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Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

economist.com

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Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#301

Post by ameister14 »

scarface74 wrote: post #218
pnutjam wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone who doesn't vote and ignores their role in Democracy let's this happen. The president matters much less then the Mayor or the Governor.

So let’s say I’m in CA voting for my two Senators. How much does my vote actually count when 10 other states combined have the same population but 20 Senators? How much does my vote count even for representatives if I’m in a state that’s heavily gerrymandered?

If you're in a district that is heavily gerrymandered, your vote may actually be more important.

Still, the best proportional representation for you is local. So mayor, state rep, governor.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#302

Post by krapp »

zarriak wrote: post #292
eric4smith wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuck did not get to where he is by being short sighted or stupid. The Metaverse is the obvious next evolution of online. Accelerated by the happenings of the last 2 years.

Zuck moved first in “metaverse” with Oculus 7 years ago and what does he have to show for it? Some decent/good hardware locked behind logging into your Facebook account. If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.

>If it had been any other company that had done with Oculus what Facebook has done with it they would be mocked endlessly for such magnitude of failure.

Did they fail? Most people don't hate Facebook as much as HN and seem not to have a problem with Oculus requiring a Facebook account, given that the Quest 2 is the best selling VR headset by far.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#303

Post by ineedasername »

scarface74 wrote: post #234
erikpukinskis wrote: post #224

I remember when Facebook Platform came out. The super early version where you could embed your app on Facebook and engage with the social graph. I thought dang, this is smart. They’ll basically own the next level up the stack from the browser: they’ll own the “social chrome” of every application on the web. Although it devolved into spam, Facebook was a hot spot of weird social games for a while there. And every web…

They killed it because it didn’t work on mobile.

Maybe their desktop traffic wouldn't have tanked so much if they'd kept it a richer experience, and continue to enrich it. Instead they abandoned it completely once traffic patterns tipped towards mobile.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#304

Post by potatolicious »

cercatrova wrote: post #275
jliptzin wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I joined FB in 2004 as a stanford student. I used it religiously in college because it was the cool new thing at the time, but after that I mostly didn't see the appeal. I really never gave a shit what some guy from high school who I haven't spoken to in 10+ years is posting about. When there is so much more interesting content to consume in the world, why would I bother with the crap someone is posting just because…

Interesting. I feel the exact opposite. I don't really care about content anymore, it's really just mind numbing drudgery. There's a reason there's a meme about getting addicted to HN and doing "deep work" with "digital minimalism". In recent times I've cared more and more about what my friends and family are doing, because those are the people I'm connected with in actuality, in real life.

I agree with your position - but I don't think it necessarily means you disagree with the other post.

I've completely stopped using FB because I want to connect with my friends and family. After using the product for many years I realized that idly surfing past pictures of children, weddings, BBQs, etc, that despite FB's loud insistence, that's not connection. Even commenting on friends' posts isn't... really connection?

It was idle voyeurism, or drive-by socialization.

Now I make an active attempt to keep in touch with people by, well, directly talking to them. This isn't some brilliant insight on my part - let's be honest, online socialization has been moving towards this for some time. The group chats I'm a part of, and the virtual/IRL meetings are far more fulfilling to me than any amount of FB feed surfing.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#305

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

mojuba wrote: post #195
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if there's SKAdNetwork attribution, why do I need to give the unique device ID to FB or Google in addition to that? They will know which ad led to the install via SKAdNetwork calls anyway, right? Nope, they'll only know that some percentage of impressions of an ad lead to installs. With their SDK, they'll know who installed, and they can then feed this back into their ML models to find more similar people for yo…

Thanks. I still doubt it though. Firstly even without the IDFA they can heuristically identify devices in vast majority of cases, in fact even more accurately compared to the IDFA method given the current opt-in rates of 30-50%. Branch does this with deep linking and it's pretty successful despite the tightened privacy on the iOS side (I can imagine how Branch and similar services irritate Apple). My hypothesis is th…

Hey man, it's entirely up to you. When you have pretty rare events (like purchase/website conversions) every single one matters, but I feel like you probably have enough information to make an informed decision now.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#306

Post by chillage »

AlexandrB wrote: post #191
chillage wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you've ever started a company with a new product. What if you make the world's best cheese grater. Nobody knows about it. You don't have connections to supermarkets. Smaller stores don't want to carry your niche item. You have $5000 budget to get your cheese grater out. How do you let people know about it? Online targetted advertising is basically the current established way to find those people who act…

I think this covers how it's supposed to work, but the reality is far messier and worse. In particular, the hypothetical cheese grater manufacturer would probably be have to pay Google to advertise on their own brand name adword so a generic competitor doesn't steal customers that already know about their great cheese graters. Oh, and about 90% of the people who see your cheese grater ads would be people who just bou…

You are right of course, it's not a perfect situation and, yes, many times may still not be able to get your cheese grater off the ground. My question remains though - if you are not allowed targeted advertising, what practical alternatives do you have to mass market your useful product?

We are not looking at this from the point of view of your personal preference where you would rather the product was in a store already, but from the point of view of a legitimate, useful small business which does not have access to a store and which is trying to match their product to consumers.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#307

Post by ericmay »

cercatrova wrote: post #295
ericmay wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why you need Facebook or TikTok or Instagram to stay connected with friends and family. What even is “being connected”? I think people hold on to friends they meet too hard. People come and go. If you don’t maintain a friendship outside of social media then that’s ok. Let them go. Move on. We run a family Slack group. All the functionality of being connected, none of the bullshit.

I can follow all my friends and family on Instagram and see what they're doing. I don't necessarily need all my friends and family to talk to each other like in a big group chat. It's a one to many relationship (me to them) versus many to many (everyone to everyone else).

> I feel the exact opposite. I don't really care about content anymore

How do they express what they are doing without content using Instagram? Can you walk me through this?

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#308

Post by cercatrova »

ericmay wrote: post #307
cercatrova wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can follow all my friends and family on Instagram and see what they're doing. I don't necessarily need all my friends and family to talk to each other like in a big group chat. It's a one to many relationship (me to them) versus many to many (everyone to everyone else).

> I feel the exact opposite. I don't really care about content anymore How do they express what they are doing without content using Instagram? Can you walk me through this?

I mean content as in what reddit or HN has, articles, posts, videos about a topic etc. Of course on Instagram people need to post stuff, photos and videos, but I don't think that when people say content they mean interpersonal photos and videos.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#309

Post by alanlammiman »

The problem isn't just Apple's action on IDFA. It's that Facebook seems to be so poorly managed on some fronts that its reactions, rather than mitigating problems, has caused further harm. For example - in a rushed effort to get their privacy issues in order, they are deactivating the live facebook integrations of customers based on cursory/mistaken/possibly machine-based readings of their privacy policies.

They did that to us yesterday: https://shared-crater-f3a.notion.site/Facebook-is-Breaking-A...

We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on facebook app ads per month. We can deal with IDFA giving way to more aggregated attribution (we don't want to track individuals - we just want to measure if the ads we paid for led to sales). But facebook breaking our app in production because they can't be bothered doing their job properly is very serious. It can't be solved by reducing ad spend, only by removing their SDK from our app.

If this is also happening to many other developers right now, that, more than the Q4 results or the IDFA issue itself, could be causing the drop in the share price.

In fact, if you look at the Q4 results, the earnings miss was more because of growth in G&A (which grew by 3 percentage-points of revenue if I'm not mistaken) than because of a top-line slowdown. And if you read the comments as to what made G&A grow, it's 'legal costs'.

Re: Apple's privacy push cost Meta $10B

#310

Post by chillage »

jjulius wrote: post #197
chillage wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you've ever started a company with a new product. What if you make the world's best cheese grater. Nobody knows about it. You don't have connections to supermarkets. Smaller stores don't want to carry your niche item. You have $5000 budget to get your cheese grater out. How do you let people know about it? Online targetted advertising is basically the current established way to find those people who act…

I still don't care. My privacy shouldn't be forced to be sacrificed just because you decided to make a cheese grater that's better than every other cheese grater in existence. >If you feel cheese graters are useless and somehow deserve to remain unbought, then replace it with any other item which does match your bar for utility value. I am doing this for nearly everything I can think of, and my privacy wins every sin…

This is off topic, I was responding to OP's statement that online ads are always useless

You may well find that any societal usefulness is offset by your own principles, whether that's privacy or aversion to tech or aversion to capitalism or aversion to marketing or aversion to small businesses or what have you. Can't argue with principles, and I won't try. The topic though is whether there is any societal usefulness or not.

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