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Other businesses that are about monetizing human interaction: telephony (pay us to talk to people), restaurants (pay us for a venue to have a conversation/date,

Other businesses that are about monetizing human interaction: telephony (pay us to talk to people), restaurants (pay us for a venue to have a conversation/date, show off your wealth), clothing (pay us to increase your apparent status/attractiveness), theater and movies (pay us to have an activity with your friends/date), beyond-low-end housing (pay us so you can entertain and impress and be in a city with lots of humans to interact with). You say this like it's a dirty, disgusting thing to do, but is Facebook really that different from all of these industries in terms of wanting to monetize human interaction?

bane 13y ago
No FB is exactly the same. They monetize interactions. So what kind of interactions will you be having with an OVR strapped to your face that they'll now be monetizing? I upvoted you because I thought your comment didn't deserve the downvoting it was getting
Geee 13y ago
There's the obvious difference that there's no platform lock-in with these, and therefore there's choice and competition. Telephony, Internet, are open technologies without locking you in as a customer for any company. Think back when we lived in caves. We shared stories, we shared cave paintings, we shared music by singing together, we had fun together, we explored and shared our curiosity, we created new things together. Most technology today is still just tools to do these same fundamental things, but in novel ways. Facebook wants to be the middleman in this. They didn't invent 'social', they brought it into digital world, they want to own it, and they want to monetize it.
- loup-vaillant 13y ago
  > Telephony, Internet, are open technologies without locking you in as a customer for any company. No, they are natural local monopolies. It takes explicit effort in policy making to avoid actual monopolies. The result is mixed: while it is possible to change your provider, it is much less convenient than changing the theatre you will go to next time. Switching costs aren't negligible. And in the US, I hear you have only two provider at any given place: the DSL provider, and the cable provider. As you suggest, there is nothing wrong with Facebook wanting to monetize human interactions. The problem is how they do it. If they charged their user for the service, and didn't bother them with ads and constant spying, that would be fine. Heck, they could even prevent most spying and cut down the server costs by selling little servers you could plug into your home, have them talk peer-to-peer, and charge for updates or something. But no, they had to violate our most intimate conversations constantly. Okay, maybe not the most intimate (those actually go through Gmail), but you get the idea. That is what's wrong with Facebook (and Google, and Apple…). Not charging for the service, but the hidden costs, the spying, and other totalitarian artefacts.
freshhawk 13y ago
All your examples are charging the user for facilitating interaction rather than monetizing on information gleaned from surveilling the interaction. That's a substantial difference. I would say that the walled garden aspect also makes it pretty substantially different from those industries. I think we all agree that if there was only one restaurant chain or one movie theatre chain it would be a pretty awful experience in comparison to our current reality. It would make financial sense to degrade the experience quite a bit for a relatively small increase in profit per customer. In telephony this experiment was already run and the answer was, yes, it was substantially worse. So yes, Facebook really is that different from your example industries.
silentOpen 13y ago
Yes. With the exception of telephony, each of those industries also delivers material/entertainment/comfort value. Telephony is just voice communication and benefits from a network effect and natural monopoly. Facebook has a far more sophisticated model of communication but is most similar to telephony. The difference between Facebook and telephony is striking. You pay for a telephone connection. Other people pay for your Facebook experience to be mediated to their wishes. Telephony is p2p and we typically frown on operator intervention and worry about excessive centralization. Facebook could be p2p but is centralized and has heavy operator intervention. Offering communications services for free and then attempting to 'monetize' the interactions that you mediate is distasteful.

bane 13y ago

No FB is exactly the same. They monetize interactions. So what kind of interactions will you be having with an OVR strapped to your face that they'll now be monetizing? I upvoted you because I thought your comment didn't deserve the downvoting it was getting

Geee 13y ago

There's the obvious difference that there's no platform lock-in with these, and therefore there's choice and competition. Telephony, Internet, are open technologies without locking you in as a customer for any company. Think back when we lived in caves. We shared stories, we shared cave paintings, we shared music by singing together, we had fun together, we explored and shared our curiosity, we created new things together. Most technology today is still just tools to do these same fundamental things, but in novel ways. Facebook wants to be the middleman in this. They didn't invent 'social', they brought it into digital world, they want to own it, and they want to monetize it.

loup-vaillant 13y ago
> Telephony, Internet, are open technologies without locking you in as a customer for any company. No, they are natural local monopolies. It takes explicit effort in policy making to avoid actual monopolies. The result is mixed: while it is possible to change your provider, it is much less convenient than changing the theatre you will go to next time. Switching costs aren't negligible. And in the US, I hear you have only two provider at any given place: the DSL provider, and the cable provider. As you suggest, there is nothing wrong with Facebook wanting to monetize human interactions. The problem is how they do it. If they charged their user for the service, and didn't bother them with ads and constant spying, that would be fine. Heck, they could even prevent most spying and cut down the server costs by selling little servers you could plug into your home, have them talk peer-to-peer, and charge for updates or something. But no, they had to violate our most intimate conversations constantly. Okay, maybe not the most intimate (those actually go through Gmail), but you get the idea. That is what's wrong with Facebook (and Google, and Apple…). Not charging for the service, but the hidden costs, the spying, and other totalitarian artefacts.

freshhawk 13y ago

All your examples are charging the user for facilitating interaction rather than monetizing on information gleaned from surveilling the interaction. That's a substantial difference. I would say that the walled garden aspect also makes it pretty substantially different from those industries. I think we all agree that if there was only one restaurant chain or one movie theatre chain it would be a pretty awful experience in comparison to our current reality. It would make financial sense to degrade the experience quite a bit for a relatively small increase in profit per customer. In telephony this experiment was already run and the answer was, yes, it was substantially worse. So yes, Facebook really is that different from your example industries.

silentOpen 13y ago

Yes. With the exception of telephony, each of those industries also delivers material/entertainment/comfort value. Telephony is just voice communication and benefits from a network effect and natural monopoly. Facebook has a far more sophisticated model of communication but is most similar to telephony. The difference between Facebook and telephony is striking. You pay for a telephone connection. Other people pay for your Facebook experience to be mediated to their wishes. Telephony is p2p and we typically frown on operator intervention and worry about excessive centralization. Facebook could be p2p but is centralized and has heavy operator intervention. Offering communications services for free and then attempting to 'monetize' the interactions that you mediate is distasteful.