those running Facebook groups routinely find that their content isn’t even being shown to those who choose to follow them thanks to Meta’s outright abusive approach to social media where the customer is not only wrong, but should ideally have little control over what they see.
inhales deeply YOU ARE NOT THE CUSTOMER!!! YOU ARE THE PRODUCT!!!
It astounds me how many people STILL don’t understand this
it doesn’t make sense, just say they’re exploiting customers. Saying “you are product” just make people take it literally and think Facebook is wrapping people up and selling them whole package, organ and brain included, which is nonsense
Only if you don’t think about it.
First you should stop and think: What is a customer?
A customer is someone that a company makes money from.
Then you think: What money have I given Facebook?
None (or extremely little)
Then you think: But Facebook makes billions. How do they do this?
They have loads of very targeted adverts.
So we who are Facebook’s customers?
Advertising companies.
What makes ad space on Facebook valuable?
Their ability to target those ads to the right people based off of the data they have about them and to get you (the product) to see those ads.
They should take it literally, because it is meant literally!
They’re not exploiting customers, they are exploiting people. Those people are NOT their customers.
Facebook is literally selling people in data form. Everything you post, everyone you interact with, everything you look at across most of the web (not just facebook.com) is all catalogued and used to create a fingerprint that is a digital representation of you, and that is their product! “Essence of /u/Melt for sale here”
Their customers are advertisers.
ETA: Link
Saying “you are product” just make people take it literally and think Facebook is wrapping people up and selling them whole package, organ and brain included, which is nonsense
You’re the only person I’ve ever seen who has taken this expression literally.
Aren’t they more successful than ever? Sure anyone with half a brain avoids them, but everyone’s Grandma has an account now. Still a net positive.
The article is talking about killing it from a product usefulness-perspective, not a monkey making-perspective.
And they are serving lots of ads under the radar and shaping their tastes by intermixing the ads seamlessly with entertainment to bypass our advertisement “antibodies”. Sometimes I find some of them saying things and having interests I’ve never known they had only to find their feed randomly peppered with these interlopers.
Good for them. The people deliberately killing Facebook, I mean.
I’ve now read several of these from wheresyoured.at, and I find them to be well-researched, well-written, very dramatic (if a little ranty), but ultimately stopping short of any structural or theoretical insight. It’s right and good to document the shady people inside these shady companies ruining things, but they are symptoms. They are people exploiting structural problems, not the root cause of our problems. The site’s perspective feels like that of someone who had a good career in tech that started before, say, 2014, and is angry at the people who are taking it too far, killing the party for everyone. I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong with that perspective, but it’s certainly a very specific one, and one that I don’t particularly care for.
Even “the rot economy,” which seems to be their big theoretical underpinning, has this problem. It puts at its center the agency of bad actors in venture capital becoming overly-obsessed with growth. I agree with the discussion about the fallout from that, but it’s just lacking in a theory beyond “there are some shitty people being shitty.”
This is an interesting perspective, and I very much see how people can have it. Totally agree that the internet just isn’t like it used to be, arguably for the worst, depending on who you ask.
As much as I hate these big tech platforms, the issue isn’t that they’re doing what they’re doing. After all, capitalistic societies (especially the US) don’t just ignore it, they actually encourage this sort of “money above all else” mentally that a lot of these CEOs and shareholders have. So what platforms are doing shouldn’t surprise anyone. Maybe some of it should be made illegal, but I’d argue making new laws still won’t really address the problem.
The real problem is that we (everyday people) need to take more responsibility over the mental health of ourselves and our children and just stop using this brain-rotting software. We can complain about what they’re doing to humanity all we want, but if we continue to use these platforms, we’re just making it easier for them to do the bad things they do.
Facebook is still around? Wow I left that over a decade ago.
