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At its core, facebook contains a useful service. It's messaging capabilities are good, and the fact that identities and connections facebook are persistent effe

At its core, facebook contains a useful service. It's messaging capabilities are good, and the fact that identities and connections facebook are persistent effectively combats the problem that plagued much of the early internet: constantly changing pseudonyms and emails. I know that it is not necessary, but it is convenient. Additionally, its support for multimedia posts, links, profiles and other adds a nice, rich experience. Unfortunately, many of the internet's great consumer businesses were built on this premise that advertising will pay for everything. That premise has been a good one for many years now, but, advertisers are getting savvier, and the addressable market is getting addressed pretty well. yes, there is room for growth, but, for many advertisers, that growth is not inside their target markets. While targeted marketing does provide value, I think it is an open question "how targeted is enough targeted?" Meaning that there is not definitive and universal data on where the benefits of less privacy really result in positive outcomes for advertisers. I would guess that in many cases greater accuracy in audience targeting does not result in statistically significant improvements in conversions when balanced against the increased cost of hyper targeted vs semi targeted ads. I am sure this depends heavily on many factors. The challenge, though, is that facebook has to grow revenue, and, they have pursued this with advertisers by attempting to differentiate their ad products on the basis of hyper targeting. they do have differentiated ability to do this, and it gives them a competitive edge. It means that they spend the majority of their time building products that the liminal areas around personal privacy and ethics. This puts them in a very difficult spot, because many of their competitors in the ad business are doing the same thing, and trying to get the same level of detail. Google has not launched multiple social networks just for the fun of it...they did it to serve their customers. The monetization and differentiation that facebook has pursued has pushed them to be on the bleeding edge of selling granular, user-specific data. This seems unlikely to change without an outside force to force a change of behavior in their competitors as well. If you take away the competitive pressure to do something (by making it illegal, for example) then it can avoid further progress in this arms race.

josefresco 8y ago
> and the fact that identities and connections facebook are persistent effectively combats the problem that plagued much of the early internet: constantly changing pseudonyms and emails This, was a problem?
- tlb 8y ago
  It was. In the 90s, people's email address changed pretty much any time they changed jobs or schools. Their phone numbers changed too, every time they moved. For college students, it often meant multiple complete changes of contact info per year. The churn is much lower now.
  - josefresco 8y ago
    Useful maybe for extended friends and family, but (when I used FB) I never even considered it as a viable option for contact beyond that small group. Maybe there's a generation that accepted Facebook this way that I'm not aware of (my kids don't even use it) Also, there's a large gap between the 90's and when Facebook took hold that it could be considered the "default" online identity for anyone. In that time, free email that lasted years/decades exploded and we were no longer tied to work/school email.
- reidjs 8y ago
  I agree in the sense you want to keep a large circle of contacts and attribute a name to a face quickly.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
asdff 8y ago
I ran away from facebook in 2015. I maybe check once a month to see if a random cousin reached out to me, and the service fails even at that. I don't understand how anyone uses this firehose of irrelevant information anymore. I check the notifications bar, and it says I have dozens and dozens of notifications, but really I have zero. All of these dozens of alerts and badges are nothing more than "Ashley commented on derricks post" I don't know a derrick at all, or "Jerry liked russian_troll_page's video." The feed is completely polluted. Out of all the mismatched and randomly shuffled posts from the past week that pop up, maybe 5% are original content from my friends, and not someone liking a page or commenting on a video with 300,000 other comments. The site used to be excellent when the content was 100% generated by the people I personally knew. Nowadays, I don't know how you get any valuable information out of it without spending hours and hours sifting through the junk. The platform regressed. I still use social media everyday. On instagram I follow my friends, and a handful of nature pages. Most of the posts I see are from people I know, an interesting story across the world, or a poorly targeted ad. On snapchat I only chat or look at stories posted by my friends; I only click the crap on the discover page if my thumb misses. I don't use twitter, I prefer daily newsletters from NYT, and follow other publishers and magazines with RSS (including this site). I've cut the fat by living within inoreader and rarely straying elsewhere. You can save a lot of time if you don't have to sift through algorithmic advertising pollution to read the headlines and see what your friend Dave did today. Start now. Drop facebook, drop twitter, unfollow everyone you don't know personally on everything else, and use an RSS reader to filter in the content you actually want to engage with, not what an advertiser wants you to see to buy something, or vote a certain way.
- abakker 8y ago
  I agree with you completely. And that is kind of my point. At its core, it has some parts that are great. The trappings paying the bills are what have created so much damage. I think ultimately, the world would be a better place if people who wanted privacy could just buy it. I’d pay money to have Facebook without any tracking and without any ads. The trouble is that I wouldn’t pay as much as that policy would cost. If everyone now is worth $5, but everyone rich enough to pay $5 just “bought out” their own ad space, advertisers would flee immediate and Facebook would lose most of their revenue. The struggle with Facebook is that they can’t afford to sell privacy to those who want it, except at a cost that nobody would want it. They are interesting to advertisers because at least some Data is fair game for everyone. If that goes away for those that are most able to pay, it drives a spiral away from advertisers, and therefore away from privacy being affordable.
beagle3 8y ago
> At its core, facebook contains a useful service. It's messaging capabilities are good At its core, the turkey farmer provides a useful service to the turkeys - it feeds them, gives them shelter, protects them from predators and thiefs, and also takes care of their health. There's just this inconvenient thing that happens occasionally, often around thanksgiving.
signal11 8y ago
> constantly changing pseudonyms and emails This is a problem only for some people who are fortunate in life. For many other people — kids discovering the internet, persecuted minorities, dissidents, victims of domestic abuse, victims of stalking — pseudo-anonymity can be helpful.

josefresco 8y ago

> and the fact that identities and connections facebook are persistent effectively combats the problem that plagued much of the early internet: constantly changing pseudonyms and emails This, was a problem?

tlb 8y ago
It was. In the 90s, people's email address changed pretty much any time they changed jobs or schools. Their phone numbers changed too, every time they moved. For college students, it often meant multiple complete changes of contact info per year. The churn is much lower now.
- josefresco 8y ago
  Useful maybe for extended friends and family, but (when I used FB) I never even considered it as a viable option for contact beyond that small group. Maybe there's a generation that accepted Facebook this way that I'm not aware of (my kids don't even use it) Also, there's a large gap between the 90's and when Facebook took hold that it could be considered the "default" online identity for anyone. In that time, free email that lasted years/decades exploded and we were no longer tied to work/school email.
reidjs 8y ago
I agree in the sense you want to keep a large circle of contacts and attribute a name to a face quickly.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

asdff 8y ago

I ran away from facebook in 2015. I maybe check once a month to see if a random cousin reached out to me, and the service fails even at that. I don't understand how anyone uses this firehose of irrelevant information anymore. I check the notifications bar, and it says I have dozens and dozens of notifications, but really I have zero. All of these dozens of alerts and badges are nothing more than "Ashley commented on derricks post" I don't know a derrick at all, or "Jerry liked russian_troll_page's video." The feed is completely polluted. Out of all the mismatched and randomly shuffled posts from the past week that pop up, maybe 5% are original content from my friends, and not someone liking a page or commenting on a video with 300,000 other comments. The site used to be excellent when the content was 100% generated by the people I personally knew. Nowadays, I don't know how you get any valuable information out of it without spending hours and hours sifting through the junk. The platform regressed. I still use social media everyday. On instagram I follow my friends, and a handful of nature pages. Most of the posts I see are from people I know, an interesting story across the world, or a poorly targeted ad. On snapchat I only chat or look at stories posted by my friends; I only click the crap on the discover page if my thumb misses. I don't use twitter, I prefer daily newsletters from NYT, and follow other publishers and magazines with RSS (including this site). I've cut the fat by living within inoreader and rarely straying elsewhere. You can save a lot of time if you don't have to sift through algorithmic advertising pollution to read the headlines and see what your friend Dave did today. Start now. Drop facebook, drop twitter, unfollow everyone you don't know personally on everything else, and use an RSS reader to filter in the content you actually want to engage with, not what an advertiser wants you to see to buy something, or vote a certain way.

abakker 8y ago
I agree with you completely. And that is kind of my point. At its core, it has some parts that are great. The trappings paying the bills are what have created so much damage. I think ultimately, the world would be a better place if people who wanted privacy could just buy it. I’d pay money to have Facebook without any tracking and without any ads. The trouble is that I wouldn’t pay as much as that policy would cost. If everyone now is worth $5, but everyone rich enough to pay $5 just “bought out” their own ad space, advertisers would flee immediate and Facebook would lose most of their revenue. The struggle with Facebook is that they can’t afford to sell privacy to those who want it, except at a cost that nobody would want it. They are interesting to advertisers because at least some Data is fair game for everyone. If that goes away for those that are most able to pay, it drives a spiral away from advertisers, and therefore away from privacy being affordable.

beagle3 8y ago

> At its core, facebook contains a useful service. It's messaging capabilities are good At its core, the turkey farmer provides a useful service to the turkeys - it feeds them, gives them shelter, protects them from predators and thiefs, and also takes care of their health. There's just this inconvenient thing that happens occasionally, often around thanksgiving.

signal11 8y ago

> constantly changing pseudonyms and emails This is a problem only for some people who are fortunate in life. For many other people — kids discovering the internet, persecuted minorities, dissidents, victims of domestic abuse, victims of stalking — pseudo-anonymity can be helpful.