What about treating them as a monopoly? And giving them the laws of a monopoly? Like suggested here: https://hbr.org/2019/05/dont-break-up-facebook-treat-it-like...
FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
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Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#622Honestly, while I have my doubts about this succeeding, it nevertheless feels like the big tech suit most likely to succeed. Amazon promoting its own brands isn't much different from a supermarket offering its own brand items. Apple isn't a monopoly in phones because of Android. And Google's search is so inherently tied to selling ads as a business model that separating them is a difficult argument -- plus search com…
Amazon can be split on other dimensions, e.g. AWS as a separate company, delivery as a separate company.
How does cleaving companies apart into their separate unrelated businesses address monopoly practices or anti-trust issues? If Amazon has a monopoly on delivery, the parted-out delivery company will still have a monopoly on delivery. If AWS has a monopoly on cloud computing, making AWS independent changes nothing. AWS is not going to begin competing with Amazon's last-mile delivery business if the two are split off into separate companies.
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point it needs to be illegal. When a large company of 30000 employees starts wiping out entire industries with cash buffers, you can see why this is just wrong and monopolistic/oligopolistic behavior.
The problem with this is that would make virtually all of silicon valley start ups illegal. In terms of loss, the actual hardware is profitable as far as I've heard.
There's a large difference between using your profits to crush competition in another area, versus setting dollar bills on fire in the pursuit of growth.
There should be regulations around both of these, but they'll need to be different ones.
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah this is the right solution. Just add a link to the page numbers at the top of the thread. It's unintrusive, and still follows the minimalist design tenants of this website.
or put previous/next links in a line at the start of the comments, instead of just 'more' all the way at the bottom. i wonder if they're constrained because their staff can't maintain the codebase well in the nonstandard arc language, and pg obviously has retired
If the codebase is the problem then the obvious best solution is to write a bot that automatically posts dang's comment, with links to the various pages. :)
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#625Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#626I don't see this as being a solvable problem.
Having a psychographic model is dangerous to social structures, it just makes it far too easy to manipulate those who are easy to manipulate (which, given any topic, is the vast majority of people).
There are no effective defenses against this that I can see.
The trouble is the disconnect between Facebook's apparent business model and what it actually is, although I'll admit this might be conflating who is the real bad guy here.
The business of advertising is behavior manipulation, pure and simple. Nothing about that strikes me as "safe"
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's why this is a politicized move by the FTC. No reason to get into politics on this site, but it's pretty obvious.
Even politically it’s just ... weird. Most of the top content on Facebook each month is sympathetic to the current administration. Facebook has arguably played the most ball with them in comparison to other tech companies.
Yes, but FB are hated by both left and right (for entirely different reasons), so this is likely to actually go ahead.
The notion that FB increase ad prices by increasing the supply of ads is completely insane though, and I hope that's a misunderstanding by the parent poster.
FB/IG have an auction-based ads system, which means that you pay what other advertisers think the user is worth, rather than what you think the user is worth. In such a system, prices increasing (along with supply) is a symptom of massive, massive demand rather than a nefarious plot on FB's part.
Don't get me wrong, FB have done a bunch of shady stuff over the years, but this lawsuit seems pretty wrongheaded to me.
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seeing sharing in a social graph is easy. Defining what is "propaganda" is all but impossible.
It’s advertising Facebook isn’t getting paid for. I’m surprised they don’t go after it as a violation of their terms of service.
It drives engagement which likely leads to overall more add views and clicks? "Doom scrolling" and such is something that keeps people on the site for longer which is probably one of their most important metrics
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a stub comment to hold all the replies to the parent. I did not mean to explode an offtopicness charge, and usually turn off replies for these because the same issue comes up every time and the answer is always the same. (When it comes to explaining something, the internet is stateless [1].) Forgot to do so in this case! I'll move them now. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I get it that HN is all about minimal design, but the need for the parent post (in this and other threads) is a sign that the UI could be improved in this aspect.
It is a courtesy, there is no real need for the post; the "More" link is quite discoverable.
I don't think this extremely minor issue warrants cluttering the UI with additional "page 1 2 3 ..." links at the top.
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget FB Dating!
turns out people didn't want to swipe right on the same website their grandma uses good lesson in there that some domains just don't mix
And don't FB have Jobs too? Their take on LinkedIN (and Glassdoor, etc) from 2017. I believe that didn't work out either, but I'm not sure, I see job posts floating in FB from time to time. Maybe another example of mixed domains that don't mix well, but I could be wrong.