My main takeaway from this is that #deleteFacebook has been a flash in the pan-- their active user count is still increasing across all regions. Also to note, FB only pay effectively 11% tax on some 12 billion dollars worth of revenue.
Internet outrage is _never_ as widespread or important as it looks.
The best way to predict the effect of any social media campaign against a person or organization is to evaluate the steadfastness of the campaign's target.
If you are the target of an internet mob and you blink, you're not only going to enact mob-demanded changes that are detrimental to your interests, but also broadcast weakness and attract further mob attacks.
If you instead stand your ground and refuse to be cowed by hashtag campaigns, the outrage mob eventually gets bored and finds another target. Your interests are preserved and you end up broadcasting strength and determination.
A lot of people are starting to figure out that internet mobs have no real teeth.
Aye, this sort of thing is a running joke in the gaming community.
The classic example is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which had calls for boycotts prior to its release. Guess what those same people bought and played when the game released?
It did work with EA's Battlefront 2 right? EA's stock value went down. Then sales of Battlefront2 wasn't as good as expected. Then there's now the hot topic of lootboxes being illegal.
We'll need to exactly define and agree what it is to be achieve tho. In my view, I think the point has been made and have been heard successfully and have caused the desired punch in the face.
I'd argue that ballooned beyond "internet outrage" though; a lot of parents started seeing the loot boxes as slot machines. That gave the issue its "Is it legal?" and "PROTECT THE CHILDREN" angles.
Honestly, people probably don't give enough credit to the MW2 "boycott"; it showed kids that they could organize if the company's practices got out of hand. I think the MW2 and BF2 issues were really part of a longer trend towards dark patterns in video games, and it took time for people in positions of authority to realize how serious the situation could become if they continued down the path they were on.
Governments getting involved with anti-gambling regulation might be significant enough to stop some practices.
But I work adjacent to some video game industry business strategy folks... and I can say that the various EA/microtransaction/season pass/pay2win boycotts haven't convinced anyone that those are the wrong way to go.
People in the industry are generally convinced that the golden goose is getting people to pay more than full price and now there are just footnote conversations about "can we get away this"
I thought the #deleteuber campaign was somewhat successful? My understanding is a series of unfortunate events, largely kicked off by that campaign, ultimately led to Kalanick's downfall.
Kalanick is still a very successful founder - not that I necessarily think he should be emulated.
Regardless of what you think of Uber, Travis Kalanick started a very large company, and Uber is as entrenched as ever.
So perhaps this actually is evidence in favor of the parent comment. Did Uber really suffer much at all? Or did they just reshuffle management, pay Kalanick billions to (kind of) leave, and continued business as usual?
1. Happened a lot over the early do or die periods of entering new markets.
2. Continued over a much longer period of time than Travis has been gone.
3. Happened while the company was being considered a darling and was not being critically scrutinized over every move it made.
Shenanigans are truly shenanigans only once the outside world gets to know about it. Paradox of sorts really.
Continuing business as usual in the context of the parent's comment though is less about shenanigans and more about the operating model probably. Drivers are still being duped. Earth scorching ride subsidization tactics are still very much in play. Although the CEO is gone and there may be some activity happening within the company to undo toxic cultures, the overall business has not truly changed. And the overall business really ought to change.
In technical terms, I think there is the economical vacuum present with the entrenched taxi business, which nature abhored hard enough that someone came along and "shot the moon" so to speak, by exploring business models on a large enough scale that the validation could occur before regulation could even understand the disruption, let alone protect innocent bystanders from the inevitable downsides.
Take for instance the case in michigan, where the Uber driver had a psychotic episode, and killed the people that were hiring him, over multiple rides over multiple hours, simply because he was the nearest driver. Uber had no infrastructure to locate a driver, or assist law enforcement in any meaningful, real time manner. Imagine if that happened in 2018, and the lack of critical infrastructure was laid that bare by a multi billion dollar tech company testing out it's latest business tweak.
In some ways, it's not much different from an organized crime structure. The main reason organized crime is able to get away with all of their crime for long enough to even establish itself is good legal representation, to help stay ahead of their regulators.
Not every tragedy is a shenanigan? I seem to recall reading that the self-driving program started before his time, and that that the poor implementation was a result of the folks in that division hastily trying to impress the higher-ups -- not a result of something the CEO condoned. IIRC they stopped their testing after the incident. Not sure how you can claim he was having Uber pull shenanigans here.
#deleteuber had pretty much gone away until Susan Fowler post pointed out real problems which led to all the changes at Uber.
From the article you pointed at:
By mid-February, #deleteuber had slowed to a trickle and Uber's top executives were exhausted. Kalanick and Michael booked their trip to Malibu for what was supposed to be a weekend of rest and recovery. Instead, Kalanick was reading Fowler's post.. [which] had already gone viral.
Depends on where you live. In Denmark every social event, both public and private gatherings is organized through Facebook.
You’re not forced to be on Facebook but if you’re not then you’re the one person people will always need to do extra work to invite. And that’s for friends, without Facebook you won’t even hear about public events until after they have happened.
Don’t get me wrong, we always invite the two guys without Facebook, but I know both of them feel a little shitty about having to be extra trouble.
Eventually people will leave, and someone have to take the first step, but that’s a really shitty step. The reason I say eventually, is because nobody uses Facebook for anything but events, I haven’t used messenger since they forced you to use the app and I’m not the only one and when I look at my news feed none of my close friends (or myself) have posted anything since New Years.
So Facebook have become a satellite network we check for events, and that’s one step from being obsolete.
This is anecdotal of course, but it is true for both my and my wife’s friend circles.
It doesn't work that way. I learned it the hard way.
I run a successful s/w company that was recently under targeted attacks by one of these hashtag campaigns. The gist was we wrote something about why we refused to hire women simply to improve the % of females in tech and why we want to hire the best people for the job irrespective of their gender. The goal of the post was to help people correctly contribute to gender ratio problems instead of blanket hiring, which is sexism by itself.
However, this backfired and a lot of feminist groups targeted us with hashtags and some even accusing us of things we never said/done (the blog post has been removed since). They created memes, fake citations of stuff me and my company staff didn't say and they revolted heavily.
At first I was really shocked as this was my first time experiencing something like this and I almost thought my company and brand name was doomed. However, I decided to take control and published a follow up post of things we said, we did, we didn't do and we decided to stand by our words. The hashtags multiplied, some even threatened us legal action. Many created fake accounts on our blogs and commented bad stuff about us everywhere. Some of them even sent emails directly to our customers!
But, I didn't give in. A week went by and things started looking better. The hashtags dropped, but the good thing was, from those hashtags, we got a LOT of new page-views and signups. We lost two customers who didn't want to be associated with our controversy, but we got 8 new ones after this campaign.
The biggest take away -
1) If you believe in something, don't give in to threats and disrespectful demands. It's almost like supporting extortion.
Those really shouldn’t have been the biggest takeaways.
Cure vs prevention.
If you write a blog on behalf of a business, perhaps ask someone to read it over - preferably someone who holds the views you seek to attack.
Yeah, I may have to eat some crow from an argument the other day with another HN user. Surveys and #deleteFacebook and protests and so forth seemed to indicate that people did finally start getting interested in their own privacy.
But no. Somehow, even with a declining youth demographic and widespread reports of less time spent on site and the CA fiasco, they still ended up with a growth of users in all markets.
I've wondered sometimes whether we're headed towards a post-privacy world, and what it'll look like -- not just one in which there is little privacy, but one in which privacy is not something that most people think about or value.
Post-Privacy means no one can get privacy even if they want it. That has never been the case.
What you are merely seeing is people are ok with the amount of data that has been collected on them. The lack of true widespread outrage means we are either at the limit or we can still collect a bit more before users get really pissed.
> Post-Privacy means no one can get privacy even if they want it. That has never been the case.
We are already there.
3-letter govt agencies can listen track your calls, intercept your browsing and read your email.
Unless you pay in cash and shop only at your local mom and pop shop, your purchases are already being tracked and reported.
Your cellphone carrier is selling your information to third parties.[1]
You may not be on Facebook or WhatsApp but all your IRL friends and family are. They have your phone number in their contacts list and they have shared it with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and God knows how many other companies. They have taken your pictures and tagged you.
Other than a very small number of privacy-conscious people, which includes living-off-the-grid doomsday preppers, the rest of the country is already there.
Constraining the discussion to America, you’d be far more wrong to assume someone doesn't use the internet[1][2] or a cellphone.[3][4]
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/05/some-america... - Only 11% of American adults don’t use the internet. Of 18-24 year olds, only 2% don’t. 2%. Holding narrowly onto your assertion, the numbers are higher for poor, rural, elderly and non-high school graduates.
Shopping at mega corps? Well, it’s well documented that Walmart has done a good job of decimating local economies and there is definitely a homogenization of retail options in the US - but even if you don’t shop at one of them, if you use a credit or debit card, a mega-corp is tracking you. Doubly so if you use a smartphone.
Many HN readers have a very myopic view of the world, constraining their perspective to what they already know and do. There is a whole army of people out there that don't have cellphones, email and don't buy from mega-corps, but those who frequent HN have little knowledge of or connection to those who live exclusively in meatspace.
What about 500 years ago where families would sleep all in the same floor and your parents would be having sex meters away from you? And the lords could do whateverthey wanted. There were not much privacy for most people at that time.
Only someone who specifically values privacy for its own sake is sensitive to how much data gets “collected” by the first parties they deliberately share it with. The rest of us care how it’s used, and ad targeting is mostly benign. The Facebook scandal is not about data or collection, but how the combination of data and attention can influence politics.
With our current news cycles and the speed at which sentiments spread nowadays 10-12 days is more than enough time for us to see negative noticeable effects.
The fact is, if it hasn’t been observed by then it’s probably not happening at all.
> The fact is, if it hasn’t been observed by then it’s probably not happening at all.
That's a big assumption. The metrics we're shown might not have enough resolution to show the effects of 10-12 days of scandal. The fallout may be a much more gradual process than you assume.
For instance: take this scenario: someone decides to #deletefacebook, even though they use it daily as a communications tool. What do you think they'll do? You seem to assume they're ragequit immediately, but I think it's far more likely that they'll dial back their usage, explore replacements for certain features, exchange alternate contact info with FB-only friends, etc. Only much later will they actually delete or show a significant usage decrease.
That scenario isn't hypothetical, it's exactly what I'm doing. I've made the decision to disengage from Facebook, but I still show up as an active user because I'm not done with the process.
If you're going to measure a phenomenon with data, you have to understand what you're measuring and have an instrument that will detect that. Otherwise, it's just sciency voodoo.
Facebook's PR struggles (and users realizing how hostile the site is at it's core) is relatively recent -- most of that stuff happened Q2 of this year, not Q1, it won't be reflected till after right?
I struggled with this initially with FB and then decided all posts would be public. Never post anything that I wouldn't want public, and not allow on my timeline posts from other people that I don't want public (I know there are limits to this).
Targeted ads are fine to me. My bigger concern is the vast amount of data sharing on the back end that is easily non-anonymized and FB is a huge part of the problem.
This is actually the widespread attitude I imagine in a post-privacy world. It's different from people not understanding the implications of targeted ads and unknowingly accepting it. In this case, it's people that (presumably) understand this, and say, "well, that's okay."
Well, we are in a "post-privacy" world already. At least in the US. I'm not OK with that. I'm ok with the concept of anonymized targeted ads, but also realize that this attitude enabled bad actors and loose regulation to tear down that wall.
"All posts public" seems like a smart approach: it makes your posts worthless to FB, since everyone else has that information. I went ahead and deleted my account, more for FB's clueless response to the CA thing than the "breach" itself. I haven't missed it so far, but if I make another one, I'll make everything public and banal.
Slightly off topic, but did you see you criteria for stuff you want to be public to change over the years ?
My main frain from using facebook is not so much the visibility but the permanent nature of having personal stuff on the internet. I wonder how other people caring about what goes public deal with the issue.
I wonder if people will just engage far less (or not at all anymore), which is less obvious on these graphs.
Say, if I check my FB twice a month to stay informed about events I might participate in, I'm still counted as a monthly active user, but I'm not active in a meaningful sense.
Similarly, many people might stop interacting with FB (which, if nothing else, takes time to register: at least a month).
Personally, I logged in for the last time in (I believe) 2012, but I won't delete my account just so my name stays "reserved".
> I've wondered sometimes whether we're headed towards a post-privacy world, and what it'll look like -- not just one in which there is little privacy, but one in which privacy is not something that most people think about or value.
I think we already live in that reality. The media really honed in on the sharing of your friends list in the case of CA but if you think about it, there are plenty of services where that is public by default (like Twitter). I don't think most people consider that to be sensitive information.
I think it was probably me you were arguing with. I disagree that we live in a world where people don’t value privacy. Rather, I think that most reasonable people understand that not all data is created equal. They expect even more privacy today than they’ve ever had on things that everyone wants to be private - think medical records - but are quite happy to publicly share other data, such as what they had for lunch, and expect no privacy around this type of data. These two ideals can peacefully coexist.
So it is because Facebook is primarily meant for the latter type of data that most people outside of a very vocal minority don’t have a problem with their privacy practices. That, combined with legislation that will decimate any chance for the rise of a viable Facebook competitor (such as GDPR), is why their numbers will continue to grow for decades to come.
>Yeah, I may have to eat some crow from an argument the other day with another HN user. Surveys and #deleteFacebook and protests and so forth seemed to indicate that people did finally start getting interested in their own privacy.
I think it largely depends on who your friends are, and who you follow. All the people I follow on twitter for tech news were ranting and raving about all the FB scandals. Not a single one of my friends or people I follow outside of the tech bubble cared about it, most had no idea. If people spend their time on FB and insta, it's not hard to understand why they wouldn't even be aware of what was going on.
But it will never truly be post-privacy. As always, the rich and powerful will carefully guard their privacy all while saying to the rest of the world that you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
While you are probably right, these numbers only account for the first 10-12 days of #deletefacebook, and those are only a few days over most of a quarter's worth of growth before them.
#DeleteFacebook is not a thing. Anyone who thinks it was going to affect Facebook doesn’t understand the fundamentals behind Facebook. It’s just some meaningless outrage porn for people to hang a hashtag off of and maybe increase their social currency.
This stock is going to be back to its 190 price levels soon enough and anyone who isn’t on board is going to be left with the FOMO.
Perhaps, but I have certainly noticed a significant downturn in the level of end user engagement on Facebook in recent weeks. Almost nobody is posting these days. Plenty of ads and commercial organizations in my feed but very little organic content.
I've noticed this too. Thing is, the expectation seems to be users deleting their accounts en masse, while the reality is that people are just slowly drifting away from it (without going through the hassle of actually deleting their account).
I agree with you, I don't think we can really glean anything meaningful from this information since it is only a fraction of the quarter after the information came to light.
If we see a significant dip in Q2, then perhaps we can surmise that this impacted revenues negatively.
I think most people do care about privacy, but they're not being given much of a choice here. Their friends are on Facebook, so the only way to share pictures with all of them is through Facebook.
From my point of view, I do care about privacy, beside I don't use mobile phone, I don't want to. Since whatsapp isn't an option for me, messenger app is only way to be in contact with friends, family. (I have iPod Touch) Considering I'm traveling often, I need to use it. I'm not fan of it, but I'm not against either. In the end we are product of Facebook and #deleteFacebook is a joke.
Maybe most people just don't care all that much about privacy
Not only that. Most people welcome the attention. The people who are fighting for privacy of their friends and family are the ones who don't get it. Friends and Family want to be out there, in the public eye, liked and commented on.
I am not familiar with recent numbers, but most controversies and calls to stop patronising a service have a positive immediate impact on the numbers of most companies where I worked (and that included Facebook some years ago).
This happens because of the publicity that companies get when new users find out about them this way. Everyone who gets this news knows Facebook by now, so there is no such effect in play here.
Comparing personal income tax rates to corporate tax rates doesn't really make sense. At the end of the chain, corporations are always owned by human beings, who must pay tax as well (albeit possibly in the form of capital gains or taxes on dividends).
Point is, if you are upset, and I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't be, then the focus should be on the difference between tax on income vs capital gains / dividend income.
Something I've always been curious about: if capital gain taxes (for both individuals and corporations) were set to reasonable (high) levels, would there still be a strong argument for taxing corporate profits?
It depends on who you ask I suppose. I think it is reasonable to have 0% tax on corporations if the other taxes were correct. An issue is that under that regime many corps would choose to never pay a dividend, so that would have to be fixed somehow.
If the only tax on corporations occurred when dividends were paid, corporations would just stop paying dividends.
You’ll also have the problem we already have today, where individuals would construct their lives around a closely held corporation. When the corporation is closely held, income is supposed to pass through to the individual for taxation, but the incentives to evade theose rules would be much stronger.
In my perfect world most government revenue would come from land value taxes, with a smattering of Pigovian taxes on top, to the extent that the bureaucracy required to levy them wasn’t too onerous.
Ah cool. I see the benefits of having a straight land tax. An issue with that is that the value of land can be hard to figure out and is easy to game.
My ideal practical tax would be just a straight sales tax and nothing else. Income = Consumption + Savings, and since we want to encourage savings and investment it seems better and simpler to just do it that way.
Total libertarian dream scenario is no taxes, and government funds it self via slight inflation as a tax.
I get it, but I'd remove the first 6/7 of the post and add another 6/7 explaining the last sentence.
The first 6/7 is a condescending description of something obvious that doesn't respond to the OP's post, then reads histrionics into the post, then in the final sentences veers towards a real explanation, only to leave the rest as an unobvious exercise to the reader.
You just about have to make a million dollars per year in the US - and be in California or NYC - to pay 50%. One million dollars in income gets you to about 47% in LA, SF, or NYC. A quarter of a million dollar income will get you up to 35% - and those are the most expensive tax locations in the country.
$50,000 (the US median full-time income) gets you a combined effective rate, before deductions, of: 16% in Dallas, 20% in LA, 23% in Portland, 16% in Seattle, 24% in NYC, and 22% in Boise.
In Seattle, Miami, or Dallas, you'll pay a combined 36% on one million dollars in income.
Lots of people in Europe. Which for sure is also a big market for FB. In Germany you are already have deductions of nearly 50% if your income is around 50000€.
I do not see how a person making 50k € in Germany would have a gross/net difference of 50 %.
According to [1], the gross/net difference would be about 34 % in the worst case (highest tax class, no children, not married etc.), which includes social security, health insurance and so on. The calculator gives realistic results for my own income.
With the “and other witholdings” it's pretty easy to hit, as typical withholdings beyond income tax include state and federal payroll taxes, employee share of group health insurance and HSA withholdings, pre-tax parking withholdings, retirement contributions, etc.
You are not including all the other taxes and withholdings that serve to raise that percentage. Personal income tax is only one -- disability, medicare, state tax, and so on. Total tax burden to all parties needs to be no more than 20% or so.
If the government here offered a quality of life equivalent to what I experienced living in western europe I'd be fine with it. But we are not getting my 35% worth of government service
My total outlay for 2017 was around 35%, taking 1 deduction, and my income is near that $100k mark. And I still had to fork over an extra $600 on tax day.
On California state plus federal income taxes (the claim I was responding to) that's simply impossible even if you refer to AGI and not gross income before deductions. If you are including some other taxes, such as payroll taxes, it's possible but not the claim I was responding to.
I don't think the effects of the privacy issues are completely reflected, given they happened towards the tail end of the quarter. That said, I don't think it's going to make a huge dent in the user metrics. Advertising revenue and usage however will be interesting over the next few quarters.
You're totally right. The issue is although people are promoting #deleteFacebook, there's no other alternatives with widespread adoption to replace each person's Facebook network.
Having said that, there's movers in the space - we just need more adoption. I'm looking at a new wave of products like Sociall to step up: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sociall
Though maybe there's already existing products out there that could pivot to claim some of facebook's space.
It would be interesting to know the active amount of users per day. I connect to fb once a month, so even a person like me, not using it at all except to see if someone has sent a message or so, is in the stats.
However, I can't see how I increase their revenues with that one 60 seconds (or less) session per month. And I am quite sure there are lots of people doing the same.
Better metric than active user count is how much time those users spend on FB (and how many Ads they get shown).
Many users don't delete their accounts, but keep using messenger only. Messenger still works even if you disable your account (but others will not be able to find you by search).
I don't think that information can be clearly determined yet, we need to wait until Q2 earnings as the big push of people deleting facebook happened after Q1 ended.
DeleteFacebook is mostly western, specifically an American thing. Their user growth is most happening in other developing markets (non-Europe and non USA).
Yes. I'm from Sweden and have seen zero about this except for a in a few tech communities like parts of reddit and HN. From my outsider perspective it feels like people in the bubble thinking everyone is on board while in reality th large majority outside of the bubble doesn't even know there is a discussion.
Facebook only started deploying its developer API and advertiser changes a couple of weeks ago, which means it already got most of its revenue, if not all of it (depending on how Facebook receives the money and accounts for it) by the time they closed the Q1 quarter.
You also can't expect to see the full impact of Cambridge Analytica scandal so soon. Let's see what happens over the next 12 months. Facebook engagement was already in free-fall last year, and I imagine a lot of people disengaged with Facebook after this scandal, and they plan on using it much less in the future, even if they don't actually delete their accounts. Eventually all of these scandals (as well as the future ones) will catch-up with Facebook.
There's no such thing as bad publicity, the latest incidents are no exception. This has probably been a benefit to the company overall as I feel it was becoming less of a focus in peoples lives until we all had to discuss the platform again.
They also probably haven't repatriated most of the cash earned overseas (on which they paid the low taxes) so they can't really use it. If they did, you'd see a different effective tax rate.
I think the #deleteFacebook thing will blow over. But we have yet to see its impact. The Cambridge Analytica story happened near the end of the quarter and we don't yet know its real impact.
Well, even though I did not delete FB, my usage has gone way down. I reckon I spend about 5 minutes/day on FB today, down from about 30 min/day a year ago.
> My main takeaway from this is that #deleteFacebook has been a flash in the pan-- their active user count is still increasing across all regions
I don't know. Think I've observed a general drop in engagement in my relatively well-off and educated social circle. If Facebook dies, it's not going to be sudden. #deletefacebook type-stuff may be more akin to lifestyle advertising than the buy-it-now kind.
Who knows what gaming mechanisms they could have in place to artificially inflate numbers, it could even be a third-party that somehow knows how much of an increase in user signups they need to stay on an upward course. With the level of bad acting linked to Cambridge Analytica, really anything is plausible if it's a method to maintain control via manipulating appearances, etc.
Maybe. What you're describing would mean prison for anyone involved, though, which makes me skeptical. Not saying it's definitely false (I have no way of knowing), and certainly white-collar crime happens. But that would be a very high-stakes move.
Eh, did you read what WF was found doing recently? When money matters, at executive level, it doesn't really look like they care about law, human lives (that FB memo), etc.
That's what I'm saying though, up until a month ago I would have been more skeptical and err on the side of doubt too, however did you see the hidden camera recording of the Cambridge Analytica CEO by Channel 4's investigation? I imagine comments like his, and hopefully evidence can be found, that will lead to prison time for him and others.
There are clearly very intelligent people and seemingly without a conscience, and who even admit that they would do things in untraceable ways, including in part under and between different company names; not a stretch to imagine activities happen on no books with no trackable gain given in exchange -- or even in plain sight however people erring on the side of doubt and disbelief. We have the evidence smacking us in the face every day though. The result of Cambridge Analytica's activities, seemingly along with Russia's help - directly or indirectly I'm not sure, is getting someone like Trump into office, along with apparently winning elections in other nations around the world.
I'd say very high-stakes they're playing for, positioning someone in as President of the United States to align with Russian motives, along with the shit going on with Syria and nerve agents actively being used.
It's certainly rallying the world to align for good, to align for accountability - against those who are acting bad.
