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The fundamental flaw is this: The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Since ads are the primary way sites stay i

• a1369209993 6y ago
  > The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Not that you're wrong, but: that's the fucking point! Advertising delenda est.
  • arihant 6y ago
    Pay for Facebook then. 1.5% of total YouTube users subscribe for YT Premium. I love how the smartest minds will ignore the most primitive economics. Ads work. For everyone. Except deluded.
    • creato 6y ago
      Where did you get that number? That's actually far, far higher than I would have thought and quite encouraging...
      • jjjensen90 6y ago
        On Feb 4th, Google said there were 20 million Youtube Premium users, and I believe the latest estimates put Youtube at 2 billion users, which would be a 1% subscription rate.
        • mikenew 6y ago
          It would be interesting to see how they count a "user" too. If a good portion of those 2 billion people don't use YouTube very much then the % of users who are using it regularly and subscribing might be a lot higher.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • nabla9 6y ago
      > Pay for Facebook You can do that?
    • monadic2 6y ago
      Compare how much money google can make off ads in a month to $15. You’re paying for way, way, way more than just removing ads and it’s obvious
      • trisiak 6y ago
        That's why you get other benefits that are much harder to price in.
        • monadic2 6y ago
          ....and most don’t use or want. Of course they conveniently only bundle these features so they can pretend it’s what customers want—hell downloading and playing when the screen is off should be a part of youtube. Just another step in the long saga of companies intentionally crippling their own services to bilk customers.
    • nicoburns 6y ago
      Paid-for Facebook would be a viable business if it wasn't competing with free-facebook. It's not ignoring economics to think that Facebook is causing significant negative externalities that ought to be priced or regulated to allow more ethical alternatives to thrive.
      • baq 6y ago
        free facebook should be regulated out of existence. what else is free that is good for you? in big cities you have to pay for clean air to breathe already.
    • comawhite 6y ago
      To be honest, I'd happily pay for YT Premium if Google didn't use my data to personalise other results and content on the internet. I personally stop using products/services that dictate what content is deemed "suitable" for my consumption. I'll happily be served adverts so long as I'm not getting manipulated.
    • Calamity 6y ago
      You know the worst part? I do pay for YT Premium and yet Google still finds a way to throw ads at me on Youtube videos through videos it suggests via Google Feeds (the leftmost screen on a Pixel). I bloody pay for the service and yet I am still getting ads on any youtube video I play when clicking any youtube suggested video on that feed. How annoying do you think that is? When you give in and pay, yet you are still getting harassed.
      • nsriv 6y ago
        I had this issue as well and logging out (in my case, switching accounts) wiping Google app cache, and I think rebooting to make Pixel Launcher refresh, then logging back into the YT Premium subscribed account fixed it for me. Convoluted I know, but I think the issue was it wasn't picking up some profile variable or token denoting me as a subscriber. Hope that helps!
        • Calamity 6y ago
          Hey, thanks for this, just did this. Will now just have to wait and see until Google suggests me a new youtube video to see if it worked.
      • dkn775 6y ago
        I knew that google feed was advertising, any reading about google news and google feed that talks about this? I have a pixel, same findings.
    • a1369209993 6y ago
      I don't use Facebook, and I want it to die. Facebook is one of the many, many reasons why advertising must be destroyed.
    • Abekkus 6y ago
      I paid for youtube for a while, but I did not get a different algorithm. It was the same feed of addictive, stressful content. I stopped paying once I noticed this.
    • pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
      That does not tell us much. Where can we look at YouTube's balnce sheet? There is likely more to YouTube as a business than selling ads on YouTube. For one, YouTube under Google is like AC Nielson on steroids. The combination easily rivals any "smart" TV.
    • freeone3000 6y ago
      I already don't get ads on youtube, so I don't see why I should pay for this when I can get all of the benefit with none of the expense.
    • pessimizer 6y ago
      If everybody paid for facebook, it would have as many ads, if not more. That companies would leave money on the table with no incentive to do so is a bizarre self-justifying myth that people who live off advertising tell themselves. You pay for cable. Paying customers are a better audience for ads than deadbeats.
      • themacguffinman 6y ago
        But everybody doesn't pay for Facebook, and the reason they don't do so is because Facebook is funded by ads and no one has paid for a Facebook without ads. But sure, Facebook might hypothetically still have ads if users paid, and my grandmother might hypothetically be a bicycle if she had wheels.
        • throwaway2048 6y ago
          Facebook's purpose of existence isn't for somebody to "pay for it". Facebook's purpose of existence is to make money.
          • themacguffinman 6y ago
            And the way they make money is by someone paying for it. Some sites collect payments from users directly. Facebook collects payments from advertisers because most users wouldn't use Facebook if they had to pay for it. Do you have a point? This reads like an unfinished thought.
            • throwaway2048 6y ago
              there is absolutely no reason that they cant do both at the same time, there is a mental short circuit going on when people think paying for a website means no ads. Its never meant that in pretty much any other media.
              • themacguffinman 6y ago
    • schuyler2d 6y ago
      The irony is that there's a disincentive to skip ads on 'paid' users even more -- because people willing to pay for things are even more valuable to advertisers -- so if you make a paid option with no ads, you're also gutting the value of the freemium-ads option (beyond the average user loss)
    • egypturnash 6y ago
      How? AFAIK you can’t pay for Facebook. There’s no “Facebook Premium”. There’s only Ad Spigot Facebook.
  • ggggtez 6y ago
    Let's imagine for a moment that a decentralized social network actually took off. How long until those ads crop back up anyway? Instagram should give us some idea on how sponsored content might look in such a system. According to some random site, the average price for a "sponsored" instagram post is $300. You think your friends are above showing you an ad when real money is on the line? Maybe they won't be making that kind of money with very few followers, but when Pizzahut asks you to post an ad in exchange for a free pizza, I think you'll see plenty of takers. Now, granted, at least the people being paid are your friends, instead of Zuck.
    • CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
      But the kind of people who get $300 for a post should have a very large group of followers. Which should imply that there should be a reasonably large group of people prepared to part with some money in support of their work. And for the small group of people it seems to me that it should be easily self correcting by normal social cues since there’s no network effect to offset it.
    • int_19h 6y ago
      This played out in LiveJournal, and the outcome, generally speaking, was that paid promotions were too blatant to be effective outside of influencers proper (where it's part of the explicit contract between them and their audience).
• manquer 6y ago
  That is how it is today. But does it have to be like that ? What is the minimum revenue per user required for service like FB to run. While everyone is sceptical on whether such a service can reach critical mass to make financial sense, a brand new FB replacement may not be able to do it, However FB itself can certainly give that as an option without hurting their revenues substantially. I was sceptical on the value prop for Youtube Premium, I am constantly surprised how many people pay for it, if google can afford to loose ad money with YT premium, I am sure FB can build a financial model around a freemium offering if they wanted to.
  • marcinzm 6y ago
    Minimum doesn't matter, the only question is if it's more profitable than the current approach. Facebook makes $9/user/quarter. That's every user no matter how little they use the site. The issue however is that the users advertisers care about are the ones with disposable income. The users most likely to opt out of ads are the ones with disposable income. Thus the marginal cost to Facebook from such users is significantly more than $9/quarter.
    • ardy42 6y ago
      >>> The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enriching content from your friends and family. They want to show you ads. The good content is just a necessary evil to make you tolerate looking at ads. >> That is how it is today. But does it have to be like that ? What is the minimum revenue per user required for service like FB to run. > Minimum doesn't matter, the only question is if it's more profitable than the current approach. Only if you think strictly inside the box. The real problem here is one is a misalignment of incentives: Zuckerberg is managing Facebook to maximize the metric he's being evaluated on (profit and wealth), not the value provided to society.
      • marcinzm 6y ago
        Value to society is subjective and many horrors of the past (and current) were caused by trying to optimize specific definitions of that term.
• monadic2 6y ago
  > Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business Flaw? It seems that the point would be to force FB to transact with currency rather than a bait-and-switch tactic. The site would also be more usable if they were forced to change business model.
• naravara 6y ago
  >Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business, they are obligated to fight against user agents or other intermediary systems. Not all users hate ads in principle, just in practice. In theory, you'd be making the users select ads for relevance and not being annoying. But obviously, the site wants to show ads based on how much they're paying and "not being annoying" only factors in if pushes people off the site entirely.
• pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  "The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enrishing content from your friends and family." Well, it is someone else's website. What do you expect Zuckerberg has his own interests in mind. In 2020, it is still too difficult for everyone to set up their own website, so they settle for a page on someone else's. If exchanging content with friends and family (not swaths of the public who visit Facebook - hello advertisers) is the ultimate goal, then there are more efficient ways to to do that without using Zuckerberg's website. The challenge is to make those easier to set up. For example, if each group of friends and family were on the same small overlay network they set up themselves, connecting to each other peer-to-peer, it would be much more difficult for advertisers to reach them. Every group of friends and family on a different network instead of every group of friends and family all using the same third party, public website on the same network, the internet. Naysayers will point to the difficulty setting up such networks. No one outside of salaried programmers paid to do it wants to even attempt to write "user agents" today because the "standard", a ridiculously large set of "features", most of which benefit advertisers not users, is far too complex. What happens when we simplify the "standard"? As an analogy, look at how much easier is is to set up Wireguard, software written more or less by one person, than it is to set up OpenVPN.
  • baq 6y ago
    i have a fundamental issue calling a content-curating, psychological-experiment-running platform visited by hundreds of millions of people daily 'someone else's website'. the fact that it is privately owned doesn't matter if nation states use it to wage information wars against other nation states' citizens. to make matters worse, the 'someone else' in question knows about it perfectly well and is fine with it because it means he's showing more ads. this is plain and simple fucked up.
    • pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
      Well, that is what it is. No one knew a single website could grow so large, but it did. Even though there are thousands of people working for its owner, when reading articles like the OP we are reminded how much control he still has over it. No doubt he still thinks of it as his personal creation. Of course, "99.99999%" of the content is not his. Perhaps most of the people who sign up on Facebook are not employed by nation states but just ordinary people who want an easy way to stay connected to friends and family. Maybe these people should have a better way to stay connected than using a public website.
• TwoBit 6y ago
  Facebook would be perfectly happy to eliminate all ads if instead you paid a small or even tiny monthly fee. But you won't pay it.
  • TeMPOraL 6y ago
    No, they wouldn't, unless advertising gets banned. They'd instead accept your payment and find a way to shove ads in anyway, in a covert or overt way, just as many paid services do, because why leave money on the table?
    • rockinghigh 6y ago
      YouTube and Spotify went that subscription route and it works well. There are no ads.
      • ponker 6y ago
        And Spotify is worth $35 billion to Facebook's $660 billion.
      • CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
        Spotify is reliant on copyright exclusions to keep competing free services at bay. So aren’t really providing any value. YouTube is still reliant on ads, and ad-funded content creators, and will continue serving you manipulative content wether you pay or not. So can’t really count that as a success either. The thing is when you remove the ugly side of those business what remains can bee done better for free using p2p networks or federation over open protocols.
        • solveit 6y ago
          > The thing is when you remove the ugly side of those business what remains can be done better for free using p2p networks or federation over open protocols. Then why hasn't it happened?
          • 6y ago
• ngold 6y ago
  Still waiting for that ublock origin web browser.
• KorematsuFred 6y ago
  I am happy to pay $10 bucks a month for a facebook like service that suggests me engaging, high quality content without any promotional content. I am already getting such service in the form of Android's newsfeed feature on pixel. Its google but its pretty good.
  • dkn775 6y ago
    You mean the screen to the left of the home screen? I have noticed a lot of low quality information and some advertising masquerading as articles.
• panopticon 6y ago
  I think another tangential but related issue is with how these companies measure success. They measure success by engagement, and things that drive the most user engagement aren't usually the best for the user. YouTube has been getting a lot of flack for this recently.
• rockinghigh 6y ago
  > The good content is just a necessary evil to make you tolerate looking at ads. You could make the same argument for Google or other online web sites relying on ads as the primary source of revenue.
  • tomaskafka 6y ago
    You can, and if you look at Google's actions long term, they do.
• justapassenger 6y ago
  > The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads "no user"? Nope. People buy magazines, that are 90% ads. Subscribe to newsletters. Hunt for coupons. Watch home shopping channels. Etc, etc. There's large part of population that wants to see ads. Scammy and bad ads? No. Good and relevant ads? A LOT of people do want them. Even tech-folks, who claim that ads are worst thing for humanity. Don't you want to learn about sale for new tech gadgets? Discounts for AWS? Good rent deals?
  • K0SM0S 6y ago
    Honestly a truly well-made ad targeting on me, something that really ticked all the right boxes... gosh I'd spend 3-4× more, easily. Because ordinarily I just don't lose time on shopping websites, but I'm kinda of a spender when I do find things that I like. And I'm a sucker for good deals, I'm a patient prey hunter, I can wait months in ambush for the right deal. Anecdotally of course, as one of those tech-folks who's got nothing against good and relevant ads.
    • microcolonel 6y ago
      I guess I just don't buy enough things to want to see any ads at all. I don't have any particular issue selecting products either. A well targeted ad doesn't need to serve you well, it just needs to convince you to buy; I have a lot of faith in myself and I'd say those are often the same thing, but experiences may differ.
    • save_ferris 6y ago
      > Anecdotally of course, as one of those tech-folks who's got nothing against good and relevant ads. Be careful what you wish for. This TED talk[0] on persuasion architectures brings up some interesting moral arguments against this idea. If we generally accept that ad conversion is a metric of an ad's success, how do we handle the situation where people that are susceptible to addictive behaviors like gambling and compulsive shopping are exposed to ads that exploit their condition? Data-driven advertising systems are built particularly well to find and exploit these kinds of people. We already see this a lot in the scam call/email world. Once you fall for one, the amount of inbound traffic you receive from scammers increases dramatically. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI&t=872s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI&t=872s
• hallambaker 6y ago
  How are the user agents funded? Probably through ads. The problem is actually how to fund the timeline publication services. But systems like Medium etc seem to work OK. I am now spending several hundred dollars a year on content subscriptions. Plus subscriptions for Gmail, Zoom and a few other things where I have outgrown the free service. A freemium model for the timeline publication services would probably work.
• stonogo 6y ago
  I sure am tired of hearing about "the fundamental flaw" in empowering people. What you describe is not a flaw in empowerment, it's a flaw in their business model, and it's one that can that be fixed (i.e. "innovate a better business model"). Can we stop propagating the idea that people who do not want to use their limited bandwidth and processing power to rasterize someone else's advertising are somehow "flawed"? The only thing more insane than blaming users for having self-interest are the people who pretend that Facebook et al. are somehow owed the business model they have, painting ad-blockers as some kind of dangerous society-destabilizing technology instead of the commonsense response to shitty business practices it clearly is.
  • solveit 6y ago
    The point is that fighting Facebook on Facebook is a losing game and "innovate a better business model" has been tried, is being tried, and is not working because it is hard. A plan that does not work is indeed "flawed", no matter how noble and natural the intentions.
    • stonogo 6y ago
      "Users don't care about your ad network" is not a "plan," it is a reality, and calling it "flawed" is just corporate propaganda. I'm sure you're arguing in good faith but the very foundation of this assessment is fundamentally incompatible with reality.
      • bobthepanda 6y ago
        Well, no, today's model is "users tolerate your ad network in return for free content". Which is clearly true given that Facebook is making profits despite everyone and their mother grumbling about ads. Something has to pay the bills.
        • stonogo 6y ago
          Yes, tolerating the ad network definitely falls under "users don't care"... until they do, and they start taking measures to counteract it, and then we're back to "something has to pay the bills," which is where I'm suggesting some R&D investment might be wise.
• flippyhead 6y ago
  I don't know about that. I buy a lot of things. I wish something would help me buy what I need and didn't know I needed so I didn't have to spend time shopping and researching.
• vinniejames 6y ago
  According to this research, it isn't even good content. It's divisive content intended to force you to pick a "side" then fight for it
• DanHulton 6y ago
  This feels like saying "the fundamental flaw about email spam blocking is won't somebody think of the spammers?"
• ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
  Not true, I want to see good ads, ads that relate to what I actually want to buy.
• egypturnash 6y ago
  Honestly I think the only way to make an ethical social network is to make a non-profit one. Fund it alongside other public goods like PBS, public education, highways, rail networks, healthcare, etc. And yes, I know: good luck getting THAT to happen in the US given how badly funded everything else in my list is. If you’re in another country that actually funds public goods maybe this is a thing you could talk to some of your fellow techies about and make a proposal, especially if your country is getting increasingly tired of Facebook? Alternatively, ground-up local funding of federated social networks might be workable; I run a Mastodon server for myself and a small group of my friends and acquaintances, with the costs pretty much evenly split between myself and the users who have money to spare. It is not without its flaws and problems but it is a thing I can generally keep going with a small investment of my spare time every few months.
  • giardini 6y ago
    The solution is to nationalize FaceBook (and any site that proves to be similar) and allow everyone free access to it w/o censorship. Give Zuckerberg a $1 for his time and effort. Meahwhile, Google must be split up: e.g., Alphabet can go do AI work as a private corporation but Google Search needs to be nationalized (or split into at least 3 entities - i prefer nationalization). Amazon must be broken up and parts nationalized, but this is a more complex case for later discussion.
    • berdario 6y ago
      Ok, but which country would Google Search have to be nationalized into? The brits won't be happy if Google is nationalized into a french public service
    • thejynxed 6y ago
      A) These companies are American, and outside of certain, very specific, industries explicitly mentioned in the War Powers Act, the American government has no authority to nationalize them at any time for any reason. B) Companies like Facebook in particular can never be nationalized due to the First & Fourth Amendments, and government being barred from competing with private entities in the private sector. C) I do agree that Google and Amazon should be tried for anti-trust violations and that Google in particular should be split for violating anti-trust laws against vertical integration across markets.
• lucio 6y ago
  maybe you're interested in hearing about X tech, or you can tell your "Agent" that you want to buy Y thing, or travel to Z. That's where ads and reviews get thru.