seawasp | (Reply)

From:

[T]he degeneration of Facebook is directly due to it not being concerned with serving the users, and instead concerned with turning its customers INTO the product -- specifically for benefit of the stockholders.

Point of order, in the middle of a post with which I most heartily agree.

Facebook's users are, emphatically, not their customers. Your customers are the entities (people, companies, govenments, etc.) which give you money in return for ... well, for something you provide to them. In the case of Facebook, the customers are those who pay to have their advertisements put in front of audients likely to purchase their products. In other words, Facebook users are the product it sells.

This has been the case for a long time. Broadcast radio and television (with the semi-exception of NPR, PBS and like entities) in the US sells audients to advertisers. That is how they make their money; that is pretty much the only way they make money.

And so it is also for Facebook, for Google, and for many other Web companies that give their services away for free or for cheap. They aren't making money from those services. They're making money from using them to attract audients for advertisers; and they are much more efficient than broadcasting, because their algorithms allow them to focus the advertising on likely buyers in a way far more effective than "People who watch The Beverly Hillbillies are likely to be interested in Winston cigarettes." (Example from real life; I am old enough to remember when shows had specific sponsors, and TBH's was Winston. But anyway.)

None of which, of course undermines your basic argument.

I am also old enough to remember when factories were proud to have their "XXX days since last workplace accident" sign get to three digits and stay there. (I also am young enough to remember a sign in a software company I worked for: "29,219,293,829 days since last velociraptor incident.")

We really need someone to write, and to make a huge best-seller of, a modernized versiono Frank Norris's The Octopus. I'm not sure how much good it would actually do, but it's worth the try.