Something I think is worth pointing out: this is happening in the Netherlands, i.e. their jurisdiction. I think most people here aren't from the Netherlands. I think they should be free to try out the legislation they want, and people elsewhere don't need to agree. It's good that different countries can try different things, and if that doesn't work it's a lesson for other places, and if it works that's even better. People on the internet tend to focus too much on uniformity and conformity, as if we lived everyone in the same place.
NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system
191–200 of 247 posts
Re: NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah sure, because life in the USA is so much more awesome than in Europe. Naww, they can keep their relevancy in the world stage. We are good over here living in the "stone age".
The problem isn't that Europe is living in the stone age, clearly they aren't. The problem is that they are living in the modern age entirely on the back of foreign tech . Chinese hardware running American software. Industry running on American energy, and protection totally reliant on American defense (the US spent more money per capita in Ukraine than the EU did...). This doesn't even factor in generous welfare pro…
> Chinese hardware running American software
Who designed the chip in your phone? Is it more likely to be Intel (US) or is it more likely to be ARM (UK)?
Where does Linux ( which pretty much runs the entire internet from routers to servers ) originate from?
> Industry running on American energy
Eh? While EU imports of US gas are on the rise due to the Ukraine war ( and the blowing up of Russian pipelines which, BTW, the US is implicated in ) - it's a fraction of total energy.
> protection totally reliant on American defense
So the US bases on British islands in the Indian Ocean, or in Japan ( put there after the end of the war with ... Japan ) are purely for the benefit of others and not in anyway part of US global interests?
Re: NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Listen I am all for these big tech companies losing the users but I don't think this was the reason why they wrote this comment or my understanding of it My understanding of the parent comment and the comment above the parent comment was that the grand comment was frustrated on why things can't be subscription based internet instead of a sneaky ad tech which invades our privacy. The comment responding to it basically…
I don't think it's that companies want the ad model, it's that they know they cannot compete with it if they have a subscription model. Nebula, the "answer" to the shittyness of youtube that creators have been falling over themselves to promote for the last 5 years, still has a conversion rate under 1%. People hate ads, but they really really hate subscriptions.
Nebula just didn’t have enough content I cared about. I happily paid for it, but outside of one or two creators it was “meh.” Half of it felt like content specifically for elementary schoolers. So I, being childless, eventually canceled it. That said, I should probably give it another go, to see if that’s improved at all.
Personally, I really don’t think the problem is subscriptions at this point. I think it’s just having enough content to justify the subscription. Netflix probably costs 4x what Nebula does but certainly has at least that much more content.
I subscribe to Disney/Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube premium. I’ve tried others but there’s not enough content to justify the monthly expense unless I’m actively watching something. And Disney/Hulu is next on the chopping block because the content sort of sucks, there are large periods of time where nothing I want to watch is released, and the whole thing with Kimmel.
Re: NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But I think every web designer knows that putting even the slightest barrier between the user and the content drives away vast numbers of people. I have a pet theory that these business models paper over the vast worthlessness of many modern technologies. That the value of Facebook is not in it's technologies or network, but rather in the arbitrage of the value of data when combined. We pay for the nearly worthless…
Even if the data collected by Meta is really worthless (and that is a big if), Meta shows content to a billion(s?) of people everyday. That alone is definitely not worthless lol
Showing content to users that don't value watching the content is worthless. There's no inherent worth to showing content. My argument is that users consider the content worthless, and therefore any attempt to monetize the the showing of the content directly will end up failing.
Re: NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system
#195The headline is provocative. The issue is simple: Meta has a recommended feed and another feed which is reverse chronological. The option is hidden and not default, and all the NL judge is asking is for that option to be preserved and not be reset everytime user opens the app/website. Instagram never had this option, this does not say whether they have to implement it too.
I would be curious if the order stands as for curation as well. Someone could have 1000s of friends, and you cant show posts from everyone in a reverse chronological order for a good ux.
Re: NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system
#196They need to just ban the ad model and make subscriptions (including free with no ads, if the provider wants it) mandatory. I don't think people understand how the economics of these apps (and websites) work, and it's been so long now that their incorrect assumptions (the feeds are free and the greedy providers shove ads in them) have turned into bedrock beliefs. You pay for instagram with your personal data, which i…
the only solution is not yo consume things that operate on the model. the difficulty there is that the model is generally adopted. so a massive amount of users will go from 1 to another system only to get rug pulled out from under them again and again.
this can be a business model, economic circumstance, mgmt change. a lot can trigger such a shift in services up to then just fine to use.
most companies did not start out on these premises, and its really hard to tell what service will turn next.
i hope maybe ISPs could handle it and offer it as a service. like an ad free internet. but then they will just more deeply embed the ads and it will still get past. changes in designs of the apps will lead to blocking being ineffective.
so really then all that is left is not to use anything that has potential to identify you and your use of it. thats not a lot of things currently. most are frowned upon if you use it in a lot of regions.
Re: NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
YouTube offers an ad-free subscription called YouTube premium. It's reasonably priced and includes access to YouTube Music. I like the hybrid approach of being able to be ad-supported or paid with no ads. I would like to see more of it. What I don't like is a paid service like Amazon Prime that also includes ads. They include ads in their search results and they include tons of ads in their video library. FWIW: Hulu…
> It's reasonably priced and includes access to YouTube Music. The “price” includes giving your data to the data vampires and is thereby incredibly unreasonable.
[dead]
Re: NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system
#198They need to just ban the ad model and make subscriptions (including free with no ads, if the provider wants it) mandatory. I don't think people understand how the economics of these apps (and websites) work, and it's been so long now that their incorrect assumptions (the feeds are free and the greedy providers shove ads in them) have turned into bedrock beliefs. You pay for instagram with your personal data, which i…
the only solution is not yo consume things that operate on the model. the difficulty there is that the model is generally adopted. so a massive amount of users will go from 1 to another system only to get rug pulled out from under them again and again. this can be a business model, economic circumstance, mgmt change. a lot can trigger such a shift in services up to then just fine to use. most companies did not start…
a last point would be that another problem is that the apps feed into ad networks. so using 1 is already an issue, mostly the same as using all of them. maybe less data but they can get a lot from little anyway.
Re: NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Listen I am all for these big tech companies losing the users but I don't think this was the reason why they wrote this comment or my understanding of it My understanding of the parent comment and the comment above the parent comment was that the grand comment was frustrated on why things can't be subscription based internet instead of a sneaky ad tech which invades our privacy. The comment responding to it basically…
I don't think it's that companies want the ad model, it's that they know they cannot compete with it if they have a subscription model. Nebula, the "answer" to the shittyness of youtube that creators have been falling over themselves to promote for the last 5 years, still has a conversion rate under 1%. People hate ads, but they really really hate subscriptions.
A good approach would be that usage means you gotta offer storage or bandwidth in some way. Very very difficult to implement, but say for a PeerTube: wanna watch it? Offer a small percentage of storage for storing chunks. Be a part of the system you use. Of course, the more services you use, the more resources you give up. Or you subscribe.
Re: NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system
#200Please for the love of god make it a legal requirement that messaging must be made available as a separate app without addictive feeds. Or make it such that users can disable the feed in settings. We need to be able to message our friends without seeing a feed without having to convert all of our friends to a new platform.
> We need to be able to message our friends without seeing a feed without having to convert all of our friends to a new platform. Those people are in the app because of the social features and the feed in the first place. The messaging features were built on top of the platform. Requiring companies to make and maintain a separate app entirely if their product has messaging features is an unreasonable requirement. If…
> Requiring companies to make and maintain a separate app entirely if their product has messaging features is an unreasonable requirement.
In this case Meta already has such an app (Messenger), and it has at times supported instagram messaging. I'm not sure why they broke that association a little while ago, but it's not unreasonable that they could reconnect it.