Every single day it seems like a new article comes out - maybe the problem is that Facebooks business model is destined to fail if people scrutinize what it’s actually doing.
It I can emit a judgment that is now more visible: a lot of the less glamorous things mentioned there come from the Growth team.
As an ex-employee, I can’t say that I’m surprised. It’s never really subtle, too.
Antonio G-M (the author of _Chaos Monkey_ where he details his experience as the PM who started Custom audiences) joked today on twitter that Advertising has some bogger bodies buried. I’m not sure: when he left Custom Audience and related programs were a bit of a Far West. Most issues were rapidly addressed, some more recently. “Why am I seeing this”, facebook.com/ads/preferences and the more recent ad transparency for political campaigns show more integrity than anyone else.
I believe that Facebook could be (statically) profitable without the Growth tactics exposed here. The company was based on the express idea that they will be replaced soon, in a race, which makes slow expansion unacceptable. It was true up until recently, but I don’t think that it still is.
> Every single day it seems like a new article comes out
That's because some news organizations have invested in bringing Facebook down. If you pay attention, you'll notice those same organizations have also tested the waters with Google and Amazon, and to a lesser extent, other SV companies and the SV community itself.
I barely ever use FB. I really don't care what happens to the webapp (although I do very much appreciate the open source tools they've built, such as react and pyTorch). But I am concerned that these media companies are attacking the tech community, and are basically opposed to any platform that circumvents their role as gatekeepers of information.
Uhhh, I feel like the constant stream of discoveries about Facebook's highly highly unethical behavior stands on it's own merit. Like, if you just made a list of the crap they've done, that's really enough for me to be very convincing. I don't really see why you think there's some media conspiracy (or why you seem okay with true anticompetitive behavior on FB's part but are highly concerned about companies having "opinions" on the behavior of a company in another industry entirely).
I think like this is a theory that has a bit of truth to it, but the stories themselves should not be brushed aside. Society hasn’t yet come to grips with the amount of surveillance these ad platforms are inserting into every aspect of their lives.
I don’t think it’s an attack motivated by a vendetta against the “tech community” so much as the media industry’s unique relationship to Facebook, which has become a (if not the) primary driver of their audience and ad revenues.
