641–650 of 736 posts
I can't help but step back and look at the trade wars between the US and China. China is gaining ground fast. US on the otherhand is turning to infighting by suing FB, Google and Amazon. Countries win through innovation. It's hard to innovate with such distractions. China must be happy cheering on its tech companies while the US is on the sidelines. Go figure...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
However the cost that users pay for engaging on the platform is the use of their data. So I guess what I meant by aggressively increase the “price” of advertising was referring to the hidden cost of Facebook being able to serve adverts in the first place.
As others have pointed out, anti-monopoly legislation os largely about preventing firms from abusing monopoly power to increase prices. If you consider the cost of using a social network to be the data the user provides, then the more data the user gives up to the use the social network, the higher the cost. Because of the strong network effect, users may have little choice but to stay on the platform if they wish to engage in the social network. The notion is that Facebook are abusing the stickiness of their social network by increasing monetisation of user data, knowing that users won’t easily leave.
By purchasing Instagram and WhatsApp, at the time the two biggest threats to engagement on Facebook the website, Facebook the company are able to coalesce the three networks, making stickiness stronger, making it easier to raise prices (consumption of user data in exchange for adverts) and thereby abusing a monopoly position.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And had they been able to, what do you think would’ve happened to Skype had it been acquired by Facebook back when it was the main game in town? I think that’s the point.
Instagram was not the "main game in town" when Facebook acquired them. It was one of many photo sharing/editing apps and had far less market penetration than it does today. Why should Facebook be punished for acquiring a promising app and turning it into what it is today by integrating it into its ecosystem? Hindsight is 20/20 but at the time of acquisition it was far from a sure thing and it's safe to say that witho…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But my point is "it's the norm". Either you use WhatsApp or you don't talk to people. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing, really.. I think "monopolies" have their place in standardizing things that we do and it makes it convenient. (Side note: if fucking Apple would open up iMessage on android/windows they would OWN the chat market in a matter of minutes in the US) But there does get to a point where you cannot s…
Isnt that the case of network effects though ? Facebook started off in a market with Orkut, Myspace, Friendster and along came Path, Twitter, Google+. Facebook had network effects and people gravitated towards it. So this is basically saying network effect is bad. You cant get too popular.
When Facebook first went public, an older relative asked me if he should invest in Facebook. My only insight was being an internet user at the time and I said no, there was no reason that Facebook wouldn’t be another MySpace. Facebook's only value was their users and users were historically very finicky and moved around platforms at will. I argued that Facebook would make no money and wouldn’t be around in a couple o…
The way facebook is different is that it isn't just a social network, it IS your online identity. The fact that they make you use your real name rather than just some username is what made it work. And what continues to make it a more permanent part of who you are digitally. Facebook login makes it even more intertwined and hard to remove.
And Facebook login being "necessary"?... Never used it. Never will.
I feel like instead of pushing for the companies to separate, congress should pass laws mandating [adversarial interoperability]( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera... ). Then the data (including the social graph) really would belong to the users, and facebook would have to compete with multiple other “social network clients” that would rapidly emerge. Facebook would lose some monopoly profi…
There's no way to provide access to the social graph in a privacy preserving way. It's not okay to allow a third party to access the data your friends have shared with you without your friends consenting. Unencumbered API access to the social graph is exactly what led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and promising to restrict API access was part of Facebook's settlement with the FTC.
Why? If they shared it with me, that should mean they trust me to decide to whom I delegate the access no? I could as well just screenshot it and post it to twitter, what does make the social graph so special?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bought all the platforms people were going to jump to. The "Onvao Protect" traffic snooping VPN to identify what up and coming products people were using was one particularly shady part of this strategy.
You didn't need any traffic snooping to notice millions of Instagram and WhatsApp users. Acquisitions were no brainer for Facebook.
I feel like instead of pushing for the companies to separate, congress should pass laws mandating [adversarial interoperability]( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera... ). Then the data (including the social graph) really would belong to the users, and facebook would have to compete with multiple other “social network clients” that would rapidly emerge. Facebook would lose some monopoly profi…
There's no way to provide access to the social graph in a privacy preserving way. It's not okay to allow a third party to access the data your friends have shared with you without your friends consenting. Unencumbered API access to the social graph is exactly what led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and promising to restrict API access was part of Facebook's settlement with the FTC.
There is risk, but saying that users can’t be trusted with an API to their own social graph seems to be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
[0] https://www.healthit.gov/topic/health-it-initiatives/blue-bu...