So the question might be; is Facebook too big to fail?
Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
171–180 of 228 posts
Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> e.g. if I click-through to a flat earth conspiracy video for a few curious laughs, it naively thinks I must have an appetite for more. Every time I'm about to click on a youtube link / watch an embedded video I ask myself if it's worth influencing my future recommendations - which are not great, but not too far off either. If the content is outside my core interests or music tastes I opt to watch in incognito mode.…
> Every time I'm about to click on a youtube link / watch an embedded video I ask myself if it's worth influencing my future recommendations I do this all the time. Often, I click on "smart" videos, which I have no intention of watching just in the hope I get better quality content in my "feed". But it's hard to find high quality content, yet it's easy to find mindless dribble.
> it's hard to find high quality content, yet it's easy to find mindless dribble.
+1 to this. I watched a few Super Smash Bros Ultimate compilations at around the time it was released, and got some recommendations. I don't own a Switch so I don't know the game, plus its a novelty, so they caught my curiosity.
I went down a such rabbit-hole of mindless dribble --endless videos of videogame characters punching each other-- I actually tired myself and am no longer considering buying the game/console. It's such mindless consumption.
> Often, I click on "smart" videos, which I have no intention of watching just in the hope I get better quality content in my "feed".
I need to try this.
Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how much of that has to do with how much FB knows about you and your interests, and your friends and their interests? With YouTube, I honestly don't get any sense that it uses what Google surely knows of me via Search and GMail, e.g. anything related to Chicago, or germane to my political inclinations or personality. Instead, it seems wholly based on my viewing history. Which has some benefits, of course (I…
It's crazy to me how Google almost telepathically guesses what I will search for in all of the web, but it doesn't know what videos I will watch. YouTube's recommendation algorithm is one of the worst I use. I have to actively manage my subscriptions and many people I know mass click "not interested" on videos to try to improve it. Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, and pretty much every other recommendation works like magic…
Google Search, Amazon, Netflix-- my guess is there's just have more structured data for these recommendation systems. Amazon and Netflix get high-quality descriptions and information tables about their videos/products, Google Search has to do a bit more digging, but it has the whole text corpus link structure, etc of a site.
Spotify probably has it a bit tougher, but my guess is playlists play a big role as they are curated clustering of similar music (as opposed to just a "folder" to put all videos in a series, like they are on YouTube). Music itself is also probably much easier to analyze than video: extract the BPM and frequencies and you can tell a lot about the composition of type of song it's from. Video on the other hand-- you can do very computationally intensive CV, but that won't tell you much about the mood, meaning, genre, etc. of video something is.
YouTube many times will have to go off a title, a very vague description and a ton of irrelevant comments.
Edit: Actually, they have captions. I'd assume dialogue could give them a lot of relevant information, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
#174Facebook is a weird mass-market product because the average American tech industry pundit has very little visibility into how it’s actually used around the world. Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop, a waste of investment. Here’s what Zuckerberg said about Watch on the earnings call: "There are now 400 million people who use it every month,…
> Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop
Maybe. For me personally I’m just not interested.
To me it seems like yet another “me too” feature which Facebook has copied from instagram or Snapchat or whoever did it first. Not to mention I don’t care about this feature on the other platforms either.
The feature itself just looks like a desperate attempt at trying to show that they are still “innovating” their fairly stagnant platforms, just for the sake of innovating.
And here Facebook looks even more desperate in plainly “me too” copying this non-feature.
Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
-Facebook is a closed system -Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it If both of these are true, the typical person commenting about its evils will have a poor idea of how it's actually used. So someone telling me it's damaging my mental health because of social gratification - I haven't posted anything real-life in years - falls about as flat as someone saying Reddit is a website for sh…
> -Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it That's a pretty big assumption. People's feelings can and do change based on new information.
I don't think it's an assumption, I think it's a tautology. It's not nicotine; if you're using it you don't feel strongly against it.
Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you claiming the downside to targeted advertising is? A change in self perception from a single (dubious) study doesn't suggest negative effects. Why do I say the study was dubious? They showed a small number of undergraduates a luxury watch ad and told them it was being shown to them based on their behavior. Those participants then rated themselves more sophisticated. Of course if someone frames it like tha…
>Those participants then rated themselves more sophisticated. Of course if someone frames it like that they would say they were sophisticated. What is the negative there? An altered self image as the result of merely staring at a luxury watch advertisement is more than a little conncering. If psychological self assessment changes even in the context of a small study, what do hours of this stuff per day do to the huma…
So basically you're saying advertising is bad for us.
What now?
Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> -Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it That's a pretty big assumption. People's feelings can and do change based on new information.
I don't think it's an assumption, I think it's a tautology. It's not nicotine; if you're using it you don't feel strongly against it.
I assumed you meant it as an assumption because you said "If both of these are true".
So, more precisely, your point was actually "anyone who had been feeling strongly about it at some arbitrary point in time will have stopped using it by that arbitrary point in time". Yes, that's a bit easier to justify but still quite uncertain (IMO) and also a much weaker statement.
Also, just because the stimulus isn't a molecule it does not follow that it's not biochemical in nature. Physics and biochemistry play a role all the way down. The very notion of "stimulus" depends on where we draw the murky, fuzzy and ultimately arbitrary border between "us" and "the world".
Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would assume people who love WeChat are much more culturally accepting of surveillance given that most of its users are Chinese. Therefore I'm not sure whether a direct comparison makes sense.
> I would assume people who love WeChat are much more culturally accepting of surveillance Or maybe they have no choice. If car companies only make black cars, it doesn't necessarily mean that black is everyone's favorite color.
Concerning networks they do actually, there were several mass migrations from service to service in China, QQ, RenRen, Weibo, now WeChat. If anything it seems that trendiness trumps the network effect. Now that they have added payments the hurdle might be larger though.
But, in the end all of them are monitored so there is no choice there. The main argument/excuse for acceptance seems to be that it is better to be spied on by your own government than somebody else's.
Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've never used FB Watch > Conclusion: FB watch is total shit. Did you expect it to just magically know your preferences?
Are you kidding? Are you somehow suggesting Facebook shouldn't be able to know anything about me given the amount of data they've sucked up over the last decade? Given I first opened my Facebook account 10 years ago and I've been posting status update and liking various bands and TV shows, I would expect it to be able to have a fair guess of things I might like. It's recommending videos that aren't even in ENGLISH! I…
I like how Sabrience got downvoted on first comment then made a super comeback with shockingly good insights.
It seems smart people expect others to read between the lines but when average people can't read between lines, same average people resort to downvoted then finally once smart person explains himself, they take his side
Re: Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
#180Facebook is the only way a lot of people have to contact one another. I feel like only celebrities deleted FB accounts during the whole #DeleteFacebook thing. Furthermore, I think a lot of that campaign (and be honest, it was not organic. It was a purposeful campaign by news and media giants in an attempt to show they still dominated the minds of people in the world) was a battle of the old rich vs the nouveau riche…
There was a "#DeleteFacebook thing" this year? I'm assuming the hashtag is from Twitter which is insanely funny to me, since I see no difference between all of these social networks. BTW outside of USA and a few west european countries people barely know what Twitter is.
In any case I feel that all this focus on Facebook makes people forget that Instagram is far more important now then any other social network, and also the fastest growing one.