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Putting away all the evilness about Facebook away, why would they shoot themselves in their own foot? Even from a completely evil company perspective, advertisi

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you "have to" advertise on the big, generic networks because that's "where all your potential customers are" is well out of date, at least in our experience.
mtgx 6y ago
The "move fast and break things" is deeply ingrained in the company culture. It's probably in their engineers' training manuals, too. They want to "get things done quickly" and inevitably break code elsewhere on the platform. The guy in the article is right - there's no other platform around where these sort of issues appear so often.
- Angostura 6y ago
  I wonder if they tae 'break things' as core part of the commandment.
  - Balgair 6y ago
    I believe it refers to your own stuff, not the things of others. As in, don't be afraid to break your own things in order to achieve goals. Which, in the case of the article, is exactly what happened.

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.

mtgx 6y ago

The "move fast and break things" is deeply ingrained in the company culture. It's probably in their engineers' training manuals, too. They want to "get things done quickly" and inevitably break code elsewhere on the platform. The guy in the article is right - there's no other platform around where these sort of issues appear so often.

Angostura 6y ago
I wonder if they tae 'break things' as core part of the commandment.
- Balgair 6y ago
  I believe it refers to your own stuff, not the things of others. As in, don't be afraid to break your own things in order to achieve goals. Which, in the case of the article, is exactly what happened.