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Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

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Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#131

Post by 9rx »

gosub100 wrote: post #90
bryanlarsen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GM is not liable when your wheels fall off because a criminal removed the nuts.

Then why do they have locks on the doors? They know there are these things called criminals. MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade.

> Then why do they have locks on the doors?

Because the customer eventually decided it was worth paying for. Emphasis on eventually. It took over 30 years from the first car having optional door locks to locks becoming a standard feature.

> MSFT did nothing to stop spyware for at least a decade.

More like half a decade. The first real instance of spyware was recognized in 1999. Microsoft began working on their anti-spyware software in 2004.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#133

Post by noir_lord »

9rx wrote: post #115
malfist wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When ford deployed LexusNexus tracking to my F150, they didn't refund any of my purchase price. Samsung isn't refunding any of their $3k fridges that now have mandatory ads

They didn't need to offer a refund. It was already priced in. You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates while standing starry-eyed at the impossibly low price it was being offered at, but they knew it was coming. After all, appropriately specced hardware to be able to do it was already onboard.

This is the most HN of HN takes.

Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future.

The price a product is offered at is the price for the product at that time, you don't get to say well I sold it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data until I recoup that $10 I "lost".

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#134

Post by Workaccount2 »

malfist wrote: post #98
Workaccount2 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't double dipping, they are subsidizing the cost with ads.

When ford deployed LexusNexus tracking to my F150, they didn't refund any of my purchase price. Samsung isn't refunding any of their $3k fridges that now have mandatory ads

The norm is reduced costs because there are ads. The same Samsung also sells deeply discounted TVs that are ridden with ads. Netflix, amazon prime, Hulu, and youtube offer ad-subsidized subscriptions.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#136

Post by hajile »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #86
macNchz wrote: post #16

Alongside a password manager and keeping things up to date, using an ad blocker is truly a foundational security practice these days. The big advertising players simply have all of the wrong incentives to control this problem. They could massively reduce the volume of scams advertised on their networks, but it’d be worse for them on two fronts: they’d have to pay for more moderation, and they’d lose billions in reven…

The answer isn't ad blocking, the answer is paying directly and in full (so no need to subsidize cost with ads) for the service. I cannot wrap my head around how generally intelligent people are completely blind to this. I guess 20 years of ad-block-is-the-norm has left people totally confused about internet monetization. I've never encoutered a problem that has such a clear answer, and that so many intelligent peopl…

We need to have an easy way to pay small amounts for a one-time service. A lot of websites offer content that you need only a couple of times in your life. It's worth paying for, but not worth all the hassle of setting up a normal payment.

This leaves ads as the only form of revenue and because ads don't care about the content, this creates a race to the bottom on generating slop.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#137

Post by 9rx »

noir_lord wrote: post #133
9rx wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't need to offer a refund. It was already priced in. You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates while standing starry-eyed at the impossibly low price it was being offered at, but they knew it was coming. After all, appropriately specced hardware to be able to do it was already onboard.

This is the most HN of HN takes. Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future. The price a product is offered at is the price for the product at that time , you don't get to say well I sold it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data until I recoup that $10 I "lost".

> the price for the product at that time

Exactly. The necessary hardware to enable the tracking was installed at the time of purchase. It is not like 10 years later someone dreamed up the idea and decided to stealthy in the night start bolting on new components to every vehicle they could find. It was a feature that was there at the time of purchase and the sale was priced accordingly.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#138

Post by strogonoff »

the_snooze wrote: post #48
strogonoff wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everybody on social media was an actual paying customer of social platforms, like we pay mobile providers (I originally wrote “water providers”, which was in fact a somewhat unfit analogy), we could demand better service and switch away to a competitor who offers it. Unfortunately, we are robbed of our ability to pay with our wallets.

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming services, IoT, operating systems) double-dip into tracking and advertisement. Why would a business actually want to do the hard work of serving user needs when they can hedge their bets with ad revenue? Line must go up.

First, in any case, the right solution is to make this business model (treating your users as a product, whether by offering free service or heavily discounted/subsidised product) simply illegal. It violates the way market is supposed to work and exploits information asymmetry—regulation against which there is plenty of precedent of.

This makes the rest moot, but I will still list why I don’t think it’s like you say at least in case of social media.

If social media was paid only (like any actual product or service intended to benefit the customer) and users were choosing between paying different amounts rather than paying vs. not paying, it would kill the network effect outright; platforms would have to struggle to keep users, and to that end would start implementing features users want and need (rather than exploiting their emotional state and employing dark patterns[0] to boost ad impressions).

The interest of a service provider is aligned with the interest of the customer. The incentive to do bad unethical things to the user may exist either way, but it is when the user is not the customer that it becomes a natural course of things. It is still possible to “double-dip”[1], but the difference between users being customers and users not being customers is that in the former you can be an honest service provider and sustain yourself by doing things in the benefit of the user.

[0] For example, have you noticed how Instagram’s GUI is carefully designed to require you to tap two times, with a teeny tiny chevron as the only indicator, every time you open the app to switch to the timeline of people you actually follow, rather than whatever the algorithm suggests (and how carelessly swiping photo carousel left makes you exist that carousel, and lose the scroll position)?

[1] Additionally, note that the examples you named (cars, IoT, OS[2]) make a lot of money from a single purchase and/or are fairly inflexible to switch away from, compared to social media where interoperability is pretty much solved with open standards.

[2] What is a paid-only streaming service that “dips” into advertisement in some unethical way?

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#139

Post by energy123 »

strogonoff wrote: post #39
malfist wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a situation we accept out of other industries. You water provider doesn't get to pipe you sewage every now and again because its too expensive to moderate. We shouldn't accept it for big tech either. And we certainly shouldn't make it the responsibility of the end use to protect themselves

If everybody on social media was an actual paying customer of social platforms, like we pay mobile providers (I originally wrote “water providers”, which was in fact a somewhat unfit analogy), we could demand better service and switch away to a competitor who offers it. Unfortunately, we are robbed of our ability to pay with our wallets.

We could demand it either way. There's no iron law of the universe that says otherwise. The application of the law is supposed to be objective but the contents are just made up by those with the power to do it.

Re: Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

#140

Post by patentatt »

vintermann wrote: post #95
Workaccount2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer isn't ad blocking, the answer is paying directly and in full (so no need to subsidize cost with ads) for the service. I cannot wrap my head around how generally intelligent people are completely blind to this. I guess 20 years of ad-block-is-the-norm has left people totally confused about internet monetization. I've never encoutered a problem that has such a clear answer, and that so many intelligent peopl…

Facebook has made it very clear that they don't want you to do this: you can pay for ad-free (I believe it's because they're legally obliged to offer that as a result of some things they'be done and deals they've made), but the cost is easily 100 times what they can make directly on ads for me. The only conclusion can be that they place an immensely high indirect value on serving me ads.

Same with streaming services, ad-free services seem to be unusually higher priced than the ad-supported tiers. Netflix for example charges $10 for ad-free over the ad support tier ($18 vs. $8). I’ve seen estimates that ad revenue per subscriber is less than that, maybe $4-$8. And there’s a cost to that revenue as well, so their profit is even lower. Why go through all that trouble? Maybe the economics works out somehow, in that users willing to pay to get rid of ads are so price insensitive they may as well squeeze them for more money? Or the lower subscription cost opens up enough new subscribers to make it worthwhile to tolerate a much lower margin. I am very suspicious though and wonder if there is a more insidious or otherwise opaque motivation behind it. Is there some kind of ‘soft power’ benefit to being in the ad business?
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