alt Hacker NewsMeta ad spend increases 10% every year. Their products have had non stop continual successes for decades at this point. If fb and insta never changed and were solely relying on tailwind you could say they havent had any success, but this clearly is not true imo. Their family of apps have changed a lot, mostly for the worse imo, but it has led to massive increases in ad shows and spend per ad show.
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there are plenty of amazingly lucrative businesses that do really well, like online casinos, tobacco companies, etc. that happily milk their users and don't bother with improving human condition. You can call that "successful product strategy" i guess, but to me that's still pretty repulsive. You can also call this hyperbole, but i really am very much repulsed at this: increasing addictiveness for the weak minds to extract more revenue.
They’ve gotten better at addiction-engineering. Like making super-cocaine, it’s not a good thing. Essentially they took a dubiously ethical business and ramped it into, “actively harmful to almost everyone”. Any reasonable country would ban half the ads that make it onto FB/Insta. FB themselves admit 10% of their ad traffic is literal scammers.