Comment by Marsymars
9 days ago
The immediate fix to this is regulatory action.
Facebook has made itself indispensable in a number of areas that are in the public interest and should be treated as a public good for these purposes.
Ads are pollution, and Facebook is forcing people to choose between ingesting pollution and using facebook marketplace, or throwing their used but functional goods in the garbage.
the immediate fix to this is to stop using facebook. If your local government are using it to publish whatever useful infromation, it may be possible to sue them on the grounds that publishing their public 'good' on a private platform exclusively is against some kind of public records law.
Alternatively, eventually they will publish where the audience is, if the audience is not on facebook then they will publish somewhere else.
> the immediate fix to this is to stop using facebook.
Sure, but that relegates my old but perfectly functional macbook to the trash. There's literally no functional alternative to fb marketplace for getting used goods re-used at any kind of scale.
Give it away to an acquaintance? Find a physical store that will take it? List it on another platform (yes they exist)? Put up a flyer at your nearest university? So many options besides "trash it".
Craigslist?
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Are you proposing banning advertising on Facebook? You know this will effectively destroy Facebook, Google, every free ad supported website on the internet?
I think there are a variety of potential solutions, but one where the public marketplace is taxed/polluted by a private entity in a way that can't be avoided isn't an acceptable status quo.
Requiring FB to provide a paid ad-free option with a price commensurate with their cost of providing service would be one approach. Prohibiting them from actively breaking adblockers would be another. I wouldn't wholesale ban ads, but banning them on FB marketplace would be reasonable - either we get an ad-free marketplace, or FB abandons the product and we get alternatives.
They have a paid ad-free option in Europe. Nobody pays for it at all. Same with every company ever that does that (YouTube, Reddit - this is a tiny fraction of their customers).
Preventing them from blocking adblockers is effectively the same thing as banning ads in that it destroys revenue. Remember that that would impact all parts of the internet, even the companies without the resources of Meta. So maybe a company the scale of Meta weathers a policy like this - but many smaller advertising based businesses would not. So effectively, you would be driving even more consolidation of power in the industry and the acceleration of the decline of the open internet.
Also - no ads on marketplace? I personally do like using marketplace vs the alternative (Craigslist), and personally I would prefer that stays available for me to use (and for free).
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We were fine before any of that. The web in 2007 was fantastic. Then Google bought DoubleClick, consolidated web advertising and Facebook opened itself to not-edu addresses. Those events were the beginning of the end. Everything that sucks about the web today can be traced back to those two events. I say fuck 'em, roll the clock back to 2007 and let the chips fall where they may. I don't care if that means a Facebook doesn't exist or that Google is just a search engine and not the web's majority shareholder.
IMO you shouldn't get to be in charge of a company just because it became successful.
Facebook is allowed to make ads show on their own product.
I hate their product, but it's theirs.
> IMO you shouldn't get to be in charge of a company just because it became successful.
In a macro sense, the prerogative there is really up to the public. Companies only exist in the first place because the public has granted them the legal and social framework to exist, and the public can adjust that framework as they so choose.
In a more specific sense, the math there changes once a company makes itself indispensable to the public good. There are any number of analogies I could run with, but I'll go with the analogy of a landfill. Suppose all the landfills in your city have been privatized, have a habit of burning garbage, and employ armed thugs to prevent any visitors to the landfill from wearing masks. If you've got a truckload of garbage to dispose of, you can either ingest burning garbage fumes, or dump it on the side of the road somewhere. It's absolutely in the public's interest to regulate the landfills' behaviour to prevent them from both burning garbage and from stopping people from wearing masks when they visit the landfill.