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Media buyer: Facebook updates have ‘wrecked the ad platform on the backend’

185 points by instagraham 6y ago

dhimes 6y ago
These kinds of posts always leave me wondering "what are they selling and for how much?" If you're selling a $12 ebook does Google work for you? Does Facebook? I feel like none of these platforms work very well for small-ticket items but Facebook seems to allow a lower-cost entry IMHO.
randunel 6y ago
Meta, but... 10 points, posted 13 minutes ago and number 1 on the front page?
- droffel 6y ago
  I think many of us have the whole 'blackhat SEO' topic on our minds given that there's a thread about it on the front page right now. That said, popularity ranking algorithms often heavily weight votes early in their life cycle, so this kind of behavior isn't necessarily suspicious.
  - hashkb 6y ago
    And it's pretty early in the day.
- jsnell 6y ago
  It's an article that, based on the title, is clearly negative about a large tech company. No need to assume any kind of foul play, that kind of title is like catnip to a significant proportion of the HN readership.
- instagraham 6y ago
  and it's my first submission on hacker news too :D That aside, IDK I read it in the group I was in and felt it would be liked here.
robin_reala 6y ago
It’s not often that you come across an article that seems designed purely to engender schadenfreude, but this fits the bill nicely. In a slightly more serious tone, the interviewee pulls out the old “won’t someone think of the small businesses?” line at the end. Is there any evidence that this is true? Is is primarily small businesses that are hurt with this kind of instability?
- save_ferris 6y ago
  if there's one sub-sector of tech that is more than willing to take data and massage it until it fits a particular narrative, it's advertising.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    I'd argue advertising isn't a sub-sector of tech; rather it's a sub-sector of phycology and persuasion. Marketing / advertising is a sub-sector of exploitation.
    - quesera 6y ago
      All of the above, of course. Modern advertising is technology deployed for the purpose of exploiting psychology to effect persuasion. Marketing is not the same thing as advertising, but it can frequently be described identically.
- scottmcleod 6y ago
  Yes because small businesses get the tests first in a lot of cases
gerikson 6y ago
"I'm looking at my sympathy-o-meter and the needle's barely moving".
- hashkb 6y ago
  This does highlight a real problem- advertisers feel like they deserve a better tool than the users they're targeting.
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    Why is it a problem if they're the ones paying for it?
    - MichaelMcG 6y ago
      Exactly, a segment of social media users don't mind or are largely apathetic to the advertising/data collection because it keeps the platforms free--that's all that matters to them. The advertisers are effectively the customer, with the social media platform acting as a vehicle to reach the willing end-user. With this model, a polished & efficient dashboard/UI for advertiser engagement is as important (if not more important) than the front-end experience that provides end-user engagement.
      - nerdponx 6y ago
        I am sympathetic to the free-but-ad-supported model. This is how we get Reddit, Stackoverflow, and Google Maps which is a fucking global map and GPS with much better navigation quality than any of its predecessors and it costs exactly $0 to the end user. It might be the case that there is simply not enough subscription revenue in the world to fund such an operation without advertising. People forget just how much objectively good and useful stuff we have access to because of ad-supported $0 products. Hell, you could argue that Tensorflow and PyTorch themselves are ad-supported products. The sticking point is that your old ad-supported classifieds paper and network news channels weren't surveilling you across the Web. And as much as I think we need strict data privacy laws, it's hard to ignore the fact that Facebook ads used to be for penis pills and karate scams, but now for the most part are things that I (or at least my demographic) might want to buy.
rob74 6y ago
Some of the article could have used another read-through: "...made it more difficult for buyers to roll out new campaigns easily". If it's now more difficult to do it easily, how is it in the end?
speeder 6y ago
I couldn't read the article, on the monitor of the ancient workstation I am using, the article is impossible to read, seemly they assumed everyone by now would have 1080p monitors or something, the site has a giant fixed menubar on the top, and a even bigger "subscribe me" bar on the bottom, and these almost touch on my screen, leaving like 3 lines of readable text on the middle... It is just silly. EDIT: for a while this reached 10 points, now it is at 2... makes me wonder, what I wrote so horribly wrong that deserves all these downvotes?
- codetrotter 6y ago
  On the mobile site the subscribe thingy that covers most of the screen can be closed by tapping the x in the corner of it. Was this not the case on your desktop?
  - kevinhq 6y ago
    i don't see it. i've blocked it manually
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  1080 is ancient dude..
- kevinhq 6y ago
  same here. i need to block that huge "subscribe me" bar with ublock origin manually to read the article properly.
- jeroenhd 6y ago
  I can recommend Hide Fixed Elements [1] for badly designed websites like these. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-fixed-elements https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-fixed-el...
  - codazoda 6y ago
    This is great. I wish for two things... 1. This should probably be on by default with some indication it's "working" 2. It makes me so sad that I can't use extensions like this on my Android browser
55555 6y ago
Facebook has the worst platform in the world. It's normal to get 6 support reps in a row ask you the same identical question you've already answered 5 times in a single thread they can scroll up to read. Each time you reply, a new rep is assigned the ticket, and they want to maximize throughput so they just use a canned response instead of dealing with the issue. But this is normal. They also ban you by default, assuming, I think, that people who aren't legit won't appeal, so legitimate merchants need to appeal to bans multiples times just to begin buying ads. They also restrict your account so you can't do anything, but they leave the ads running and keep billing you. This bankrupts people who can't pause their unprofitable campaigns. My business partner was being billed ten grand daily via a banned/restricted account for weeks on end. But this is the game. I've spent millions of dollars on G/FB/etc and that's just how it goes.
- caspper69 6y ago
  Smells like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Is this real? salivating
  - 55555 6y ago
    Yes it is real but he/we were profiting handsomely off the restricted account's spend so we weren't complaining. Not that there is anyone to complain to.
- anticensor 6y ago
  > Each time you reply, a new rep is assigned the ticket This is insane. > They also restrict your account so you can't do anything, but they leave the ads running and keep billing you. This bankrupts people who can't pause their unprofitable campaigns. This is insane too.
  - dreamcompiler 6y ago
    And almost certainly illegal. If you refused to pay you would probably prevail in a lawsuit, and you might even have a case for extortion or fraud. (IANAL)
popotamonga 6y ago
Its terrible, i cant even make the simple ads with the wizard anymore because at the last step there are JS errors in the console, in every browser. Support doesnt know what js errors are. nightmare.
- coldcode 6y ago
  Facebook requires that you pay them enormous money but you do not matter to them at all otherwise, as there are always more suckers out there to replace you if you leave. Both Google and Facebook understand that support costs them money, so they don't provide any, which lets them keep the money. Quality costs money, so not having quality lets them keep more money since people are desperate enough to put up with a lack of it to point ads at 2B people. The market for ads is completely captured by Facebook and Google, so you either put up with no support and no quality, or you can't play. It's like living in a run down tenement, no matter how many rats and roaches you have to deal with due to a lack of maintenance, you have no choice if the alternative is the street. Yet the owner makes money no matter how horrific the building.
  - GrinningFool 6y ago
    When your market and customer base is _that_ big, maybe you have scaled past what you are reasonably capable of supporting with actual humans.
    - GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
      that sounds like ‘scaled too far’ then
      - ben_w 6y ago
        Or “not actually scaled”
    - jakub_g 6y ago
      Alphabet had $34B net income in 2019, FB $18B. They could hire a legion of developers in any place which is not California/Switzerland, whose only responsibility would be bugfixing, and it would barely make a dent in their numbers.
pabl0rg 6y ago
Facebook is terribly buggy and also has google-level customer service (none)
- dannyr 6y ago
  I qualify this with customer service on Google's free products. I have no problem getting good customer support from Google's paid products (YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, Google One, etc).
  - Bahamut 6y ago
    I've had terrible customer service from Google's paid products as well. Google is intentionally customer service hostile overall because it's an area that defies automation.
ianhawes 6y ago
I've worked with FB Business Manager since early 2014 and it has always been bad: slow, requires constant refreshing, and is extremely complex. For comparison, AdEspresso is not nearly as complex but hugely more productive for doing split testing in Facebook campaigns. You build your ads on their interface and they submit via API.
polytely 6y ago
It's really sad how the most well-payed engineers and designers are spending the best years of their lives working on this hostile platform. I'm so tired of being treated like garbage by these companies, I just hope there is some tipping point, a straw that finally breaks the camels back, that leads to their downfall.
- swyx 6y ago
  not to put it too bluntly but they're well paid because we as a society keep paying them to. in attention and then in money.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    When I was looking for a new SWE job in 2016 after my startup laid off a third of its employees the vast majority of open positions in other startups were in "analytics", marketing or advertising-related companies. And similarly most of the positions that Amazon, Facebook and Google recruiters have approached me for are also in that field (even though I don't have any professional experience in that area, nor any keywords in my LinkedIn profile). I understand it's where the money is, and it's probably a good idea to work in a profit-center for once instead of being viewed as a cost-center by the MBAs, but I still have a soul.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  It's really sad how the most well-payed engineers and designers are spending the best years of their lives working on this hostile platform I'm at the age where I'm starting to look back at the various phases of my life and think about whether they were wasted or not. A lot of my similarly-aged friends are doing the same. Some who worked for the wrong tech companies really regret it now. At the time they thought it was cool because they were living the tech dream. Now they wonder what it was all for.
can16358p 6y ago
Putting away all the evilness about Facebook away, why would they shoot themselves in their own foot? Even from a completely evil company perspective, advertising is the biggest revenue generating aspect of their whole ecosystem, what incentive do they have to cripple it (and at least, not immediately react to it)?
- jrumbut 6y ago
  My guess is that there is an incentive for Facebook the company but not for any particular human working at Facebook. Things are going well so inefficiency is fine (and it really may be fine), instead of fixing problems the best people are looking for new sources of growth.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  I think it's a strong signal that they are a monopoly that they can treat their paying customers this badly yet still have them come back for more.
  - LaundroMat 6y ago
    This. Their ad interface has been a complete mess ever since its inception and the fact it has never received the attention the users' frontend gets, is indeed a suretell sign of a monopoly. "Good luck using a better ad platform with no users to target your ads to". The real alternative is simply not playing their game which is essentially an arms race with other advertisers anyway.
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      "Good luck using a better ad platform with no users to target your ads to". That might be true for huge advertisers trying to reach mass-market audiences. For smaller businesses operating in niche markets, it is plausible that you can get better returns through other promotional channels that appeal directly to those markets, without needing all the nasty tracking or dubiously effective targeting that come with the likes of Facebook and Google. The idea that you "have to" advertise on the big, generic networks because that's "where all your potential customers are" is well out of date, at least in our experience.
shripadk 6y ago
Here is the crazy part about Facebook Ad Manager. It had a targeting option called "React (Javascript Library)" in Additional interests. That has been removed since last month. But Angular and other frameworks still exist as a targeting option. It is crazy because React is a Facebook product. I literally have no idea why they deprecated their own product's targeting option. And as usual, if you ask anything from support, you get back canned replies. If you are in the drop-shipping world you'll know the daily gripes drop-shippers have with Facebook Ads. Like is said in the article, the first few days are decent and then it tanks completely. Someone at Facebook who knows what they are doing needs to get Facebook Ads under control. It was working fine until all these changes wrecked the platform!
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
The ad platform / business manager has always felt like several systems and products bolted together (which it probably is). There's too much legacy crap poking through and breaking things. I find understanding what's going on a struggle if I'm not using it day-to-day Even doing a simple Instagram promotion in the App has to jump through the FB app for authentication which can hang and show me a blank screen.
donedealomg 6y ago
did they moved their stuff to India? Sounds like it.
bsenftner 6y ago
The Ad industry has itself to blame. I tried FB Ad when they were new, and it was so terrible in every direction I stopped using the platform, entirely. If the advertisers would simply say "no", FB would be forced to improve.
- johnward 6y ago
  Really? I had some decent success on FB early but not now. I also made a killing when MySpace launched it's terrible ad service.
kiplkipl 6y ago
Any time Facebook's UI is insulted, it's common to see the defence that it's a feature, not a bug, because clearly it works or a competitor would replace them. That time spent improving it is time wasted, because it doesn't make money. I see this as proof that a highly-scalable market doesn't optimise for good, it optimises for good-enough, and there's a lot of potential revenue lost between good and good-enough.
- dannyr 6y ago
  > a competitor would replace them Sadly, competition is difficult to flourish in the current environment because of Facebook's market share and tactics. It's not as bad in the US compared to other countries especially developing countries where Facebook is pretty much the only online channel. Sometimes, people only have access to Facebook and not the rest of the internet.
  - 3np 6y ago
    Got any example of country where you saw this happening?
- reaperducer 6y ago
  doesn't optimise for good, it optimises for good-enough It's about pride. Not everyone has pride in their work, in their person, or in their actions. I once worked with one of these "good enough" people. He bought his wife the cheapest things because they were "good enough." All he was focused on was the ticket price. Not the quality. Not the workmanship. Not going with a good company instead of a bad company. It's become more common these days in everything from consumer goods to personal behavior. There was an article in the newspaper yesterday saying that sales of Folger's Crystals is up 14%. It's "good enough" coffee. There's a congressman up for re-election right now who admits to having an affair with an intern. His campaign doesn't hide this fact that would have made him un-electable ten years ago. His behavior is "good enough." It's like all the Facebook and Google employees who are working on things that make the world a worse place. They're making money, so that's "good enough" for them. Someone else can be moral.
Kiro 6y ago
> Facebook is more worried about making [the platform] look good, like a Fisher Price toy, than how the [ad] platform actually performs. They make it sound like a bad thing but pretty sure it's not true anyway. If Facebook saw that their ads performed the best with Comic Sans they would go with it and any design changes they make are surely done to increase ad revenue.
draw_down 6y ago
Well, I’m really sorry to hear Facebook advertisers aren’t having a good time.
peteretep 6y ago
Using the FB Ads platform is a continuing fucking disgrace. I hate it. I cannot believe it’s their core money maker and still such a shit show to use.
- ship_it 6y ago
  Using the FB [...] is a continuing fucking disgrace
nautilus12 6y ago
"Facebook is more concerned about making the platform look good than how it actually performs" This has been a universal problem that I've observed in most tech companies i've worked with. Hyper-focus on the optics and less on the content / results. I dont know if its a by product of giving front end design equal / greater weight than back end design / analytics or something more systematic like the apple design influence. Maybe both. Eitherway seems like websites are getting easier to look at, more clever, and less useful all across the board.
Kiro 6y ago
The biggest problem I have is the randomness of targeting desktop only. The option is only visible in one of the many flows that I can never remember how to find. Once you manage to actually enable it it randomly reverts back to also targeting mobile. My theory is that it does it when you edit some other parameter of the ad since the edit form is part of the flow where you don't have the option.
- baking 6y ago
  I have literally not seen an ad on Facebook desktop since they forced through the update. Maybe that's why.
blinding-streak 6y ago
I wonder if Facebook has done some good support/bad support A/B tests. Maybe customers receiving bad support spend just as much, or possibly even more, than those receiving good support.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Those who receive bad support and stay probably are more desperate and in need of FB so you would expect the bad support group to be higher value customers on average (those who stay).
rogerthat_au 6y ago
I used to own a large APAC agency. We had six figures in Facebook going through us every month. Issues like ad accounts being blocked, poor performance, etc received no feedback or conversation. Google over time assigned an account manager and improved support but Facebook was always awful. In one instance email went to Sheryl Sandberg, reply to which got forwarded down to 6 people who eventually gave us a 'this is policy' answer. I often advice founders to find friends who work there to get their issues resolved - because there is no formal sensible way to get it done.
- fred_is_fred 6y ago
  Yet you still spent 6 figures in Facebook - so what incentive did they have to change?
- Silhouette 6y ago
  I often advice founders to find friends who work there to get their issues resolved - because there is no formal sensible way to get it done. Yes, Facebook is a complete train wreck, which survives in spite of its abysmal technology and support for its real customers rather than because of them. Even then, speaking only from the point of view of a much smaller business that has been a regular Facebook advertiser in the past, it probably left 33-50% of the money we would have spent with it on the table simply because we couldn't spend that money on the Facebook platform due to all the bugs. We redirected those funds to other channels instead. And yes, we too only got around Facebook's systems demanding nonsensical or literally impossible things that would have totally blocked our access at least once because we knew a senior dev who worked there and could escalate internally. Unfortunately, this model seems to have become SOP for big tech service providers in recent years. Google are similarly non-communicative and have also provided such a bad experience to us as an advertiser that we stopped all our ads on their platforms for a long time. It's not just the big advertising platforms, either. Every payment service we use (including some that are darlings of HN) has messed us around horribly over the years, too. Unless you're spending literally millions of dollars per months with these tech giants, it seems they've decided it's not commercially sensible to offer any meaningful support, and presumably to accept that in some cases they'll lose customers entirely and damage their reputation as a result.
mtgx 6y ago
"Move fast and break (our customers') things."
scottmcleod 6y ago
Lol everyone in here is such a baby...We spend $500k a day on FB with great support; platform rarely breaks for us as we get features later. If you're spend $100-1000 a day you get tests and early UI/UX. Spend more get out of the baby support tiers. Someone has to the best test bed.. might as well be the smallest clients.
snissn 6y ago
around May(?) i noticed facbook pushed out an update and i had to keep my facebook browser tabs closed or my video games would be super laggy
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
That's an interesting read, and it shows how buggy so much of the software is. It also shows how developers rank the priorities of bug fixes. I'm an Xcode user. That means that I experience lots of bugs; some, pretty damn nasty. I tend to only report the ones I consider serious, but I find it a bit depressing that so many of them seem to remain untouched. That's because Apple assumes that I have a much higher tolerance for bugs than the vast majority of their users. They're right. I keep using Xcode, despite the bugs. I'm not a fan of other IDEs, and my experience with them, is that they are every bit as buggy as Xcode, except that they also run slower. But user interface (and security) bugs in the general operating systems get high priority. I suspect the same goes for Facebook. They know that they are the only game in town, and that marketers will tolerate a much buggier experience than users. I would like to see software quality rise all over. Speaking only for myself, I spend a great deal of time refining the interface for administrative functionality, and have a standard policy of "Don't move on to the next item until you believe this one is 100% bug-free, and completely usable.", even if it means delaying, or even reversing, progress of the project. That's not a popular stance, but it does tend to result in pretty high-quality software. I'm writing a social media app, right now, and this philosophy has paid off in a big way. It does mean that the team needs to wait longer for some functionality, but the app is constantly in a state, where they can simply hand it to potential investors, and not worry about them encountering highly embarrassing bugs. I'm hoping that the end result will be a real joy to use.
12xo 6y ago
And yet, they keep spending money... This is a problem. The fact that they offer no service, no communication, so resolutions and yet buyers are still dumping 100's of thousands a month because, they dont have any other options... Can you name any other business that could function like this? Health care is the only ones that come to mind...
- 72deluxe 6y ago
  Any monopolies? It's just like playing along to Google's game (including vague "exact" matches for adwords) because there's no alternative, and no recourse. It stinks.
  - 12xo 6y ago
    The worst part is that there is no market what-so-ever for FB or Google ads. The prices are not set by competition, or the market, they are set by the seller. They decide that something's baseline price is $10 per X, not the market. The market has no choice but adjust their ROI based not on actual market conditions, but on the whim of the seller. And to top it off, almost all digital ads are money losers for the buyer. Its the few that work that get backed into their ROI calculations. Which are essentially a tax added to the purchase price of anything marketed and sold via these channels. The business is a fraud.
    - newcomputer 6y ago
      Their prices are in fact set by the market. Do you not understand the concept of an auction?
- newcomputer 6y ago
  Advertising has more competition than probably any other industry except restaurants. In addition to the big digital advertising shops (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Reddit), you can also buy print advertisements, radio advertisements, television advertisements, billboard advertisements, bus advertisements, etc, all from hundreds of different sources. They have plenty of options. They choose to use Facebook because it's one of the better options.
kumarski 6y ago
This is why I own Facebook Stock. They have so many profit and revenue levers, this is another example of one. So many companies would pay for ironclad API access and relationship. I believe that the lack of transparency around their APIs is by design for political reasons not a lack of engineering know how issues or ignorance issues.
marcinzm 6y ago
I recently connected my online store to facebook (for ads, selling on facebook, etc.) and the whole process was a such a mess. Multiple confusing business UIs that you only get between by magic clicks or knowing the URL. Then they don't tie together or tied to the personal account instead of the business page or some other random insanity. The initial UI is clean and simple but then there's a cliff when you try to do anything more complicated. Then again when I tried to place ads on Twitter it wouldn't show me my tweets in the list so I couldn't promote them.
throwaway29303 6y ago
It boggles my mind how other companies, and people who resort to ad platforms like this, still use these tools given how those ad platforms treat them (no or very poor human support). I find their behaviour so unbelievably disrespectful. What other alternatives are there?
fred_is_fred 6y ago
As a former user: good.

185 points by instagraham 6y ago

These kinds of posts always leave me wondering "what are they selling and for how much?" If you're selling a $12 ebook does Google work for you? Does Facebook? I feel like none of these platforms work very well for small-ticket items but Facebook seems to allow a lower-cost entry IMHO.

randunel 6y ago

Meta, but... 10 points, posted 13 minutes ago and number 1 on the front page?

droffel 6y ago
I think many of us have the whole 'blackhat SEO' topic on our minds given that there's a thread about it on the front page right now. That said, popularity ranking algorithms often heavily weight votes early in their life cycle, so this kind of behavior isn't necessarily suspicious.
- hashkb 6y ago
  And it's pretty early in the day.
jsnell 6y ago
It's an article that, based on the title, is clearly negative about a large tech company. No need to assume any kind of foul play, that kind of title is like catnip to a significant proportion of the HN readership.
instagraham 6y ago
and it's my first submission on hacker news too :D That aside, IDK I read it in the group I was in and felt it would be liked here.

robin_reala 6y ago

It’s not often that you come across an article that seems designed purely to engender schadenfreude, but this fits the bill nicely. In a slightly more serious tone, the interviewee pulls out the old “won’t someone think of the small businesses?” line at the end. Is there any evidence that this is true? Is is primarily small businesses that are hurt with this kind of instability?

save_ferris 6y ago
if there's one sub-sector of tech that is more than willing to take data and massage it until it fits a particular narrative, it's advertising.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  I'd argue advertising isn't a sub-sector of tech; rather it's a sub-sector of phycology and persuasion. Marketing / advertising is a sub-sector of exploitation.
  - quesera 6y ago
    All of the above, of course. Modern advertising is technology deployed for the purpose of exploiting psychology to effect persuasion. Marketing is not the same thing as advertising, but it can frequently be described identically.
scottmcleod 6y ago
Yes because small businesses get the tests first in a lot of cases

gerikson 6y ago

"I'm looking at my sympathy-o-meter and the needle's barely moving".

hashkb 6y ago
This does highlight a real problem- advertisers feel like they deserve a better tool than the users they're targeting.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  Why is it a problem if they're the ones paying for it?
  - MichaelMcG 6y ago
    Exactly, a segment of social media users don't mind or are largely apathetic to the advertising/data collection because it keeps the platforms free--that's all that matters to them. The advertisers are effectively the customer, with the social media platform acting as a vehicle to reach the willing end-user. With this model, a polished & efficient dashboard/UI for advertiser engagement is as important (if not more important) than the front-end experience that provides end-user engagement.
    - nerdponx 6y ago
      I am sympathetic to the free-but-ad-supported model. This is how we get Reddit, Stackoverflow, and Google Maps which is a fucking global map and GPS with much better navigation quality than any of its predecessors and it costs exactly $0 to the end user. It might be the case that there is simply not enough subscription revenue in the world to fund such an operation without advertising. People forget just how much objectively good and useful stuff we have access to because of ad-supported $0 products. Hell, you could argue that Tensorflow and PyTorch themselves are ad-supported products. The sticking point is that your old ad-supported classifieds paper and network news channels weren't surveilling you across the Web. And as much as I think we need strict data privacy laws, it's hard to ignore the fact that Facebook ads used to be for penis pills and karate scams, but now for the most part are things that I (or at least my demographic) might want to buy.

rob74 6y ago

Some of the article could have used another read-through: "...made it more difficult for buyers to roll out new campaigns easily". If it's now more difficult to do it easily, how is it in the end?

speeder 6y ago

I couldn't read the article, on the monitor of the ancient workstation I am using, the article is impossible to read, seemly they assumed everyone by now would have 1080p monitors or something, the site has a giant fixed menubar on the top, and a even bigger "subscribe me" bar on the bottom, and these almost touch on my screen, leaving like 3 lines of readable text on the middle... It is just silly. EDIT: for a while this reached 10 points, now it is at 2... makes me wonder, what I wrote so horribly wrong that deserves all these downvotes?

codetrotter 6y ago
On the mobile site the subscribe thingy that covers most of the screen can be closed by tapping the x in the corner of it. Was this not the case on your desktop?
- kevinhq 6y ago
  i don't see it. i've blocked it manually
mrmonkeyman 6y ago
1080 is ancient dude..
kevinhq 6y ago
same here. i need to block that huge "subscribe me" bar with ublock origin manually to read the article properly.
jeroenhd 6y ago
I can recommend Hide Fixed Elements [1] for badly designed websites like these. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-fixed-elements https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-fixed-el...
- codazoda 6y ago
  This is great. I wish for two things... 1. This should probably be on by default with some indication it's "working" 2. It makes me so sad that I can't use extensions like this on my Android browser

55555 6y ago

Facebook has the worst platform in the world. It's normal to get 6 support reps in a row ask you the same identical question you've already answered 5 times in a single thread they can scroll up to read. Each time you reply, a new rep is assigned the ticket, and they want to maximize throughput so they just use a canned response instead of dealing with the issue. But this is normal. They also ban you by default, assuming, I think, that people who aren't legit won't appeal, so legitimate merchants need to appeal to bans multiples times just to begin buying ads. They also restrict your account so you can't do anything, but they leave the ads running and keep billing you. This bankrupts people who can't pause their unprofitable campaigns. My business partner was being billed ten grand daily via a banned/restricted account for weeks on end. But this is the game. I've spent millions of dollars on G/FB/etc and that's just how it goes.

caspper69 6y ago
Smells like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Is this real? salivating
- 55555 6y ago
  Yes it is real but he/we were profiting handsomely off the restricted account's spend so we weren't complaining. Not that there is anyone to complain to.
anticensor 6y ago
> Each time you reply, a new rep is assigned the ticket This is insane. > They also restrict your account so you can't do anything, but they leave the ads running and keep billing you. This bankrupts people who can't pause their unprofitable campaigns. This is insane too.
- dreamcompiler 6y ago
  And almost certainly illegal. If you refused to pay you would probably prevail in a lawsuit, and you might even have a case for extortion or fraud. (IANAL)

popotamonga 6y ago

Its terrible, i cant even make the simple ads with the wizard anymore because at the last step there are JS errors in the console, in every browser. Support doesnt know what js errors are. nightmare.

coldcode 6y ago
Facebook requires that you pay them enormous money but you do not matter to them at all otherwise, as there are always more suckers out there to replace you if you leave. Both Google and Facebook understand that support costs them money, so they don't provide any, which lets them keep the money. Quality costs money, so not having quality lets them keep more money since people are desperate enough to put up with a lack of it to point ads at 2B people. The market for ads is completely captured by Facebook and Google, so you either put up with no support and no quality, or you can't play. It's like living in a run down tenement, no matter how many rats and roaches you have to deal with due to a lack of maintenance, you have no choice if the alternative is the street. Yet the owner makes money no matter how horrific the building.
- GrinningFool 6y ago
  When your market and customer base is _that_ big, maybe you have scaled past what you are reasonably capable of supporting with actual humans.
  - GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
    that sounds like ‘scaled too far’ then
    - ben_w 6y ago
      Or “not actually scaled”
  - jakub_g 6y ago
    Alphabet had $34B net income in 2019, FB $18B. They could hire a legion of developers in any place which is not California/Switzerland, whose only responsibility would be bugfixing, and it would barely make a dent in their numbers.

pabl0rg 6y ago

Facebook is terribly buggy and also has google-level customer service (none)

dannyr 6y ago
I qualify this with customer service on Google's free products. I have no problem getting good customer support from Google's paid products (YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, Google One, etc).
- Bahamut 6y ago
  I've had terrible customer service from Google's paid products as well. Google is intentionally customer service hostile overall because it's an area that defies automation.

ianhawes 6y ago

I've worked with FB Business Manager since early 2014 and it has always been bad: slow, requires constant refreshing, and is extremely complex. For comparison, AdEspresso is not nearly as complex but hugely more productive for doing split testing in Facebook campaigns. You build your ads on their interface and they submit via API.

polytely 6y ago

It's really sad how the most well-payed engineers and designers are spending the best years of their lives working on this hostile platform. I'm so tired of being treated like garbage by these companies, I just hope there is some tipping point, a straw that finally breaks the camels back, that leads to their downfall.

swyx 6y ago
not to put it too bluntly but they're well paid because we as a society keep paying them to. in attention and then in money.
HenryKissinger 6y ago
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  When I was looking for a new SWE job in 2016 after my startup laid off a third of its employees the vast majority of open positions in other startups were in "analytics", marketing or advertising-related companies. And similarly most of the positions that Amazon, Facebook and Google recruiters have approached me for are also in that field (even though I don't have any professional experience in that area, nor any keywords in my LinkedIn profile). I understand it's where the money is, and it's probably a good idea to work in a profit-center for once instead of being viewed as a cost-center by the MBAs, but I still have a soul.
reaperducer 6y ago
It's really sad how the most well-payed engineers and designers are spending the best years of their lives working on this hostile platform I'm at the age where I'm starting to look back at the various phases of my life and think about whether they were wasted or not. A lot of my similarly-aged friends are doing the same. Some who worked for the wrong tech companies really regret it now. At the time they thought it was cool because they were living the tech dream. Now they wonder what it was all for.

can16358p 6y ago

Putting away all the evilness about Facebook away, why would they shoot themselves in their own foot? Even from a completely evil company perspective, advertising is the biggest revenue generating aspect of their whole ecosystem, what incentive do they have to cripple it (and at least, not immediately react to it)?

jrumbut 6y ago
My guess is that there is an incentive for Facebook the company but not for any particular human working at Facebook. Things are going well so inefficiency is fine (and it really may be fine), instead of fixing problems the best people are looking for new sources of growth.
AlexandrB 6y ago
I think it's a strong signal that they are a monopoly that they can treat their paying customers this badly yet still have them come back for more.
- LaundroMat 6y ago
  This. Their ad interface has been a complete mess ever since its inception and the fact it has never received the attention the users' frontend gets, is indeed a suretell sign of a monopoly. "Good luck using a better ad platform with no users to target your ads to". The real alternative is simply not playing their game which is essentially an arms race with other advertisers anyway.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    "Good luck using a better ad platform with no users to target your ads to". That might be true for huge advertisers trying to reach mass-market audiences. For smaller businesses operating in niche markets, it is plausible that you can get better returns through other promotional channels that appeal directly to those markets, without needing all the nasty tracking or dubiously effective targeting that come with the likes of Facebook and Google. The idea that you "have to" advertise on the big, generic networks because that's "where all your potential customers are" is well out of date, at least in our experience.

shripadk 6y ago

Here is the crazy part about Facebook Ad Manager. It had a targeting option called "React (Javascript Library)" in Additional interests. That has been removed since last month. But Angular and other frameworks still exist as a targeting option. It is crazy because React is a Facebook product. I literally have no idea why they deprecated their own product's targeting option. And as usual, if you ask anything from support, you get back canned replies. If you are in the drop-shipping world you'll know the daily gripes drop-shippers have with Facebook Ads. Like is said in the article, the first few days are decent and then it tanks completely. Someone at Facebook who knows what they are doing needs to get Facebook Ads under control. It was working fine until all these changes wrecked the platform!

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

The ad platform / business manager has always felt like several systems and products bolted together (which it probably is). There's too much legacy crap poking through and breaking things. I find understanding what's going on a struggle if I'm not using it day-to-day Even doing a simple Instagram promotion in the App has to jump through the FB app for authentication which can hang and show me a blank screen.

donedealomg 6y ago

did they moved their stuff to India? Sounds like it.

bsenftner 6y ago

The Ad industry has itself to blame. I tried FB Ad when they were new, and it was so terrible in every direction I stopped using the platform, entirely. If the advertisers would simply say "no", FB would be forced to improve.

johnward 6y ago
Really? I had some decent success on FB early but not now. I also made a killing when MySpace launched it's terrible ad service.

kiplkipl 6y ago

Any time Facebook's UI is insulted, it's common to see the defence that it's a feature, not a bug, because clearly it works or a competitor would replace them. That time spent improving it is time wasted, because it doesn't make money. I see this as proof that a highly-scalable market doesn't optimise for good, it optimises for good-enough, and there's a lot of potential revenue lost between good and good-enough.

dannyr 6y ago
> a competitor would replace them Sadly, competition is difficult to flourish in the current environment because of Facebook's market share and tactics. It's not as bad in the US compared to other countries especially developing countries where Facebook is pretty much the only online channel. Sometimes, people only have access to Facebook and not the rest of the internet.
- 3np 6y ago
  Got any example of country where you saw this happening?
reaperducer 6y ago
doesn't optimise for good, it optimises for good-enough It's about pride. Not everyone has pride in their work, in their person, or in their actions. I once worked with one of these "good enough" people. He bought his wife the cheapest things because they were "good enough." All he was focused on was the ticket price. Not the quality. Not the workmanship. Not going with a good company instead of a bad company. It's become more common these days in everything from consumer goods to personal behavior. There was an article in the newspaper yesterday saying that sales of Folger's Crystals is up 14%. It's "good enough" coffee. There's a congressman up for re-election right now who admits to having an affair with an intern. His campaign doesn't hide this fact that would have made him un-electable ten years ago. His behavior is "good enough." It's like all the Facebook and Google employees who are working on things that make the world a worse place. They're making money, so that's "good enough" for them. Someone else can be moral.

Kiro 6y ago

> Facebook is more worried about making [the platform] look good, like a Fisher Price toy, than how the [ad] platform actually performs. They make it sound like a bad thing but pretty sure it's not true anyway. If Facebook saw that their ads performed the best with Comic Sans they would go with it and any design changes they make are surely done to increase ad revenue.

draw_down 6y ago

Well, I’m really sorry to hear Facebook advertisers aren’t having a good time.

peteretep 6y ago

Using the FB Ads platform is a continuing fucking disgrace. I hate it. I cannot believe it’s their core money maker and still such a shit show to use.

ship_it 6y ago
Using the FB [...] is a continuing fucking disgrace

nautilus12 6y ago

"Facebook is more concerned about making the platform look good than how it actually performs" This has been a universal problem that I've observed in most tech companies i've worked with. Hyper-focus on the optics and less on the content / results. I dont know if its a by product of giving front end design equal / greater weight than back end design / analytics or something more systematic like the apple design influence. Maybe both. Eitherway seems like websites are getting easier to look at, more clever, and less useful all across the board.

Kiro 6y ago

The biggest problem I have is the randomness of targeting desktop only. The option is only visible in one of the many flows that I can never remember how to find. Once you manage to actually enable it it randomly reverts back to also targeting mobile. My theory is that it does it when you edit some other parameter of the ad since the edit form is part of the flow where you don't have the option.

baking 6y ago
I have literally not seen an ad on Facebook desktop since they forced through the update. Maybe that's why.

blinding-streak 6y ago

I wonder if Facebook has done some good support/bad support A/B tests. Maybe customers receiving bad support spend just as much, or possibly even more, than those receiving good support.

rightbyte 6y ago
Those who receive bad support and stay probably are more desperate and in need of FB so you would expect the bad support group to be higher value customers on average (those who stay).

rogerthat_au 6y ago

I used to own a large APAC agency. We had six figures in Facebook going through us every month. Issues like ad accounts being blocked, poor performance, etc received no feedback or conversation. Google over time assigned an account manager and improved support but Facebook was always awful. In one instance email went to Sheryl Sandberg, reply to which got forwarded down to 6 people who eventually gave us a 'this is policy' answer. I often advice founders to find friends who work there to get their issues resolved - because there is no formal sensible way to get it done.

fred_is_fred 6y ago
Yet you still spent 6 figures in Facebook - so what incentive did they have to change?
Silhouette 6y ago
I often advice founders to find friends who work there to get their issues resolved - because there is no formal sensible way to get it done. Yes, Facebook is a complete train wreck, which survives in spite of its abysmal technology and support for its real customers rather than because of them. Even then, speaking only from the point of view of a much smaller business that has been a regular Facebook advertiser in the past, it probably left 33-50% of the money we would have spent with it on the table simply because we couldn't spend that money on the Facebook platform due to all the bugs. We redirected those funds to other channels instead. And yes, we too only got around Facebook's systems demanding nonsensical or literally impossible things that would have totally blocked our access at least once because we knew a senior dev who worked there and could escalate internally. Unfortunately, this model seems to have become SOP for big tech service providers in recent years. Google are similarly non-communicative and have also provided such a bad experience to us as an advertiser that we stopped all our ads on their platforms for a long time. It's not just the big advertising platforms, either. Every payment service we use (including some that are darlings of HN) has messed us around horribly over the years, too. Unless you're spending literally millions of dollars per months with these tech giants, it seems they've decided it's not commercially sensible to offer any meaningful support, and presumably to accept that in some cases they'll lose customers entirely and damage their reputation as a result.

mtgx 6y ago

"Move fast and break (our customers') things."

scottmcleod 6y ago

Lol everyone in here is such a baby...We spend $500k a day on FB with great support; platform rarely breaks for us as we get features later. If you're spend $100-1000 a day you get tests and early UI/UX. Spend more get out of the baby support tiers. Someone has to the best test bed.. might as well be the smallest clients.

snissn 6y ago

around May(?) i noticed facbook pushed out an update and i had to keep my facebook browser tabs closed or my video games would be super laggy

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

That's an interesting read, and it shows how buggy so much of the software is. It also shows how developers rank the priorities of bug fixes. I'm an Xcode user. That means that I experience lots of bugs; some, pretty damn nasty. I tend to only report the ones I consider serious, but I find it a bit depressing that so many of them seem to remain untouched. That's because Apple assumes that I have a much higher tolerance for bugs than the vast majority of their users. They're right. I keep using Xcode, despite the bugs. I'm not a fan of other IDEs, and my experience with them, is that they are every bit as buggy as Xcode, except that they also run slower. But user interface (and security) bugs in the general operating systems get high priority. I suspect the same goes for Facebook. They know that they are the only game in town, and that marketers will tolerate a much buggier experience than users. I would like to see software quality rise all over. Speaking only for myself, I spend a great deal of time refining the interface for administrative functionality, and have a standard policy of "Don't move on to the next item until you believe this one is 100% bug-free, and completely usable.", even if it means delaying, or even reversing, progress of the project. That's not a popular stance, but it does tend to result in pretty high-quality software. I'm writing a social media app, right now, and this philosophy has paid off in a big way. It does mean that the team needs to wait longer for some functionality, but the app is constantly in a state, where they can simply hand it to potential investors, and not worry about them encountering highly embarrassing bugs. I'm hoping that the end result will be a real joy to use.

12xo 6y ago

And yet, they keep spending money... This is a problem. The fact that they offer no service, no communication, so resolutions and yet buyers are still dumping 100's of thousands a month because, they dont have any other options... Can you name any other business that could function like this? Health care is the only ones that come to mind...

72deluxe 6y ago
Any monopolies? It's just like playing along to Google's game (including vague "exact" matches for adwords) because there's no alternative, and no recourse. It stinks.
- 12xo 6y ago
  The worst part is that there is no market what-so-ever for FB or Google ads. The prices are not set by competition, or the market, they are set by the seller. They decide that something's baseline price is $10 per X, not the market. The market has no choice but adjust their ROI based not on actual market conditions, but on the whim of the seller. And to top it off, almost all digital ads are money losers for the buyer. Its the few that work that get backed into their ROI calculations. Which are essentially a tax added to the purchase price of anything marketed and sold via these channels. The business is a fraud.
  - newcomputer 6y ago
    Their prices are in fact set by the market. Do you not understand the concept of an auction?
newcomputer 6y ago
Advertising has more competition than probably any other industry except restaurants. In addition to the big digital advertising shops (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Reddit), you can also buy print advertisements, radio advertisements, television advertisements, billboard advertisements, bus advertisements, etc, all from hundreds of different sources. They have plenty of options. They choose to use Facebook because it's one of the better options.

kumarski 6y ago

This is why I own Facebook Stock. They have so many profit and revenue levers, this is another example of one. So many companies would pay for ironclad API access and relationship. I believe that the lack of transparency around their APIs is by design for political reasons not a lack of engineering know how issues or ignorance issues.

marcinzm 6y ago

I recently connected my online store to facebook (for ads, selling on facebook, etc.) and the whole process was a such a mess. Multiple confusing business UIs that you only get between by magic clicks or knowing the URL. Then they don't tie together or tied to the personal account instead of the business page or some other random insanity. The initial UI is clean and simple but then there's a cliff when you try to do anything more complicated. Then again when I tried to place ads on Twitter it wouldn't show me my tweets in the list so I couldn't promote them.

throwaway29303 6y ago

It boggles my mind how other companies, and people who resort to ad platforms like this, still use these tools given how those ad platforms treat them (no or very poor human support). I find their behaviour so unbelievably disrespectful. What other alternatives are there?

fred_is_fred 6y ago

As a former user: good.