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People “want” the free content and services that this advertising has been paying for. And the actual consequences of Apple’s decision for users and small busin
by avalys 5y ago
People “want” the free content and services that this advertising has been paying for. And the actual consequences of Apple’s decision for users and small businesses that rely on efficient advertising to connect with users will take time to become clear.
- donw 5y agoYou mean... they might need to charge money in exchange for goods and/or services? How capitalistically gauche!
- warkdarrior 5y agoGood. This will just accelerate the shift to crypto, where I can pay per page or per click, just tiny amount at a time.
- IAmLiterallyAB 5y ago"shift to crypto" mmm that seems unlikely
- jeffgreco 5y ago$0.15 for the page and $50.00 for the gas fee.
- keymone 5y agoTwitter has announced support for lightning. Why would anyone use eth when streamable money in isolated payment channels on top of the most secure monetary network in the world exists, is beyond me.
- yokem55 5y agoBecause rollups exist on Ethereum that are cheap and are far more suited to end user self-custody then lightning ever can be. At the moment zk-rollups are roughly 100x cheaper then mainnet, don't require the user to run a node to self custody, and the user can force a withdrawal to mainnet even if the roll-up operator completely dies.
- keymone 5y agoRight, you’re only missing one important detail: > on top of the most secure monetary network Because eth is a circus: major cult of personality issues, major scalability issues, monetary policy is all over the place, changed at a whim of god knows who or in reaction to past shortsightedness and a planned transition away from the one thing that keeps at least some semblance of stability - PoW towards even less politically stable rich-get-richer PoS, being sold as scalability solution without having anything to do with scalability at all. It’s a joke.
- donw 5y agoThe problem is twofold: 1. I want to look around and find what is useful for me. I'm not willing to spend very much money per unit of information, because I'm sifting through a bunch of crap. 2. For stuff that is valuable, I'm willing to pay, but I can't tell if something is valuable until I look at it in its totality.
- macintux 5y agoI've been holding out hope for at least 15 years that Apple would find a way to make micropayments work for news. I pay for a few subscriptions, but I'd happily pay a little bit for news items I read elsewhere.
- DevKoala 5y agoPeople don’t “want” the free content at the cost of privacy infringing surveillance and toxic behavior manipulation. These companies need to find a better business model, otherwise they are about to go the way of the dodo.
- arcticbull 5y agoI'm honestly not sure we've proven that. All this experiment shows is 96% of people want something for free (without ads) and 4% of people feel bad about taking something for free. I don't want the tracking either, but not badly enough to stop using the free services I get. I think most people probably actually feel this way, but I don't have data to back my assertion.
- iainmerrick 5y ago96% of people want something for free, sure; but these are iPhone users, so they’ve already paid extra money for a premium product.
- Nextgrid 5y agoAt the moment you can't really pay for Facebook. A fair experiment would be for FB to launch a premium version with no ads/spying for a monthly fee equivalent to their average revenue per user in that country and see how many people sign up.
- learc83 5y agoThe problem with that is that the premium users then become a more valuable ad target, and the free users less valuable. So you have to charge even more making them even more valuable. Eventually you reach some equilibrium. But by this point the premium users are such an attractive ad target that the platform eventually starts sneaking in an occasional ad, and then more frequently etc… Cable TV used to be ad free when it started out. HBO is probably the best counterexample, but if you look at what they’re doing with HBO max, even they might not be able to resist forever.
- dylan604 5y agoThat's one way to look at it, and it's easy to see that conclusion. Nobody wants to pay for anything they don't have to, so it is a fair conclusion. However, it could also be that people are sick and tired of having all of the data collected with no control over how it is used. It could be initially used for one thing, but then re-accessed later when something new the data is determined useful. It could even be used by a different company than what originally collected it. When asked in a manner that makes it obvious it is tracking, people clearly are saying no. When phrased in a manner like 'allow us to offer you deals', as it has been in the past, it is less obvious and people have just shrugged their shoulders and said "whatevs just stop bugging me".
- judge2020 5y agoThat’s a good observation but it remains that no amount of hosts are going to foot the bill of a billion Facebook users without some serious societal shift to people realizing they can ‘say no to tracking’ if they give up real dollars.
- smilebot 5y agoAnecdotal, but I am people so I think it’s fair. I never went back to “free” tv after Switching over to Netflix and Hulu.
- Beldin 5y agoI was quite shocked to learn that when US cable tv was a new thing, one of its advertising thrusts was that there were no ads. Not being in the US, I don't know what the situation is precisely. But I do know that a "1 hour" tv show is over after 42 minutes... apparently, cable went from almost no ads to 1/3rd ads. I moderate my long-term expectations for streaming accordingly.
- calgoo 5y agoDepends on the channel too. I was visiting the US and tried to watch history channel show. The ads made it unwatchable; there where literally a break in the ads to show what was coming up on the show I had been watching for 20 min before going back to ads. Felt like they where saying: “ don’t forget you where watching this”. Never going to watch cable without a dvr again (still annoying but better).
- fouc 5y agoTaking advantage of humanity's cognitive bias towards seeking free & convenient services while ignoring the fine print or the long term consequences is still exploitation. Frankly, hidden externalities should be illegal.
- brokenmachine 5y ago>Frankly, hidden externalities should be illegal. I'd love to see how the lawyers would phrase that one.
- judge2020 5y agoIt’s an externality, but certainly not hidden.
- handrous 5y agoWe can't know what the Web would look like without spying, data-moated giants wandering the landscape, making everything "free". The thing about a "free" spying service is that it competes with paid services and with actually-free ones. There's a reason open protocols have stagnated over the last couple decades—it's less rewarding to work on and promote a free, open social network based Email + a hypercharged, dynamic, living and evolving RSS (or whatever, maybe Mastadon, who knows) when the competition is Facebook and Twitter, and they're both "free" and the teams you're competing with are funded at eight, nine, or even ten figures.
- FranksTV 5y agoAnd let's not forget that every time some promising alternative appears Facebook either fast follows (i.e. plagiarizes) it, or buys it and buries it in a hole somewhere.
- annadane 5y agoThis. That's the problem. It's not just one company unfairly being screwed by Apple. They've lied about everything else.
- judge2020 5y agoHas Facebook ever done this to an alternative that wasn’t just ‘Facebook 2’, ie. it would have solved the problems and grievances people here have with the Facebook platform?
- tobylane 5y agoHard to say, as many of the industry’s more famous acquisitions/destructions were before any effective attempts to monetise.
- danijelb 5y agoI think there's a possibility it would resemble similar industries like mobile services - you would subscribe to a social media service provider of your choice and you'd use their service which is interoperable with other social media service providers. They could sell different monthly plans with some amount of allowed photo/video uploads, messages, etc. To us it might sound strange now, but it would feel entirely normal to people in a world who never experienced free services powered by spying. Not sure if that would be better or worse than what we have now.
- TrueDuality 5y agoThe vast majority of the actual content of the internet is provided by people for free to the internet in general. Even your post right now that I disagree with, you likely didn't get paid to post. That content on Facebook that keeps people coming back? It's not the ads or deals; What keeps people coming back is what their friends, families, and idols post. They're effectively generating content for Facebook which they are then profiting off of "for free". The straw man argument here is that Facebook is providing the platform and that is how people are compensated for their content. It's kind of fair, but it's been wildly abused. There are competitors, but it's the lock in and invasion that has given Facebook it's value not choice. There is no informed opt-in, discussion or debate about the value you provide to Facebook in exchange for the value they get out of you. That is the cash-cow Facebook has been milking and when given an informed choice people are now saying, "No, I'm worth more than this garbage." I'm tearing into Facebook because that's the target of this post but that content is provided on every platform. The value is in what the users are providing not the platform. Reddit, Hacker News, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Google Everything. The content is provided by the users for free to the platforms. The marketing content is noise that people complain about and do not want.
- kaczordon 5y agoIdk I find myself scrolling on Instagram and being more interested in the ads they show then some of the content I see. People want to see ads for cool things, there’s a reason places like Pinterest are big.
- Jordrok 5y agoI honestly cannot fathom this opinion. I literally cannot think of a single instance where I've ever seen an ad and thought "Yes, I'm glad that I'm seeing this instead of the content I came here for." If that's true, why bother even going on Instagram at all? I'll admit that I don't use Pinterest, but from what I understand, it's main feature is being a place for user-curated image collections, yes? That's very different than algorithmically distributed, paid-for ads.
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- grecy 5y agoFacebook makes $9.5B in profits per quarter. I think it's safe to say their ads are doing A LOT more than just paying for the service.
- random292929 5y agoYeah. But HN audience are people with good disposable income. So its say for them to say pay for it.
- Pabdk 5y agoDid people "want" a thousand dollar phone? People are dumb as hell. Most people just do, say and think what the people around them do, say and think. Information asymmetry within the chimp troupe is at all time highs and those who have info exploit those who dont. Fact of life.
- shandor 5y agoBut that bullshit of course. Advertising has existed for hundreds of years in different forms, and it also existed in the Internet, without the planet-scale tracking and spying networks the tech giants have now set up. Nobody was complaining or refusing to use advertising to their benefit pre-internet, so why wouldn't the same non-privacy-destroying methods work just as well as previously?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- judge2020 5y agoAdvertisers already settle for non-targeted ads when they need to, ie. the contextual App Store ads pre-iOS 15 (15 or maybe 14.x added personalized ads based on location). But advertisers will always go to the ad exchange that promises more conversions, and website owners will partner with the ad exchange that promises the highest payout. If you can achieve the highest of both without tracking, I can guarantee you advertisers and web admins will jump ship and swim to your ad exchange.
- shandor 5y agoWell, the advertisers that have no morals will, naturally. That's why setting up these global spying networks should be made illegal. Or, like what TFA is about, why other parts of the modern technology stack providers should be making a stand that those advertisers are going much too far with much too little upsides. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for advertising as a business model and it's awesome how advertising on the web has allowed at least some of the content creators on the web to monetize their valuable work. But I'm strongly against the idea that anything in that equation actually depends on the global spy network of the advertisers.
- diffeomorphism 5y agoNo,they want content that advertising paid for and are totalky fine with advertising. They just don't want surveillance or "efficiency" as you call it. So what changes? Currently you can buy ads and you can buy surveillance, which costs about 3x as much. If surveillance stops being an option, there is no reason to believe prices for ads won't change. However, even if they didn't the only thing that would happen is that ads replace surveillance and the number and size of ads might change a bit. The end. Why is this a big deal to you?
- amelius 5y ago> People “want” the free content and services that this advertising has been paying for. Eventually people pay for advertising. First, we pay with our data, and then we pay for the ads too (in the form of more expensive products). We pay twice! And people don't want these services as most are perfectly fine without them.
- boloust 5y agoIs the data valuable without ads to monetize it?
- Lio 5y agoApple have not stopped advertising or user tracking. They’ve just made apps behave in an upfront honest way by letting the user know about it and giving the user the option to stop it.
- caskstrength 5y ago> People “want” the free content and services that this advertising has been paying for. And the actual consequences of Apple’s decision for users and small businesses that rely on efficient advertising to connect with users will take time to become clear. You are being downvoted, but I agree in principle. This is why I have multi-tier privacy protections (NextDNS, uBlock Origin, etc.) but subscribe to services that offer paid subscription (YouTube, several news sites, etc.). Unfortunately, FB doesn't give users that choice.
- nielsbot 5y agoNobody is banning advertising. They're letting people opt out of tracking advertisements/data brokering. Just stick with content ads.