12 ms·

‘Your Map Is Wrong’

96 points by p2pai 4y ago

gnfargbl 4y ago
https://archive.ph/m2Ab1 https://archive.ph/m2Ab1
iammjm 4y ago
”We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else.” Bullshit. Meta's whole business is predation on user's attention. If I am scrolling their stupid page, then I am not scrolling some other stupid page. This is as zero-sum as it gets.
- Pr0ject217 4y ago
  I share your distaste for Meta/FB; however, if their investment to advance the 'meta-verse' leads them to invent technologies that end up being used in different contexts by other companies/industries (charting more of the uncharted map), then all the better.
- prepend 4y ago
  I think Facebook consumed non-monetized life activities. So instead of doing free things IRL, people started browsing and scrolling. So it was zero sum for attention but not for economic value. I think Zuckerberg was right in that Facebook didn’t take market away from others, they created a new market. At least 12 years ago.
- seydor 4y ago
  This is not even contestable. Google and FB took the advertising money from everyone else. Businesses still pay (and always have) the same % in advertising, only it's 2 monopolies now instead of thousands of media.
  - balsam 4y ago
    Since the article comes from a “crypto”-related site, perhaps I can make a metaphoric (& mildly schizophrenic) response without getting downvoted. Google is USD and Meta wants to be Gold. The % of businesses that accept mainstream currencies have always been the same. What’s left are businesses that people still find socially unacceptable.
  - golergka 4y ago
    > Businesses still pay (and always have) the same % in advertising That's completely false. A lot of small businesses (think housewifes selling cupcakes) were not viable before Google and especially Facebook/Instagram — they simply could not realistically find their consumers before internet advertising.
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      They could always post an ad in a local newspaper. Many people read those things before the proliferation of internet.
      - golergka 4y ago
        They could also use a lot of other advertisement methods, which were much less cost-effective and make their businesses unprofitable overall.
        ajsnigrutin 4y ago
        Most of those ads were free "back in my days" here.. you got a "postcard" in each of those magazines, and could post an ad (limited length, text only) for free... how do you thing people sold cars before the internet? And yes, facebook is more cost effective, because people don't get paid for their data... if people got paid for viewing ads and having their data gathered (like they used to be, market research groups and all that), the cost would be a lot different.
        jasode 4y ago
        >how do you thing people sold cars before the internet? You're not following the particular context of your subthread and inadvertently moving the goalposts. The side conversation you're replying to was niche businesses with niche customers e.g. gp's example of "small businesses (think housewifes selling cupcakes)" Buying ad space in a local newspaper is a waste of money for _small_ businesses like that because the subset of readers interested in paying for homemade cupcakes is too tiny. There's a threshold where it's just not financially feasible to pay $$$ targeted at a general audience in the hopes of converting the subset of that audience into customer revenue. On the other hand, cars are purchased by everybody and the profit margins are also higher to get a return-on-investment when spending for ads in local newspapers. Mabye a better example than housewife cupcakes is the niche video educational content on Youtube that's supported by advertising. The niche videos from Animagraffs, Practical Engineering, etc with micro-audiences wouldn't be economically viable on traditional network tv or even PBS. It required the long-tail of the internet matching the marketplace of viewers + creators + advertisers.
  - thematrixturtle 4y ago
    I'm no fan of ads, but I would still contest that. The pre-Internet advertising arsenal was all remarkably blunt weapons (newspaper ads, TV, radio, direct mail) that made targeting very difficult and were out of reach or not economic for countless businesses. Now anybody can buy precisely targeted impressions for any keyword under the sun and very closely track their performance, opening up entirely new markets.
    - nulbyte 4y ago
      I'm not a fan of these new markets. We got by just fine with simple, static ads that weren't spying on everyone. It gave rise to local, niche publications that were a heck of a lot more interesting than today's one-size-fits-all social media junk.
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      And with that, millions and billions of users get profiled, their private information taken away and processed by those two companies, as ads get embedded into everything (even lockscreens it seems)
    - seydor 4y ago
      https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachel-Soloveichik/publication/315481909/figure/fig1/AS:563549458137088@1511372069345/Advertising-Expenditures-Relative-to-Global-GDP.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachel-Soloveichik/publ... There is no such thing as 'blunt' or sharp weapon, the market shows that all advertising has some efficacy (around 1% but nobody knows how much precisely). Internet advertising did not increase overall consumption, thus it is not more effective than the sum of previous media. Anyway the biggest trick BigTech played was not that it hypnotized the masses, but that they convinced advertisers that they are better than everyone
      - lesam 4y ago
        My model is advertising is roughly zero sum - there’s only so much disposable income for advertisers to chase. So it doesn’t seem contradictory that overall consumption stayed constant while the advertising arms race advanced significantly.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > This is as zero-sum as it gets. Given the impact of FaceBook on political and media systems, I think that this a strongly negative sum game. Spreading "junk food news" and other lurid conspiratorial stories is a negative externality, like venting pollution.
cehrlich 4y ago
Zuckerberg is fundamentally right [1], and I think it's a good observation that many people fail to make. But I think it's companies other than Facebook/Meta that are creating the new value. [1] https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-know-just-made-a-gr-1825121606/ https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...
- mlatu 4y ago
  he is right in a way that makes it hard to see what facebook is turning into profit: the users attention. sure they are creating a space without taking away volume for other people to build there, but nobody will care about the other things because a proper map of the internet is not concerned with what is there, but what a given user spends their attention on.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    I think the argument which is charitable to Facebook is that they make money by more efficiently matching advertisements to slots: advertisers are less willing to pay for generic slots in a newspaper than targeted slots because, in theory, a slot seen by someone more desirable. Facebook do advanced targeting to allow slots to be sold at closer to their fair value by making buyers better informed and they take a fee for improving the efficiency. But it’s still reasonable to argue that the targeting is not as effective as claimed, the fee is too large, or that there are political reasons to dislike targeting and we should disallow it even if it makes the ad market more efficient.
    - mlatu 4y ago
      i mean, of course i want the best THINGS for my bucks, so advertising good wares is kind of desirable... but perhaps that is not enough. perhaps the scope needs to include production of wares: i dont just want inferior wares to not be advertised, but rather not even made. time, effort and resources wasted on trash products are a shame we are going to feel painfuly in the coming decades if humanity ever wakes up from the capitalist dream
chris_wot 4y ago
I’m curious why anyone takes inspiration from Zuckerberg.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  Basically, when you are rich the same opinions you had when you were poor now matter. Its magic, like a superpower.
  - danaris 4y ago
    "And it won't make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong— When you're rich, they think you really know!" ~ Tevye, _Fiddler on the Roof_
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  I find it funny, how social media created even more hate against the rich... especially movie stars. Before social networks, the rich and famous (from large businessmen to moviestars) had tv interviews and large newspaper articles, where whole PR teams went over the questions, the answers, the article itself, and made things "look god" for the rich/famous person. Now, with social media, you have (eg.) people suffering due to lockdowns, and Madonna posts a video in a milky bathtub complaining about crap, Gal Gadot does a really bad singing job and sings "imagine" ("...imagine no posessions...") while people are literally going broke an hungry, and Elon Musk posts a tweet and half of crypto goes up/down, depending on whats in the tweet.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Because under religious capitalism, money = grace.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  "An idea is good no matter where it comes from" shouldn't be true in reverse?
robocat 4y ago
Full text: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’ – P2P.AI On stage with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at the 2010 Web2.0 Summit, Mark Zuckerberg stared at the Summit backdrop, that had a map with various consumer technology areas that have been ‘conquered’, charted out. “Your Map is Wrong,” Zuckerberg said. “The biggest part of the map has to be uncharted territory — this map makes it seem like it’s zero-sum, but it’s not. We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else.” (Source) “It is not a zero-sum game” is something we tend to forget as we start competing in the marketplace. There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. Wealth is not a fixed pie (PG). Steve Jobs famously said that there is no point in asking the customer what they need because they wouldn’t know until it is given to them. That is classic uncharted territory. None of us knew we needed Steve’s devices until they were given to us. The next time you look at a map, look for the uncharted territory. Without that, your view of the map is most definitely wrong.
- usrn 4y ago
  I really don't like Zuckerberg and expected to disagree with him (especially about maps, everyone gets maps wrong (especially especially on computers) but this isn't a map of the earth.) This sounds right to me. Every time someone says we've figured everything out they're always wrong. There's always more to understand. I don't think Facebook legitimately adds value, I think it's entirely parasitic. But we haven't discovered everything there is to know about talking with each other.
  - altruios 4y ago
    Aye, this rings true... but the source...
- criddell 4y ago
  > We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else. Does Facebook still build anything? These days it seems like they mostly buy other companies that are still able to build and innovate.
  - 4y ago
lucideer 4y ago
> Wealth is not a fixed pie (PG). I've read a fair bit of PG's writing but hadn't dug into The Pie Fallacy referenced here. Wow, what utter nonsense. I've certainly not agreed with everything PG comes out with but this is a new logical low. And it's not just the usual problem of an oversimplified analogy not accurately representing more complex systems, the analogy[0] isn't even internally consistent with itself. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html#f4n http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html#f4n
- nuclearnice1 4y ago
  What specifically is over simplified, inconsistent, or wrong?
  - eagleal 4y ago
    Economics is too broad. For example Land and Real Estate is zero-sum, as is strictly Debt/Financial/Monetary exchange. Some things, as with blue skies research, really do create more wealth as in overall some technological advancements make making some things cheaper, or available. Creating debt to print capital now for making X cheaper to produce is generally good as that zero-sum is offset by the wealth/wellness created by that capital in the future (a company producing cheaper components for example). Meta exists in a zero-sum market, as advertisers fight for the same limited resource: attention (an individual can view as much advertisement in 24H).
- jedimastert 4y ago
  I'm also curious to know where you think he goes wrong, it's pretty well acknowledged at this point that economics is generally not a zero-sum game
  - falcolas 4y ago
    Where is all this extra money coming from, if not from someone else? Inflation - the one action that actually creates more money - accounts for a pretty small part of it. Without creation of additional money, every dollar earned is someone else’s dollar spent. And yes, I’ve heard theories that the commodities purchased with a dollar are worth more than that dollar, but if that were true, the item would be sold for more; a “rational” capitalist would sell it according to its actual worth.
nicoco 4y ago
>None of us knew we needed Steve’s devices until they were given to us. I have recently been given a $2500 toy by $EMPLOYER$ and I still don't need it. Personal anecdote aside, is this post seriously advocating for creating needs from scratch?
- waynesonfire 4y ago
  Meh, I don't buy it either. Why would anyone ask me what features a nuclear power plant should have? The only frame of reference that I can speak to is I'd like cheap, safe, and clean electricity. If I were a nuclear engineer I'd have more opinions about what could be done to make it cheaper, safer, and cleaner.
- balsam 4y ago
  “None of us knew that we needed sexual intimacy until we s-tumbled into porn.”
  - zelphirkalt 4y ago
    Let me translate that: "None of us knew that we needed privacy until it was taken away from us by Steve's devices, Facebook, Google and others."
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      And now this can be a new profitable market to sell some privacy back to you!
      - eagleal 4y ago
        Wouldn't that make this market zero-sum?
- kibwen 4y ago
  > is this post seriously advocating for creating needs from scratch? What do you think the vast majority of marketing and advertisement is concerned with? Using psychological manipulation to trick people into believing that they're missing out on something and then selling them a solution to the fabricated need is par for the course. The perverse monetary incentives create an inevitable race to the bottom where human desire itself is manipulated in order to increase corporate profit.
s_dev 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
balderdash 4y ago
Sounds like an allusion to blue ocean strategy “ BLUE OCEANS, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today – the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid.” https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/what-is-blue-ocean-strategy/ https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/what-is-blue-ocean-strateg...
imtringued 4y ago
What if the inverse is true? Someone (maybe Meta, maybe someone else) is playing a zero sum game and now you are forced to bake a bigger pie otherwise your slice gets smaller.
m0llusk 4y ago
The product that lifted Apple out of mediocrity and into the public eye was the iPod. The iPod, especially in its initial release, had a feature list that was explicitly derived from the failings of competing products. The idea was to take and dominate the mobile music player market. All of the biggest power moves Steve Jobs made were about eating someone else's lunch.
- filesystem 4y ago
  This implies that the MP3 market was already sufficiently large or saturated by the time the iPod came on the scene, which is false. The MP3 market at the time was mostly an intersection of tech-savvy individuals and musicians. Everyone else was still using portable CD players or walkmans.
  - eloeffler 4y ago
    At the time, portable CD/MD players and walkmans were competing products to the iPod. mp3 players weren't a separate market. There were even portable CD players that could read mp3s off a CD.
    - cupofpython 4y ago
      anecdotally, I had CD player first then I moved to iPod and downloaded limewire
- yobbo 4y ago
  The big difference was iTunes/store integration, which would have been impossible for any of the smaller companies.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  The iPod's initial release did correct some misfeatures of competitors but it was not a mass market success. It took Apple until the third generation iPod to hit mass market success. The first two generations of iPod only had FireWire connectivity, available on every Mac but very few PCs. With the third generation iPod USB 2.0 capability was added giving it compatibility with a huge portion of PCs. Sales skyrocketed after the addition of USB support. After the addition of USB when the iPod took off it didn't outright kill the competition. It just sold so well and expanded the market so much that the PMP market became the iPod market and also-rans. The iPod had a lot of competitors but no real competition in terms of sales. The PMP that killed the iPod mini (that was selling like gangbusters) was the iPod nano. I'd argue that the iPod was the opposite of a zero sum product because it expanded the PMP market far beyond its size at the iPod's inception.
registeredcorn 4y ago
>there is no point in asking the customer what they need because they wouldn’t know until it is given to them. Although I understand the sentiment, I have to disagree with it. The mindset that people are either: uninformed, misinformed, or unaware of what they need is a kind of idea that pushes one towards a sort of syndrome that assumes: 1) The public, as a whole, is too stupid to think for themselves 2) The public, as a whole, needs YOU to show them how "forward thinking" (smart) you are (and how stupid they are) If we draw out that line of thinking a bit further, it also seems to hint at this tedious Western idea that, "If I don't do this, no one else will". In my view, that is not so much an entrepreneurial mindset, and moreso sheer, unrestrained arrogance. It is a roundabout way of saying, "No one else will ever do this, because only I CAN do this." It assumes that you are the defacto - the ONLY - creator of new things. I dislike that because although there surely are stupid people in the world, however, we are also PART of that public. This mindset works more to separate us from "the horde" and throws us into this "put upon" position, that it is only by our own doing that any progress can possibly be made. This is illogical and irrational. There are surely thousands upon thousands of others who are willing, able, and trying to achieve the same goals. Of those many thousands, surely there are hundreds among them that could design and implement it far better than ourselves. The only differentiating factor then, is: 1) Marketing 2) Market dominance 3) Profitability TL;DR people know what sucks in life. They know this instinctively because they live their life every single day. They know what could be done better. Thinking that "only I can show it to them" in a fancy little package leads to an overwhelming amount of arrogance. It ignores competitors. It ignores that we are a PART of the public. This kind of mindset is detrimental, if not outright counter to its own goals. The focus must instead be on improving implementation, design, and ease of use.
carbadtraingood 4y ago
> There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. At any appreciable scale I disagree with this, or at least believe this ignores a whole lot of complexity. Like, it totally ignores how profits are allocated within a company, for instance. Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at the expense of making himself poorer. It also seems to ignore the extractive elements of companies. Whether we are extracting raw minerals, agricultural products, or manufacturing capacity.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yobbo 4y ago
  > There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. Actually, economics doesn't create wealth. Technology and industry creates wealth. In the case of facebook, you'd have to make the argument that advertising budgets is creating more "wealth" in the hands of facebook than anywhere else. Advertising spending budgets are, in fact, zero-sum. Which form of advertising creates more "economic wellfare" is probably a normative debate, and we'd need someone motivated enough to have it. But in the end, facebook's revenue comes at the expense of other companies' revenue.
  - temporalparts 4y ago
    Advertising spend is not zero-sum. Budgets are determined by advertising efficiency; if a new platform comes along that significantly improves cost per conversion, then you'd allocate more money than before. The reason advertisers are flocking to Google and Facebook is because of their advertisement efficiency (through targeting), and this has lead to an increase in overall advertiser spending.
- jl6 4y ago
  > Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. How did he make them poorer? He took money from them?
_Algernon_ 4y ago
"We’re building value" in the mouth of Zuckerberg has to be the joke of the day. Destroying democracy isn't creating value.
- brnt 4y ago
  > Destroying democracy isn't creating value. Peter Thiel begs to differ.
masswerk 4y ago
There's much confusion in this. The map is about uncharted business opportunities, ie. introducing new competitors. Yes, consumer products (in contrast to goods that enable buyers to generate income) are competing for buyers' budgets. This is actually quite literally a zero-sum game. (There's only a rather limited probability that your income will automatically increase as you buy a new TV set, in order to make up for it.) What these budgets are, is rather a matter of macroeconomics, which remain entirely untouched by the article. Finally, Jobs' statement is about the validity of market research as the sole driving input for innovation and development. (Going back to the map, it's as if we would be mapping undiscovered species: gorilla – checked, found that, okapi – checked, tripedal swan – not found yet, monopod – not found yet, etc. This quite Borgesesque chart would be able to map any successes possible in advance. Therefor, we would know that it makes no sense to look into the seas, as there are no unchecked species left there. However, product development is neither a zero-sum game nor is there a finite pool of ideas, nor is it defined or limited by what we already know. Chances are, the optimum hasn't been reached yet, nor does everybody know what this may look like, otherwise, there'd be little incentive to innovate at all.) I have a hard time even wondering how these things should be connected. At best, you could link the map to the "known unknowns", but, going with Jobs, you'd have to admit that this is not a map at all, but a rather weak metaphor. Meaning, as a map is all about navigating the known world, it is of little help for imagining what may be beyond it. (The known existence of uncharted territories is rather an invitation to go there and find what may be found there in order to increase that portion of the sum, which is accessible to me.) But, we'd have to admit also that this insight doesn't revolutionize macroeconomics, as these are on an entirely different level. In a sense, the map in the first example is more about a sweeping spotlight, highlighting those areas where budgets are momentarily spent.
Comevius 4y ago
Let me repeat myself for the thousandth time, just because something is new it doesn't mean that it's useful or valuable. Charting new territories, experimenting inevitably gets you the wrong answer most of the time. Innovation implies both invention and commercialization. Registering a domain called p2p.ai to lure venture capital trying to show up early for a new potentially lucrative Ponzi scheme is not innovation, unless pumping and dumping is a commercial activity.
nostromo 4y ago
It's interesting to apply Zuckerberg's views to his company 12 years later. Meta's actions towards social media make it seem like it's now a zero-sum game. They copy features from Snapchat and TikTok, or buy companies like WhatsApp and Instagram, precisely because those companies are taking value away from Facebook. The whole metaverse thing is a touch different. It does look like they're trying to build new value there -- of course, who knows if they'll pull it off.
- uoaei 4y ago
  Build new value? It looks like they're building a new walled garden...
gumby 4y ago
There are big opportunities in the blank parts of the map, but we only remember the very few survivors. People rarely know they need the new product (remember the apocryphal Henry Ford quote: "If I asked people what they want they'd say a faster horse"). A friend of mine who is a VC told me years ago, "I only get to meet crazy people: either they have a completely new product, and so will run out of runway before they manage to get the plane airborne, or they are going into an existing market, where the incumbents will crush the aircraft before it gets enough speed to leave the ground." Despite the amusing language it was a useful perspective.

96 points by p2pai 4y ago

https://archive.ph/m2Ab1 https://archive.ph/m2Ab1

”We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else.” Bullshit. Meta's whole business is predation on user's attention. If I am scrolling their stupid page, then I am not scrolling some other stupid page. This is as zero-sum as it gets.

Pr0ject217 4y ago
I share your distaste for Meta/FB; however, if their investment to advance the 'meta-verse' leads them to invent technologies that end up being used in different contexts by other companies/industries (charting more of the uncharted map), then all the better.
prepend 4y ago
I think Facebook consumed non-monetized life activities. So instead of doing free things IRL, people started browsing and scrolling. So it was zero sum for attention but not for economic value. I think Zuckerberg was right in that Facebook didn’t take market away from others, they created a new market. At least 12 years ago.
seydor 4y ago
This is not even contestable. Google and FB took the advertising money from everyone else. Businesses still pay (and always have) the same % in advertising, only it's 2 monopolies now instead of thousands of media.
- balsam 4y ago
  Since the article comes from a “crypto”-related site, perhaps I can make a metaphoric (& mildly schizophrenic) response without getting downvoted. Google is USD and Meta wants to be Gold. The % of businesses that accept mainstream currencies have always been the same. What’s left are businesses that people still find socially unacceptable.
- golergka 4y ago
  > Businesses still pay (and always have) the same % in advertising That's completely false. A lot of small businesses (think housewifes selling cupcakes) were not viable before Google and especially Facebook/Instagram — they simply could not realistically find their consumers before internet advertising.
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    They could always post an ad in a local newspaper. Many people read those things before the proliferation of internet.
    - golergka 4y ago
      They could also use a lot of other advertisement methods, which were much less cost-effective and make their businesses unprofitable overall.
      - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
        Most of those ads were free "back in my days" here.. you got a "postcard" in each of those magazines, and could post an ad (limited length, text only) for free... how do you thing people sold cars before the internet? And yes, facebook is more cost effective, because people don't get paid for their data... if people got paid for viewing ads and having their data gathered (like they used to be, market research groups and all that), the cost would be a lot different.
        jasode 4y ago
        >how do you thing people sold cars before the internet? You're not following the particular context of your subthread and inadvertently moving the goalposts. The side conversation you're replying to was niche businesses with niche customers e.g. gp's example of "small businesses (think housewifes selling cupcakes)" Buying ad space in a local newspaper is a waste of money for _small_ businesses like that because the subset of readers interested in paying for homemade cupcakes is too tiny. There's a threshold where it's just not financially feasible to pay $$$ targeted at a general audience in the hopes of converting the subset of that audience into customer revenue. On the other hand, cars are purchased by everybody and the profit margins are also higher to get a return-on-investment when spending for ads in local newspapers. Mabye a better example than housewife cupcakes is the niche video educational content on Youtube that's supported by advertising. The niche videos from Animagraffs, Practical Engineering, etc with micro-audiences wouldn't be economically viable on traditional network tv or even PBS. It required the long-tail of the internet matching the marketplace of viewers + creators + advertisers.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  I'm no fan of ads, but I would still contest that. The pre-Internet advertising arsenal was all remarkably blunt weapons (newspaper ads, TV, radio, direct mail) that made targeting very difficult and were out of reach or not economic for countless businesses. Now anybody can buy precisely targeted impressions for any keyword under the sun and very closely track their performance, opening up entirely new markets.
  - nulbyte 4y ago
    I'm not a fan of these new markets. We got by just fine with simple, static ads that weren't spying on everyone. It gave rise to local, niche publications that were a heck of a lot more interesting than today's one-size-fits-all social media junk.
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    And with that, millions and billions of users get profiled, their private information taken away and processed by those two companies, as ads get embedded into everything (even lockscreens it seems)
  - seydor 4y ago
    https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachel-Soloveichik/publication/315481909/figure/fig1/AS:563549458137088@1511372069345/Advertising-Expenditures-Relative-to-Global-GDP.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachel-Soloveichik/publ... There is no such thing as 'blunt' or sharp weapon, the market shows that all advertising has some efficacy (around 1% but nobody knows how much precisely). Internet advertising did not increase overall consumption, thus it is not more effective than the sum of previous media. Anyway the biggest trick BigTech played was not that it hypnotized the masses, but that they convinced advertisers that they are better than everyone
    - lesam 4y ago
      My model is advertising is roughly zero sum - there’s only so much disposable income for advertisers to chase. So it doesn’t seem contradictory that overall consumption stayed constant while the advertising arms race advanced significantly.
SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
> This is as zero-sum as it gets. Given the impact of FaceBook on political and media systems, I think that this a strongly negative sum game. Spreading "junk food news" and other lurid conspiratorial stories is a negative externality, like venting pollution.

cehrlich 4y ago

Zuckerberg is fundamentally right [1], and I think it's a good observation that many people fail to make. But I think it's companies other than Facebook/Meta that are creating the new value. [1] https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-know-just-made-a-gr-1825121606/ https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...

mlatu 4y ago
he is right in a way that makes it hard to see what facebook is turning into profit: the users attention. sure they are creating a space without taking away volume for other people to build there, but nobody will care about the other things because a proper map of the internet is not concerned with what is there, but what a given user spends their attention on.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  I think the argument which is charitable to Facebook is that they make money by more efficiently matching advertisements to slots: advertisers are less willing to pay for generic slots in a newspaper than targeted slots because, in theory, a slot seen by someone more desirable. Facebook do advanced targeting to allow slots to be sold at closer to their fair value by making buyers better informed and they take a fee for improving the efficiency. But it’s still reasonable to argue that the targeting is not as effective as claimed, the fee is too large, or that there are political reasons to dislike targeting and we should disallow it even if it makes the ad market more efficient.
  - mlatu 4y ago
    i mean, of course i want the best THINGS for my bucks, so advertising good wares is kind of desirable... but perhaps that is not enough. perhaps the scope needs to include production of wares: i dont just want inferior wares to not be advertised, but rather not even made. time, effort and resources wasted on trash products are a shame we are going to feel painfuly in the coming decades if humanity ever wakes up from the capitalist dream

chris_wot 4y ago

I’m curious why anyone takes inspiration from Zuckerberg.

yieldcrv 4y ago
Basically, when you are rich the same opinions you had when you were poor now matter. Its magic, like a superpower.
- danaris 4y ago
  "And it won't make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong— When you're rich, they think you really know!" ~ Tevye, _Fiddler on the Roof_
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I find it funny, how social media created even more hate against the rich... especially movie stars. Before social networks, the rich and famous (from large businessmen to moviestars) had tv interviews and large newspaper articles, where whole PR teams went over the questions, the answers, the article itself, and made things "look god" for the rich/famous person. Now, with social media, you have (eg.) people suffering due to lockdowns, and Madonna posts a video in a milky bathtub complaining about crap, Gal Gadot does a really bad singing job and sings "imagine" ("...imagine no posessions...") while people are literally going broke an hungry, and Elon Musk posts a tweet and half of crypto goes up/down, depending on whats in the tweet.
pessimizer 4y ago
Because under religious capitalism, money = grace.
mikkergp 4y ago
"An idea is good no matter where it comes from" shouldn't be true in reverse?

robocat 4y ago

Full text: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’ – P2P.AI On stage with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at the 2010 Web2.0 Summit, Mark Zuckerberg stared at the Summit backdrop, that had a map with various consumer technology areas that have been ‘conquered’, charted out. “Your Map is Wrong,” Zuckerberg said. “The biggest part of the map has to be uncharted territory — this map makes it seem like it’s zero-sum, but it’s not. We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else.” (Source) “It is not a zero-sum game” is something we tend to forget as we start competing in the marketplace. There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. Wealth is not a fixed pie (PG). Steve Jobs famously said that there is no point in asking the customer what they need because they wouldn’t know until it is given to them. That is classic uncharted territory. None of us knew we needed Steve’s devices until they were given to us. The next time you look at a map, look for the uncharted territory. Without that, your view of the map is most definitely wrong.

usrn 4y ago
I really don't like Zuckerberg and expected to disagree with him (especially about maps, everyone gets maps wrong (especially especially on computers) but this isn't a map of the earth.) This sounds right to me. Every time someone says we've figured everything out they're always wrong. There's always more to understand. I don't think Facebook legitimately adds value, I think it's entirely parasitic. But we haven't discovered everything there is to know about talking with each other.
- altruios 4y ago
  Aye, this rings true... but the source...
criddell 4y ago
> We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else. Does Facebook still build anything? These days it seems like they mostly buy other companies that are still able to build and innovate.
- 4y ago

lucideer 4y ago

> Wealth is not a fixed pie (PG). I've read a fair bit of PG's writing but hadn't dug into The Pie Fallacy referenced here. Wow, what utter nonsense. I've certainly not agreed with everything PG comes out with but this is a new logical low. And it's not just the usual problem of an oversimplified analogy not accurately representing more complex systems, the analogy[0] isn't even internally consistent with itself. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html#f4n http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html#f4n

nuclearnice1 4y ago
What specifically is over simplified, inconsistent, or wrong?
- eagleal 4y ago
  Economics is too broad. For example Land and Real Estate is zero-sum, as is strictly Debt/Financial/Monetary exchange. Some things, as with blue skies research, really do create more wealth as in overall some technological advancements make making some things cheaper, or available. Creating debt to print capital now for making X cheaper to produce is generally good as that zero-sum is offset by the wealth/wellness created by that capital in the future (a company producing cheaper components for example). Meta exists in a zero-sum market, as advertisers fight for the same limited resource: attention (an individual can view as much advertisement in 24H).
jedimastert 4y ago
I'm also curious to know where you think he goes wrong, it's pretty well acknowledged at this point that economics is generally not a zero-sum game
- falcolas 4y ago
  Where is all this extra money coming from, if not from someone else? Inflation - the one action that actually creates more money - accounts for a pretty small part of it. Without creation of additional money, every dollar earned is someone else’s dollar spent. And yes, I’ve heard theories that the commodities purchased with a dollar are worth more than that dollar, but if that were true, the item would be sold for more; a “rational” capitalist would sell it according to its actual worth.

nicoco 4y ago

>None of us knew we needed Steve’s devices until they were given to us. I have recently been given a $2500 toy by $EMPLOYER$ and I still don't need it. Personal anecdote aside, is this post seriously advocating for creating needs from scratch?

waynesonfire 4y ago
Meh, I don't buy it either. Why would anyone ask me what features a nuclear power plant should have? The only frame of reference that I can speak to is I'd like cheap, safe, and clean electricity. If I were a nuclear engineer I'd have more opinions about what could be done to make it cheaper, safer, and cleaner.
balsam 4y ago
“None of us knew that we needed sexual intimacy until we s-tumbled into porn.”
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  Let me translate that: "None of us knew that we needed privacy until it was taken away from us by Steve's devices, Facebook, Google and others."
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    And now this can be a new profitable market to sell some privacy back to you!
    - eagleal 4y ago
      Wouldn't that make this market zero-sum?
kibwen 4y ago
> is this post seriously advocating for creating needs from scratch? What do you think the vast majority of marketing and advertisement is concerned with? Using psychological manipulation to trick people into believing that they're missing out on something and then selling them a solution to the fabricated need is par for the course. The perverse monetary incentives create an inevitable race to the bottom where human desire itself is manipulated in order to increase corporate profit.

s_dev 4y ago

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balderdash 4y ago

Sounds like an allusion to blue ocean strategy “ BLUE OCEANS, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today – the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid.” https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/what-is-blue-ocean-strategy/ https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/what-is-blue-ocean-strateg...

imtringued 4y ago

What if the inverse is true? Someone (maybe Meta, maybe someone else) is playing a zero sum game and now you are forced to bake a bigger pie otherwise your slice gets smaller.

m0llusk 4y ago

The product that lifted Apple out of mediocrity and into the public eye was the iPod. The iPod, especially in its initial release, had a feature list that was explicitly derived from the failings of competing products. The idea was to take and dominate the mobile music player market. All of the biggest power moves Steve Jobs made were about eating someone else's lunch.

filesystem 4y ago
This implies that the MP3 market was already sufficiently large or saturated by the time the iPod came on the scene, which is false. The MP3 market at the time was mostly an intersection of tech-savvy individuals and musicians. Everyone else was still using portable CD players or walkmans.
- eloeffler 4y ago
  At the time, portable CD/MD players and walkmans were competing products to the iPod. mp3 players weren't a separate market. There were even portable CD players that could read mp3s off a CD.
  - cupofpython 4y ago
    anecdotally, I had CD player first then I moved to iPod and downloaded limewire
yobbo 4y ago
The big difference was iTunes/store integration, which would have been impossible for any of the smaller companies.
giantrobot 4y ago
The iPod's initial release did correct some misfeatures of competitors but it was not a mass market success. It took Apple until the third generation iPod to hit mass market success. The first two generations of iPod only had FireWire connectivity, available on every Mac but very few PCs. With the third generation iPod USB 2.0 capability was added giving it compatibility with a huge portion of PCs. Sales skyrocketed after the addition of USB support. After the addition of USB when the iPod took off it didn't outright kill the competition. It just sold so well and expanded the market so much that the PMP market became the iPod market and also-rans. The iPod had a lot of competitors but no real competition in terms of sales. The PMP that killed the iPod mini (that was selling like gangbusters) was the iPod nano. I'd argue that the iPod was the opposite of a zero sum product because it expanded the PMP market far beyond its size at the iPod's inception.

registeredcorn 4y ago

>there is no point in asking the customer what they need because they wouldn’t know until it is given to them. Although I understand the sentiment, I have to disagree with it. The mindset that people are either: uninformed, misinformed, or unaware of what they need is a kind of idea that pushes one towards a sort of syndrome that assumes: 1) The public, as a whole, is too stupid to think for themselves 2) The public, as a whole, needs YOU to show them how "forward thinking" (smart) you are (and how stupid they are) If we draw out that line of thinking a bit further, it also seems to hint at this tedious Western idea that, "If I don't do this, no one else will". In my view, that is not so much an entrepreneurial mindset, and moreso sheer, unrestrained arrogance. It is a roundabout way of saying, "No one else will ever do this, because only I CAN do this." It assumes that you are the defacto - the ONLY - creator of new things. I dislike that because although there surely are stupid people in the world, however, we are also PART of that public. This mindset works more to separate us from "the horde" and throws us into this "put upon" position, that it is only by our own doing that any progress can possibly be made. This is illogical and irrational. There are surely thousands upon thousands of others who are willing, able, and trying to achieve the same goals. Of those many thousands, surely there are hundreds among them that could design and implement it far better than ourselves. The only differentiating factor then, is: 1) Marketing 2) Market dominance 3) Profitability TL;DR people know what sucks in life. They know this instinctively because they live their life every single day. They know what could be done better. Thinking that "only I can show it to them" in a fancy little package leads to an overwhelming amount of arrogance. It ignores competitors. It ignores that we are a PART of the public. This kind of mindset is detrimental, if not outright counter to its own goals. The focus must instead be on improving implementation, design, and ease of use.

carbadtraingood 4y ago

> There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. At any appreciable scale I disagree with this, or at least believe this ignores a whole lot of complexity. Like, it totally ignores how profits are allocated within a company, for instance. Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at the expense of making himself poorer. It also seems to ignore the extractive elements of companies. Whether we are extracting raw minerals, agricultural products, or manufacturing capacity.

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yobbo 4y ago
> There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. Actually, economics doesn't create wealth. Technology and industry creates wealth. In the case of facebook, you'd have to make the argument that advertising budgets is creating more "wealth" in the hands of facebook than anywhere else. Advertising spending budgets are, in fact, zero-sum. Which form of advertising creates more "economic wellfare" is probably a normative debate, and we'd need someone motivated enough to have it. But in the end, facebook's revenue comes at the expense of other companies' revenue.
- temporalparts 4y ago
  Advertising spend is not zero-sum. Budgets are determined by advertising efficiency; if a new platform comes along that significantly improves cost per conversion, then you'd allocate more money than before. The reason advertisers are flocking to Google and Facebook is because of their advertisement efficiency (through targeting), and this has lead to an increase in overall advertiser spending.
jl6 4y ago
> Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. How did he make them poorer? He took money from them?

_Algernon_ 4y ago

"We’re building value" in the mouth of Zuckerberg has to be the joke of the day. Destroying democracy isn't creating value.

brnt 4y ago
> Destroying democracy isn't creating value. Peter Thiel begs to differ.

masswerk 4y ago

There's much confusion in this. The map is about uncharted business opportunities, ie. introducing new competitors. Yes, consumer products (in contrast to goods that enable buyers to generate income) are competing for buyers' budgets. This is actually quite literally a zero-sum game. (There's only a rather limited probability that your income will automatically increase as you buy a new TV set, in order to make up for it.) What these budgets are, is rather a matter of macroeconomics, which remain entirely untouched by the article. Finally, Jobs' statement is about the validity of market research as the sole driving input for innovation and development. (Going back to the map, it's as if we would be mapping undiscovered species: gorilla – checked, found that, okapi – checked, tripedal swan – not found yet, monopod – not found yet, etc. This quite Borgesesque chart would be able to map any successes possible in advance. Therefor, we would know that it makes no sense to look into the seas, as there are no unchecked species left there. However, product development is neither a zero-sum game nor is there a finite pool of ideas, nor is it defined or limited by what we already know. Chances are, the optimum hasn't been reached yet, nor does everybody know what this may look like, otherwise, there'd be little incentive to innovate at all.) I have a hard time even wondering how these things should be connected. At best, you could link the map to the "known unknowns", but, going with Jobs, you'd have to admit that this is not a map at all, but a rather weak metaphor. Meaning, as a map is all about navigating the known world, it is of little help for imagining what may be beyond it. (The known existence of uncharted territories is rather an invitation to go there and find what may be found there in order to increase that portion of the sum, which is accessible to me.) But, we'd have to admit also that this insight doesn't revolutionize macroeconomics, as these are on an entirely different level. In a sense, the map in the first example is more about a sweeping spotlight, highlighting those areas where budgets are momentarily spent.

Comevius 4y ago

Let me repeat myself for the thousandth time, just because something is new it doesn't mean that it's useful or valuable. Charting new territories, experimenting inevitably gets you the wrong answer most of the time. Innovation implies both invention and commercialization. Registering a domain called p2p.ai to lure venture capital trying to show up early for a new potentially lucrative Ponzi scheme is not innovation, unless pumping and dumping is a commercial activity.

nostromo 4y ago

It's interesting to apply Zuckerberg's views to his company 12 years later. Meta's actions towards social media make it seem like it's now a zero-sum game. They copy features from Snapchat and TikTok, or buy companies like WhatsApp and Instagram, precisely because those companies are taking value away from Facebook. The whole metaverse thing is a touch different. It does look like they're trying to build new value there -- of course, who knows if they'll pull it off.

uoaei 4y ago
Build new value? It looks like they're building a new walled garden...

gumby 4y ago

There are big opportunities in the blank parts of the map, but we only remember the very few survivors. People rarely know they need the new product (remember the apocryphal Henry Ford quote: "If I asked people what they want they'd say a faster horse"). A friend of mine who is a VC told me years ago, "I only get to meet crazy people: either they have a completely new product, and so will run out of runway before they manage to get the plane airborne, or they are going into an existing market, where the incumbents will crush the aircraft before it gets enough speed to leave the ground." Despite the amusing language it was a useful perspective.