming (that the law could be read as encouraging to limit the liability of the platform). This analogy erases the nuance that might make one desirable to society and the other undesirable.
>This analogy erases the nuance that might make one desirable to society and the other undesirable.
Could you explain the nuance then? In recent days I've found this explanation often used and generally in ways that I am not convinced of. In many cases, the arguments being presented are done so without any concern for nuance, so I find it hard to expect someone to understand nuance that wasn't originally included in the argument. I get this is largely a result of people only presenting a summary of their argument (as I find any writing to be a summary as words convey less than thoughts contain).
Especially since we are not talking about legal action the government is taking to ban something dangerous enough to society to be illegal, but a private business choosing to ban something because they choose to do so.
It’s possible the other people were implicitly saying private companies should be free [to not publish someone’s speech]; I can’t argue on behalf of all the other people you have talked to.
But I can say that to me these are just different situations. It’s not contradictory to think that companies should be free to not associate with individuals for their brand, but should not be free to buy ads impersonating a competitor, or blocking links to a competitors products. The phrasing of companies should be free to do X doesn’t carry over to a different issue.
Well played. It is their platform, I don't see a problem in what they are doing. If someone doesn't like it, then use a different one.. (that is the narrative, right?)
I think this is the point. Going after, not the people actually making a call to violence, but some service three degrees upstream from them -- along with all of its other legitimate users -- is madness.
Yes, but a private company does not have to be consistent in how it applies it standard. One could even argue the standard is consistent but more complex, something of a difference between 'ban app that allows bad things' and 'ban app that allows bad things which we don't own', though this gets into the nature of what is consistency, arbitrariness, and hypocriticalness.
It's muddled by the fact that the largest tech companies have been known to enter into secret (sometimes anti-trust violating) agreements. For all we know the other companies have an agreement to deplatform apps like Parler in the name of "free speech" but just to make sure that one of the big tech companies is dominant in a given space.
I'm not saying I think such an agreement exists in this latest spat of deplatforming. I am suggesting that that's the kind of conspiracy theories such capricious & unprincipled stances take (& yes - they are unprincipled given how much it depends on which political party is dominant when they go to do something).
A more benign framing of the conspiracy is that the tech companies desperately want to avoid any trust-busting activities by Congress so when the right is in power they don't do anything about right-wing extremism letting it grow & conveniently when the left is in power they deplatform right wing extremism that has grown, making legislators more anxious to enact any kind of regulation (just like the BS that MPAA played with ratings to avoid getting regulating).
>A more benign framing of the conspiracy is that the tech companies desperately want to avoid any trust-busting activities by Congress so when the right is in power they don't do anything about right-wing extremism letting it grow & conveniently when the left is in power they deplatform right wing extremism that has grown, making legislators more anxious to enact any kind of regulation (just like the BS that MPAA played with ratings to avoid getting regulating).
If we accept the 'private company' argument as it has been recently presented, then even this falls under it as an acceptable outcome. I am not making an argument saying we should either reject or accept it was presented, only that if we were to accept it, this is a conclusion of the argument.
It would be weird that they'd make it display a 404 though. It's possible Signal could be returning that when they see FB perform a request to them for some reason (e.g. want to make sure no metadata leaks to FB).
Whatsapp isn't close to a monopoly in the US. Here iMessage, SMS, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger by far have greater market share. You can argue that FB Messenger should be linked to Whatsapp for the purposes of anritrust, but even then, there is very healthy competition.
I can also say by having lived there that it is the same for Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Italy. There will always be an exception to the norm, but it is clear that Whatsapp is the number one tool for instant messaging/calling.
Monopoly is one part of antitrust laws but you don't have to be a monopoly to be breaking antitrust laws. This is pretty clearly anti competitive. Other examples would be price fixing or bid rigging (where you purposefully underbid so your competitor can win the contract for cheaper. And then your competitor does you a favor later).
No more than a Ford dealer buying a billboard outside a Chevy dealership. It's not anti-competitive to advertise in the same place your competition advertises.
The issue with Facebook doing this is the fact that they're a huge company that is buying these ads where the smaller company cannot.
It is illegal and anticompetitive to be a huge company using enormous resources to squash competition for smaller firms. There are many ways in which this is done. Not all of them are illegal, depending on how you look at it.
My opinion: Buying marketshare is usually bad for the user.
At the very least, they shouldn't be allowed to advertise for the words "Local Craft Soda (tm)" -- especially if competitor's name is what they are buying.
Facebook and Whatsapp are effectively the same entity, as the recent requirement of sharing Whatsapp data with Facebook shows. It's basically Microsoft with Windows and IE using special hidden dlls to execute faster than Netscape and that was of course a landmark and exemplary example of anti-trust abuse by a non-monopoly in either OS or browsers. Facebook needs to be broken up and the special ownership rules privileging Mark Zuckerberg need to be removed.
App linking (URLs that open apps) doesn't work in Messenger. You have to press-and-hold the link, tap "Open in Safari", and then safari will redirect to the app. Terrible UX.
It looks like the link is fine when clicked by the recipient, but the preview comes up as 404.
Either fb/wa is doing something odd in the request when generating the preview, or the other end is responding badly to something unusual-but-correct that there's are doing. Perhaps due to the initial request's accept headers a redirect is being sent instead of the usual content, and requesting that results in a 404.
Could be malicious as many are suggesting, I certainly wouldn't put it past them, but I suspect cockup is a more likely explanation.
No, I mean I can't reproduce the preview. I think you experienced a fluke. If it was anything else wouldn't that mean that WA wasn't in fact e2ee? Or at least link previews (I know Signal does this client side, I don't know about WA)
One reason I support the DOJ action against Facebook is that with the power of subpoena and compelling testimony we might finally find out all of the dirty tricks Facebook have been up to all of these years.
Bill Gates squirming during his anti-trust testimony when answering questions from David Boies was game-changing for the company and our industry
I don't think it will be pretty - but it will inform all users for the better
Cory Doctorow was talking about this on the most recent Exponential View podcast, a great riff on how that really helped the competitive landscape, at least for a while. Worth listening to https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/exponential-view-with-...
The link preview is generated locally, but Whatsapp blacklists domains it doesn't want previews to be generated for by marking them as 'bad domains' in the app. It did this for telegram a few years ago, and an analysis of the android app's source code proved it was intentional.
"Ah, yes. I'm looking for a peer-to-peer, secure messaging system. What's this, Facebook Messenger? Maybe I'll try that instead."
In all seriousness though, this kind of advertising should not be beneficial to Facebook. You're telling a group of people biased not to buy your product, to buy your product. There's obviously some other reason.
When I’m annoyed with an ad, I love clicking on it, especially since a click can cost from $.5 to $12. Also, upon clicking, they build a profile of me based on products I don’t like, so all the better.
Tough for the advertiser, but maximizing advertiser dissatisfaction is also in my interest (at least since I don’t advertise anymore - after an important realization that I had poured money into it for very few actual new customers).
It's usually detected by anti-click-fraud stuff (since it's the same UA, cookies, and IP that's mass whacking ads, it's the easy case). However, the users of the tool occasionally intend to punish the publishers (people who put these ads on their sites) which does happen for some low volume publishers - like your buddy's blog with AdSense and stuff.
I usually block all known trackers and advertisers, so even if they could track me (which is less likely to happen) they don't get any benefit from that.
This sounds like cutting off the nose to spite the face. Sure, you may be harming the advertisers, but you are directly reinforcing the ecosystem that creates those annoying ads in the first place by telling them you like those ads.
I hate ads too, but let's not pretend like this childish rebellion is actually self-serving. It's like me saying I'm upset with politics so I'll show the world by not voting.
Given the current mass (for some values of "mass") migration, there will be some people who have very low tech knowledge but read enough about migrating to signal and WhatsApp being bad, that they'll search for "Signal" and will try the first communicator that comes up. Not sure if they will be fooled for long, but still... People are fooled by basic spam and they will be fooled by this.
Seems like a waste of effort by both Facebook and Signal advocates when the Dems will just lobby to have big-tech ban anything that can be used by the far right to communicate.
Probably because their Chinese overlords told them to. Memes and conspiracies aside I do think it’s a little suspicious that Zuck asked Xi to name his friggin first born child. And the amount of information including beliefs and location that this guy has on our families is mildly terrifying.
This is kind of embarassing. Do you guys think that the people at Facebook who make these decisions realise how pathetic it looks from the outside? Or are they somehow justifying it in their own heads?
They don’t “realize it’s pathetic” because it’s SOP for companies buying ads to bid on their competitor’s name. You can argue that that is pathetic, but this one instance isn’t special.
This practice is called "Brand bidding" and is actually extremely common among competitors. Occasionally companies will mutually agree to not participate.
It's actually surprising why it's not perceived to be more hostile.
Ya this is kind of a non-story. They were probably bidding on 'Signal' prior to this current set of events anyways. And since Signal doesn't appear to be bidding on it's own name, Facebook is probably paying very little for that top spot.
Bidding on your name might be an even bigger waste of money than bidding on a competitor's name, especially for established brands. eBay's experience with this came up on a recent episode of Freakonomics - https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
Whenever I search for a brand by name and an ad for them pops up (in the rare case that I’m browsing without an ad blocker), I try to click on the non ad version right below it just to save them a bit of money.
I don't know if this is still the case, but for a while the easiest way to get the best deal from Dominoes was to search Google for Pizza Hut with your adblocker turned off.
It's possible that Facebook isn't intentionally targeting Signal.
When buying App Store ads, the default is to use a "broad match" for the keywords you enter -- i.e. Apple automatically decides what keywords are similar to the keywords you selected and runs your ads against those as well.
It's pretty annoying because there's no way to switch the default -- you have to remember to put your keywords in brackets to disable it -- but probably great for Apple's revenue.
I would assume they’ve been doing this for a long time. Lots of companies do stuff like this. If you’re against this then you have to be against basically all search ads. You can go search for Venmo or Cash App now and you’ll see ads for some other banking products.
It definitely seems like a policy that should be reexamined. If you're a newcomer to a market and a big entrenched player buys up all of the search ads with your product's name, how can you hope to be discovered via SEO?
Ads are pretty clearly highlighted as such at the top. If your SEO is good then you will still be at the top, just below the ads.
I do agree that a lot of these companies do have the ability to use advertising to crush their competition, but I’m not sure what the solution is to that.
Yeah everybody here is up in arms because it's FB/Signal but this is as old as the hills. Search for any major product and most of the ads will be their competitors.
Not sure why this is a big deal. Is it good? No. Is it new? Not particularly.
This is one of the major reasons that I don't believe search ads are worth anything for any but the largest of players. There will always be someone with a larger check book, especially if you are just starting and bootstrapping your thing. The playing field is always tilted in the direction of the larger player
Our great-grandchildren are going to look back on history and struggle to understand why we used a search engines that intentionally accept bribes to poison their SERPs.
I hope we can get this right one day. Allowing trademark squatting helps nobody but scammers (and search engines).
As a relatively small business with no clout we've had to deal with fly-by-night operations violating our trademark with Google ads (basically randoms running ads that look like they are from US when people search our web domain) and Google not doing anything because we didn't register the trademark. Of course Google won't do anything—it'd hurt their bottom line!
As I understand it, if you didn't register the trademark then it's not your trademark legally except as a defense against lawsuits. So Google seems to have followed the law. Better than them becoming some sort of extra-legal arbitrator of quasi-trademarks.
This is exactly the mentality I was talking about in my first comment.
You think it's better than Google only follows the letter of the law, and destroy it's search credibility, than put some process in place to prevent deceptive advertising.
Searching for one thing, seeing something different at the top of the page feels pretty deceptive to me. If it didn't work, they probably wouldn't do it.
It seems difficult to do this in general when so many search terms can have multiple meanings. Are you suggesting there should be human review for every ad? (Which is not saying it's necessarily a bad idea; just trying to understand how you imagine it'd work.)
I think a lot of people here will say that there should be a decentralized "global" index that any search provider frontend can source their results from. I'm not sure exactly how that would work. But the goal is to separate advertising from the search index itself.
I'm confused, what is the relevance of that to this problem? Wherever the results are coming from, ads will have to appear before them pretty much by definition, right?
If the owner of the search index is also the advertising broker then you end up in situations like this. If the search results themselves are effectively commoditized, then the advertising layer becomes less of an issue.
Yahoo Search used to have a list of brand keywords that advertising was restricted on. Not perfect but covers the vast majority of cases especially if you allow additions over time. Apparently since then the courts have ruled that it's not a legal issue so it's not done anymore.
That seems reasonable, though likely less effective for some countries. It seems like an interesting regulatory idea though - maybe some regulator should maintain a list of trademarks whose advertising should be restricted? Not sure if that might end up becoming gameable.
You may be assuming too much of our great-grandchildren. Based on what we can see of mobile phones today, they will be having their attention spans minutely controlled at all times, and may not be thinking anything.
Signal is a registered Trademark. They are buying ads for the word Signal. How is that not Trademark squatting?
> Facebook is not bribing anyone.
I think OPs point is that it should be considered bribery to pay Google to show up at the top of the search results. I think they chose their words very intentionally.
I read it in the context of "some day". They may be expressing optimism that the legal definitions could be corrected to match what they (and I) consider to be the commonly used meanings of these words.
> Trademark squatting is when one party intentionally files a trademark application for a second party's registered trademark in a country where the second party does not currently hold a trademark registration.
"Under U.S. law, use of a competitor's trademark in accurate and non-deceptive comparative advertising is legal and does not constitute trademark infringement" [1]
Which shows that it is a fairly grey area. "Fair use" doctrines apply to trademark infringement and using your competitor's name in this way has in the past been allowed.
They wont struggle, they will easily understand the phenomena and even group it under the same umbrella of the rubber barons,Spanish conquistadors and the opium merchants . A group of thugs exploiting a market by mercilessly taking advantage of undefined, inadequate and slow regulation on which it is basically a new situation, all this helped by buying the politicians.
Many non-technical or older people can't easily tell the difference. I've seen it in action with colleagues and relatives (smart well-educated experts in their fields).
Because long term thinking and good relationships with users is worth more than whatever small % of revenue Apple gets from letting these shitty search ads scam old people and less technical users.
You should not be able to buy ads on a company name that isn’t yours.
I suspect people higher up at Apple that see this would agree and change policy if they thought about it.
Has anyone recently tried searching for ‘Signal’ to check this? I don’t see any Facebook Messenger ads personally. Think this is a bit of marketing from Signal.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadBut then I read stuff about Oculus and how hard it is to create new accounts. If that is true the user base growing would be strange... Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
I'm not in deep enough to tell you whether that's a net loss or benefit, but it's probably close enough to zero...
But you're always going to see an ad regardless, right? If that's the case I don't see any advantage in making yourself more expensive.
Your impact on any other keyword would be effectively zero.
You would be better off spending the 5 minutes you wasted on something positive.
I guess maybe there might be some who don't know about Facebook Messenger and so they heard about this new Signal app and now they see a new chat app that works with Facebook.
I'm sure there's analytics and testing behind the decision to support it.
It's also common to book political ads in newspapers that will be placed next to articles discussing that topic.
Whoever pays most, gets that screen/paper space.
I miss the old Google layout where it was crystal clear what is an ad. Nowadays, you can't even blame normal people that they don't notice the tiny "Ad"
It seems that Facebook bidding on Signal keywords is unlikely to gain them much, as those searching for signal right now are very likely going there expressly to escape from Facebook, and are searching for a specific brand name already.
But there are absolutely people like this, and FB makes money off of them in droves.
(Sadly, in spite of the noise in my personal social bubble, I suspect the number of users departing WhatsApp over that is so small it's completely indiscernible from regular churn...)
[1]: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/101985252700794470...
Really?
Seems a very strange thing to think, particularly in a thread mentioning Epic games, who've chosen to allow Fortnite to be delisted from the app store in protest over the 30% commission the store takes on their sales...
My suspicion is that ad revenue in Apple's app store is insignificant compared to revenue from paid app commissions. (I do have nothing except gut feel and some probably obly vaguely informed opinion to base that on...)
I assume you mean just "this particular sort of anti-competitive behavior is legal because it's all within their private service".
https://youtu.be/gRelVFm7iJE
I'm getting slightly fatigued with this point of view ("X is a private company and can do what it wants").
If a company reaches a certain size and has a quasi-monopolistic position so that other people or companies depend on it, it starts to have some degree of responsibility towards society that's beyond value maximization for shareholders.
Whatever future we want, we are going to have to push for it legally. Because right now management can be replaced if shareholders don't like what they're doing, given that shareholders are their only legal obligation here.
Here people are arguing this looks like monopolistic behavior (that the law attempts to make illegal); and there people were arguing for allowing de-platforming (that the law could be read as encouraging to limit the liability of the platform). This analogy erases the nuance that might make one desirable to society and the other undesirable.
Could you explain the nuance then? In recent days I've found this explanation often used and generally in ways that I am not convinced of. In many cases, the arguments being presented are done so without any concern for nuance, so I find it hard to expect someone to understand nuance that wasn't originally included in the argument. I get this is largely a result of people only presenting a summary of their argument (as I find any writing to be a summary as words convey less than thoughts contain).
Especially since we are not talking about legal action the government is taking to ban something dangerous enough to society to be illegal, but a private business choosing to ban something because they choose to do so.
But I can say that to me these are just different situations. It’s not contradictory to think that companies should be free to not associate with individuals for their brand, but should not be free to buy ads impersonating a competitor, or blocking links to a competitors products. The phrasing of companies should be free to do X doesn’t carry over to a different issue.
I'm not saying I think such an agreement exists in this latest spat of deplatforming. I am suggesting that that's the kind of conspiracy theories such capricious & unprincipled stances take (& yes - they are unprincipled given how much it depends on which political party is dominant when they go to do something).
A more benign framing of the conspiracy is that the tech companies desperately want to avoid any trust-busting activities by Congress so when the right is in power they don't do anything about right-wing extremism letting it grow & conveniently when the left is in power they deplatform right wing extremism that has grown, making legislators more anxious to enact any kind of regulation (just like the BS that MPAA played with ratings to avoid getting regulating).
If we accept the 'private company' argument as it has been recently presented, then even this falls under it as an acceptable outcome. I am not making an argument saying we should either reject or accept it was presented, only that if we were to accept it, this is a conclusion of the argument.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/350461/mobile-messenger-...
When I visited some friends in Chile it was also #1 by far
It's actually really annoying that all my international friends are on whatsapp while all my US friends are not.
No more than a Ford dealer buying a billboard outside a Chevy dealership. It's not anti-competitive to advertise in the same place your competition advertises.
It is illegal and anticompetitive to be a huge company using enormous resources to squash competition for smaller firms. There are many ways in which this is done. Not all of them are illegal, depending on how you look at it.
My opinion: Buying marketshare is usually bad for the user.
You're telling me Coke can't advertise soda because there's a small local craft soda manufacturer here in town?
Facebook also “doesn’t support” these sorts of links (at least to Telegram, Snapchat, others) on Instagram: https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/03/instagram-starts-blocking-...
Either fb/wa is doing something odd in the request when generating the preview, or the other end is responding badly to something unusual-but-correct that there's are doing. Perhaps due to the initial request's accept headers a redirect is being sent instead of the usual content, and requesting that results in a 404.
Could be malicious as many are suggesting, I certainly wouldn't put it past them, but I suspect cockup is a more likely explanation.
https://i.imgur.com/Y8hg6zW.png
Bill Gates squirming during his anti-trust testimony when answering questions from David Boies was game-changing for the company and our industry
I don't think it will be pretty - but it will inform all users for the better
Yeah, right. Was this sarcasm? I think most day-to-day users have zero color on this kind of stuff.
Whatsapp blocking Telegram links
I'm fact I had always assumed those are generated by the local application
The preview is generated and sent along with the message. Nothing is loaded from the other chats' side.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/09/09/whatsapp-is-blockin...
In all seriousness though, this kind of advertising should not be beneficial to Facebook. You're telling a group of people biased not to buy your product, to buy your product. There's obviously some other reason.
Tough for the advertiser, but maximizing advertiser dissatisfaction is also in my interest (at least since I don’t advertise anymore - after an important realization that I had poured money into it for very few actual new customers).
But the ad networks get paid for those clicks, so while businesses keep buying ads from a known[1] mostly fraudulent industry, they will not.
1: "Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend" -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858
I hate ads too, but let's not pretend like this childish rebellion is actually self-serving. It's like me saying I'm upset with politics so I'll show the world by not voting.
Then they shouldn't be using Signal either. Signal is not peer to peer at all and doesn't even federate.
It's extremely common now and before the internet this sort of marketing i.e. positioning against your competitor was also extremely common.
I don't think this practice is generally bad.
Edit: Don't flag me. Fuck you too. It's a perfectly legitimate comment.
It's actually surprising why it's not perceived to be more hostile.
When buying App Store ads, the default is to use a "broad match" for the keywords you enter -- i.e. Apple automatically decides what keywords are similar to the keywords you selected and runs your ads against those as well.
It's pretty annoying because there's no way to switch the default -- you have to remember to put your keywords in brackets to disable it -- but probably great for Apple's revenue.
I do agree that a lot of these companies do have the ability to use advertising to crush their competition, but I’m not sure what the solution is to that.
Not sure why this is a big deal. Is it good? No. Is it new? Not particularly.
I hope we can get this right one day. Allowing trademark squatting helps nobody but scammers (and search engines).
You think it's better than Google only follows the letter of the law, and destroy it's search credibility, than put some process in place to prevent deceptive advertising.
Searching for one thing, seeing something different at the top of the page feels pretty deceptive to me. If it didn't work, they probably wouldn't do it.
Words matter. Inflammatory nonsense has no place on HN.
Signal is a registered Trademark. They are buying ads for the word Signal. How is that not Trademark squatting?
> Facebook is not bribing anyone.
I think OPs point is that it should be considered bribery to pay Google to show up at the top of the search results. I think they chose their words very intentionally.
It does not mean bidding on your competitor's keywords or paying to use Google's advertising platform.
You do understand that what you are saying is libellous right ?
https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/newsletter/inve...
It's legal, but I don't understand why. The broader discussion point is why we do this to ourselves.
Which shows that it is a fairly grey area. "Fair use" doctrines apply to trademark infringement and using your competitor's name in this way has in the past been allowed.
[1] https://corporate.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/ours-wor...
Except for the time they weren't... https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/squint-and-youll-click-it/
I've seen it for any popular app - at best it's a tax apple is charging apps to protect themselves by buying ad slots for their own name.
At worst it's an attack on old people.
Whenever I see it I think less of the company trying to manipulate less technical users.
You should not be able to buy ads on a company name that isn’t yours.
I suspect people higher up at Apple that see this would agree and change policy if they thought about it.
See Christopher Wray's testimony in Jan 2020. I'm sure this will be accelerated.