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> Canning said he expected Facebook to continue leading the way with chatbots and ads in Messenger, along with WhatsApp I think Facebook has truly pioneered th
by mikenew 8y ago
> Canning said he expected Facebook to continue leading the way with chatbots and ads in Messenger, along with WhatsApp
I think Facebook has truly pioneered the worst form of advertising. Compare it to YouTube. YT puts ads at the beginning of videos, and tries to make the ad as relevant to the video's audience as possible. They're still ads, they're still annoying, but at least they are clearly and obviously ads. It also incentivizes good content. Both the audience, the content creator, YT, and the advertiser benefit from the videos being as high quality and engaging as possible.
Facebook does the opposite. The vast majority of the advertising spend on Facebook is to "boost" a post, which just means that Facebook biases the algorithm to cause the post to be more visible to more people than it otherwise would be. This means that 1) that post pays money to displace other content. Content that the viewer would have enjoyed more. Generally it's organic content from actual friends. 2) that post is in no way marked as an advertisement. The viewer does not know that someone is paying money to influence them. Something as simple as "<friend> likes <company>" can be shown in your news feed just because that company is paying money to show you that.
It's as if someone paid your friends to say things like "wow, I love McDonalds" when they're around you. Except that both you and your friend don't know they only said that because McDonalds paid for it. It's deeply manipulative. And there's really no line between advertising for some company selling a product and advertising for a political candidate or platform. The fact that they want to expand into private conversations is genuinely scary.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoHow do you know the YT content creator isn't paid for saying or showing something in the video?
- mikenew 8y agoThey often are. But it's not something that's fundamentally built into the platform like it is on Facebook. YouTube receives no benefit from it so they certainly don't promote it, and the audience discourages it too because they feel like they're watching dishonest content. So yes, it happens, but it's outside the control of YouTube. Facebook fully embraces it. They've built their entire platform around it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ilovecaching 8y agoI find Youtube advertising to be way worse, primarily because I can’t skip the ad, I have to sit their for some minimum number of seconds, and the ads never seem relevant. Compare that to Facebook, where I can just keep scrolling. I’ve also found a few hobbies through Facebook ads, I think their targeting is pretty good. No advertising company wants you to see ads you don’t care about. It just wastes the advertisers money. Ads that are boosted are still trying to target audiences that will actually click on the ad.
- elorant 8y agoYou don't need to skip the ad. Just install uBlock Origin and optionally uMatrix and there will be no ads anymore, either on YT or any other site for that matter.
- ams6110 8y agoOr pay for YouTube Red.
- a1369209993 8y agoI'll chime in to recommend youtube-dl[0], which in addition to fixing ads, also means you have a local copy that can't be stolen by copyright trolls or otherwise bitrotted. 0: http://youtube-dl.org/ http://youtube-dl.org/
- beauzero 8y ago...I pay for keeping ads off and generally have one of the 4k relaxation/outdoors or old Warren Miller videos playing. I really enjoy that specific interaction. As for Facebook, I am off, except for occassionally logging in to retrieve messages. I can't find a way to interact with it personally. I just don't enjoy it anymore.