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Facebook Should Pay All of Us

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Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#101

Post by api »

Spooky23 wrote: post #62
api wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe so, or at least it's an interesting thought experiment. I've thought for a while that the dominant business model of the web is for-profit piracy. I don't mean The Pirate Bay -- those are small time players and are not very profitable if at all. I mean Google, Facebook, etc. To make that argument work you have to define piracy independently of whether or not it's illegal piracy. In this case we'd define for-pro…

Your premise is backwards. Does your desire to be a farmer oblige society to build a road so you can get access to the market? The the internet is a big stack of books in a room, Google is a librarian with a master index who organizes the data. Calling that piracy is a stretch of the term. Actually, taking the thought experiment further, you could argue that book publishers are the real pirate, taking ideas and makin…

Yes, that's a very valid counterpoint.

The problem being explored by this and other ideas is this: the Internet has massively increased our intellectual wealth, but for the vast majority this does not translate into any increase in physical wealth. If anything, the Internet may actually make it harder for many people to earn physical renumeration from intellectual activity.

Meanwhile the cost of the most necessary physical goods and services keeps rising. We've created a world where a person can be homeless yet have the combined knowledge of all of humanity available to them instantly. We've created an imaginary post-scarcity society online, but that's coming into stark conflict with the very real scarcity of the physical world in which it ultimately exists. Cyberspace is like the Egyptian afterlife: you go to heaven, but someone must guard and bring food to your Ka.

It's truly bizarre, a total inversion of the ancient world where almost everyone could live off the land yet the priests monopolized knowledge and literacy.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#102

Post by austenallred »

wahsd wrote: post #98
austenallred wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know no one forces you to use Facebook, right?

That's not a valid argument and rather telling of your immaturity. As has been pointed out on many occasions in many different contexts, facebook has become the dominant social network. It's really not even a question of using it at all, especially when there are dependencies and compulsion to use it. So your choice of social self-exclusion or abdication of rights is a patently false one choice. In fact, many time yo…

It's valid to say, "I don't like Facebook's policies," "I don't like that Facebook is so embedded in society," or even "I don't like Facebook." But the notion you put forward that Zuckerberg started "stealing your person" or that "You are not free when you are on the Internet" is absurd. You are free. And you are not, as you suggest, being forced to take part.

Facebook is a platform. A lot of people use it. It gathers the data that you put into it. Its existence doesn't hinder your freedom, unless you're misconstruing the definition of "freedom."

Society has a lot of bullshit expectations, and there are many dominant opinions that cause circumstances I like, but none of those stop me from being "free."

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#103

Post by cousin_it »

austenallred wrote: post #100
cousin_it wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think people should always walk away rather try to fix flaws (in governments, companies or relationships)? I think it's a tradeoff, and many people feel that fixing Facebook's policies is worthwhile.

I'm by no means saying Facebook is perfect, but I take issue with the the "You are not a free person [because Facebook exists]" trope.

Yeah, it looks like we're in violent agreement.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#104

Post by pdeuchler »

austenallred wrote: post #24

The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself. Excluding the type of information that lets you steal identities (and therefore bank accounts), there's not much you can do with huge swaths of data. There's not really a market for sheer information. What makes Facebook (and other platforms that use your personal data) valuable is that they have both information about you…

What? How is this even remotely true?! Do you have any sort of factual backing behind this viewpoint?

Facebook has years and billions of data points on human interaction between friends, lovers, acquaintances, and enemies. Facebook can determine your lifestyle, sexual orientation, socio economic status, and whether or not you're married just from your friend list. Facebook has one of the largest sources of demographic information on the planet, and each of those demographics has told facebook exactly what their hopes, dreams, interests, and fears are.

This is an absolutely ridiculous line of reasoning that willfully ignores the fact that knowledge, and more importantly knowledge about you, is almost pure power. By this same logic Gmail is only worth money because they have a tiny bar above your inbox that people look at, as opposed to having an enormous machine learning corpus of people's intimate communications.

If anything, the simple fact that algorithmic traders are using Facebook's open graph data to find an edge on the stock market is blatant proof that the real money is in the data.

>>> If everyone stopped using Facebook tomorrow, the value of all the information Facebook has gathered would be negligible.

Just like if everyone stopped using the internet today all the information the NSA has gathered would be negligible, right?

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#105

Post by williamcotton »

austenallred wrote: post #96
williamcotton wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spending time and money optimizing for accounting accuracy is one of the best ways to help maximize profits! I'm having a hard time following your examples. Are you saying that they can make a fictional $7/user-per-year appear higher than the actual $0.20/user-per-year? The goal wouldn't be to have an accurate average, rather the goal would be to segment the market in to different buckets, and then perhaps use differ…

I'm not sure what you're saying anymore; I thought you were advocating that they charge per user to make the accounting more simple, instead of a more variable advertising model. Now I think you're advocating best accounting practices? I'm sure they have great internal accounting.

[tried to move to parent, but I lost the ability to edit before I could go back and add the whitespace... so I'm putting it back here so it is easier to read... sorry, I have no idea what I'm doing!!]

Ah, I think you're assuming that I'm saying they should go to a completely paid-for-in-cash-by-users model... which I'm not!

I'm just saying that if they flipped the model, and covered the operations costs directly from users, that the books would make more sense. This would make the accounting significantly more complex, so I wasn't making an argument for simplicity, rather as much detail and accuracy as possible! This information can be later analyzed and acted upon in simple ways.

This doesn't mean that there can't be a free to use service on top of a model like this. It just means that advertisers are literally paying on behalf of users for hosting, distribution and other operating costs.

This would mean that there wouldn't be advertisements on the read-side, in the "stream", rather on the write-side, when publishing... like with sponsored posts... Like, I personally choose to make my post sponsored by the Buffalo Bills because I love giving my money to the Buffalo Bills and the NFL (which I really do).

Or maybe some low-rent ads make you watch a 20 second video before paying for you to upload 200 photos from your phone, but at least you don't have to associate yourself with them.

We're smart enough to create the kinds of incentive structures that have made intellectual property function in a market economy for hundreds of years, we just need to revisit some deep fundamentals about how we buy and sell information.

It'll work out better for everyone. Facebook could take a percentage of the business for having created the market that introduced the advertisers to the authors. The authors are now free to do business as they please, directly covering their own costs or choosing to have them subsidized. The advertisers can establish better relationships with the authors, essentially treating them like business partners.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#106

Post by quadrangle »

beobab wrote: post #58
quadrangle wrote: post #57

What Facebook should do is open-source all their code, become a user-owned cooperative, and implement policies that actually serve the public interest. Short of that, it should shut down.

Why?

Because business should (should is a value judgement, remember) only do things that are positive for the world, and if a business is overall negative for the world or unethical, it shouldn't exist. Yes, that means a notable portion of today's businesses shouldn't exist.

And Facebook is overall negative because they are taking things that otherwise can exist without Facebook, like people sharing personal updates with each other, and works to be the gatekeeper "capturing value" i.e. exploiting people for their own gain in ways that severely lack accountability and democracy.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#110

Post by kuschku »

crusso wrote: post #32
kuschku wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, in many places people don’t use most of these features, but Facebook still collects Shadow-Profiles of them. At least for shadow profiles Facebook should pay.

Well, really it would be best if it were legislated that shadow profile type information not be allowed since by definition the user (or even a non-user) has not given informed consent. It would be great if we could move toward a model where each citizen had copyright-like protection of his personal data.

It is not allowed under EU legislation, which is why Facebook was fined again and again, and had to delete it again and again.

But sadly most people don’t see this as a problem Facebook caused, but as EU overregulation.

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