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Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#71

Post by tim333 »

randomsearch wrote: post #24
clay_the_ripper wrote: post #17

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Fac…

What if those two billion accounts are bullshit? Has anyone actually done a sample of Facebook users (or humans) to check those stats? I do not believe them, based on my personal experience and the very large number of businesses and bots on facebook. Given the massive incentive for Facebook to lie, we’d be naive to take their numbers for granted. If they provided really fine-grained data, we could easily verify thei…

I've got a friend who buys targeted ads through facebook and they work well. At least some of the stuff isn't bullshit.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#72

Post by JoshMnem »

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #40

Facebook is just getting started. Imagine you have a dataset that can identify over a billion people around the world simply by looking at their face. When you walk into McDonalds, cameras analyze you and the people you enter with. Oh, there's John Smith and his friend Tom. He loves the McFlurry. Instantly the digital menus rearrange to feature a large McFlurry, animating and advertising a deal on the largest size. F…

Society needs to figure out if that should be illegal. It's the secret manipulation of people's reality to get them to do things that are against the interests of their wallets and health. Very few people would consent to that if they understood how it works, especially at Internet scale. I think it would be easy to reach a dystopia if society travels too far along that path.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#73

Post by macNchz »

ssivark wrote: post #45
clay_the_ripper wrote: post #17

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Fac…

Are there ways to use Facebook data to serve advertisements outside the Facebook platform? I was under the impression that FB customers (advertisers) can only serve ads on Facebook i.e. Facebook does not display ads on other websites (unlike Google), and it does not pass on user data which advertisers can use to serve ads on other platforms/websites.

Yes it's called Audience Network: https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#74

Post by genghizkhan »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #68
dasil003 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Macdonald’s pay for that? Tom is already in McDonald’s and is going to buy what he wants. There’s no incremental value in making the menu confusing by changing it all the time.

They’re not changing the menu, they’re just subtly highlighting things, offering discounts, etc. And yeah, he’s in the store already, but if they can sell him MORE on that visit, that’s good. How much do you think McDonalds would pay for a magic camera + menu that boosted all their store revenue by 5% overnight?

Less than 5% of their revenue for sure.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#75

Post by itronitron »

halflings wrote: post #67
namrog84 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe half is even optimistic. I'd venture a gamble that at most 25% are unique and original people. Even my non technical friends often have 2-4 accounts. For work, for friends, for forgotten passwords, etc... And then of course bots and bots and bots. Of course it depends on how they define a user and an account. If I logon only 1 of my accounts in a given month or 10. Do they count as 1 or 10 in either case?

Anecdote rebuttal to an anecdote: None of my personal friends have more than one account on facebook. Facebook estimates than 10% of the accounts are duplicates [0], so that wouldn't match with most people (~50%?) having 2 to 4 accounts. [0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/02/facebook-ad...

Anecdote^3 ... none of my personal friends have more than zero facebook accounts :)

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#76

Post by Gatsky »

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #17

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Fac…

Facebook has no solution for China, which will never allow a foreign company to capture all the wealth of that network. The totalatarianism of China also allows them to create the type of invasive dystopian social network that is probably Facebook's ultimate, yet inaccessible, business model.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#77

Post by abecedarius »

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #17

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Fac…

> the fact that you have a Facebook account allows advertisers to track and target you

I use a separate browser profile just for Facebook; I never log in from my main profile. Do they link the separate browsers? There'd be a bunch of clues like the IP address, window size, browser version and OS, related but not identical time of activity, etc.

So how hard do they work at linking up data from people who expressly don't want them to? I despise Facebook and expect this is the sort of thing they'd do, but does anyone know more?

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#78

Post by dasil003 »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #68
dasil003 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Macdonald’s pay for that? Tom is already in McDonald’s and is going to buy what he wants. There’s no incremental value in making the menu confusing by changing it all the time.

They’re not changing the menu, they’re just subtly highlighting things, offering discounts, etc. And yeah, he’s in the store already, but if they can sell him MORE on that visit, that’s good. How much do you think McDonalds would pay for a magic camera + menu that boosted all their store revenue by 5% overnight?

Changing the menu "subtly" is still changing the menu. How does it work with everyone else in the store, are you going to compute optimal clusters on the fly? How are people going to react when the menu is morphing in front of them? Are franchisees expected to pay for all the hardware and compute involved?

Sorry, but I'm just not buying the vision. Facebook has ridden this incredible wave, first of investors spooging themselves with excitement over the potential value of all the data collected, then the wave of advertisers coming in and spending massive amounts with very questionable ROI. Long term everyone is going to get more sophisticated and realize there are cases where "would you like fries with that?" simply performs better once you factor in the weaknesses of comprehensive data-driven in-store advertising (cost, bandwidth, alienation, noisy data, key data out of band, etc, etc).

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#79

Post by titanomachy »

itronitron wrote: post #75
halflings wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote rebuttal to an anecdote: None of my personal friends have more than one account on facebook. Facebook estimates than 10% of the accounts are duplicates [0], so that wouldn't match with most people (~50%?) having 2 to 4 accounts. [0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/02/facebook-ad...

Anecdote^3 ... none of my personal friends have more than zero facebook accounts :)

Where do you live?

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#80

Post by dreamcompiler »

utellme wrote: post #21

Almost nobody talks about lack of trust, yes there are words about fake news and formal reassurances from FB staff that they will investigate, fix and so on. But trust was already undermined, you just can't restore it to previous level. People were reading news in FB feed and didn't even think it can be fake, now they read and go "outside" for fact checking. Not a good sign for social network which wants you to be en…

Trust is my issue too. I've put almost no personal information on FB since the day I opened my account. But over the last year it's gotten worse: I trust the news sources less, I trust the ads less, I deleted the FB app, and I trust the FB company least of all. That translates to me posting less and spending less time on the website, and never "just using FB" to sign up for another website.

And you know what? I'm happier with less FB in my life.

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