The Problem With Facebook
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it, with its follow-up, as an exposé of fake likes and bot activity, and as a warning before spending on Facebook ads.
What it is
Veritasium's Derek Muller argues that Facebook's business model works against pages and creators, because it charges them to reach the audiences they built. He explains how filtering and paid promotion undermine the value of likes.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 9 different months, 2014 to 2018.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec lingben · 2014-02 · on “Facebook Fraud [video]”
If you haven't yet watched Derek's earlier video about "the problem with facebook", you should: [this video] because in it he lays bare several fundamental structural issues about facebook which 99% people don't realize. Well worth the watch. Unless fb changes drastically, it will die a surprisingly fast death.
Strong rec lingben · 2014-09 · on “With New Ad Platform, Facebook Opens Gates to Its Vault of User Data”
facebook ads are junk and have been proven to be so before you waste any money, watch these two videos: [LINK] [this video]
Strong rec lingben · 2015-04 · on “The Bot Bubble: Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency”
for those interested in this topic these two excellent videos from veritasium corroborate this article and go beyond to explain the stark implications for facebook's business model: facebook fraud: [LINK] the problem with facebook: [this video] > From January 2013 to February 2014, a global team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Microsoft’s and AT&T’s research labs, as well as Boston and Northeastern Universities, conducted an experiment designed to determine just how often advertising campaigns resulted in likes from fake profiles. The researchers ran ten Facebook advertising campaigns, and when they analyzed the likes resulting from those campaigns, they found t
Strong rec lingben · 2017-04 · on “A Facebook bot purge clobbered USA Today”
for a fantastic expose of how facebook is riddled with fraud and bots, check out veritasium's two videos: facebook fraud [LINK] the problem with facebook [this video]
Recommends vacri · 2014-03 · on “The Free Marketing Gravy Train Is Over on Facebook”
Ambiguous headline: 'over' meaning 'finished'? Or 'over' meaning 'located'? Veritasium has an interesting related video explaining some of the Facebook shennanigans where they withhold your posts from a large amount of your subscribers if you're popular, unless you pay them money: [this video]
Recommends lingben · 2014-03 · on “The Free Marketing Gravy Train Is Over on Facebook”
in case you haven't watched these videos from Veritasium yet: [this video] [LINK] both videos show why facebook's model is inherently self-destructive and incoherent and will inevitably implode
Recommends vacri · 2014-04 · on “Facebook earnings gain as ad sales surge 82%; CFO is stepping down”
Veritasium on youtube has a couple of videos breaking down the numbers - not only do you have to pay to get views now, but the views delivered above and beyond what you usually get are fraudulent. He showed the usage of his page beforehand, with users clustered in Western countries, generally 20-40% of whom interacted with his page in some way. After paying for more views, they were all from developing countries, a profile of users he'd never seen before with very little (0-1%) engagement with his page. It's worth checking out his videos if you want more detail on the patterns he found. It's pretty clear that it's fraudulent. [this video] (explores problems he sees with FB as a marketing platform
Recommends Veedrac · 2015-03 · on “Reasons not to use Facebook”
Since this seems to just be a braindump, I might as well add Veritasium's comments on the matter: [this video] [LINK] I found them pretty interesting listening from a content-distribution and -consumption side of things, rather than from a social-network perspective.