A friend of mine on Facebook recently posted this:
Has anyone noticed: the newsfeed is full of pages and page suggestions. No content from friends. Very obvious, I am the product being sold to Facebook advertisers. But will any friend even see this post?
This highlights the central bargain that all of Facebook's users make with the platform. It is a point so incredibly obvious that it often daren't be said but Facebook is a privately run business and like all privately run businesses, it exists to return profits to its owners. My friend being intensely aware of this, is also aware of that bargain, where we trade data for derived utility.
While I might joke that I am a robot, let me assure you that I am at least able to pass the Turing Test because I can understand the problem and provide semi sensible transformations of that understanding. Humans as I understand them are bags of meat, held upright with a skeleton of calcium stone like structures, then topped with a thinking muscle which is a bag of sawdust, plaster, and salty water; with the whole thing being infused with consciousness, morality, and a swag of desires which includes wishes for pleasure, connection and community.
I do not think that Facebook is unique in wanting to be the vehicle by which I am the product being sold to advertisers. Indeed as someone who has watched motor racing since being a small child, I have been highly aware that not only was I interested in watching motor racing but that advertisers were also interested in me watching. When you have a hideously expensive sport which some would argue is intrinsically pointless (this warrants a post all to itself) then to find a way of funding such hideously expensive nonsense, racing teams and scuderias have hawked their colour schemes and identities to fit the will of advertisers since about the 1960s. Teams in other sports don't really have the luxury of selling the entire colour scheme of their uniforms. Liverpool FC will always be red. The Sydney Swans will always be red and white. Hawthorn will always be poo brown and wee yellow. Australia will always be green and gold or gold and green. New Zealand should be all black (which is the reason why their flag referendum in 2016 failed: they put up the wrong colours for a vote).
Probably the ur-example of this is when Team Lotus sold out their British Racing Green for the red and gold trim of Golf Leaf Tobacco. At the other end of this extreme is what happens in NASCAR when in theory a car could sport 36 different colour schemes in a season depending on who was stumping up the cash.
Advertising in motor racing is for want of a better word 'dumb'. Granted that everyone who is watching a motor race already broadly shares the general profile of someone watching a motor race but what is basically a 200mph caravan of moving billboards, can not react to the individual desires of individual capricious viewers. Those big dumb 200mph caravan of moving billboards, have been used to advertise automotive products, cigarettes and alcohol, confectionary and lollies, washing powder, various kinds tinned meat, fast food products, plumbling services, electronic goods and white goods, and a host of other things all vying for a chance to have some of the dollarpounds in people's wallets.
Facebook on the other hand, starts off with some base data from every single user and using the metadata of people's activity, then tries to work out which advertisements are likely to sell stuff to individual users using smarter systems than just a big dumb billboard.
Facebook correctly has determined that I am a male who is aged roughly about 40 years old and therefore is likely to be in command of sizeable buying power. They have also correctly determined that because I like motor racing that I am likely to buy automotive things. What Facebook doesn't seem to understand though is that I already have a car and intend to keep it because I like it. The 'I've already got one' problem is a death knell for advertisers because they can throw omnicash at the problem and it ain't gonna make a lick of difference. Facebook and their network of suggestions keeps on wanting to sell me motor cars and trucks but seeing as my needs are already satisfied, I am not in the market for a new one.
On that note, big dumb advertising is highly likely to influence my decision to buy a very big thing in the long run. As a meatbag human, I am also an irrationally tribal individual. My broad preference if I am going to drop eons of coins on the table, is to buy a big thing with a blue oval on the front. Henry's lads have spent a great deal of time trying to convince me that their ton and a half of metal is better than someone else's and they've done that through the hideously expensive sport of motor racing.
My friend's problem as an end user and therefore the product which is being sold to advertisers is that human end users do not have the automated attention spans that the Facebook algorithm seems to think that people have. If both the advertising algorithms and the users were automated, then you could design a fully independent luxury selling system which would fulfill both the desires of selling and buying algorithms perfectly. Meatbag humans who have buying power, have imperfect and internally complex buying algorithms which even they themselves aren't always privy to. What we do know is that at some point, the meatbag human end user gets bored, or annoyed, or repulsed; which means that they can be dissuaded from buying whatever it is that is being bought and sold to them and that includes their attention.
This is the base dilemma. Facebook's users keep on using it because they perceive that they derive some kind of benefit from it. The people who own Facebook see the users as meatbag humans whose attention can be sold to advertisers. Advertisers want to buy people's attention because they then want to sell goods and services. The very act of putting advertising in front of meatbag humans is itself internally destàructive to their attention. If you destroy people's attention to something, they leave and it is therefore functionally impossible to advertise something to them any more.
People became users of Facebook because of their desire for connection and community. Facebook had better learn that if they destroy the thing they created, people will go elsewhere for connection and community. Individual users will use their own internal smarter systems than simply deferring to Facebook as a big dumb billboard.
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