Just a matter of time until WhatsApp have ads or somehow used to datamine the conversations.
Because it would not make sense otherwise, considering how much it must cost them to run something like WhatsApp with millions of users and not get anything in return.
Bruh, I wouldn't even mind these companies datamining me if their ads were even close to being relevant for my needs. It would spare me loads of time I waste online looking for that exact product that fits my needs.
I mean, what's the point of all the data they have from me plus the armies of well paid ML engineers they have on their payroll, when if I order a laptop from Amazon, I'll get bombarded with ads for laptops for the next month. Do advertisers imagine I go through laptops like toilet rolls or something? If this is peak ML, then those who fear an AI uprising can sleep soundly.
Exactly. Every time I see some new article about how ML is going to mind-control us through perfectly placed ads and Yuval Noah Harari writes a new book about the machines knowing us better than we do I just have to spent five minutes on Amazon or Youtube. I'm not afraid that the machines are too smart but too stupid to be honest.
I'm not convinced that if you went and did an actual scientific study on the efficacy of "big data" teams and ad-targeting and went through every business it would do any better than just regular boring contextual ads.
I spent a lot of energy and time studying applied ML in university. After competing in several contests I realized in most cases a simple linear equation threw shade on the whole carnival. Don't get me wrong there are amazing applications for ML, image recognition, simulated physics, the list goes on. But most of the commercial applications I've seen render a ML model wholly unnecessary. You don't need a heavy handed big data machine learning model to figure out, "people who bought also bought", nor does a crime prediction system need to be more complicated than, "where the cops and poor people were last year". FFS a national convenience store contracted one of our classes to do analysis on 10 years of data and the shocking conclusion most groups arrived at was, "people smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink a lot of beer". A revelation. Maybe if it were required curriculum people would realize you don't need to a hire a warlock to do basic statistics...
At my job, there is a problem that's classically solved with a bunch of regexps and run of the mill text parsing.
The ML experts in my company keep telling me maintaining these regexps is too costly dev wise, and that they can use ML to adapt to changes in the real world, and get a better result faster.
After nearly a year of work, buying some fancy new computers with giant GPUs, and countless meetings to describe the problem space, they have something that's around 60-70% as accurate as the current state of the art, and say they're close to closing the gap.
Meanwhile I add a new regexp or tweak an existing one and cause them to go back to the drawing board because I've "changed the entire problem description".
Sometimes I feel like I want the job where the only criteria is that I'm using the fancy new toys. It seems like more fun.
I think its possible the targeting works for the advertisers (at some level) while still failing completely for end users. e.g. If I get my hit-rate up from 1% to 2% by moving from contextual to 'give-me-all-your-data'-targeting, then that doubles my return as an advertiser, while as a user I don't see a difference and still think: "all ads I see are terrible".
The lie is telling users that targeted ads are good for them
"relevant ads" has to be one of the greatest PR/marketing/scam terms ever created. It's a lie to collect data and get small business to spend at least some advertising money even though they never get seen over the big companies competing for the same ad space. There was never an incentive to get actual relevant ads working, development would just be a waste of money.
But if the data isn't even used for the ads... Why do they collect them at all? I thought this was the only reason for businesses to collect data in the first place
It's not used for mass market ads, it's being used for analytics and being sold directly, and also for precision targeting (political attack ads shown only to people in a target constituency considered likely to vote for someone, to discourage them from doing so). Companies pay for "tell me what kind of people are looking at my site, in extreme detail". Scammers pay for "people who use/buy a particular item/service" so they can do targeted scams based on that. Political campaigns pay for targeted attack ads. For mass marketing, that kind of targeting is too expensive and the data is too fuzzy, since you basically want to reach everyone and the selection criteria are limited so you get lots of dumb "would you like to buy the thing you just bought".
I live in Hong Kong, speak a bit of Mandarin, and just a few words of Cantonese.
YouTube knows my UI is in English, and I've never watched a Cantonese video, and yet it constantly shows me ads in Cantonese. There are a lot of people in Hong Kong who don't speak Cantonese, or at least who are more fluent in English than Cantonese.
When you lost that you lost everything. Whatever you said would be on record to go after you. May be you can trust your national Gov. but the whole world. Would the record be leaked hacked or even required by the police.
Not believe there is totalitarian is the greatest myth one can have in today workd.
Yep, there are some many simple comments you can make in person or via text that can have huge ramifications on your life if it got out. Sometimes we say extreme things just because we're frustrated but taken out of context, it sounds insane. So if you want to be blackmailed in the future if you have any sort of ambitions, play game and give big tech all your data.
Its annoying to get ads for something you bought and wont need to rebuy for many years, its an extra punch in the stomach if the ads show you a lower price than you paid :)
I swear there are bots running around on HN just waiting for the opportunity to tell us that we're not the customer. Bot or not, I'll ask: thanks for the insight, how does that tie into parent's point? That advertisers "need" to show you ads for things already purchased? Advertisers are playing the long game, setting up for my next laptop purchase?
I think they're just saying that it doesn't matter if the end user converts based on the ad, but rather whether the company making the ad decides to put it on FB. FB wants to optimize for companies buying ad slots from them, not whether the end user is influenced.
Attributing conversions to ads is a really difficult problem. There's probably a decent amount of cluelessness and institutional inertia that keeps them spending on ineffective ads. See the recent stories on Uber drastically reducing ad spend without seeing any downstream effects.
That's the dumb ML practice of those companies, not Facebook. Also even an irrelevant ad probably converts through brand exposure alone. They are forced to fork over to compete for limited exposure.
I'm sorry for somewhat cynical response, but... Those customers need to believe they're getting value out of it, and it's all that counts for Facebook's business.
They target something like "people interested in computer hardware" and they get them, including those who don't need a laptop. It's bad but must be somewhat better than completely non-targeted ads, as it excludes people who have never expressed any interest (so, while having false positives at least it tries to save on false negatives). And, of course, there is opportunity for Facebook to tell how their superior ad platform is smarter than last year.
The rest (but maybe even more important than actual value advertisers are getting) is advertising of advertising - all those stories how this machine learning agile blockchain big data is our only future. And many people just believe it, and non-ironically talk how Facebook is that omniscient deus ex machina that knows us better than we do ourselves. As this meme lives, those who have a product to advertise are inclined to believe it as well (and this makes them spend money on Facebook Ads).
So, in the end, the fact you're getting ads you're not interested in is less relevant and is kind of shadowed over by the fact advertisers get somewhat better value or maybe even just believe they do.
There are shouts that the king is naked and memes that modern machine learning has two objectives: classifying data and making predictions^W^W^W^W^W bullshitting investors and raising money... but so far, such voices are in minority.
I don’t know, I live far away from the SV bubble and Facebook has worked well for our local, annual paid event (we advertised exclusively there so attribution was not difficult, in a simple way). 5000 people over 2 days.
Is there another channel that will accept the money of a small business and provide the same results? Even with a compelling event we don’t have the relationships or budget to achieve the same effect through other channels.
The advertisers can tell from cookies etc that you are interested in a product and were looking. They cannot always tell that you clicked 'buy' at some point.
I mean, it's not really unheard-of for people to have a Macbook Air as their daily driver plus a gaming PC for enjoying stuff like Cyberpunk or Flight Simulator 2020.
Bring back the $1/yr charge and keep it private. It'd be a good look. It's really a good product, technically. A pleasure to use and the voice and video quality has been excellent basically everywhere I've used it.
All that said, Signal is making steady progress, and I've had zero resistance getting people to use it. Got 12 people on it this past week. Starting a few group threads helped it stick.
What they get in return, and the reason they paid megabucks for it in the first place, is that no other social media entity is able to get control of Whatsapp's 100's of millions of users. That's worth while in itself without being able to monetize it. But...since the founders have now left and no one is watching why not add a little monetization to a good deal? Unfortunately with a reputation like Facebook's one little twitch and the herd will stampede.
I can envisage a pivot to a wechat style monopoly on everyday life interactions. If they can hold on to their market share... And we all sleep walk into it.
> how much it must cost them to run something like WhatsApp with millions of users
I'd be very curious to know. I don't remember specifics, but they were running a shockingly low number of servers early on in large part because WhatsApp is built on top of Erlang/OTP.
It's not a given that ads or datamining are the only options, they could do in app payments and paid business account. But its not very likely with facebook as parent company...
Whatsapp already supports in app payments and business accounts. In fact the point of the recent privacy policy change was just to enable more features for business uses.
With a splash of governmental assistance, I'm sure they can side step the whole encryption issue - for the normal children/terrorist/organised crime reasons
Because it would not make sense otherwise, considering how much it must cost them to run something like WhatsApp with millions of users and not get anything in return.