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Facebook Should Pay All of Us

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Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#71

Post by wahsd »

austenallred wrote: post #24

The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself. Excluding the type of information that lets you steal identities (and therefore bank accounts), there's not much you can do with huge swaths of data. There's not really a market for sheer information. What makes Facebook (and other platforms that use your personal data) valuable is that they have both information about you…

The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the internet needs a totally different structure or service that operates on a totally different premise that retains data with their owner, their person.

I relish seeing the day that Facebook is jettisoned for a system of distributed and individual ownership of profiles and data, like the internet should be. Humanity strayed at some point when the nefarious actors like Zuckerberg and his predecessors came in and started stealing your data, stealing your person, removing the information from you that your liberty and freedom is built on. You are not a free person when you are on the internet, your person is being smeared and skimmed everywhere you go and things against your choosing or even awareness are being done to your person and identity by people and for reasons you did not authorize. That's not liberty, that's not freedom.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#72

Post by austenallred »

jebblue wrote: post #65
austenallred wrote: post #24

The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself. Excluding the type of information that lets you steal identities (and therefore bank accounts), there's not much you can do with huge swaths of data. There's not really a market for sheer information. What makes Facebook (and other platforms that use your personal data) valuable is that they have both information about you…

>> The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself. It is valuable to the company you're giving it to since they get paid by the advertising. They also get money from their partners who we so graciously agree to allow them to "share" it with which happens to be for profit for them. >> The data is a means to an end, which is showing you relevant ads. >> If everyone stoppe…

Right, that's why I said it's not valuable in and of itself. It helps them make money, no doubt, but there's not much of a market for that data alone. The only other potential buyers would be the people who already have a platform to display ads.

But let's play devil's advocate and say they could sell the data for $100M (I think that's extraordinarily high). Given Facebook's 1.4 Billion monthly active users, that values the data at about $.14 per user.

Facebook's market cap is $270B ($187.5 per user). In other words, using obviously sketchy numbers, your attention is worth approximately 2,800 times more than your data.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#73

Post by tjr »

a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #43
Yhippa wrote: post #9

I'm not the biggest fan of FB or for the fact that I pretty much have to use it to keep up with friends and family these days. These are some things that you get in exchange for giving up your information: A place to store photos A platform to publish your photos A communications platform (Messenger) A platform to stay officially connected to things you "like" and their updates Near instant publication of your brain…

Email handles all of this just fine. All we ever needed was a good "whitepages" for email addresses.

In theory, yes. I found, though, that the sort of non-urgent correspondence that often went unresponded-to by friends and family when sent over email resulted in comments and "likes" on Facebook, offering a higher sense of engagement.

I ditched my Facebook account two years ago, seemingly with a mixture of benefits and losses.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#74

Post by gknoy »

kpcyrd wrote: post #48
Rainymood wrote: post #6

"If it's free, you're the product."

How much do you pay for your hackernews account?

My HN account costs me hours of productivity, and a great deal of imposter-syndrome-feelings, in exchange for a curated list of really interesting things, not to mention every comment by patio11, tptacek, edw519, and just about every highly-ranked commenter on threads. It seems a fair trade, especially when you factor in that I learn about new frameworks and concepts.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#75

Post by austenallred »

wahsd wrote: post #71
austenallred wrote: post #24

The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself. Excluding the type of information that lets you steal identities (and therefore bank accounts), there's not much you can do with huge swaths of data. There's not really a market for sheer information. What makes Facebook (and other platforms that use your personal data) valuable is that they have both information about you…

The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the internet needs a totally different structure or service that operates on a totally different premise that retains data with their owner, their person. I relish seeing the day that Facebook is jettisoned for a system of distributed and individual ownership of profiles and data, like the internet should be. Humanity strayed at some point when the nefarious actor…

You know no one forces you to use Facebook, right?

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#76

Post by prostoalex »

williamcotton wrote: post #56
austenallred wrote: post #24

The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself. Excluding the type of information that lets you steal identities (and therefore bank accounts), there's not much you can do with huge swaths of data. There's not really a market for sheer information. What makes Facebook (and other platforms that use your personal data) valuable is that they have both information about you…

What if the model was flipped, so instead of advertisers paying Facebook to cover their operation costs, individual users covered their own operation costs, and perhaps the advertisers directly subsidized individual users at the time of publication ? This would mean that people who wanted to pay could turn off advertising and just use Facebook as pay-as-they-go service. I dunno what kind of accounting they're doing a…

> What if the model was flipped, so instead of advertisers paying Facebook to cover their operation costs, individual users covered their own operation costs,

Why would that be a good deal for Facebook? With current revenue scheme they cover operation costs, R&D, various projects that do not directly contribute any revenue, various internal projects that fail and no one else hears about them, growth and marketing campaigns, various campuses and real estate around the globe and even then have some profits left over.

Why would any software company willingly cut its R&D funnel and profits that can be used as a rainy day fund?

> Right now there's no way to price how much a user is worth and how much they actually cost, which seems like a very strange way to run a business.

I'm sure there is if you have access to internal data, and entire departments in the company know not only operational cost per user, but can segment the costs by country and/or product (feed vs platform vs messaging vs video).

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#77

Post by skybrian »

Perhaps people don't value their data because so many business transactions require you to fill out a form with your name, address, phone number, and often more. You can't easily travel without doing that at every hotel you stay at. If you've become used to handing it out for free, it's a bit weird to say that Facebook alone should pay for it.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#79

Post by williamcotton »

Retra wrote: post #67
williamcotton wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the model was flipped, so instead of advertisers paying Facebook to cover their operation costs, individual users covered their own operation costs, and perhaps the advertisers directly subsidized individual users at the time of publication ? This would mean that people who wanted to pay could turn off advertising and just use Facebook as pay-as-they-go service. I dunno what kind of accounting they're doing a…

Why would anybody offer a pay-to-avoid-advertising scheme unless they were paying significantly more than the advertisers? Furthermore, if people thought their content were valuable intellectual property, they wouldn't be posting it for free on some corporations website. So you're having to resolve a conflict between where an economic process is assumed to work based on perceptions, and where the actual value of thin…

Well, considering that it is incredibly cheap to host and distribute digital media these days, individuals could still pay significantly more than the advertisers and it wouldn't cost them more than a few dollars a month.

This co-op that your describing is basically the approach taken by certain songwriters and recording artists with Tidal, but again, we're talking about shares in the aggregator and purposefully deciding not to treat what is published as property in a marketplace.

Songs played on terrestrial radio, for example, work very differently. You're right, if songwriters thought their content was valuable intellectual property, they wouldn't let a radio station play it for free, and they don't. Radio stations have to pay a percentage of their advertising profits as performance royalties to the songwriters.

What's interesting is that Facebook seems to be headed towards a private version of this and is starting to share ad-revenue with content creators, mainly because when you don't do this, the content that people click on is so filled up with advertisements that it ruins the experience.

Imagine Top 40 radio without performance royalties... the songs would probably be nothing but jingles as the songwriters would have to embed their profit making mechanisms directly in to the content itself!

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#80

Post by prostoalex »

angry-hacker wrote: post #31
Yhippa wrote: post #9

I'm not the biggest fan of FB or for the fact that I pretty much have to use it to keep up with friends and family these days. These are some things that you get in exchange for giving up your information: A place to store photos A platform to publish your photos A communications platform (Messenger) A platform to stay officially connected to things you "like" and their updates Near instant publication of your brain…

A platform to stay officially connected to things you "like" and their updates - This doesn't work for long time already. If you have liked something, you rarely see the updates anymore unless the page owners pay for Facebook. It's called Boosting now. Really sucks for small companies or communities, unless you pay - your page is dead. For me personally, Event management is the only thing it keeps me on Facebook. Par…

> If you have liked something, you rarely see the updates anymore unless the page owners pay for Facebook. It's called Boosting now.

Seems like it's highly dependent on the number of things you liked/followed, not on the page itself.

In one extreme case you have 0 friends, and have liked that and only that page. You're likely to see 100% of their postings.

On the other extreme, you like that page + 500 others + you are friends with 1,500 people who all produce some type of content. Why would you expect to see content of that one page over 2,000 other potential sources?

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