5 ms·

Why would you give it to Facebook?

Syonyk 6y ago
Because 12-13 years ago when a lot of people signed up, it wasn't clear that they were exceptionally evil. Pre-IPO, pre-ads, back when it was just status updates and photos, it didn't strike a lot of people (myself included) as a particularly bad idea. We hadn't seen the monster social media would become when it suddenly had to improve quarterly profits.
- cozzyd 6y ago
  when I signed up in 2005 it was only open to people at colleges, and your info could only be seem by people at the same college... (hence the name, facebook, which no longer makes sense).
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  Ads began in 2007, over 13 years ago. I purchased my first FB ad in late summer 2007. Not sure if that’s also when it opened up.
  - Syonyk 6y ago
    I don't think the first few years of ads really made a big difference - Facebook couldn't really figure out how to make advertising terribly profitable while not driving people off. Like most things, it took a few years to really take off. They IPO'd in 2012, and then really had to prove they could turn a profit (and increase it over time). I've honestly not been a heavy enough Facebook user to be able to pin the transition to a particular point in time (and it was almost certainly a long period of time, pushing for more and more), but the transition of the "Like" widget on random pages from an image icon to a data collection tool was probably a good indication of the transition. In any case, by... oh, 2014 or so at the latest, they'd definitely started showing their true colors. Engagement Uber Alles. Because ads.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      I don’t see much of a difference. It’s obvious this was going to happen. Is there any instance of a big site that doesn’t go this way? It seems as if sometimes people will always act surprised when sites monetize heavily. As if the site was always going to remain as basic as it was in its early days while growing. This is almost never the case except in cases where it goes paid [only]. Even those have exceptions (newspaper sites vs Substack)
- elwell 6y ago
  ELI5 why facebook is exceptionally evil. (Of course I'm inviting downvotes, but please give me a comment too; ideally a reason that isn't also applicable to 'internet as a whole').
  - Syonyk 6y ago
    They're not much more evil than any other publicly traded, advertising supported content repackager (so the bulk of "social" media these days), but they're far worse than a lot of other places on the internet because of their power as the "default location" for a lot of people to go when bored. Facebook, long ago, stopped being about connecting people (except that claiming this gets more people to join), and more about "keeping people on Facebook as long as they possibly could" - because that means more ad impressions, which means more money for Facebook. They rely on every quirk in human psychology to keep people addicted ("engaged") and scrolling as long as possible. Intermittent reward, randomized ordering (the refresh throbber followed by "new" content), and driving people into toxic emotions and rabbit holes. Anger, outrage, and conspiracy rabbitholes are /great/ for keeping people on the site. They're terrible for the people involved (one could offer the handwaving parallel of a grocery store offering free heroin if you buy stuff there to keep people shopping), but profitable for Facebook. They believe the entire internet is theirs to scrape user activity from (the "like" buttons were turned into data collection elements long ago, against the original promises made about them), so they can offer better-targeted advertisements to anyone who has a valid credit card. Foreign actor, scammer, seller-of-medical-nonsense, it's all fine - as long as they pay up properly. And in a wide variety of cases of Facebook being fingered as directly responsible for enabling reprehensible behavior like genocides, their responses are consistently, "We are so, so sorry that you caught us doing that, and we promise to try harder not to get caught in the future." Genocide is extremely engaging, and as long as they can sell ads to people othering their neighbors and calling for violence against them, well, what's wrong? The guiding principle of Facebook has been clearly demonstrated to be, "What's Good for Zuck is Good for Zuck!" Anything else is secondary (and mostly a concern in that if you don't do anything, people might get around to cancelling their accounts or no longer using Facebook). I can, and do, apply these criticisms to a number of other properties on the internet, but the social media companies (companies who take user-generated content, repackage it, and algorithmically deliver it in optimally engaging order to other people, interleaved with ads) are the parts of the internet that are demonstrably ruining just about everything that people care about.
8note 6y ago
By accident? They used to sync contacts on android

Because 12-13 years ago when a lot of people signed up, it wasn't clear that they were exceptionally evil. Pre-IPO, pre-ads, back when it was just status updates and photos, it didn't strike a lot of people (myself included) as a particularly bad idea. We hadn't seen the monster social media would become when it suddenly had to improve quarterly profits.

cozzyd 6y ago
when I signed up in 2005 it was only open to people at colleges, and your info could only be seem by people at the same college... (hence the name, facebook, which no longer makes sense).
skinnymuch 6y ago
Ads began in 2007, over 13 years ago. I purchased my first FB ad in late summer 2007. Not sure if that’s also when it opened up.
- Syonyk 6y ago
  I don't think the first few years of ads really made a big difference - Facebook couldn't really figure out how to make advertising terribly profitable while not driving people off. Like most things, it took a few years to really take off. They IPO'd in 2012, and then really had to prove they could turn a profit (and increase it over time). I've honestly not been a heavy enough Facebook user to be able to pin the transition to a particular point in time (and it was almost certainly a long period of time, pushing for more and more), but the transition of the "Like" widget on random pages from an image icon to a data collection tool was probably a good indication of the transition. In any case, by... oh, 2014 or so at the latest, they'd definitely started showing their true colors. Engagement Uber Alles. Because ads.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    I don’t see much of a difference. It’s obvious this was going to happen. Is there any instance of a big site that doesn’t go this way? It seems as if sometimes people will always act surprised when sites monetize heavily. As if the site was always going to remain as basic as it was in its early days while growing. This is almost never the case except in cases where it goes paid [only]. Even those have exceptions (newspaper sites vs Substack)
elwell 6y ago
ELI5 why facebook is exceptionally evil. (Of course I'm inviting downvotes, but please give me a comment too; ideally a reason that isn't also applicable to 'internet as a whole').
- Syonyk 6y ago
  They're not much more evil than any other publicly traded, advertising supported content repackager (so the bulk of "social" media these days), but they're far worse than a lot of other places on the internet because of their power as the "default location" for a lot of people to go when bored. Facebook, long ago, stopped being about connecting people (except that claiming this gets more people to join), and more about "keeping people on Facebook as long as they possibly could" - because that means more ad impressions, which means more money for Facebook. They rely on every quirk in human psychology to keep people addicted ("engaged") and scrolling as long as possible. Intermittent reward, randomized ordering (the refresh throbber followed by "new" content), and driving people into toxic emotions and rabbit holes. Anger, outrage, and conspiracy rabbitholes are /great/ for keeping people on the site. They're terrible for the people involved (one could offer the handwaving parallel of a grocery store offering free heroin if you buy stuff there to keep people shopping), but profitable for Facebook. They believe the entire internet is theirs to scrape user activity from (the "like" buttons were turned into data collection elements long ago, against the original promises made about them), so they can offer better-targeted advertisements to anyone who has a valid credit card. Foreign actor, scammer, seller-of-medical-nonsense, it's all fine - as long as they pay up properly. And in a wide variety of cases of Facebook being fingered as directly responsible for enabling reprehensible behavior like genocides, their responses are consistently, "We are so, so sorry that you caught us doing that, and we promise to try harder not to get caught in the future." Genocide is extremely engaging, and as long as they can sell ads to people othering their neighbors and calling for violence against them, well, what's wrong? The guiding principle of Facebook has been clearly demonstrated to be, "What's Good for Zuck is Good for Zuck!" Anything else is secondary (and mostly a concern in that if you don't do anything, people might get around to cancelling their accounts or no longer using Facebook). I can, and do, apply these criticisms to a number of other properties on the internet, but the social media companies (companies who take user-generated content, repackage it, and algorithmically deliver it in optimally engaging order to other people, interleaved with ads) are the parts of the internet that are demonstrably ruining just about everything that people care about.

8note 6y ago

By accident? They used to sync contacts on android