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From BBSes to Facebook: gains and losses

From BBSes to Facebook: gains and losses

Last updated on: July 21, 2017 at 8:07 am by Jane the Actuary

From BBSes to Facebook: gains and losses 2017-07-21T08:07:55-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Back in college, I was acquainted with a Star Trek fan and computer science major who combined both of those interests by running a BBS from his dorm room. I remember this only vaguely, but it seems to me that he lived in a single room, so had no roommate to complain, and would, every night, connect the phone to the modem so that BBS users could dial in to his computer to access the BBS itself.

It was, so far as I understand, a purely non-profit effort. Perhaps he was funding college by earning money in the form of some kind of subscription, or getting a monthly check from the Star Trek fan club. I don’t know. But it seems to me that at the time, there were plenty of such forums, where like-minded people gathered.

The nearest descendant to the BBS would be, I imagine, the special-interest sites with forums of all kinds. There are, yes, Star Trek forums, and forums for Catholics, and forums for expectant moms, and forums for expats in Germany. And the general model seems to be that they pay their expenses, or perhaps earn a modest profit for the site owner, via moderate amounts of advertising.

But Facebook provides universality. Your group of facebook-friends creates an instant, customized forum. And facebook groups provide the same ability to chat with like-minded people, but far more accessibly, whether it’s a large group like “Tea Party Conservatives for Freedom” (which, yes, is chock full of genuinely fake news; I don’t recommend them), or a small group like the local Boy Scout troop families. And you can find the groups you want, and they can find you. And especially for us homebodies and introverts and all-around nerds, they’re great, and provide some semblance of a social life that would otherwise be much more limited.

It’s great.

But there are costs.

Facebook is, after all, a corporation, and one keen on increasing its profit margin.

And that’s a big plus –but there’s a cost: it’s a corporation. Users are subject to increasing quantities of advertising. As blogger Adam Frey writes in “Social Media is Turning Us All Into Billboards,”

Remember back when we all first got into social media in the last decade? It was a great way to catch up with people. Suddenly, the doors were open to communicate with high school and college classmates we hadn’t talked to in years. If you’re approaching 40 and geographically separated from your hometown, you probably wondered whatever happened to this guy and that girl and didn’t feel like waiting for the next class reunion. Facebook seemed to fix all that. Suddenly, you could see who was getting married, having kids, getting divorced, going on vacation. People you hadn’t seen in years were suddenly right there at your fingertips, and it was great.

Something’s changed. Have you noticed? Seriously, look at your Facebook or your Twitter and see how many vacation or cat photos you still have. If you’re like me, your Facebook is full of…advertisements. Some are overt, some are a little more covert. There’s a lot of ads for this movie or that TV show or concert or product or whatever. Sometimes it’s our own fault: we were excited for Star Wars and “liked” their page and now we’ve got lots of Star Wars crap in our feeds. Oftentimes it’s a little more subtle. Your friend likes Game of Thrones even though you don’t, so you get a notification that your ex-coworker in your friends list likes the show and Facebook makes a point of reminding you of that fact. Or maybe it’s outright manipulation: your friend belongs to one or several Walking Dead fan pages and they’re constantly sharing a funny meme or an article about the show as if to show you and everyone else that the show is great.

Facebook wants us to spend ever greater periods of time on the site, not for any grand social good, but so that they can sell more advertising, and sell those advertisements for more money. Heck, as a blogger who has a facebook page (which I do a very inconsistent job of keeping current), Facebook keeps prodding me to advertise my facebook page. Frey recommends unfollowing pages and using the options Facebook has to hide ads, but I suppose I’ve always assumed that Facebook is going to give you a fixed number of ads no matter what, so that you can’t really escape this. (Though that’s not to say I won’t try this, and see what happens.)

Now, did Facebook have to develop as a money-hungry entity? There are non-profit major websites out there, or at least one that I can think of: wikipedia. But Zuckerberg and his pals weren’t interested in building a platform for community and socialization as a public service, they were interested in making big piles of money, and, let’s face it, the latter is a more powerful motivator than the former.

And even if they were nominally a non-profit entity, they’d still effectively be a monopoly, due to the very powerful network effect.

A recent BusinessWeek article cites an eyepopping statistic:

[Researcher Jonathan] Taplin pegs Facebook’s share of mobile social media traffic, including the company’s WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram units, at 75 percent.

Figures are equally dramatic for other giants:

Alphabet Inc.’s Google gets about 77 percent of U.S. search advertising revenue. Google and Facebook Inc. together control about 56 percent of the mobile ad market. Amazon takes about 70 percent of all e-book sales and 30 percent of all U.S. e-commerce.

(Although actually it surprises me that 30% of e-books are sold outside of Amazon, and I also wish they’d included e-bay on their list.)

And as a quasi-monopoly, Facebook has an enormous amount of power. Even if we don’t pay money to use the site, it can collect our data, show as many ads as it likes, dictate terms for advertisers, favor one political point of view over another, and so on. Just yesterday there were reports that they had blocked a number of Catholic pages, and the explanation, that they had all simultaneously gotten caught up in spam detection, left some users skeptical. Although the pages were restored, and an anti-Catholic agenda does seem unlikely to me, it does highlight the enormous power that Facebook has.

Of course, here in the U.S., we’re fretting with Facebook making the decision to interfere in politics, such as with their efforts to “combat fake news”; in Germany, the federal government has stepped in and has passed a law which imposes massive fines if Facebook fails to remove what they’re calling “obvious hate speech” within 24 hours. Irritatingly, I cannot find any details on exactly how loosely they’re defining hate speech: is it “they should all be sent to the ovens” or “they should all be sent home,” or somewhere in-between? To what degree has the government moved from “don’t incite genocidal persecution of minority groups” to trying to prevent those who oppose the wide-scale immigration from majority-Muslim areas now taking place, from sharing their message and opposing the government? And to what extent will Facebook, out of fear of prosecution and fines, pre-emptively ban anything that they suspect the government will oppose?

So I don’t know. It worries me that Facebook, tapping into our desire to feel connected, now has so much power, and that even if they choose not to exercise that power, others may require them to.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AFacebook_on_Nasdaq.jpeg; By ProducerMatthew (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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