Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram • Hacker News Board

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#121

Post by wvenable » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

fireflash38 wrote: post #114

s1artibartfast wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a perfect example of how people confuse causality and responsibility. They are not the same. Trying to monetize and compensate for every externality is absurd. If I make coffee at home that causes a coffee shop to lose out on Revenue. Surely I'm not responsible for paying the coffee shop for the Lost Revenue. If I do go to the coffee shop, should the coffee shop have to share their revenue with the car compan…

Your analogy is flawed. It's like someone consuming coffee but not wanting the persons who grew the coffee beans/roasted/brewed it to be compensated.

Your analogy is flawed. It's like someone smelling the coffee but not wanting to compensate the person who grew/roasted/brewed the coffee.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#122

Post by wvenable » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 10:09 PM UTC

EatingWithForks wrote: post #112

wvenable wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My go to solution for that was reddit.com/r/somecommunity which was local enough to have posts about lost cats and dogs. More than once local media near me has literally just published a story that was first posted as text to Reddit.

I've tried this strategy but often r/somecommunity is either never used by people who live there/is too small to be useful, but the bigger neighborhood/city is absolutely astroturfed by people who don't live there.

I do live in a country with a disproportionately large Reddit population.

I guess you just have to get everyone together in one place -- but that place could still be on the Internet.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#123

Post by wvenable » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 10:15 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #117

wvenable wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real threat to local news is Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. Local newspapers were mostly funded by their classifieds section. The news is merely to bring eyeballs to those ads. When the market for classifieds disappeared, there was no longer any financial support for local news. You could even argue that newspapers were only viable businesses because they had a monopoly over the local distribution of inform…

> Local newspapers were mostly funded by their classifieds section. Local newspapers (at least in my US state) were mostly funded by their commercial ad placements, not by the classified section. Classified ad revenue and the purchase price of the paper were minority fractions of their revenue.

Most reports have classified ads at at least 1/3 of total ad revenue for newspapers. Some sources show higher but none lower.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#124

Post by alphanullmeric » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 10:16 PM UTC

If you believe in the force is only justified in response to force principle, what force is Facebook using against Canadian broadcasters to justify being forced to pay a ransom?

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#125

Post by admax88qqq » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 10:27 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #118

EatingWithForks wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't think the Internet has been a good substitute for a local distribution of information. It's too global and too big. There's people who aren't from a neighborhood talking about it and skewing information about that neighborhood. Portland's supposed to be literally a BLM-flagged wasteland or something, y'know? I'd really love for there to be a local newspaper that tells me a new bakery opened in town,…

> I actually don't think the Internet has been a good substitute for a local distribution of information. It started off looking very promising for that sort of thing -- but when people fled for the likes of large social media properties, that killed things dead. Facebook, Reddit, etc., are very bad at encouraging local community.

I disagree.

I'm a member if many local communities on Reddit and Facebook.

Where I live, Facebook Marketplace is _the_ place to go to buy and sell used goods. And it is absolutely hopping in my community. So much waste is averted from landfills due to the platform Facebook provides, which has good search, and a reasonable UX.

If all we had were the old school classifieds in the newspaper, I doubt nearly as much activity would happen.

HN just loves to shit on social media and lament the fall of old school local news, but I think that's just rose coloured glasses.

Through Facebook I do local second hand shopping, I discovered and am and member of several local niche sports and activity groups. And I see local news through the eyes and mouths of locals talking about it rather than what the one or two employed local journalists think.

If all you do is scroll /r/all or your Instagram feed than sure you're not getting local info, but you get what you consume.

And I say this as someone who doesn't like Meta/Facebook and would delete it in a heartbeat if there was a viable alternative, but the matter stands it _does_ support and encourage local communities and content in some places.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#126

Post by tensor » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 10:33 PM UTC

halifaxbeard wrote: post #56

grf27 wrote: post #45

Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? There…

My understanding of the core issue is people aren’t clicking through to read the article, but they’re commenting on Facebook based on the headline. Facebook gets ad views and user-generated content/comments, and the organization doing the reporting sees nothing of the economic value generated in this scenario. (Hacker News is specialized in audience and news orgs generally aren’t posting all their stories here) CBC t…

Correct. Essentially the root of the issue is that the news sites believe that the value is in their article, but in reality for the majority of users the value is in the headline, which the news sites give away for free along with the link so that they can be indexed.

In my opinion, the answer here is for the news sites to not show any headlines for free, and require a login to access all content. Then, they are free to negotiate with google and meta and others if those companies want access to the content. It wouldn't require any new laws.

They would need to solve users being able to post links, but a link shortener of sorts forcing the user to write their own headline in the post would probably do the trick. Most people would still want to see the actual headline, and then they'd be forced to login or at least view the page.

I'm very strongly against bill c18.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#127

Post by s1artibartfast » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 10:40 PM UTC

fireflash38 wrote: post #114

s1artibartfast wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a perfect example of how people confuse causality and responsibility. They are not the same. Trying to monetize and compensate for every externality is absurd. If I make coffee at home that causes a coffee shop to lose out on Revenue. Surely I'm not responsible for paying the coffee shop for the Lost Revenue. If I do go to the coffee shop, should the coffee shop have to share their revenue with the car compan…

Your analogy is flawed. It's like someone consuming coffee but not wanting the persons who grew the coffee beans/roasted/brewed it to be compensated.

I think it's like someone talking about coffee, because that's literally what they're doing, talking about the news.

If people were actually consuming the news and reading articles, it wouldn't be an issue.

Nobody wants to drink the nasty coffee, they just want to talk about how bad it is.

If we want to be a hyperbolic about causality, both social media and news outlets should be paying the school shooters for creating the news

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#128

Post by brailsafe » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 10:57 PM UTC

mcpackieh wrote: post #78

halifaxbeard wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of the core issue is people aren’t clicking through to read the article, but they’re commenting on Facebook based on the headline. Facebook gets ad views and user-generated content/comments, and the organization doing the reporting sees nothing of the economic value generated in this scenario. (Hacker News is specialized in audience and news orgs generally aren’t posting all their stories here) CBC t…

> My understanding of the core issue is people aren’t clicking through to read the article, but they’re commenting on Facebook based on the headline. If this is the meat of the matter, then how does asking Facebook to pay for links/headlines address the problem? Whether or not facebook pays for linking to news stories, the discussion on facebook remains vapid and the public isn't properly informed. Unless the idea wa…

What's concerning to me is literally every single MP except the conservatives voted for the bill, including my local NDP rep, and not only is it's premise absurd, but they made a huge bet on it working and risked our access to public news sources. Therefore, every non-conservative member of parliament was in-favour of an idiotic bill that compromised a fairly important seri s contemporary ways to access even their own publicly funded content. If people were to be single-issue-voters at all—usually with their issue only ever representing some hypothetical tenuous outcome—now might be a more appropriate time than ever.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#129

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 11:02 PM UTC

admax88qqq wrote: post #125

JohnFen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually don't think the Internet has been a good substitute for a local distribution of information. It started off looking very promising for that sort of thing -- but when people fled for the likes of large social media properties, that killed things dead. Facebook, Reddit, etc., are very bad at encouraging local community.

I disagree. I'm a member if many local communities on Reddit and Facebook. Where I live, Facebook Marketplace is _the_ place to go to buy and sell used goods. And it is absolutely hopping in my community. So much waste is averted from landfills due to the platform Facebook provides, which has good search, and a reasonable UX. If all we had were the old school classifieds in the newspaper, I doubt nearly as much activ…

It might depend on the community, then. In my area, the big social media outfits are not useful in that way at all. (Except for selling stuff on Facebook, but that's not what I was talking about.)

Facebook and Reddit are the only ones I'm familiar with for this, though, and they both have the same problem -- they are dominated by a very small number of people.

Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram

#130

Post by TimPC » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 11:03 PM UTC

halifaxbeard wrote: post #58

jamincan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the issue that Facebook/Google don't just share the link, they share the content behind the link as well?

Close. Sharing it on Facebook means you’ll comment on the story on Facebook and not on the linked website hosting the comment. Facebook gets the linger time to show you more ads but the organization doing the actual reporting misses out.

Should HN owe money to the National Post for the very same reason? The argument is stupid and the only way the government could push for this solution is by guaranteeing they will restrict it to big corporations few people like.