Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: facebook

The Decline Of Facebook (Meta)

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On December 23, 2022

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Back in August of this year Cheryl Sandberg stepped down as Chief Operating Officer of Meta, . I’d been keeping a lazy eye of Facebook and Meta for a while: the organization felt sick to me, not in terms of ethics, but in terms of health. Sandberg jumping was a sign: the most important insider other than the founder and CEO leaving.

Then, this week:

Facebook is going down, is my guess. There’s irony to this, Facebook built it’s HQ where Sun Microsystem’s HQ was and Sandberg and Zuckerberg were fond of saying that they did so to remind people that Facebook would have to stay on the ball or go down.

Facebooks new virtual world is crap and is doing abysmal numbers. Their audience growth is anemic, and they’ve had some periods of negative growth in the last couple years, though it’s minor. Young people aren’t interested in Facebook. Their VR goggles are excellent, but not showing a profit.

Every social internet company (this includes Google search) which manages to get large enough numbers to achieve audience capture; where you have to be there because everyone is there; starts excessive fiddling with their algo.

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In Google’s first years its search results really were excellent. But once almost everyone used Google, they started fiddling the algo to increase revenue as much as possible, rather than optimizing for good search (so far, they’re fine, but it’ll be what brings them down.) Social media does the same thing with their algos — instead of just showing people the content they signed up for by following someone, they start boosting some content, de-emphazising other content and shoving content in front of users faces they didn’t ask for, and not just some advertising.

This degrades the utility of joining them: you aren’t actually getting the feed you signed up for: content from the people and orgs you explicitly said you wanted to see, in chronological order.

Everyone does this. They start of mostly clean, like twitter, then they optimize and tweak until they damage the experience. By optimizing for profit “now” they damage their profit potential going forward.

This isn’t necessarily a huge problem for the decision makers: Sandberg and Zuckerberg, absent profound stupidity or civilization collapse, are never not going to be rich.

But it is how companies destroy themselves. Something similar happened to General Electric when Jack Welch decided to optimize for short term profit over long term and gutted the most important industrial producer in America. He was praised to the heavens for it at the time and died rich in 2020, but he also turned GE into a second tier company after it was one of the 10 most important companies in America for about a century.

Every time a company tries to optimize profits over providing a good service or product a price is paid. Make into your corporate culture to do so, and you gut the firm.

Facebook had some real utility (finding people you had lost contact with and staying in contact), but it doesn’t even really offer that any more because of the crud load-up.

No one will really miss it. Some other place will offer what it used to. Or maybe it’ll stagger along for a few decades, a shadow of its former self.

But it’s in grave danger now, and it’s simple to tell, because the people in the know who can leave, are.

 

Facebook, Destroyer of Media

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On October 15, 2019

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So, Facebook has been fined forty million dollars for inflating video statistics.

Sounds like a yawn, eh? Not a very big fine, for a not-very-big crime.

But it was a big crime. Newspapers, web sites, etc…pivoted to video. Facebook said that views were as much as 900 percent higher than they actually were (counting, among other things, three-second views as viewership.)

So companies hired video staff, got rid of writers and pivoted.

And revenues crashed, because there wasn’t actually viewership or a way to monetize that viewership.

Virtually the entire online humor industry, for example, went under.

Facebook and Google are parasites and predators. They don’t create sweet fuck all, but they take a huge share of the revenue that would go to actual content producers. They devastate entire industries. And in this case, Facebook did it by straight-up fraud. They made billions from their lies, and paid a tiny fine.

In other words, the fine is so small, that Facebook knows they should commit fraud again in the future.

This isn’t effective law, effective regulation, or anything approaching justice.

Facebook needs to be broken up into constituent parts, and they need to be regulated. As a place to connect to friends, with a chronological timeline, Facebook provides a genuine service. As surveillance capitalism and a gateway that skims actual producers’ profits, destroying producers wholesale, it’s a catastrophe.

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Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and Inevitable Abuses that Inevitably Happen

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On March 20, 2018

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So, you’re probably aware of the furor over Cambridge Analytica. They scraped Facebook’s database and used the psychological information to craft their campaign. They have also been caught on tape admitting they do dirty tricks like honey traps, and propaganda (knowing lies).

And there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

First of all, it is essentially impossible that they are the first group to scrape Facebook’s database, as Atrios points out.

The data is there for the taking, and I am sure many others have done so, including both Democrats and Republicans.

Second, the techniques Analytica used against the US are extensions of techniques used against other countries regularly, and especially against the Muslim, Russian, and post-USSR world. To the extent that Russia is involved, they likely regard this is a fair play–they’re just doing what the West has done to them, post-USSR Republics, and their allies for many years.

Third, Facebook is a data-gathering organization, as is Google. What they do is create psyshological and life-event profiles so that advertisers can manipulate people to sell to them. This is hardly different from using the same data to manipulate people to sell candidates or policies.

Cambridge Analytica is just one part of an entire industry set up around this sort of information. Peter Thiel’s Palantir does much the same general sort of stuff, but Thiel is smart, and does it for the US military and spies, so he is protected, even though Palantir does far more evil.

There are certain doors that should not be opened. Collection of this sort of data is probably past one of these doors. The problem isn’t just scraping, the problem is that it will inevitably, and I do mean inevitably, wind up available to anyone. Every leak, every hack, is available, and so many records from so many companies have leaked that you have to simply assume your information is available to anyone who cares enough to plunk down a little money, or who is a little code savvy.

Just as information on who was what religion was used by Nazis to hunt and kill Jews, and just as when it was destroyed, it saved lives, this information will inevitably be abused. So one has to ask if the public good of knowing it and having everyone able to know it, is superseded by the public bad of knowing it, and having everyone able to know it.

As with moving from physical cash to electronic cash, I think the answer is no. (I know the answer is no with respect to cash.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

How Internet Monopolies Are Destroying the Web

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On December 6, 2017

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The actual enemy of entrenched interests is not the right, or “Russia” (a country with half the GDP of California), it is the left, who are the people who would tax them and break their power.

Thus, it is not surprising that when Google decided to attack “fake news” they hit the left.

The estimated declines in traffic generated by Google searches for news sites are striking:

I have noticed declines in my own search traffic, though I’m a bit player.

The left, in general, favors high tax rates and either very strict regulation of large corporations or breaking them up. Google, certainly, needs to be broken up, at the least back into its constituent parts (i.e., sever the search engine from everything else.)

But Google is a particularly bad actor: For years it has been evident to everyone in the space that they are hoovering up most of ad revenue. In the early 00s, until 2006/7 it was fairly easy for relatively small websites to make money from ads. That went away as Google cornered much of the market and it’s only gotten worse since then.

Google’s relationship to web sites is almost identical to railroads and farmers in the 19th and early 20th century: Without railroad shipping, farmer’s products couldn’t make it to market, so the railroads set rates that maximized their profit, driving many farms into bankruptcy and keeping most in penury. They took virtually all of the profit.

For smaller, and even mediums-sized web sites Google (and Facebook, to a lesser degree) are in the same position. They determine who gets traffic, especially to newer web sites without established audiences. Because without them you get little to nothing, they get the money.

That means, in effect, that Google and Facebook and other similar companies, exist by taking away the value of other people’s labor–value without which they would have no business or profits. The web’s content comes first; Google’s “finding” it comes second.

There is a lot of gloating in the tech world about how good they are with information, but the basic information problem has not been fixed. Finding what you want or need or what would suit you best is really hard when there are so many options, and no one has figured out how to do it.

This is, at least in part, a matter of incentives. It is in Google’s interest to match you to whatever site benefits Google most, not the site that benefits you most. Just as Amazon doesn’t show everyone the cheapest alternatives for their search (if you can pay more, why show you cheap?), Google wants to make money for Google, and serving you is only important to the extent it makes them money.

As Google has gotten older, it feels as if their results have gotten worse, because they are now in a monopoly situation in most Western countries. People use Google to search, there is no major alternative.

Unregulated monopolies are bad. Unregulated, bundled monopolies are worse (as in, Google and Facebook buying up other market dominant firms, like YouTube).

This problem, combined with the FCC getting rid of network neutrality, is going to destroy a ton of livelihoods (no, not such money as I get from donors; I’m grandfathered in). It has already made the net far less interesting. Every year more stuff is on the Web, yeah, but it’s more mainstream commercial stuff. The weird web of the 90s and early 00s withers.

And it withers because it is in the interest of almost every big actor, from Facebook to Google to the major ISPs, that it does so. They don’t all have identical interests, no, but they all want a Web where either everyone pays a toll, or you have to go to them to get a specific type of content.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Only Person with Sense in the Trump Administration…

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On July 29, 2017

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Steve Bannon

…is Steve Bannon. (Yes, he’s a nasty nativist as well.)

In the last few days, Bannon has suggested increasing the top marginal rate to 44 percent and regulating Google and Facebook.

Both of these are good ideas. I’m sure that Bannon’s regulations of Facebook and Google might not be what I’d want, but the bottom line is that these are now the primary media organizations of the world: What people read or see is mostly determined by Google or Facebook–their algorithms and employees.

For example, three months ago, Google put out a new algo to reduce fake news. Result?

In the three months since Google implemented the changes to its search engine, fewer people have accessed left-wing and anti-war news sites. Based on information available on Alexa analytics, other sites that have experienced sharp drops in ranking include WikiLeaks, Alternet, Counterpunch, Global Research, Consortium News and Truthout. Even prominent democratic rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International appear to have been hit.

Hey! What a surprise. Major corporation does something which makes people who tend to think badly of major corporations read less!

The bottom line is simple: Two companies control most of what people read and that should be under democratic control. And that’s before we even get to how Google and Facebook have systematically taken control of advertising, diverting more and more of the profit to them and away from actual content creators.

This is similar to the problem of railroads before major highways and trucking: farmers could only get crops to market through railroads, so railroads took almost all the profits. We have forgotten, but farmers hated the railroads with a sickly passion, and for good reason.

Google and Facebook determine who gets read, the political and economic repercussions of which are massive. (And Facebook’s CEO quite clearly wants to be President.)

Bannon is right, whether you like his other politics or not.

As far as the Trump admin goes, Ivanka and Jared are the ones who try to mitigate the nasty social stuff (often failing) and Bannon is the only one who wants ordinary Americans to do well.

You can despise all three, with good reason, but understand the reality.

Oh, and “fake news”? It exists, but the hysteria around it is being ridden heavily by people you want nothing to do with. And no fake news so far has ever equaled the New York Times lies which helped sell the Iraq war.

Fake news hysteria among elites is really just them saying: “Our monopoly on lies is being taken away from us! Only approved lies should be allowed!”

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

Rational People Sell Out: WhatsApp Edition

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On February 21, 2014

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A while back I wrote something which made a number of people angry:

Any new social structure must throw off surplus that people can live on, and that surplus must not be able to be bought up by the old system, which will seek to do so.  The ban against selling out/being bought out must be irrational and ideological.  Rational people sell out.

As you’ve probably heard, WhatsApp (the largest messaging system outside North America) was just bought out by Facebook, for 19 billion.  A normal enough story, but Robert Myers pointed me to this article on WhatsApp’s ethics:

He had just three rules as he experimented with the early iterations: his service would defiantly not carry advertising, an experience satisfyingly absent from his Soviet upbringing; it would not store messages and thus imperil individual citizens’ privacy; and it would maintain a relentless focus on delivering a gimmickless, reliable, friction-free user experience.

Now that Facebook owns it, how long will it be before all information is stored, the NSA has a backdoor and there are ads?

Rational people sell out.  When there are bad actors (and Facebook is a bad actor), who have so much money that they can make you filthy rich overnight, it is rational to sell out.  (Assuming they don’t have you already because they funded you with a very nasty contract).

This is a supremely important point.  People are very confused about rationality.  Rational is not a synonym for “good”. It is often rational to be a complete scumbag and to act in ways which will hurt other people (or at least not help them.)  This is true even in the long run, because you don’t have to deal with most people.  Betray millions of people, who cares?  There are millions more who will be happy to give you whatever you want when you are a billionaire.

The response to that, of course, would be “it’s only an app company.”  True, but it’s also a way of communicating without it being so easy to be spied on, and soon that will be gone.   You can’t create anything good in tech, without it being bought out. It cannot be done. People will always sell. Only open source offers the possibility of it, but open source projects, once they get big, almost always take money from dubious sources, because only dubious sources have a lot of money right now, and even a small team of developers still costs hundreds of thousands or millions a year to support.

Ethics which are negotiable for cash, aren’t ethics you can build a society on.  Rational people betray.  Systems that work take betrayal off the table by simply forbidding it, and backing it up with an irrational attachment to norms.  “We don’t spy on people, period.  We don’t torture.  We don’t allow pharma companies to price their drugs so high that people can’t afford them.  We don’t allow vote suppression.”

As I wrote on rationality and ideology in the past:

Note, finally, the use of the word irrational.  We think of irrationality as bad, but rational decision making leads to betrayal.  If someone’s going to offer me more than I can otherwise earn to betray the rest of my people, a lot of folks are going to take that deal unless they have the irrational belief that it’s wrong, and a rational belief that if they do it, those who have an irrational belief in the system will hurt them, or even kill them.

Irrational people don’t sell out. Rational people do: unless they know that irrational people will find them, and hurt them, if they do.

You cannot have a prosperous, free society without irrational attachment to social norms which are not always in the interest of individuals. You must take various forms of betrayal and race to the bottom off the table. It will always be in someone’s interest to exploit people, to pollute, to spy, to torture. Rationality does not stop such behavior in individuals.

Brits Attempt to Snoop On Everything And Tell Anyone

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On March 22, 2009

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The UK is already the most surveiled society in the world, with more cameras per capita than any other country.  There’s no evidence that this reduces crime, but that isn’t stopping the government from wanting to spy even more.

Recently they’ve proposed  spying on social networking sites:

“The UK government, which is becoming increasingly Orwellian, has said that it is considering snooping on all social networking traffic including Facebook, MySpace, and bebo.

They have also attempted to bypass current privacy protections and share private info with the private sector, other governments, departments and, well, pretty much anyone:

“Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, currently being debated by the UK Parliament, would allow any Minister by order to take from anywhere any information gathered for one purpose, and use it for any other purpose. Personal information arbitrarily used without consent or even knowledge: the very opposite of ‘Data Protection.’ An ‘Information Sharing Order’, as defined in Clause 152, would permit personal information to be trafficked and abused, not only all across government and the public sector — it would also reach into the private sector. And it would even allow transfer of information across international borders.

Fortunately public uproar made them withdraw this particular anti-privacy provision.

The UK has been leading the US and other Western nations in the march closer and closer toward surveillance states.  I hope the rejection of the sharing provisions means a reversal in trend, but I suspect it’s only a small setback to those who believe that taking away citizens’ privacy and liberty is the route to security.

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