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Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

wsj.com

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Re: Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

#101

Post by mliker »

toxik wrote: post #50
throwaway_quote wrote: post #45

> For example, when Mr. Zuckerberg met with the founders of startups, including Evan Spiegel, chief executive of Snap, and Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare Inc., he presented them with two scenarios: either they accept the price he was offering for their companies, or face Facebook’s efforts to copy their products and make operating more difficult, according to people familiar with the conversations. In both…

I don’t see the problem with this. Isn’t it fair market competition? Facebook had (and has) deeper pockets and more users, so they won against Snap and Foursquare. Their acquisition of IG and WA were great moves too, it’s almost impossible to escape the Facebook and Google internet.

Agreed. Facebook came out with the Newsfeed, and now nearly every social product has a newsfeed: MyFitnessPal, Twitter, Venmo, etc.

Re: Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

#102

Post by dang »

MiroF wrote: post #17

Why is this thread full of commentators attacking Snap for completely unrelated things? Strikes me as odd. FB told IG influencers they might lose their verified status if they link to a SC profile? Seems like that was a mistake on their part, could they really not anticipate future antitrust action?

Most threads are full of commenters attacking whatever for unrelated things.

Please don't insinuate astroturfing without evidence; this is in the site guidelines because it's so common, off-topic, and undermining of community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

#103

Post by dang »

debt wrote: post #25
xwdv wrote: post #22

Classic. Not a day goes by that Evan Spiegel doesn’t regret selling Snap for a cool 7 billion to Facebook and just moving on with his life, so they throw out crap like this as some kind of revenge by social mob justice. He drank too much of his own koolaid.

SNAP has $23 billion market cap you dolt.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't post like this to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

#104

Post by joe_the_user »

soup10 wrote: post #94
joe_the_user wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efficient markets have never been about absolute fairness. There's no industry that has been built without the attempted participation of deep pocketed enterprises from earlier, related industries - adding machine companies (like IBM) naturally wanted to jump into computers. The system we live under is capitalism. It's aims are to provide profits to those who invest their existing wealth in innovations. If those with…

I don't get why people play devil's advocate in defense of scummy behavior by tech companies. Every shitty thing they do should be called out, exposed and condemned. If they know they don't have public support or defenders they will be better behaved.

I don't get why people play devil's advocate in defense of scummy behavior by tech companies.

"Scummy behavior" is dumping poison in rivers or working people 90 hours a week. Normal competition is large companies putting smaller companies out of business through greater leverage. I don't care about a random small company getting rewarded for its random innovations. Why should I? The smaller company would probably crush an even small company given the opportunity. Large companies can sometimes offer more health benefits and such and smaller companies work 90 hour weeks more often.

If you want a different social system or something, good for you. If we're talking the present system, weeping for the operations of the market is waste of time. Regulate actual bad behavior, sure. But otherwise, save all regulatory effort, I'd suggest.

Re: Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

#105

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway_quote wrote: post #45

> For example, when Mr. Zuckerberg met with the founders of startups, including Evan Spiegel, chief executive of Snap, and Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare Inc., he presented them with two scenarios: either they accept the price he was offering for their companies, or face Facebook’s efforts to copy their products and make operating more difficult, according to people familiar with the conversations. In both…

[deleted]

Re: Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

#106

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #102
MiroF wrote: post #17

Why is this thread full of commentators attacking Snap for completely unrelated things? Strikes me as odd. FB told IG influencers they might lose their verified status if they link to a SC profile? Seems like that was a mistake on their part, could they really not anticipate future antitrust action?

Most threads are full of commenters attacking whatever for unrelated things. Please don't insinuate astroturfing without evidence; this is in the site guidelines because it's so common, off-topic, and undermining of community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[deleted]

Re: Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

#107

Post by lifeisstillgood »

vonmoltke wrote: post #86
sp332 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10125704

I think lifeisstillgood was asking for the eHarmony study.

Yes I was looking for the study behind moron4hire's comment:

I did a study of eHarmony years ago and came to the conclusion that only 10% of all "matches" were people who had the capability of returning a message.

I can quite believe that dating sites manipulate the numbers to look better themselves, and weirdly it's something that with my old school hat on is "not worth regulating" - but as we move to a world where most (?) people will find a partner online this way, being able to trust those numbers would be paramount.

(oddly perhaps such regulation would kill off the market. One of my wife's now divorced friends showed me her Tinder matches - and boy the pickings are poor for middle aged women. Now if you showed a parade of out of shape morons and then said actually only 2 of them are available, people might just stop the whole market and take up needlepoint)

Re: Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

#108

Post by buboard »

sandworm101 wrote: post #26
moron4hire wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you are aware of the specific details of what Ashley Madison did, but basically they were using bots to convince men that there were actual women interested in meeting (if only the use paid the membership fee to enable messaging), when by-and-large there were none. It was a scam. I mean, most dating websites use a series of tricks of messaging and "matches" to trick people into thinking there are more…

There werent any women on AM. When the story broke they couldnt find anyone who actually had an affair. It was scams all the way down. (And when the mounties responded after the hack there wasnt any evidence either. A so-called unicorn had no cohesive security program.)

wow that's ... in a way ... sad. pretty telling about the state of relationships in this day

Re: Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

#109

Post by lammalamma25 »

Does anyone else have trouble getting upset about these kind of stories? I can believe anti-competitive behavior is happening, but we're talking about snapchat stories and Instagram trends. It's not like they are a phone company raising prices on their customers or a railroad squeezing shippers. I get why this could be bad for a competitive marketplace, but does this hurt the consumer? What are the net downsides of this sort of behavior (not being sarcastic. I really have trouble thinking of any serious ones)

Re: Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

#110

Post by darawk »

lammalamma25 wrote: post #109

Does anyone else have trouble getting upset about these kind of stories? I can believe anti-competitive behavior is happening, but we're talking about snapchat stories and Instagram trends. It's not like they are a phone company raising prices on their customers or a railroad squeezing shippers. I get why this could be bad for a competitive marketplace, but does this hurt the consumer? What are the net downsides of t…

The downside is that if you know Facebook can and will do this to any competitive threat, you just won't bother to start your company in the first place.
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