Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

shaneosullivan.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 145 posts

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#31

Post by hiq »

beefield wrote: post #14
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many aspects of adtech that are ethically neutral. Just as advertising itself - there are even ads created by great creators that are works of modern art. It's only when it's abused adtech becomes evil.

It may be "many" but it does not mean that the defining nature of advertising is ethically neutral. I think I just quote Banksy/Tejaratchi: "People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is h…

> I think I just quote Banksy

Banksy is not the original author, Sean Tejaratchi is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Tejaratchi#Crap_Hound https://i.imgur.com/D0pTs.jpg

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#32

Post by ForHackernews »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #15
simonh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this sort of thing happen many times. What usually happens is the original team that built it leave the company or move on to other teams, and the one engineer left actually has a different job as well now but is stuck supporting it part time as a favour. It's not that you couldn't assign other engineers to help support it, but they wouldn't have any idea how to do so because there's probably no documentati…

It was because Facebook practiced open allocation for engineers at the time. Essentially, you had a choice of teams and the manager would need to convince the engineer to work on the project. At the time, ads was not a high status part of FB engineering, and as such, it was very difficult to get people to work on ads products.

It's funny that people want to work at Facebook or Google but don't want to work on ads.

In other companies, everyone wants to work near the profit center and avoid cost centers.

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#34

Post by jasonvorhe »

mutatio wrote: post #29

It raises interesting questions of whether Google (advertising company) should be the guardian of the web's primary browser; strategically it could deprecate features direct competitors depend on (let's assume FB is now also a ad company). The fact that web's primary ad platform also owns the web's primary browser sure is "interesting". The inverse of that is that it might not have incentive to deprecate features - w…

iirc it was Mozilla who put the nail in the coffin of WebSQL and if you read this post, it actually mentions that Chrome was the last browser to even still support the feature after it had been abandoned by Firefox and Opera already. What does this have to do with Google owning Chrome?

Of course, the question itself is valid but I don't see how it relates to the topic.

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#35

Post by rvba »

ForHackernews wrote: post #32
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was because Facebook practiced open allocation for engineers at the time. Essentially, you had a choice of teams and the manager would need to convince the engineer to work on the project. At the time, ads was not a high status part of FB engineering, and as such, it was very difficult to get people to work on ads products.

It's funny that people want to work at Facebook or Google but don't want to work on ads. In other companies, everyone wants to work near the profit center and avoid cost centers.

Because those projects are hard.

It is much easier to make a greenfield project that will get 70% done and cancelled before anyone even asks to fix bugs.

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#36

Post by chaz6 »

baybal2 wrote: post #33

Google actually had a successful social network project, Orkut, they just continuously marginalised it for it to be too NIH for US headquarters.

As far as I can tell, Orkut was the original incarnation of a modern social network, but they failed to capitalize on it.

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#37

Post by [deleted] »

ForHackernews wrote: post #32
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was because Facebook practiced open allocation for engineers at the time. Essentially, you had a choice of teams and the manager would need to convince the engineer to work on the project. At the time, ads was not a high status part of FB engineering, and as such, it was very difficult to get people to work on ads products.

It's funny that people want to work at Facebook or Google but don't want to work on ads. In other companies, everyone wants to work near the profit center and avoid cost centers.

[deleted]

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#38

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Osiris wrote: post #7

If the product was responsible for 25% of the company revenue, why was only half of one engineer assigned to it? And after the vulnerability was discovered, they still only had 5 people assigned to it while it increased in importance to 50% of revenue?

I hope those 13 engineers got paid millions. So much weight and responsibility on their shoulders! They were responsible for nearly $2 billion in 2013 (25% of $7.87bn), and nearly $14bn in 2016 when the work was finished (50% of $27.63bn)

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#39

Post by yholio »

Today it's called Business Manager and it remains a user hostile pile of JavaScript with dubious design and riddled with bugs.

The only reason anybody puts up with it is because there's no other way to access powerful targeting tools, and we are forced to depend on Facebook.

More to the point of the original story, no, Google couldn't have killed Facebook by flipping that switch. The Power Editor users would have done whatever it takes to access the interface, installed an insecure older browser, ran commands in the console, build a relay computer in their back yard, and so on. They will do whatever it takes because they are not choosing that platform for its features, they are professionals doing a job, and that job is reaching the user base of Facebook with their ads. If they can't do that they will lose their jobs and clients.

Re: Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch

#40

Post by dna_polymerase »

Teever wrote: post #22
beefield wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be "many" but it does not mean that the defining nature of advertising is ethically neutral. I think I just quote Banksy/Tejaratchi: "People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is h…

One time I saw a fascinating article about how scientists were working to grow skin complete with natural looking hair from stem cells for burn victims and such. I thought the article was really neat and I was in a hurry so I emailed a the link to myself. The next time I logged into my gmail to read it I happened to be at a machine without adblock and I saw that google was serving me ads for garbage treatments for ma…

The ad probably promoted a product that could regrow hair for bald people. You just took that B̶a̶n̶k̶s̶y̶ Sean Tejaratchi quote and applied it to them. You chose to be offended by it. Sure baldness isn't wrong. But a lot of people like hair better and therefore a market exists for this type of product. Nothing wrong about that.
Post reply on HN