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‘Your Map Is Wrong’
21–30 of 101 posts
Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not even contestable. Google and FB took the advertising money from everyone else. Businesses still pay (and always have) the same % in advertising, only it's 2 monopolies now instead of thousands of media.
> Businesses still pay (and always have) the same % in advertising That's completely false. A lot of small businesses (think housewifes selling cupcakes) were not viable before Google and especially Facebook/Instagram — they simply could not realistically find their consumers before internet advertising.
They could always post an ad in a local newspaper. Many people read those things before the proliferation of internet.
Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’
#23I’m curious why anyone takes inspiration from Zuckerberg.
I find it funny, how social media created even more hate against the rich... especially movie stars.
Before social networks, the rich and famous (from large businessmen to moviestars) had tv interviews and large newspaper articles, where whole PR teams went over the questions, the answers, the article itself, and made things "look god" for the rich/famous person.
Now, with social media, you have (eg.) people suffering due to lockdowns, and Madonna posts a video in a milky bathtub complaining about crap, Gal Gadot does a really bad singing job and sings "imagine" ("...imagine no posessions...") while people are literally going broke an hungry, and Elon Musk posts a tweet and half of crypto goes up/down, depending on whats in the tweet.
Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’
#24”We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else.” Bullshit. Meta's whole business is predation on user's attention. If I am scrolling their stupid page, then I am not scrolling some other stupid page. This is as zero-sum as it gets.
> This is as zero-sum as it gets.
Given the impact of FaceBook on political and media systems, I think that this a strongly negative sum game. Spreading "junk food news" and other lurid conspiratorial stories is a negative externality, like venting pollution.
Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’
#25Zuckerberg is fundamentally right [1], and I think it's a good observation that many people fail to make. But I think it's companies other than Facebook/Meta that are creating the new value. [1] https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...
Very strongly agree. If you work in tech in general you should probably be thinking about most decisions with this kind of positive sum mindset where one person’s gain is not another’s loss. For one thing, I think it feels better, but it is also very typically true.
Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not even contestable. Google and FB took the advertising money from everyone else. Businesses still pay (and always have) the same % in advertising, only it's 2 monopolies now instead of thousands of media.
I'm no fan of ads, but I would still contest that. The pre-Internet advertising arsenal was all remarkably blunt weapons (newspaper ads, TV, radio, direct mail) that made targeting very difficult and were out of reach or not economic for countless businesses. Now anybody can buy precisely targeted impressions for any keyword under the sun and very closely track their performance, opening up entirely new markets.
I'm not a fan of these new markets. We got by just fine with simple, static ads that weren't spying on everyone. It gave rise to local, niche publications that were a heck of a lot more interesting than today's one-size-fits-all social media junk.
Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’
#27Zuckerberg is fundamentally right [1], and I think it's a good observation that many people fail to make. But I think it's companies other than Facebook/Meta that are creating the new value. [1] https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...
he is right in a way that makes it hard to see what facebook is turning into profit: the users attention. sure they are creating a space without taking away volume for other people to build there, but nobody will care about the other things because a proper map of the internet is not concerned with what is there, but what a given user spends their attention on.
I think the argument which is charitable to Facebook is that they make money by more efficiently matching advertisements to slots: advertisers are less willing to pay for generic slots in a newspaper than targeted slots because, in theory, a slot seen by someone more desirable. Facebook do advanced targeting to allow slots to be sold at closer to their fair value by making buyers better informed and they take a fee for improving the efficiency.
But it’s still reasonable to argue that the targeting is not as effective as claimed, the fee is too large, or that there are political reasons to dislike targeting and we should disallow it even if it makes the ad market more efficient.
Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’
#28>None of us knew we needed Steve’s devices until they were given to us. I have recently been given a $2500 toy by $EMPLOYER$ and I still don't need it. Personal anecdote aside, is this post seriously advocating for creating needs from scratch?
“None of us knew that we needed sexual intimacy until we s-tumbled into porn.”
Let me translate that: "None of us knew that we needed privacy until it was taken away from us by Steve's devices, Facebook, Google and others."
Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not even contestable. Google and FB took the advertising money from everyone else. Businesses still pay (and always have) the same % in advertising, only it's 2 monopolies now instead of thousands of media.
I'm no fan of ads, but I would still contest that. The pre-Internet advertising arsenal was all remarkably blunt weapons (newspaper ads, TV, radio, direct mail) that made targeting very difficult and were out of reach or not economic for countless businesses. Now anybody can buy precisely targeted impressions for any keyword under the sun and very closely track their performance, opening up entirely new markets.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachel-Soloveichik/publ...
There is no such thing as 'blunt' or sharp weapon, the market shows that all advertising has some efficacy (around 1% but nobody knows how much precisely). Internet advertising did not increase overall consumption, thus it is not more effective than the sum of previous media.
Anyway the biggest trick BigTech played was not that it hypnotized the masses, but that they convinced advertisers that they are better than everyone
Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’
#30>None of us knew we needed Steve’s devices until they were given to us. I have recently been given a $2500 toy by $EMPLOYER$ and I still don't need it. Personal anecdote aside, is this post seriously advocating for creating needs from scratch?
> is this post seriously advocating for creating needs from scratch?
What do you think the vast majority of marketing and advertisement is concerned with? Using psychological manipulation to trick people into believing that they're missing out on something and then selling them a solution to the fabricated need is par for the course. The perverse monetary incentives create an inevitable race to the bottom where human desire itself is manipulated in order to increase corporate profit.