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The Problem With Facebook

The Problem With Facebook

2veritasium
3 HN recommenders · discussed 2014–2018
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About this video

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.

Why it appears in the archive

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.

AI-generated summary and labels from the source dataset; verify important details against the video. Source & credits.

From the Hacker News discussion

lingben · 2014-02 · strong rec

If you haven't yet watched Derek's earlier video about "the problem with facebook", you should: [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.

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lingben · 2014-09 · strong rec

facebook ads are junk and have been proven to be so before you waste any money, watch these two videos: [LINK] [VIDEO]

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lingben · 2015-04 · strong rec

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: [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 that 1,867 of the 2,767 likes—or about 67 percent—appeared to be illegitimate. After being informed of these suspicions, Facebook corroborated much of the team’s work by erasing 1,730 of the likes. Sympathetic researchers from a study run by the online marketing website Search Engine Journal have suggested that targeted Facebook advertisements can yield suspicious likes at a rate above 50 percent. In the fall of 2014, Professor Emiliano De Cristofaro of the University College of London presented research which found that even a page explicitly labeled as fake gained followers—the vast majority presumably bots. > The bot buildup can even affect companies that aren’t advertising with Facebook, but are just passively hoping their pages gain real fans. In 2014, Harvard University’s Facebook fan

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lingben · 2017-04 · strong rec

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 [VIDEO]

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vacri · 2014-03 · rec

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: [VIDEO]

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lingben · 2014-03 · rec

in case you haven't watched these videos from Veritasium yet: [VIDEO] [LINK] both videos show why facebook's model is inherently self-destructive and incoherent and will inevitably implode

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vacri · 2014-04 · rec

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. [VIDEO] (explores problems he sees with FB as a marketing platform) [LINK] (massive influx of unengaged developing-world pageviews)

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Veedrac · 2015-03 · rec

Since this seems to just be a braindump, I might as well add Veritasium's comments on the matter: [VIDEO] [LINK] I found them pretty interesting listening from a content-distribution and -consumption side of things, rather than from a social-network perspective.

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