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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

#531

Post by scarface74 »

ipaddr wrote: post #530
scarface74 wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the same thing Adobe thought when Flash wouldn’t work in the iPhone.

Different audience. People went on the internet for the first time for facebook. A lot of people never leave the facebook ecosystem. Having a phone that didn't have facebook would make it less popular. A phone not supporting flash might get developers upset. But by that time developers wanted html5 to take over and developer preference doesn't push product. One can make the case that the most inexperienced with compu…

Wasn’t FarmVille and applications like them Flash based?

You also have to remember even as late as 2011, Motorola was trying to sell the Xoom tablet as being able to browse “the real internet” because it (belatedly) supported Flash.

But then we still get back to the fact that in 2008, the iPhone 3G had 128MB RAM and couldn’t even fully load a regular web page. When you scrolled to fast, there was a checkerboard while it tried to render the rest of the page. It definitely couldn’t do any complex animation within Safari.

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

#532

Post by scarface74 »

ipaddr wrote: post #529
scarface74 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I develop to trade labor for money. The last thing I want to do when I get off work is more computer work. If I’m just doing a hobby project proof of concept to learn a new for me technology, I would do that on my work computer. We have a very liberal open source process where we can open source a project under: https://github.com/aws-samples That only requires going through a simple process. That also means I have u…

I can imagine working at Amazon taking away your desire to do anything outside of work. Did you feel the same way before Amazon?

I’ve felt the same way for 25 years. I haven’t programmed as a hobbyist since graduating from college in 1996.

BTW, I would never want to be an SDE at Amazon. I don’t do on call. I work in consulting. We are told that we are “in charge of our own calendar”. Meaning that if we are putting in more than 40 hours regularly, we aren’t managing our projects correctly.

On a day to day basis, my actual manager only has a high level idea of what I’m working on. We as consultants guide our project implementations.

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

#533

Post by clarge1120 »

mercutio2 wrote: post #492
user_7832 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The problem was never about the ads. It was about the fact that ads were forced, privacy-invasive (due to customization) and generally were terrible overall (think malware/crypto mining risks, terrible UX - think annoyingly flashy gifs, or those gigantic banners in the middle of a scenic drive), not to mention poorly regulated, leading to lots of "double your money/phallus in 3 days!" type of scams. There…

Oh, anti advertising maximalists certainly exist! I'm certainly not in the majority, but if I could live in a world where: A) Advertising was considered so extremely gauche that no one did it B) No revenue from advertising existed C) Ad-supported services went away I would be a very happy man.

So would I, but I’d also not have a job, or at least make a lot less income. Without marketing, advertising and sales, there is very little economic activity.

It’s like the old adage: this job would be great it weren’t for those pesky customers.

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

#534

Post by clarge1120 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #439
ksec wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cant upvote you enough. This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil.

First, it's not "all ads are evil". It's the spying and tracking of ads that most people oppose. Second, how is this a "balanced ideological fight" counterargumnet. Let's say I oppose Facebook ads as invasion of privacy (and I do). A person on the internet used Facebook ads to make money. Those are contrary why? It's not like I'm sitting here and was like "oh, now that someone made money on the ads, I'm totally in fa…

If you have an income it’s because of economic activity, most likely derived from advertising.

I pay for YouTube Premium to avoid ads because I hate ads. But I also like robust economic activity. So, I’m happy to pay a fee instead of seeing ads.

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

#535

Post by yuliyp »

laurent92 wrote: post #507
yuliyp wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by conflated? The tracking and profile building is how they correlate results with ad impressions. That this data is then also used for training the models and identifying the user coefficients is just a different use of the same correlation data (a website visit is just another type of ad conversion, after all).

We shouldn’t identify the user. We should identify the content. “I want to be shown next to car pictures, because maybe the guy is missing carpets for his car” instead of “We want to be shown to guys 24-30 with interest in cars.” First is tracking the content, second is tracking the user.

Conversion tracking is all about tracking the user, though, to realize the same user that saw an add "converted", whatever that means.

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

#536

Post by dwaite »

bobthepanda wrote: post #438
FabHK wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. In the old world, ads were attached to matching content, which gave an incentive to produce insightful pertinent content (and develop a reputation in a certain content subject area). Those ads were not much of a problem. Today, the ad industry tracks the user, and ads are attached to matching user interest, which gives an incentive to produce arbitrary, but addictive content, with most of the benefit accruin…

also, while ads were certainly dispersed through magazines and the like, a huge chunk of them were really just in the back and not with the main stuff.

Also, it was unlikely you'd see the same set of five ads on every page of every article. Because such a thing would not just be pointless, but counterproductive.

Today's statistically-driven advertising does not relate to the context and thus has no bridge for engagement. We are all desensitized to them, so they just have to block content, flash more incessantly, and make the dismiss click box smaller (or just start putting fake dismiss boxes to trick people into more engagement).

I think the scammy/dark side of advertising is driven by the cost of impressions being so low. This is because of the pricing disparities allowed by the advertising broker tracking attributions rather than the business themselves. Legitimate products suffer as a result, similar to the effect of spam on email.

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

#537

Post by dwaite »

clarge1120 wrote: post #534
HWR_14 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, it's not "all ads are evil". It's the spying and tracking of ads that most people oppose. Second, how is this a "balanced ideological fight" counterargumnet. Let's say I oppose Facebook ads as invasion of privacy (and I do). A person on the internet used Facebook ads to make money. Those are contrary why? It's not like I'm sitting here and was like "oh, now that someone made money on the ads, I'm totally in fa…

If you have an income it’s because of economic activity, most likely derived from advertising. I pay for YouTube Premium to avoid ads because I hate ads. But I also like robust economic activity. So, I’m happy to pay a fee instead of seeing ads.

> I pay for YouTube Premium to avoid ads because I hate ads. But I also like robust economic activity. So, I’m happy to pay a fee instead of seeing ads.

Yep, and I drastically limited watching YouTube on-site because their advertising became untenably invasive. The last straw was when they tried to get me to pay money to back-track how much they made their product suck, rather than actually providing me value over the out-of-box experience a few years prior.

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

#538

Post by dwaite »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #385
ksec wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well no one's arguing that targeted ads are not effective. Oh they sure were. All ads are useless. Targeted ads are evil. And Ads should not be targeted were the HN's view, which later became there shouldn't even be any ads, it should all be subscription. That is 2018/19. By 20/21 HN were even targeting those who were working inside the online Ad industry. And this is seen across the tens of thousands of comments. (…

> All ads are useless I don't think I've ever seen someone say this. People hate that they make the internet impossible to use. I have a family friend that runs a small business and all of the revenue comes from ads on the websites they run. I hate using their website because of the ads. Pop-up that takes up the whole screen asking to subscribe, auto-play video ad, content moving as ads get loaded slowly. It's all ju…

99.99% of ads are useless, by volume.

This is a side-effect of media selling advertising through brokers rather than direct, that these brokers then built tools to track impressions, clicks and sales attributions, and then created a disparity between each level of several orders of magnitude.

When advertisers were paying an order of magnitude more for ad impressions, we needed far fewer ads and those ads tended both to be of higher quality and more topically relevant.

At the current CPM, I routinely get ads which aren't spelling or grammar-checked.

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

#539

Post by bentcorner »

tehjoker wrote: post #414
bryan_w wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads aren't inherently trying to make people unhappy (at least the good ones). Ads in the best case, are just informing a person about the existence of a thing. There have been many ads that I've found useful, not because of some evil mind games, but rather because i didn't know of a company providing such a service. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with expending money for things that are valuable. Th…

The idea of an ad is that it says you don't have this thing. Your life will be so much better if only you had this thing. In some cases, that makes sense, but mostly it serves to reset people's expectations and become dissatisfied with what they have. I think in many cases we should be aiming to do that for social fundamentals that would make all of us live richer and happier lives like healthcare and education, but…

While I hate ads, it's impossible to live in a world without it.

Because even at the most extreme, where there are no ads, even the most minimal difference like location or appearance has value. Consider the simple example of a grocery store - what products do they place at eye level? What products do they place closer to the entrance? What color does P&G make their detergent bottle? What do they call it?

It's all "advertising", and there's no practical way to prevent it.

The alternative is that everything is packaged in the same sized gray box and described in perfectly utilitarian terms.

So advertising will always exist. We just need to know where to draw the line.

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

#540

Post by bobthepanda »

dwaite wrote: post #536
bobthepanda wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, while ads were certainly dispersed through magazines and the like, a huge chunk of them were really just in the back and not with the main stuff.

Also, it was unlikely you'd see the same set of five ads on every page of every article. Because such a thing would not just be pointless, but counterproductive. Today's statistically-driven advertising does not relate to the context and thus has no bridge for engagement. We are all desensitized to them, so they just have to block content, flash more incessantly, and make the dismiss click box smaller (or just start…

This is a good point. I don't need to see the same GoDaddy or St. Jude's ad 200+ times a week.
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