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After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

jordan-shared.medium.com

201–210 of 322 posts

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#201
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satellite fleets?

Which could theoretically be done today but then you'd be a tenant of Musk. I really think the idea of mesh networks is great for neighborhoods but can it be extended to a global-scale network (well ... continent scale until there's a personal communication mechanism that will cross oceans)? EDIT: This was posted on today's "Who is hiring?" thread - not really p2p Internet but ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

I imagine there are no upper bounds to the growth of satellite communication capabilities other than physical limits. Extrapolating a few decades at current growth rates out the network be enormous.

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#202
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you were right about crap content. I'd never heard of shared.com, but the articles on that site are complete garbage. I really don't understand how that sort of thing can generate enough money to spend millions of dollars on ads.

This is very common content marketing content. These articles are not intended to educate the reader, they're written to get high search rankings, and high click throughs.

So is the business that I buy an ad on Facebook, someone clicks on it, I then show them a bunch of ads, and I get paid enough for those ads to recoup the money I spent on my Facebook ad, and then some?

Kind of genius, in a way.

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#203
post #182
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

It's obviously a judgment call but I don't think the GP comment was super pejorative. It was fulminating a bit (also against the guidelines), but not so much that we would post a moderation scolding. The issue with the comment I replied to is that it crossed into a personal harangue. That tends to degrade discussion much faster—note how with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25634048 the thread is already headed d…

Who are you dang?

Are you an official representative of HN? Because it appears that the vast majority of your comments are nothing but comments about other people's comments, or directives to follow guidelines.

Frankly, it seems more positive for the community to vote with their feet on comments and posts vs one individual continuously navigating through posts and threads telling people how to behave.

I'm serious about the first question...

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#204
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously a judgment call but I don't think the GP comment was super pejorative. It was fulminating a bit (also against the guidelines), but not so much that we would post a moderation scolding. The issue with the comment I replied to is that it crossed into a personal harangue. That tends to degrade discussion much faster—note how with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25634048 the thread is already headed d…

Who are you dang? Are you an official representative of HN? Because it appears that the vast majority of your comments are nothing but comments about other people's comments, or directives to follow guidelines. Frankly, it seems more positive for the community to vote with their feet on comments and posts vs one individual continuously navigating through posts and threads telling people how to behave. I'm serious abo…

> Are you an official representative of HN?

Yes, he is. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25225775

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#205
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously a judgment call but I don't think the GP comment was super pejorative. It was fulminating a bit (also against the guidelines), but not so much that we would post a moderation scolding. The issue with the comment I replied to is that it crossed into a personal harangue. That tends to degrade discussion much faster—note how with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25634048 the thread is already headed d…

Who are you dang? Are you an official representative of HN? Because it appears that the vast majority of your comments are nothing but comments about other people's comments, or directives to follow guidelines. Frankly, it seems more positive for the community to vote with their feet on comments and posts vs one individual continuously navigating through posts and threads telling people how to behave. I'm serious abo…

he's a moderator

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#207
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$330k/month means that you could have multiple employees specifically and solely tasked with managing this one account. It is not a small amount by any means.

You could but isn't the whole thesis of the internet-business a la Google or Facebook that it's "automated"?

Ad buy isn't that automated. Check out vendors like Wordstream -- it stays complicated above the minimal purchase threshholds.

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#208
post #161

Let's be fair here. Shared.com is in the business of producing and distributing crap content. That's a subjective term, but it's like the supreme court ruling on pornography, you'll know it when you see it. These guys most likely "skirt the line" to just operate as a mediocre and crappy content distribution network, that at scale, makes a lot of money because there is a certain subset of the population that will eat…

Wow, you were right about crap content. I'd never heard of shared.com, but the articles on that site are complete garbage. I really don't understand how that sort of thing can generate enough money to spend millions of dollars on ads.

Obviously anecdotal but from my experience of having done a bit of tech support for many friends and family members, this kind of content is extremely popular. By this kind of content, I mean what I consider low-effort memes, jokes and gifs surrounded with copious amounts of ads. Many if not most users seem to be ok with it.

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#209

I've become increasingly more skeptical when I read those stories. Let me be clear, I absolutely despise Facebook, but as I understand it, they are massively under fire from all sorts of governments over moderating the content which is posted on their platforms. There is a chance that this business knew they were doing something borderline dodgy in a grey area and Facebook started to weed those "bad" actors out in th…

That's the really bad thing about being the victim of algorithmic discrimination (like I was too with FB ads) and quasi-monopoly abuse. There are plenty of people with similar stories like this one complaining on forums like r/PPC. Dealing with Facebook is like a bureaucratic nightmare from a Kafka story even for customers who spend millions of dollars.

But of course these cases remain a minority or else Facebook would already be bankrupt. That's why the majority will call these people whiners, probably guilty, and so on.

Basically, what Facebook is doing is automatized slander. You've violated some policy but we don't tell you which one. You've been caught in "suspicious behavior" (an actual term used by them) but we don't tell you what we mean by that. You've tried to circumvent our policies - or maybe you haven't, just beg us to give you another chance.

Let's just say it's not fun having to deal with this, and no company should rely much on Facebook ads.

Re: After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shared.com is in the business of producing and distributing crap content. ... > They just aren't going to bring themselves down to the level... and I don't blame them. Without being familiar with Shared, I'm willing to take you at your word on the company. I do question your conclusion though. I've seen no indications that Facebook has any standards and if anything they seem to promote crap content not bury it. If…

There's a difference between "crap content" shared by users on the platform, and crap content promoted via ads.

The difference is primarily the fact that the crap content promoted by ads pays Facebook's bills.
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