16 ms·

The Price of Free Is Actually Too High

353 points by anacleto 9y ago

jimmaswell 9y ago
"We cannot afford the advertising business model. The price of free is actually too high. It is literally destroying our society, because it incentivizes automated systems that have these inherent flaws." This is ridiculous. If nobody knew that this was happening, we'd be going on with our lives and nothing would be different. Society is not being destroyed by advertisements being delivered more effectively with user data. Whatever they're doing with it, it's preferable to having to pay to use websites. How about the very small vocal minority of people who legitimately care about their data being harvested get to pay every website they want to visit, and the rest of us stick with ads?
- mistermann 9y ago
  I don't think the author is talking about simple advertising, I think he is talking about the power to influence the public on a mass scale. I think it is fair to say that western societies are more polarized than they were ten years ago, and a reasonable argument can be made that social media has something to do with it. Ad-based business models make it necessary, to a degree at least, for platforms to monetize their user base.
  - notahacker 9y ago
    I think it's fair to say Western societies have at least one millennium of being easily roused by pretty crude propaganda and much more polarised when the economy's not going so good. It's not like good old fashioned paid-for newsprint had a reputation for not provoking hysteria on a mass scale, or like the most obnoxious political commentators on the internet don't have Patreon accounts. Nothing to do with the payment model and everything to do with people being willing to influence and others being easily influenced.
    - mistermann 9y ago
      If membership on Facebook was paid rather than ad based, is it not reasonable to think there would be less people available to be influences on that individual platform? Add some more restrictive legislation on what major online platforms are allowed to display to users, and I think it would be a very different ball game.
      - mistermann 9y ago
        So, at least two people disagree with the assertions that: - Facebook being a paid platform for subscribers would reduce subscribers - Adding restrictions to what Facebook was allowed to show users would have some affect Very interesting.
  - skybrian 9y ago
    re: "I don't think the author is talking about simple advertising, I think he is talking about the power to influence the public on a mass scale." Isn't that what mass advertisers do? Do you think Coca Cola doesn't want to influence the public? Maybe it's not about the power to do this, but rather what it's used for? Use advertising to sell a good product, and all is forgiven. It might even be considered positive in the case of a public health campaign. Sell a defective, dangerous product, or outright scam, and they will complain about the advertising. (These days, many people are looking at soda rather skeptically.)
    - mistermann 9y ago
      Right, it's persuasion in both cases, but what people are being persuaded to do, and the degree of effectiveness, appears to be different enough now that it might be worthy of a public discussion and perhaps some policy changes. That's my interpretation anyways.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  You can have functional platforms without the creepy and manipulative behavior that Facebook uses. Facebook would be a better Facebook if it were a service for users instead of advertisers. The problem with Facebook is that it is owned and controlled by an individual whose personality, ethical standards and philosophy seems to be pretty static and problematic in many ways.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  Well, everyone can point to their favorite problems in society. If you choose political polarization, loneliness, atomization and despair, this mix can suggest a society "coming apart" and might suggest social media could be a big of this by polarizing dialog, idea bubbles and "lack of real connections". The thing is this picture kind of comes apart if you notice a lot of the polarizing dialogue comes from mainstream with dynamic that's been accelerating for many years, that atomization similarly increased significantly as described by Robert Putnam in Bowling alone and blaming things like the opioid epidemic on social networking is fairly absurd (factors like the loss of high paid industrial jobs and destruction of community are clearly more to blame than Facebook, however you might apportion the overall blame). Moreover, the growing wealth disparity in this country is the elephant the behind a lot of these factors. I'd note that the current wave of anti-Facebook rants seem to have appeared after the Cambridge Analytica "scandal", which allowed a parade of haters to appear with a variety of complaint; Facebook helped Trump win, Facebook sharing annoys because I don't want to engage with people's political rants. https://thebaffler.com/latest/cambridge-analytica-con-levine https://thebaffler.com/latest/cambridge-analytica-con-levine
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    How would elimination of advertising fix online communication platforms. It isn't the ads that is causing the groupthink and polarization, but the abundance of choice in things to follow and voices to listen to. Do you suggest restricting the speech of people online? The polarization and groupthink is even present on online platforms that have no ads whatsoever, like Wikipedia and, to an extent, Hacker News.
    - michaelt 9y ago
      The theory is: Funded by advertising -> commercially incentivised to get as many users as possible and keep them on the site as long as possible -> optimise structure/design/layout/activity feed/suggested content/notifications to do that -> online communication problems. For example, Facebook controls the algorithm that decides which posts appear in your news feed, the order of them, the real name policy, which other users see your posts, and when you receive notifications; Reddit controls which content appears on the front page, the ease of sign-up, and the default subs; Youtube controls which video auto-plays next, and the content and ordering of videos on the homepage, and so on. All of them also have hired moderators, reporting mechanisms, automatic spam filtering; and policies on things like bots, how bans work, what sort of content is allowed/banned, pornography, hate speech, copyright infringement, and so on. So for example, in the pursuit of growth and engagement, companies might turn a blind eye to thousands of bots propping up their user numbers; or promote content that made people angry or mislead them; if doing so produced the best engagement metrics. There's also the problem of funded by advertising -> incentivised to improve ad targeting -> incentivised to push the boundaries on user privacy. I think we're only beginning to see the consequences of this.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > Society is not being destroyed by advertisements being delivered more effectively with user data. Oh yes it is. When Russian (and American) Trump, Brexit or other Nazi supporters use targeting to deliver propaganda to those segments of society most vulnerable to it, democracy suffers. The US got Trump, the UK got the Brexit, France the shocking rise of the Front National, we Germans got the AfD fash, Austria the FPÖ, Italy the M5S and Berlusconi rising from the dead, and the situation in Poland or Hungary went to total collapse of democracy. Most of this was enabled by propaganda on social media, especially as many newspapers and other real media outlets get their headlines from Facebook and Twitter trending topics. One thing common to all these "movements": easily shareable (and digestible) "share pics" filled with lies and "alternative facts" creating a massive echo chamber for those lured into it. With an equally massive radicalization feedback loop - like with snuff videos, people always need more extreme stuff.
  - hyperdunc 9y ago
    Your suggestion that Brexit, Trump, AfD, etc supporters are more vulnerable to propaganda is naive.
  - vk23 9y ago
    I dont understand why this gets downvoted. While all those things might have happend without social media its pretty obvious that targeted advertisment and "social media bubbles" push people into more extreme positions.
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      > I dont understand why this gets downvoted. I have a suspicion: many people in the tech world do not like it when someone points out that the tech world is very much at fault for what happened. Many people (tm), especially here, believe in the Holy Free Market as the Solution To All Problems... and having someone show them that the total lack of regulation did cause issues is bound to cause discomfort.
tedunangst 9y ago
> We are getting a first taste of how difficult it is for a world in which humans and computers are intrinsically linked. It's not just the humans being linked to computers. They're also linked to other humans.
- mirimir 9y ago
  And computers that pretend to be humans. And computers that process, redirect and focus stuff from other humans. Unless AIs have a higher ethical standard, free will for humans will become more and more an illusion. Edit: I'm thinking of Ian Banks' Culture novels. In Excession, there's a ship mind that doesn't respect human autonomy. Other ship minds call it "meatfucker". As a slur.
John_KZ 9y ago
I completely agree, and this is a prime example of when government intervention is absolutely necessary: Consumers cannot protect their long term interests and someone is taking advantage of it. There are many reasons why they can't. Sometimes there's competition that forces you to only consider your short term interests. Other times a limited resource (ie time, expertise) is required to evaluate a set of choices and the consumer can't afford it on it's own. Or maybe the widespread adoption of one thing creates a monopoly and makes other choices impossible. Whether the end result is nutritional deficiencies from unenriched food or complete and total misinformation, someone needs to intervene, and the only organization that has the obligation and means to do so is the government. The governments all across the world need to stop this cancer of misinformation and deception from spreading any further. We need to make them stop it.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  "The governments all across the world need to stop this cancer of misinformation and deception from spreading any further. We need to make them stop it." The irony is, a good number of these govs persist because of misinformation and deception. Until a tool like FB actually undermines that status quo the odds of change are low. Look at the alleged Russian interference in the USA. The USA's spin was on the order of "we would never do that." Obviously, we know, that's no true. The US has been "protecting American interests" for ages.
  - squiggleblaz 9y ago
    But Facebook does seem to have undermined the status quo in the US and Britain, if we attribute anything to fb. Actually, what they have to do is almost undermine the status quo but not quite, and still look threatening. If the status quo is undermined, the new people have no motivation to change it.
    - chiefalchemist 9y ago
      Allow me to be blunt. 1) The rich and powerful have gotten more rich and powerful since the birth of FB. 2) Cyber-surveillance by state and non-state actors has increased since the birth of FB. Yes, on one hand it's correlation (but on the other it's an assessment of the status quo). If 1 depends on 2 then FB is not to be considered on the side of the people.
drchiu 9y ago
I find whenever I consider the alternative to free, I need to examine deep within myself to ask if I’d be willing to pay for the half a dozen services or so that I use every day for free, subsidized currently by an advertising model. Although the idea would be great if companies existed solely to serve people like myself for free, it isn’t realistic. Weighing the cost of free vs the potential loss of privacy at some point in the future, I can’t help but choose free today and kick the proverbial privacy can down the road. Thus, I’m a bit hesitant to go find my pitch fork in this fight for privacy.
- dleslie 9y ago
  I pay for a VPN, Cloud Storage, VPS hosting, and Encrypted Email; I'd probably pay for Maps if Open Street Map weren't sufficient. The total comes to just over $300/yr. That's... really not that much, is it?
  - projektir 9y ago
    > The total comes to just over $300/yr. That's... really not that much, is it? I'd imagine for minimum mage workers, that's obscene.
    - dleslie 9y ago
      I agree, but this is HN; isn't it safe to assume a certain income among most commentators?
      - lazyasciiart 9y ago
        I know of at least two homeless HN commentors, and more than that who are unemployed.
      - DoreenMichele 9y ago
        I'm quite poor and was homeless until a few months ago. I am quite open about that and I get told bluntly to stop talking about myself here at times. I have seen evidence that suggests other poor people here are reluctant to stick their neck out as much as I do. So the number of poor people here is probably more than it seems.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
Facebook is a mirror, and a magnifier. "Fixing" FB is, at best, curing a symptom. A general lack of critical thinking is not FB's fault. To promote otherwise is naive and dangerous.
- zeth___ 9y ago
  Facebook is a mirror in the same way meth is a mirror. That everyone has self destructive tendencies is pretty clear, it's only when you get a reward for following through with them that you have a problem. That the reward is likes or drugs is pretty immaterial.
- bobbygoodlatte 9y ago
  It's a mirror, but perhaps it's a fun-house mirror: algorithmically warped to amplify 'engaging' content. YouTube has similar issues. Start a fresh account and do some innocent searches on topics like the history of civil rights. Pretty soon you'll see suggested videos with some pretty extreme political perspectives
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > A general lack of critical thinking is not FB's fault. Are you sure about that?
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    I don't believe FB is responsible for the education system. It's the gov's (and parents') best interest to blame FB, else they have to admit their responsibility.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      How does it follow from that that it's not also facebook's fault? If the government and parents are failing to prepare children for dealing with the adversaries that they encounter in life ... does that mean anyone who is using that lack of preparation to their advantage while knowingly hurting those under-prepared people cannot possibly be at fault for their actions? If a child hasn't learned about the dangers of drugs in school or from their parents ... does that mean that someone selling them hard drugs cannot be at fault for making money from that situation?
eevilspock 9y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair SV makes too much money from advertising to be able to admit the truths about it. There is no free lunch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 Advertising is our C8: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706
shmerl 9y ago
> The Price of Free is Actually Too High The price of centralized "free" is indeed too high.
skookumchuck 9y ago
I'm amazed that storage is cheap enough that companies can afford to keep all that data.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  The type of data we are talking about has not grown, while storage capacity has. Back in the 90s, that sentiment reflected reality; but not today.
wangii 9y ago
It's paradoxical b/c paying customers are even better ad targets. I think advertisements are OK, as long as personal data not aggregated, nor cross referenced/shared. I'm OK with google display few search related ads along the page. But it's insane to see van ads on youtube after I searched for one.
cleandreams 9y ago
Pretty good. The one thing in this article I found off was the notion that regulation by "the community" was preferable to regulation by, well, regulation. That is a fundamental mistake. "The community" is a bunch of businesses that follow this system because if they didn't, someone else would, and get market share. This lack of privacy is just capitalism at work. The problem to excesses in capitalism is government regulation. True that, for child labor, pollution, whatevs. "The community" is just mouthwash.
piracykills 9y ago
Stupid clickbait.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
retrogradeorbit 9y ago
There is an alternative to this method of providing a free service: Mining cryptocurrency on the users computer. Yet doing that, even floating the possibility of it, is met with great, vociferous anger. "How dare you use my CPU." Even if you are up front and ask people first. And so joining a massive surveillance system is the alternative left. People are their own worst enemy. No one is putting a gun to anyone's head to use facebook, and even when people find out what's going on, 90% keep using facebook.
- nukeop 9y ago
  The problem is that cryptominers are not an alternative to ads, they're used in parallel with ads.
Proven 9y ago
When Obama won his first presidency, American socialists were singing praises to his team’s use of Big Data.... Unlike the silly Republicans, the Dems had the brains to influence the election. Both then and now, the key assumption is people are stupid enough to be influenced by propaganda. If that is true, the fix is to dismantle democracy. Anarchocapitalism solves the Facebook problem.
makecheck 9y ago
What ought to happen is that people have more than enough money to buy things they’re likely to use, driving money into the economy for things that are useful. Instead, wages are terrible for the most part. Income inequality is so off the scale now that you can’t expect people to just pay for all the little things they use. Making all these free things might have the side effect of distracting people from realizing how little they can actually afford. Since no one is paying for things that are useful, instead money goes to whatever can trick the most ad viewers: sensational news, outrageous things, etc. Anything that can’t be made interesting to most people has trouble making money.
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  So if people had more money they would buy useful things, since they don't have money they buy useless things?
nstj 9y ago
Good point to the article, though the quote about Cambridge Analytica seems a bit misguided - the leak there was as a result of Facebook Platform which is antithetical to the ad targeting model which the rest of the article is about. FB leaking user data through CA is not part of FB’s business model.
EGreg 9y ago
Actually, the problem is centralization, as Tim pointed out. The early pioneers are often proprietary systems (Windows, IE, Britannica) followed by open source software (Linux, WebKit, Wikipedia) which are better in tons of ways. For one, the long tail is served better (Linux has even been known to run on toasters, Wikipedia has way more articles). For another, people own their own data, identity and brand. Look, you are writing this on YOUR domain because Wordpress gave you that ability. It powers 20% of all new websites. What we need as a society is a Wordpress for social networking.
- carapace 9y ago
  Exactly! The peer-to-peer file sharing services prove that we can have nice things and not pay for them too. (Although there is a problem if you want to make nice things and get paid for them...) There already are P2P social network platforms, the problem is how do you get mass adoption?
  - EGreg 9y ago
    We built such a platform. Our company already has mass adoption. There are various ways to get it. I would say viral expansion is the best way.
    - carapace 9y ago
      Qbix, eh? It looks great, congratulations!
      - EGreg 9y ago
        Thank you! Feel free to reach out by email if you want to get help getting started with the FOSS platform
        carapace 9y ago
        Cheers! Will do.
methodover 9y ago
Oh please. The price of free -- being shown ads -- is not too high. It's free. We need good advertising systems. Businesses need to be able to pitch new customers. We need to clean up some issues wrt privacy of course. But well-targeted, relevant ads are a good thing.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > Oh please. The price of free -- being shown ads -- is not too high. It's free. Seriously? That's supposed to be an argument? > We need to clean up some issues wrt privacy of course. But well-targeted, relevant ads are a good thing. How do you define privacy that using data about a person to target them is compatible with that concept of privacy?
zaidf 9y ago
Almost everyone making this claim is pretending to speak from a highly priveleged position on behalf of people who aren’t priveleged. They assume that just because they don’t have a problem paying $5/mo, rest of the world doesn’t either. Their naive solution (“charge me money!”) is all about providing them some privacy while leaving the overwhelming majority of the world either without the free services or without the same privacy the relatively-rich would get.
- sametmax 9y ago
  Yes but it's a step. At least the privacy oriented offer would improve. We can always iterate on that. You can't solve a complicated problem all at once, and a lot of things start by being sold for a lot of money to the riches first before their execution become cheap enough to be targeted to less privileged, and so one. See: beds, fridges, etc. And we can a apply your other plan in parallel in you have one, to maximize efficiency. And if you don't, well, then you realize it's though.
  - zaidf 9y ago
    a lot of things start by being sold for a lot of money to the riches first before their execution become cheap enough to be targeted Things don’t become cheap in a vacuum: advertising is literally how many things that would have cost money could be offered for free. In that sense, we already have a solution to what you describe. It’s been over a decade since the iPhone was launched. Its cost hasn’t come down. So Apple can boast all it wants about its privacy features but it’s not a mass market product outside of the US. For proof, just look at their marketshare in countries like India. I think if in a decade a company like Apple hasn’t been able to figure out a way to lower price in order to make their privacy-first product more affordable, it’s at least worth admitting this is a very hard problem to solve at scale. And I say this as an Apple fanboy.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      > It’s been over a decade since the iPhone was launched. Its cost hasn’t come down. Huh? Says who? How much do you think you could charge for an iPhone 3G today? Apple hasn't lowered prices in the manner you're imagining because they are a luxury brand. Their business model is that you pay extra so that other people can see that you own an iPhone. Lowering prices means they get less money while losing value. But Apple has lowered prices in a very real sense, by providing much more performance at the same inflation-unadjusted prices.
fiatjaf 9y ago
Facebook is not bad because they leak your data, it is bad because it hypnotizes people.
textmode 9y ago
"There are a few mentions of Zynga (which we were investors in) in the various article chain which caused me to reflect even more on the 2007 - 2010 time period when free-to-consumer (supported by advertising) was suddenly conflated with freemium (or free trials for enterprise software)." Is that the company that sold "virtual goods" on Facebook. Pay real money to "send" a cartoon image of a brownie to another Facebook user. "What is going on here ("free services") is nothing new. The entire television industry was created on it (broadcast TV was free, supported by advertising, dating back well before I was born.) Nielsen ratings started for radio in the 1940s and TV in the 1950s. The idea of advertisers targeting users of free services based on data is, well, not new. Propaganda is not new either. The etymology of the word from Wikipedia is entertaining in its own right." Questions: What if a user simply wants a method of communicating with a friend, family member or colleague Is that type of communication done via television, radio or propaganda How about telegraph, telephone or internet service What is the "service" Is it entertainment Is it a means of communication between friends, family and colleagues If it is entertainment, then is it dissemination[1] 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840205 Is advertising also dissemination Is communication with friends, family and colleagues different from "dissemination* See [1] Is there any history of surveillance of communication over telegraph, telephone or (until recently) internet service in order to inform advertising
- kitotik 9y ago
  This is such a great point. I remember first seeing ads in gmail and trying to figure why it made me feel physically nauseous, while the early implementations of Google search ads seemed completely reasonable and inoffensive. It was definitely the fact that they were showing me ads based on private communication as opposed to my previous consumption habits that caused the visceral reaction.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
Yet another false dichotomy. There is a difference between free as in beer and free as in freedom. Only the latter can offer us privacy and security.
godot 9y ago
Nearly every first level reply on this post are in response to the title only (price of free is too high). But if you read the actual article, that was only the intro/lead-in. The main point of the article is near the end: > I think something more profound is going on here. We are getting a first taste of how difficult it is for a world in which humans and computers are intrinsically linked. Tristian’s punch line “The problem with Facebook is Facebook” hints at this. Is the problem the leadership of Facebook, the people of Facebook, the users of Facebook, the software of Facebook, the algorithms of Facebook, what people do with the data from Facebook, or something else. Just try to pull those apart and make sense of it. > ... the big transitions are hard to see when you are in them but easy to see with the benefit of decades of hindsight. This might be that moment of transition, where there is no going back to what was before. Brad is bringing up a question here. He's not making a claim about anything. Our world is being changed. We don't know how things are going to turn out yet.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  He basically identifies 3 free related issues coming to a nexus with FB. First is that free and monopoly (in the Pete Thiel sense) are related. A lot of the FB problems are problems of concentrated scale. Second is the advertising business model. There as side effects to this three-way market. In any casefb as business works because they are such a monopoly. Third is political influence, which I think is at the centre of FB's current heat, not data security. People become presidents on FB, revolutions happen on FB. This gives extra importance to the first two. FB had been in denial about the politics issue, I suspect they still don't fully grasp it. They're not a neutral platform. They actually built in certain biases via their "optimization" for "engagement". In any case, since people like to argue politics on FB, it's a great advertiaing platform for politics. I think they will not like the answer to the last problem. Its either an editorial approach, recognizing their position as a publication or trying to get rid of politics.
  - manjushri 9y ago
    >FB had been in denial about the politics issue, I suspect they still don't fully grasp it. They're not a neutral platform. They grasp it. They've been running research studies on elections[1], politics, and "emotional contagions"[2] since at least 2010. [1]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-a-facebook-experiment-increased-real-world-election-turnout-33547221/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-a-facebook... [2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-user-news-feeds-to-create-emotional-contagion/#3bf9104239dc https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebo...
mosselman 9y ago
Just as you think the introduction is done, the whole article is over. It feels very incomplete and there are some punctuation mistakes and incomplete scentences. Sheep-like upvoting seems like the cause of it reaching the top here.
realpeopleio 9y ago
Exactly why RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io https://realpeople.io) was created. The business model of using targeted advertising needs to go away. With ads, platforms have the incentive to sell user data and keep users online as much as possible to maximize ad impressions. AI creates and uses phycological profiles of users and not only shows them targets ads but decides who sees what. We need to support social media that use paid subscriptions with no ads. And we need to support platforms that make it core to their offering that they are not going to share user data, and which have a business model that will align with that. There is a lot of discussion around this nowadays which is good, but it's time for people to actually take action and be leader and make the change themselves.
- klunger 9y ago
  I like this idea. But... you really need to put up more content or content preview so users know what they are getting before signing up.

353 points by anacleto 9y ago

"We cannot afford the advertising business model. The price of free is actually too high. It is literally destroying our society, because it incentivizes automated systems that have these inherent flaws." This is ridiculous. If nobody knew that this was happening, we'd be going on with our lives and nothing would be different. Society is not being destroyed by advertisements being delivered more effectively with user data. Whatever they're doing with it, it's preferable to having to pay to use websites. How about the very small vocal minority of people who legitimately care about their data being harvested get to pay every website they want to visit, and the rest of us stick with ads?

mistermann 9y ago
I don't think the author is talking about simple advertising, I think he is talking about the power to influence the public on a mass scale. I think it is fair to say that western societies are more polarized than they were ten years ago, and a reasonable argument can be made that social media has something to do with it. Ad-based business models make it necessary, to a degree at least, for platforms to monetize their user base.
- notahacker 9y ago
  I think it's fair to say Western societies have at least one millennium of being easily roused by pretty crude propaganda and much more polarised when the economy's not going so good. It's not like good old fashioned paid-for newsprint had a reputation for not provoking hysteria on a mass scale, or like the most obnoxious political commentators on the internet don't have Patreon accounts. Nothing to do with the payment model and everything to do with people being willing to influence and others being easily influenced.
  - mistermann 9y ago
    If membership on Facebook was paid rather than ad based, is it not reasonable to think there would be less people available to be influences on that individual platform? Add some more restrictive legislation on what major online platforms are allowed to display to users, and I think it would be a very different ball game.
    - mistermann 9y ago
      So, at least two people disagree with the assertions that: - Facebook being a paid platform for subscribers would reduce subscribers - Adding restrictions to what Facebook was allowed to show users would have some affect Very interesting.
- skybrian 9y ago
  re: "I don't think the author is talking about simple advertising, I think he is talking about the power to influence the public on a mass scale." Isn't that what mass advertisers do? Do you think Coca Cola doesn't want to influence the public? Maybe it's not about the power to do this, but rather what it's used for? Use advertising to sell a good product, and all is forgiven. It might even be considered positive in the case of a public health campaign. Sell a defective, dangerous product, or outright scam, and they will complain about the advertising. (These days, many people are looking at soda rather skeptically.)
  - mistermann 9y ago
    Right, it's persuasion in both cases, but what people are being persuaded to do, and the degree of effectiveness, appears to be different enough now that it might be worthy of a public discussion and perhaps some policy changes. That's my interpretation anyways.
Spooky23 9y ago
You can have functional platforms without the creepy and manipulative behavior that Facebook uses. Facebook would be a better Facebook if it were a service for users instead of advertisers. The problem with Facebook is that it is owned and controlled by an individual whose personality, ethical standards and philosophy seems to be pretty static and problematic in many ways.
joe_the_user 9y ago
Well, everyone can point to their favorite problems in society. If you choose political polarization, loneliness, atomization and despair, this mix can suggest a society "coming apart" and might suggest social media could be a big of this by polarizing dialog, idea bubbles and "lack of real connections". The thing is this picture kind of comes apart if you notice a lot of the polarizing dialogue comes from mainstream with dynamic that's been accelerating for many years, that atomization similarly increased significantly as described by Robert Putnam in Bowling alone and blaming things like the opioid epidemic on social networking is fairly absurd (factors like the loss of high paid industrial jobs and destruction of community are clearly more to blame than Facebook, however you might apportion the overall blame). Moreover, the growing wealth disparity in this country is the elephant the behind a lot of these factors. I'd note that the current wave of anti-Facebook rants seem to have appeared after the Cambridge Analytica "scandal", which allowed a parade of haters to appear with a variety of complaint; Facebook helped Trump win, Facebook sharing annoys because I don't want to engage with people's political rants. https://thebaffler.com/latest/cambridge-analytica-con-levine https://thebaffler.com/latest/cambridge-analytica-con-levine
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  How would elimination of advertising fix online communication platforms. It isn't the ads that is causing the groupthink and polarization, but the abundance of choice in things to follow and voices to listen to. Do you suggest restricting the speech of people online? The polarization and groupthink is even present on online platforms that have no ads whatsoever, like Wikipedia and, to an extent, Hacker News.
  - michaelt 9y ago
    The theory is: Funded by advertising -> commercially incentivised to get as many users as possible and keep them on the site as long as possible -> optimise structure/design/layout/activity feed/suggested content/notifications to do that -> online communication problems. For example, Facebook controls the algorithm that decides which posts appear in your news feed, the order of them, the real name policy, which other users see your posts, and when you receive notifications; Reddit controls which content appears on the front page, the ease of sign-up, and the default subs; Youtube controls which video auto-plays next, and the content and ordering of videos on the homepage, and so on. All of them also have hired moderators, reporting mechanisms, automatic spam filtering; and policies on things like bots, how bans work, what sort of content is allowed/banned, pornography, hate speech, copyright infringement, and so on. So for example, in the pursuit of growth and engagement, companies might turn a blind eye to thousands of bots propping up their user numbers; or promote content that made people angry or mislead them; if doing so produced the best engagement metrics. There's also the problem of funded by advertising -> incentivised to improve ad targeting -> incentivised to push the boundaries on user privacy. I think we're only beginning to see the consequences of this.
mschuster91 9y ago
> Society is not being destroyed by advertisements being delivered more effectively with user data. Oh yes it is. When Russian (and American) Trump, Brexit or other Nazi supporters use targeting to deliver propaganda to those segments of society most vulnerable to it, democracy suffers. The US got Trump, the UK got the Brexit, France the shocking rise of the Front National, we Germans got the AfD fash, Austria the FPÖ, Italy the M5S and Berlusconi rising from the dead, and the situation in Poland or Hungary went to total collapse of democracy. Most of this was enabled by propaganda on social media, especially as many newspapers and other real media outlets get their headlines from Facebook and Twitter trending topics. One thing common to all these "movements": easily shareable (and digestible) "share pics" filled with lies and "alternative facts" creating a massive echo chamber for those lured into it. With an equally massive radicalization feedback loop - like with snuff videos, people always need more extreme stuff.
- hyperdunc 9y ago
  Your suggestion that Brexit, Trump, AfD, etc supporters are more vulnerable to propaganda is naive.
- vk23 9y ago
  I dont understand why this gets downvoted. While all those things might have happend without social media its pretty obvious that targeted advertisment and "social media bubbles" push people into more extreme positions.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > I dont understand why this gets downvoted. I have a suspicion: many people in the tech world do not like it when someone points out that the tech world is very much at fault for what happened. Many people (tm), especially here, believe in the Holy Free Market as the Solution To All Problems... and having someone show them that the total lack of regulation did cause issues is bound to cause discomfort.

tedunangst 9y ago

> We are getting a first taste of how difficult it is for a world in which humans and computers are intrinsically linked. It's not just the humans being linked to computers. They're also linked to other humans.

mirimir 9y ago
And computers that pretend to be humans. And computers that process, redirect and focus stuff from other humans. Unless AIs have a higher ethical standard, free will for humans will become more and more an illusion. Edit: I'm thinking of Ian Banks' Culture novels. In Excession, there's a ship mind that doesn't respect human autonomy. Other ship minds call it "meatfucker". As a slur.

John_KZ 9y ago

I completely agree, and this is a prime example of when government intervention is absolutely necessary: Consumers cannot protect their long term interests and someone is taking advantage of it. There are many reasons why they can't. Sometimes there's competition that forces you to only consider your short term interests. Other times a limited resource (ie time, expertise) is required to evaluate a set of choices and the consumer can't afford it on it's own. Or maybe the widespread adoption of one thing creates a monopoly and makes other choices impossible. Whether the end result is nutritional deficiencies from unenriched food or complete and total misinformation, someone needs to intervene, and the only organization that has the obligation and means to do so is the government. The governments all across the world need to stop this cancer of misinformation and deception from spreading any further. We need to make them stop it.

chiefalchemist 9y ago
"The governments all across the world need to stop this cancer of misinformation and deception from spreading any further. We need to make them stop it." The irony is, a good number of these govs persist because of misinformation and deception. Until a tool like FB actually undermines that status quo the odds of change are low. Look at the alleged Russian interference in the USA. The USA's spin was on the order of "we would never do that." Obviously, we know, that's no true. The US has been "protecting American interests" for ages.
- squiggleblaz 9y ago
  But Facebook does seem to have undermined the status quo in the US and Britain, if we attribute anything to fb. Actually, what they have to do is almost undermine the status quo but not quite, and still look threatening. If the status quo is undermined, the new people have no motivation to change it.
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    Allow me to be blunt. 1) The rich and powerful have gotten more rich and powerful since the birth of FB. 2) Cyber-surveillance by state and non-state actors has increased since the birth of FB. Yes, on one hand it's correlation (but on the other it's an assessment of the status quo). If 1 depends on 2 then FB is not to be considered on the side of the people.

drchiu 9y ago

I find whenever I consider the alternative to free, I need to examine deep within myself to ask if I’d be willing to pay for the half a dozen services or so that I use every day for free, subsidized currently by an advertising model. Although the idea would be great if companies existed solely to serve people like myself for free, it isn’t realistic. Weighing the cost of free vs the potential loss of privacy at some point in the future, I can’t help but choose free today and kick the proverbial privacy can down the road. Thus, I’m a bit hesitant to go find my pitch fork in this fight for privacy.

dleslie 9y ago
I pay for a VPN, Cloud Storage, VPS hosting, and Encrypted Email; I'd probably pay for Maps if Open Street Map weren't sufficient. The total comes to just over $300/yr. That's... really not that much, is it?
- projektir 9y ago
  > The total comes to just over $300/yr. That's... really not that much, is it? I'd imagine for minimum mage workers, that's obscene.
  - dleslie 9y ago
    I agree, but this is HN; isn't it safe to assume a certain income among most commentators?
    - lazyasciiart 9y ago
      I know of at least two homeless HN commentors, and more than that who are unemployed.
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      I'm quite poor and was homeless until a few months ago. I am quite open about that and I get told bluntly to stop talking about myself here at times. I have seen evidence that suggests other poor people here are reluctant to stick their neck out as much as I do. So the number of poor people here is probably more than it seems.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

Facebook is a mirror, and a magnifier. "Fixing" FB is, at best, curing a symptom. A general lack of critical thinking is not FB's fault. To promote otherwise is naive and dangerous.

zeth___ 9y ago
Facebook is a mirror in the same way meth is a mirror. That everyone has self destructive tendencies is pretty clear, it's only when you get a reward for following through with them that you have a problem. That the reward is likes or drugs is pretty immaterial.
bobbygoodlatte 9y ago
It's a mirror, but perhaps it's a fun-house mirror: algorithmically warped to amplify 'engaging' content. YouTube has similar issues. Start a fresh account and do some innocent searches on topics like the history of civil rights. Pretty soon you'll see suggested videos with some pretty extreme political perspectives
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> A general lack of critical thinking is not FB's fault. Are you sure about that?
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  I don't believe FB is responsible for the education system. It's the gov's (and parents') best interest to blame FB, else they have to admit their responsibility.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    How does it follow from that that it's not also facebook's fault? If the government and parents are failing to prepare children for dealing with the adversaries that they encounter in life ... does that mean anyone who is using that lack of preparation to their advantage while knowingly hurting those under-prepared people cannot possibly be at fault for their actions? If a child hasn't learned about the dangers of drugs in school or from their parents ... does that mean that someone selling them hard drugs cannot be at fault for making money from that situation?

eevilspock 9y ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair SV makes too much money from advertising to be able to admit the truths about it. There is no free lunch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 Advertising is our C8: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706

shmerl 9y ago

> The Price of Free is Actually Too High The price of centralized "free" is indeed too high.

skookumchuck 9y ago

I'm amazed that storage is cheap enough that companies can afford to keep all that data.

thomastjeffery 9y ago
The type of data we are talking about has not grown, while storage capacity has. Back in the 90s, that sentiment reflected reality; but not today.

wangii 9y ago

It's paradoxical b/c paying customers are even better ad targets. I think advertisements are OK, as long as personal data not aggregated, nor cross referenced/shared. I'm OK with google display few search related ads along the page. But it's insane to see van ads on youtube after I searched for one.

cleandreams 9y ago

Pretty good. The one thing in this article I found off was the notion that regulation by "the community" was preferable to regulation by, well, regulation. That is a fundamental mistake. "The community" is a bunch of businesses that follow this system because if they didn't, someone else would, and get market share. This lack of privacy is just capitalism at work. The problem to excesses in capitalism is government regulation. True that, for child labor, pollution, whatevs. "The community" is just mouthwash.

piracykills 9y ago

Stupid clickbait.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

retrogradeorbit 9y ago

There is an alternative to this method of providing a free service: Mining cryptocurrency on the users computer. Yet doing that, even floating the possibility of it, is met with great, vociferous anger. "How dare you use my CPU." Even if you are up front and ask people first. And so joining a massive surveillance system is the alternative left. People are their own worst enemy. No one is putting a gun to anyone's head to use facebook, and even when people find out what's going on, 90% keep using facebook.

nukeop 9y ago
The problem is that cryptominers are not an alternative to ads, they're used in parallel with ads.

Proven 9y ago

When Obama won his first presidency, American socialists were singing praises to his team’s use of Big Data.... Unlike the silly Republicans, the Dems had the brains to influence the election. Both then and now, the key assumption is people are stupid enough to be influenced by propaganda. If that is true, the fix is to dismantle democracy. Anarchocapitalism solves the Facebook problem.

makecheck 9y ago

What ought to happen is that people have more than enough money to buy things they’re likely to use, driving money into the economy for things that are useful. Instead, wages are terrible for the most part. Income inequality is so off the scale now that you can’t expect people to just pay for all the little things they use. Making all these free things might have the side effect of distracting people from realizing how little they can actually afford. Since no one is paying for things that are useful, instead money goes to whatever can trick the most ad viewers: sensational news, outrageous things, etc. Anything that can’t be made interesting to most people has trouble making money.

fiatjaf 9y ago
So if people had more money they would buy useful things, since they don't have money they buy useless things?

nstj 9y ago

Good point to the article, though the quote about Cambridge Analytica seems a bit misguided - the leak there was as a result of Facebook Platform which is antithetical to the ad targeting model which the rest of the article is about. FB leaking user data through CA is not part of FB’s business model.

EGreg 9y ago

Actually, the problem is centralization, as Tim pointed out. The early pioneers are often proprietary systems (Windows, IE, Britannica) followed by open source software (Linux, WebKit, Wikipedia) which are better in tons of ways. For one, the long tail is served better (Linux has even been known to run on toasters, Wikipedia has way more articles). For another, people own their own data, identity and brand. Look, you are writing this on YOUR domain because Wordpress gave you that ability. It powers 20% of all new websites. What we need as a society is a Wordpress for social networking.

carapace 9y ago
Exactly! The peer-to-peer file sharing services prove that we can have nice things and not pay for them too. (Although there is a problem if you want to make nice things and get paid for them...) There already are P2P social network platforms, the problem is how do you get mass adoption?
- EGreg 9y ago
  We built such a platform. Our company already has mass adoption. There are various ways to get it. I would say viral expansion is the best way.
  - carapace 9y ago
    Qbix, eh? It looks great, congratulations!
    - EGreg 9y ago
      Thank you! Feel free to reach out by email if you want to get help getting started with the FOSS platform
      - carapace 9y ago
        Cheers! Will do.

methodover 9y ago

Oh please. The price of free -- being shown ads -- is not too high. It's free. We need good advertising systems. Businesses need to be able to pitch new customers. We need to clean up some issues wrt privacy of course. But well-targeted, relevant ads are a good thing.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> Oh please. The price of free -- being shown ads -- is not too high. It's free. Seriously? That's supposed to be an argument? > We need to clean up some issues wrt privacy of course. But well-targeted, relevant ads are a good thing. How do you define privacy that using data about a person to target them is compatible with that concept of privacy?

zaidf 9y ago

Almost everyone making this claim is pretending to speak from a highly priveleged position on behalf of people who aren’t priveleged. They assume that just because they don’t have a problem paying $5/mo, rest of the world doesn’t either. Their naive solution (“charge me money!”) is all about providing them some privacy while leaving the overwhelming majority of the world either without the free services or without the same privacy the relatively-rich would get.

sametmax 9y ago
Yes but it's a step. At least the privacy oriented offer would improve. We can always iterate on that. You can't solve a complicated problem all at once, and a lot of things start by being sold for a lot of money to the riches first before their execution become cheap enough to be targeted to less privileged, and so one. See: beds, fridges, etc. And we can a apply your other plan in parallel in you have one, to maximize efficiency. And if you don't, well, then you realize it's though.
- zaidf 9y ago
  a lot of things start by being sold for a lot of money to the riches first before their execution become cheap enough to be targeted Things don’t become cheap in a vacuum: advertising is literally how many things that would have cost money could be offered for free. In that sense, we already have a solution to what you describe. It’s been over a decade since the iPhone was launched. Its cost hasn’t come down. So Apple can boast all it wants about its privacy features but it’s not a mass market product outside of the US. For proof, just look at their marketshare in countries like India. I think if in a decade a company like Apple hasn’t been able to figure out a way to lower price in order to make their privacy-first product more affordable, it’s at least worth admitting this is a very hard problem to solve at scale. And I say this as an Apple fanboy.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    > It’s been over a decade since the iPhone was launched. Its cost hasn’t come down. Huh? Says who? How much do you think you could charge for an iPhone 3G today? Apple hasn't lowered prices in the manner you're imagining because they are a luxury brand. Their business model is that you pay extra so that other people can see that you own an iPhone. Lowering prices means they get less money while losing value. But Apple has lowered prices in a very real sense, by providing much more performance at the same inflation-unadjusted prices.

fiatjaf 9y ago

Facebook is not bad because they leak your data, it is bad because it hypnotizes people.

textmode 9y ago

"There are a few mentions of Zynga (which we were investors in) in the various article chain which caused me to reflect even more on the 2007 - 2010 time period when free-to-consumer (supported by advertising) was suddenly conflated with freemium (or free trials for enterprise software)." Is that the company that sold "virtual goods" on Facebook. Pay real money to "send" a cartoon image of a brownie to another Facebook user. "What is going on here ("free services") is nothing new. The entire television industry was created on it (broadcast TV was free, supported by advertising, dating back well before I was born.) Nielsen ratings started for radio in the 1940s and TV in the 1950s. The idea of advertisers targeting users of free services based on data is, well, not new. Propaganda is not new either. The etymology of the word from Wikipedia is entertaining in its own right." Questions: What if a user simply wants a method of communicating with a friend, family member or colleague Is that type of communication done via television, radio or propaganda How about telegraph, telephone or internet service What is the "service" Is it entertainment Is it a means of communication between friends, family and colleagues If it is entertainment, then is it dissemination[1] 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840205 Is advertising also dissemination Is communication with friends, family and colleagues different from "dissemination* See [1] Is there any history of surveillance of communication over telegraph, telephone or (until recently) internet service in order to inform advertising

kitotik 9y ago
This is such a great point. I remember first seeing ads in gmail and trying to figure why it made me feel physically nauseous, while the early implementations of Google search ads seemed completely reasonable and inoffensive. It was definitely the fact that they were showing me ads based on private communication as opposed to my previous consumption habits that caused the visceral reaction.

thomastjeffery 9y ago

Yet another false dichotomy. There is a difference between free as in beer and free as in freedom. Only the latter can offer us privacy and security.

godot 9y ago

Nearly every first level reply on this post are in response to the title only (price of free is too high). But if you read the actual article, that was only the intro/lead-in. The main point of the article is near the end: > I think something more profound is going on here. We are getting a first taste of how difficult it is for a world in which humans and computers are intrinsically linked. Tristian’s punch line “The problem with Facebook is Facebook” hints at this. Is the problem the leadership of Facebook, the people of Facebook, the users of Facebook, the software of Facebook, the algorithms of Facebook, what people do with the data from Facebook, or something else. Just try to pull those apart and make sense of it. > ... the big transitions are hard to see when you are in them but easy to see with the benefit of decades of hindsight. This might be that moment of transition, where there is no going back to what was before. Brad is bringing up a question here. He's not making a claim about anything. Our world is being changed. We don't know how things are going to turn out yet.

dalbasal 9y ago
He basically identifies 3 free related issues coming to a nexus with FB. First is that free and monopoly (in the Pete Thiel sense) are related. A lot of the FB problems are problems of concentrated scale. Second is the advertising business model. There as side effects to this three-way market. In any casefb as business works because they are such a monopoly. Third is political influence, which I think is at the centre of FB's current heat, not data security. People become presidents on FB, revolutions happen on FB. This gives extra importance to the first two. FB had been in denial about the politics issue, I suspect they still don't fully grasp it. They're not a neutral platform. They actually built in certain biases via their "optimization" for "engagement". In any case, since people like to argue politics on FB, it's a great advertiaing platform for politics. I think they will not like the answer to the last problem. Its either an editorial approach, recognizing their position as a publication or trying to get rid of politics.
- manjushri 9y ago
  >FB had been in denial about the politics issue, I suspect they still don't fully grasp it. They're not a neutral platform. They grasp it. They've been running research studies on elections[1], politics, and "emotional contagions"[2] since at least 2010. [1]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-a-facebook-experiment-increased-real-world-election-turnout-33547221/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-a-facebook... [2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-user-news-feeds-to-create-emotional-contagion/#3bf9104239dc https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebo...

mosselman 9y ago

Just as you think the introduction is done, the whole article is over. It feels very incomplete and there are some punctuation mistakes and incomplete scentences. Sheep-like upvoting seems like the cause of it reaching the top here.

realpeopleio 9y ago

Exactly why RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io https://realpeople.io) was created. The business model of using targeted advertising needs to go away. With ads, platforms have the incentive to sell user data and keep users online as much as possible to maximize ad impressions. AI creates and uses phycological profiles of users and not only shows them targets ads but decides who sees what. We need to support social media that use paid subscriptions with no ads. And we need to support platforms that make it core to their offering that they are not going to share user data, and which have a business model that will align with that. There is a lot of discussion around this nowadays which is good, but it's time for people to actually take action and be leader and make the change themselves.

klunger 9y ago
I like this idea. But... you really need to put up more content or content preview so users know what they are getting before signing up.