The business model of the Internet is crushing us. Rant on. We could start with Twitter, which is deleting millions of bots, trolls, and other fake accounts (often with automated software generating hundreds of tweets per day). This is raising concerns over the company's growth and true number of monthly users. But not raising concern about the business and social value of Twitter. Has anyone looked at the age distribution of Twitter users? Only 8% are 65+, and the biggest block is aged 18-29. Consider that its share price and profit of $61 million in Q1 2018 are tied to growth in ‘legitimate human users -- the only ones capable of responding to the advertising that is the main source of revenue for the company.” Translate: capable of responding because they are human 18-29 year olds, not because they have money to spend. And then there are:
Websites – as quantity of edited text declines, the user experience is crushing us. The Wall Street Journal is not a junk website, but because I used Chrome on a big display screen to search for closet built-ins, the first-displayed ad for one of those companies ate up the upper one-third of the screen real estate. I did not search for BMWs – nor do I own one, but the NY Times website equivalent has BMW videos to warn me that there are only a few weeks left of summer. Of course, your results will, as goes the web, vary greatly and with each visit. Look for a topic presented in a Google Alert, for example, telehealth. First click ‘No’ on whether to subscribe to a site for home health agencies, then study the ring of event ads. Or car rentals – where a website popup called ‘Advertiser Disclosure’ admits that it prioritizes rental agencies that compensate it.
Facebook – personal data exposure has been crushing us. In the first quarter, Facebook disabled 583 million accounts in Q1 of 2018 (versus Twitter’s 70 million). The company claims that it has 2.9 billion active users, though that is a global number, and the active daily number is ‘closer’ to 1.15 billion. Okay, and that is a number net of the disabled 583 million accounts? those numbers with Pew’s 68% of US adults on Facebook, unchanged from 2016. Per the NY Times (this time the ad is about Quicken Loans – maybe to buy that previously-displayed BMW?), A Facebook ‘bug’ changed the privacy setting of 14 million users. The has a long and well-tracked history of so-called ‘privacy missteps.’
Ah, Google, let’s (not) be evil – it could be crushing other companies. Did you know that the company dropped that ‘Don’t Be Evil’ phrase from its code of conduct in May? Or that the US is doing little in light of the efforts in the EU to rout out its (some say outrageous – in 2017) anti-competitive behavior? We, the users, of course, don’t complain as much as the algorithmically down-ranked companies that are driven to distraction like Yelp – or out of business. And though the EU is leveling a big fine, India a smaller fine – but the US has been asleep at the switch, though perhaps there is a bit of awakening (reported in the UK, of course). Meanwhile and no doubt, the distribution of companies in the search space is striking – though $100 billion revenue Alphabet/Google denies that it has a monopoly on search. And what ever happened to Yahoo? Rant off.
from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/abcs-internet-today-ads-bots-and-crushing-clutter
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.