I'd like to note that TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew,
a former Goldman Sachs banker and venture capital investor,
joined TikTok in March 2021.
He is from Singaporean and is married to Vivian Kao,
an American of Taiwanese descent.
Unlike Zuck, Musk, and Bezos,
Chew did not found the company with which he is most associated,
and his net worth is somewhat less than a billion dollars.
Contrary to what seems to be Google's belief, most websites are _not_ continuously deployed SPAs with a team of engineers who work on each release. The indifference shown to actual developers here is staggering.
Well said. It's stunning how ignorant Google is about the web. The vast majority of the web is old and poorly maintained or not maintained at all. It relies on things not breaking, web tech being backwards compatible.
This assumption that behind every website is a team of developers maintaining it for its entire lifecycle is a stubborn and elitist Google fantasy.
They're imperious, but never ignorant. A website without a team of maintainers is beneath their concern. What are you going to do, fax them a nastygram about it?
The original goal of reducing news prevalence was to show less outrage/clickbait and show more friends and family content. Of course, hindsight shows that the move was of limited efficacy, but it's disingenuous to suggest that it was done in order to 'squeeze journalists'.
I don’t think harming journalists was the motive, but it was the outcome, and in hindsight it seems predictable. At least it should serve as a lesson to anyone who faces a similar decision in the future.
I’m not sure. If Facebook had been more surgical to send less traffic to clickbait listicles, but more to Prestigious Investigative Journalists, would the outcome have been the same? Did the unemployed listicle authors find their passion and become serious journalists working the tech beat?
This is correct. Nothing overtly nefarious is happening here (above the baseline level of telling FB who your customers are in order to figure out how much ROI your campaign had).
> Facebook is effectively grading their own homework here and ignores other marketing campaigns that may have contributed to the action
One thing I'd add is that FB is _still_ incentivized to accurately attribute actions. Over-attribution (and thus over-estimation of ROI) would give FB more spend in the short term, but would hurt them in the long term by causing auction inefficiencies.
This is the reason direct action campaigns on Google are perceived to be low(er) value: last click attribution disproportionately favors AdWords.
Just reading this and the parent post it is still amazing to me how much effort we expend to attempt to force a sale/advertise. We’re even calling it “pay to acquire users”, you don’t earn your users anymore, you buy them. Entire, very wealthy, industries exist around this one concept that users don’t want but businesses just love. Ranting yes, but interesting still.
It's much more reminiscent of BB-style forums where moderators were part of the community and would explain their actions at the time of enforcement. This is unfortunately un-scalable, and so larger communities turn to strictly enforced rules with zero flexibility a la Reddit or moderation via machine classification like FB, Twitter, and YouTube.
