 Do the people stating that Meta can’t possibly “monetize” posts originating from other fedi services not believe that Threads users are going to experience, for example, Mastodon posts as *part of their Threads timeline*…which is algorithmically populated and will get monetized as soon as Meta flips ads on? Is there any documented reason not to believe that this is not the most likely outcome? 9 comments
@stoneymonster It feels like people think Meta makes their money by…selling scraped profile data wholesale or something? Maybe from inside a trench coat down at the Burger King?  @kissane This is a likely scenario in my view. What is being sold is attention. To direct our attention, corporate social media use our own posts to keep us engaged, and then present marketing messages around (and in) them. So at the very least, fedi content flowing into Threads is just more interesting stuff for them to keep people's eyes on the platform.  @kissane I think a lot of it stems from people just not really understanding how platforms monetize social media. It's not the most transparent system, after all. But it's a pretty big leap to suppose that, since fediverse posts were made on non-commercial services, they CAN'T be monetized. And from my perspective, the very fact that Meta is attempting to federate suggests that they already see a way to profit off of the additional traffic. @lrhodes Honestly, even though the book is good, I think the phrase “surveillance capitalism” has made people think this stuff is so much more complicated than it is. The targeting mechanisms are increasingly fine-grained, but the profit mechanism is *still just ads*! It’s not especially sophisticated. @kissane  @kissane I can't even get people to give coherent descriptions of what an ad is or isn't. I think every claim at this point is just reflexive defensiveness, on every side. |
Gregory's Server
@kissane yeah this should not be confusing. The Fediverse isn't GPLv3 or something. It's not virally de-monetizing Meta.