> there's a zero percent chance any social media platform such as Facebook would ever ban ads.

Yes, this is what the article says. This means we must force them to.

> This means we must force them to.

Advertising represents 98.5% of Facebook's revenue and you're proposing that we (btw, who is "we"? They are a global company) tell them they can't run ads? What exactly remains for the 43,000 employees and the 5% of the S&P500 market cap that you just decided to eliminate?

Why not? To put this into perspective, Facebook was founded in 2004. This is relatively recent. Internet and World Wide Web existed fine without advertisement sponsored gardens of Facebook since around 1990. There is no reason why there necessarily should be Facebook in the Internet landscape.

It's not impossible to imagine that, say, Microsoft and Apple, in competition for users, could start filtering advertisements in the browsers. That this pulls users from Chrome. And changes the landscape yet another time.

There's going to be far more economic repercussions if ads are yanked out of the market. Believe it or not but they do drive a huge amount of small business growth.

Advertising is zero sum. It doesn't create value, it just redistributes it. And even worse it redistributes it through psychological manipulation. Modern advertising is an arms race of capital to rob the poor of their time and money through the most aggressive manipulation they can.

In the absence of abusive advertising people would not suddenly stop spending money. They might even be more inclined to seek out new experiences without a constant mental assault by the largest corporations with the deepest coffers to bury them in their ads. Regardless of the way it goes, advertising is absolutely a net deficit to a small business - they don't have the capital resources or scale to permeate culture the way large corporations can. And if they are expending their limited resources trying to participate in the rat race they are sacrificing value to their existing customers and shortchanging their own growth for what is effectively an extortion of participation - if everyone else is deluged in manipulation to rob them and you don't participate there will be no money left over once the wallet has been rung dry by as many emotional vectors as possible for them to find you.

Actually, no. I do marketing for a lot of SMBs and startups that offer tech and service solutions not offered by the incumbents. Without ads there's no way for them to get people access to their superior products.

Advertising is “positive sum” overall. Actually almost all economic activity is, that’s why our economy keeps growing.

And with ads the mechanism is really obvious—-it helps people identify products that solve their problems.

In terms of utility, advertising is negative-sum, because it misleads people about solutions to their problems. An advertiser has an incentive to try to get you to buy their product regardless of whether it's actually a good solution to your problem. In fact, it seems like the less useful a product is, the more it needs to be advertised. I've never in my life seen an ad for bread, but I've seen lots of ads for scams, fad diet books, and breakfast candy (sometimes called "cereal").

The economy growing is not necessarily a good thing. For instance, the economy would get bigger if the government passed a law requiring everyone to buy mud pies — a mud pie industry would spring up, employ lots of people, and add to the country's GDP. But society wouldn't be better to live in for it, because mud pies are useless. Likewise, the economy would be smaller if people didn't constantly replace their clothes to keep up with the latest corporate-engineered fashion, or if they stopped buying books like Rich Guy's System for Making Guaranteed Free Money in Real Estate, but people would still be better off if they did.

I think there are strong ethical arguments to be made about why it's wrong to force a company to not advertise inside of their own services.

But I don't really think that adverse economic impact is one of them.

Nothing like a good old fashioned moral panic, every time a new communication medium turned up someone tried to ban it or neuter it.

so basically force facebook to shutdown so that all these people flock to HN which is ads-free?

The shortsightedness of such thinking amazes me.

They could try charging users for access to a clean, spyware-free social network instead. If Facebook can't survive without selling their users like products, then good riddance. It wasn't meant to be.

Even better ending their exploitative ad model business would promote the use of decentralized social network solutions.

If people couldn't easily monetize the platform the way Facebook does it opens up the market for diverse platforms. Monetizing email service is notoriously difficult and Gmails lack of in-app advertising sets a playing field nobody else can exploit for massive growth. That has probably in large part been what has kept IMAP alive while XMPP and other open communication protocols died - the ubiquity and lack of ability to dilute the user experience with ads for profit keeps predatory competition out. That hasn't stopped Google from doing some seedy shit in recent years with their position but even they have to be conservative on radical anti-user behavior that would drive their base off Gmail - because their userbase can leave. Its the beauty of decentralization.

"try to charge" , and "survive only on ads" are not mutually exclusive. FB could charge for ads-free, but nobody would use it. It's delusional assume otherwise, with FB costing the average person $40/year, which is in some places on earth the entire year's income. I also assume FB doesn't offer the option because it's too much work to filter all the tracking in and out of their properties.

> FB could charge for ads-free, but nobody would use it. It's delusional assume otherwise

It seems more delusional to predict the future (nobody would use it) with confidence.

I know framing such things as false dichotomies is kinda what educated Western intellectuals do, but God or nature impose no such limitations on us. We are free to think, negotiate, create hybrid solutions and adjust as necessary, and so forth and so on. We have the ability to largely be the masters of our own destiny, but waking up and making that choice is our responsibility, not God's.

"nobody" is a figure of speech of course. It's easy to settle the question with a poll: ask people worldwide if you 'd pay $40/year for FB. My bet would be it's < 5%

Then the ultimate valuation of FB is 5%, or a little less, of current. That's perfectly fine. They would have found an appropriate level in the marketplace.

hmm the ultimate valuation is exactly the same, perhaps a bit higher because of the lowered negative press?

Hmm, that would be ironic, FB ending up being worth more by suddenly getting some ethics. :)

> "nobody" is a figure of speech of course.

Ok then, can you restate your prediction of the future without the use of figures of speech? Calling people delusional who disagree with an utterly vague warning seems a bit inappropriate.

> It's easy to settle the question with a poll: ask people worldwide if you 'd pay $40/year for FB. My bet would be it's < 5%

I like this much better, as it is no longer suggestive that certain approaches cannot be done for certain reasons, and instead only poses a perfectly valid question with an explicitly speculative bet about what the answer would be. Fantastic.

And why does Facebook need such high annual revenue? $2b/year should be more than plenty to sustain the social network

Sure. But why not offer the option?

Google offers me Gmail for $5/mo. Why won't they do that with search? Why won't FB or Twitter do the same? Ad-free google search is easily worth >$28/yr and I'd gladly pay it.

Given the enormous armies of engineers in the employ of Google, FB, Twitter, etc, and the fact that Google already offers paid services on non-search products, the ONLY explanation is malice.

Because the price would be too high. $28/yr is the global per-user price but it's extremely skewed by region. The same equivalent price a US/CA user is $140/yr. Also the necessary 20% price increase every year would be really tough to convince people of the value.

How about instead we just stop using Facebook? I dropped it 3 years ago and haven't missed it one bit.

> I dropped it 3 years ago and haven't missed it one bit.

Yes. I dropped it much earlier than that, and have suffered no inconvenience or problem as a result.

Neither of you seem to be members of social groups that announce their goings-on on Facebook, because if you were you'd realize that missing out or getting your info from elsewhere is pretty damn inconvenient

That's not true for me. What is true is that I'm not a member of any social group that uses FB exclusively. I don't know of many that do that, because doing so excludes a lot of people.

undestand though that for people who live in the poorest of regions , the ones who absolutely can't pay for it, facebook is free communication with their loved ones, often in another country. for most people that's what makes FB useful, not the constant political bickering

> Because the price would be too high.

What is the correct price? Do Facebook and other internet companies have some sort of a God given right to at least their current revenues? If so, why do I have to comply with a whole slew of laws and regulations that society has "decided" are better for the greater good, but we can't impose similar restrictions on them?

> Also the necessary 20% price increase every year

Lest the executives maybe make more money but a smaller profit margin? How about instead of spending resources on psychological exploitation of their userbase, they either cancel that expenditure or redirect it to adding beneficial features that users want to pay for?

> How about instead we just stop using Facebook?

If that can solve the problem, I'm happy to consider it.

> I dropped it 3 years ago and haven't missed it one bit.

And yet, we still seem to have a problem.

Once again, an utterly obvious problem seems unfixable because of some combination of excessive corporate influence over politicians combined with a disinterested public who seems to have been convinced that humans live in a world whose parameters we have absolutely no control over, all while being told how superior, powerful, and necessary democracy is. Meanwhile, over in China, when something is causing problems, the problem maker is asked to stop, and if he doesn't, he is made to stop, or else. And from anything I've seen, the Chinese government seems to be improving the well being of their citizens at a rapid pace (in both relative and absolute terms), and they have high support from the public, despite the lack of absolutely necessary Democracy.

Why is it that a bi-partisan group of politicians can't get together to come up with a plan to improve the situation, and while they're doing that telegraph to these social media companies that something is going to be done, possibly very much not to their liking, so it might be in their best interests to come up with a plan B of their own that is fundamentally different than the pure advertising model of the day? Of course, there are many reasons for this, one of them being that the political system in most Western countries is effectively broken and outdated, completely incapable of managing the complexities of the over-optimized societies that the scientists and technologists have built for us, while no corresponding discipline developed to handle important questions like whether just because we can do something, should we do it?

As always, I imagine we will just continue the charade of pointing our fingers at each other and the Russians, fiddling while Rome burns, as China grows ever more powerful and socially united.

I hope I at least live long enough to see how this will be explained away in the future as something that "no one" could see coming, just as "no one" could have seen the 2008 housing bubble coming.

I do not think totalitarian dictatorship is the solution to ads on facebook.

The problem is that the most lucrative users to advertisers (lots of expendable income) are also the ones most likely to pay for the privilege of not using ads.