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Posted

This all broadly tracks with his tunnel-vision focus on growth. He NEEDED China's users to keep facebook growing, and it's 100% believable that he would be overly enthusiastic to help them without thinking about the long-term consequences

Posted

And then there's Traces of Texas on Facebook, pumping out good content on a daily basis.  Just about every day I get a DM from somebody telling me they'd leave FB except that they want to keep reading Traces.

So I guess I'm part of the problem. 

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Posted (edited)
9 hours ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

And then there's Traces of Texas on Facebook, pumping out good content on a daily basis.  Just about every day I get a DM from somebody telling me they'd leave FB except that they want to keep reading Traces.

So I guess I'm part of the problem. 

I wouldn’t say that there’s plenty of people that still are on Facebook. The question becomes could you easily move your services off of Facebook onto like say a blog managed by WordPress or something. Frankly, given the terms of service of Facebook I totally would move all that stuff off given the carte blanc that they have with your materials just my two cents.

Edited by Captain Ron
Posted
1 minute ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

Ron does make an interesting point, though, regarding Facebook TOS.  If you put much beyond links to ToT content, you're giving Facebook a license to use that content for its own purposes.  Maybe you consider that beneficial in terms of promotion, but it is a bit scary if the content goes beyond personal and into the realm of actually creative and "for profit."

Posted
1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

Ron does make an interesting point, though, regarding Facebook TOS.  If you put much beyond links to ToT content, you're giving Facebook a license to use that content for its own purposes.  Maybe you consider that beneficial in terms of promotion, but it is a bit scary if the content goes beyond personal and into the realm of actually creative and "for profit."

 

Ever since I became aware of the Facebook TOS, I have seriously cut down on my posting to FB to a near trickle. Most of my posts are tags by my wife. I just don't like Meta having that much control of my content.

For a site like Traces, I would be intrigued to see you could do a link that would provide enough information and a picture without making much of a post on FB proper. The big thing is that it would start to ween people off FB and over to your site, granted that would drive up your traffic and costs, but there is little question as to who controls your content.

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Posted
15 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

For a site like Traces, I would be intrigued to see you could do a link that would provide enough information and a picture without making much of a post on FB proper. The big thing is that it would start to ween people off FB and over to your site, granted that would drive up your traffic and costs, but there is little question as to who controls your content.

The real problem is the digital "foot traffic". It's basically impossible for a small website to be discovered on its own now. Search engines are fundamentally broken in a way that they weren't up until about the mid 20-teens. It's all either SEO garbage or AI generated shit, or both.

Unfortunately, the best way to build an audience is to go where the people already are - and that's gonna be at the great big troughs of social media. It's why elon bought twitter - he wanted control of a trough in order to better steer the conversation and drive "foot traffic" towards sites he prefers. 

The internet writ large is MUCH more prescriptive and less built around discovery than it used to be. It's now primarily a surveilance tool in order to sell more valuable ad impressions and steer eyeballs

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Posted
11 minutes ago, Captainant said:

The real problem is the digital "foot traffic". It's basically impossible for a small website to be discovered on its own now. Search engines are fundamentally broken in a way that they weren't up until about the mid 20-teens. It's all either SEO garbage or AI generated shit, or both.

Unfortunately, the best way to build an audience is to go where the people already are - and that's gonna be at the great big troughs of social media. It's why elon bought twitter - he wanted control of a trough in order to better steer the conversation and drive "foot traffic" towards sites he prefers. 

The internet writ large is MUCH more prescriptive and less built around discovery than it used to be. It's now primarily a surveilance tool in order to sell more valuable ad impressions and steer eyeballs

No disagreement with any of that.

My main point is really a way to make sure you control your content while simultaneously being able to grow your site via something like Facebook, Twitter/X, Bluesky, etc.

When you read the TOS, you realize that you are granting them a pretty wide, royalty-free, license to your material in a way that is very easy to lose control/rights to it (interpretation via Claude AI):

Quote

Based on Facebook's Terms of Service, when you post content on Facebook, you grant them several significant rights:

  1. A non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content.
  2. This license allows Facebook to use virtually any content you post or share across their platforms and services.
  3. The license technically ends when you delete your content or account, but with important exceptions:
    • If your content has been shared with others who haven't deleted it
    • If Facebook has already used your content according to this license
  4. Facebook can use your name, profile picture, and information about your actions for commercial and advertising purposes.
  5. They can feature your username, profile picture, and activity in sponsored content and advertisements.

This essentially means that while you retain ownership of your content, you give Facebook extremely broad rights to use it however they see fit, including for commercial purposes, without paying you. Even after deletion, content may persist if it's been shared or used by Facebook in certain ways.

If you just use links, you do a little work to limit what they get

Quote

When you post a link to a site on Facebook, their Terms of Service still apply to your post containing the link, but there are some important distinctions about what rights Facebook has over external content that's merely linked:

Facebook would have rights over:

  • Your post itself (the text you wrote when sharing the link)
  • Any commentary you added
  • The act of sharing the link (as part of your activity data)
  • The preview/thumbnail that Facebook generates from the linked site

Facebook would NOT have rights over:

  • The actual content hosted on the external site
  • Any materials on that external site that aren't directly uploaded to Facebook
  • The underlying intellectual property of the linked content

 

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Posted

think one strategy for making sure anything FB does with your content is useful for site promotion is to make sure anything you post is well-branded with "Traces Of Texas" and the URL.

That a) deters FB from using your material without credit (or at all) and b) insures that any use they make benefits you.

I have never been a Facebook subscriber, so I have only relatively vague notions of how it's used for promotion by others.

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Posted
37 minutes ago, Captainant said:

The real problem is the digital "foot traffic". It's basically impossible for a small website to be discovered on its own now. Search engines are fundamentally broken in a way that they weren't up until about the mid 20-teens. It's all either SEO garbage or AI generated shit, or both.

Unfortunately, the best way to build an audience is to go where the people already are - and that's gonna be at the great big troughs of social media. It's why elon bought twitter - he wanted control of a trough in order to better steer the conversation and drive "foot traffic" towards sites he prefers. 

The internet writ large is MUCH more prescriptive and less built around discovery than it used to be. It's now primarily a surveillance tool in order to sell more valuable ad impressions and steer eyeballs

The other problem is that no one actually clicks on fucking links anymore anyway. All of these websites are designed for you to feed them traffic, not for their site/app to feed your property traffic - they don't have intuitive features etc to really drive traffic the same way the SEO of olde would have worked. They want you to buy ads, and those ads they want people to click on so they can charge you more for the ads, they don't actually care about anything else. 

Surly/Shaggy used to be a top ranked result on nearly anything with a thread over 3 pages. Like top 10 on google, definitely page 1. We have a lot of content, and good content at that. They have changed everything to derank anything but reddit from discussions and virtually everything you click on is nearly identical copypasta garbage because a ton of articles that are well written are now behind paywalls. 

Effectively the internet has become a bunch of little fiefdoms and the taxes you pay are to send people to your little fiefdom that may be interested in it. The scam is that I bet if I spent $5000 on google/meta/whatever ads I'd get a $3000 boost in traffic from the display ads shown here to the new blood that comes to the site. If your site is sticky you can game around that, but if not you effectively are losing money to inflate your top line (which is all most people care about). 

It's insane that there's more margin in the ads for these tech companies than there is on the high margin products that get sold through. Example if you have a great item you get mfg somewhere where the supply chain was (lol tariffs) cheap and you can get lets call it a 55% margin on a $25-30 product because of that, now you need people to buy it. Well what people aren't factoring into the real margin for those products is the marketing cost and the sales cost etc. For every $25-30 dollar product you sell if you are spending $5-6 dollars per for people to even know it exists, then another $1.50-$2.00 to process payment and another $.75-$1 to manage the inventory or whatever bs on it. 

Everything is a scheme for big tech to suck out $$

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Posted
4 minutes ago, immamac said:

It's insane that there's more margin in the ads for these tech companies than there is on the high margin products that get sold through. Example if you have a great item you get mfg somewhere where the supply chain was (lol tariffs) cheap and you can get lets call it a 55% margin on a $25-30 product because of that, now you need people to buy it. Well what people aren't factoring into the real margin for those products is the marketing cost and the sales cost etc. For every $25-30 dollar product you sell if you are spending $5-6 dollars per for people to even know it exists, then another $1.50-$2.00 to process payment and another $.75-$1 to manage the inventory or whatever bs on it. 

Everything is a scheme for big tech to suck out $$

Rent seeking, but digital! It's got excellent profit margins

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

Zuckerberg and his wife started a pair of schools for low income minority students.  Now they are closing them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/us/school-closure-zuckerberg-chan.html

 

Quote

The Primary School opened in 2016, just a couple miles from Facebook’s headquarters. Its mission was to serve as a tuition-free hub where children from low-income families could be educated and have access to health care and social workers under one roof.

Dr. Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician married to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, worked with Meredith Liu, an educator and friend, to build the school in East Palo Alto, Calif., a diverse town that rarely reaps the benefits of its far wealthier Silicon Valley neighbors.

 

Quote

They talked about how low-income children were more likely to have experienced trauma early in life, and how that trauma would have lasting effects. The Primary School, its website declared, tried to overcome the systemic racism and poverty that hurts communities of color.

This week, however, school officials stunned families when they told parents the campus will shutter in the summer of 2026.

 

Quote

Emeline Vainikolo said she and other parents were invited by school administrators to a breakfast of bagels, fruit and Starbucks coffee and were abruptly told of the closure, but given no reason. They were left staring at one another “dumbfounded,” she said. Her son, a kindergartner, later relayed a reason that he had gleaned from his teacher, she said.

“‘Mommy, the guy who’s been giving money to our school doesn’t want to give it to us anymore,’” he told her.

 

Spoiler

The guy in question is Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, who has joined many of his fellow Silicon Valley tech leaders in trying to court President Trump this year. That has included a pullback on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at their companies and philanthropic organizations.

The closure of the Primary School and a sister campus in the East Bay has led families to wonder if the timing was a coincidence. Their schools were established in a different era when tech leaders were pouring resources into racial justice and diversity measures that were intended to reduce societal inequality.

The Primary School was one of the first beneficiaries of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which was founded by Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan 10 years ago and is still run jointly by them as co-chief executives. The initiative gave about $100 million in grants to the school and related groups from 2018 to 2024.

The school started with just preschoolers, but was expected to eventually serve toddlers through eighth graders, adding one grade every year. The 2025-26 school year will be the first time it has offered eighth grade — and the last.

When 35 students complete the eighth grade, the Primary School, as well as the East Bay campus, a newer counterpart in San Leandro, Calif., will shut down. The two sites serve about 550 children.

School leaders and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have said little about the reasons for the closures. The Primary School posted the news on its website Monday after the parent breakfast, but did not state the reasons.

It did say the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will invest $50 million in the affected communities, as well as education savings accounts for the schools’ students and “transition specialists” to help families find new schools. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative directed reporters to the school’s statement.

If the school was an experiment, it did not go smoothly. Parents said that teacher turnover was high, though school officials said retention over the past two years was “good.” The community was saddened in 2023 when Ms. Liu, the school’s co-founder, died.

The program also struggled to attract funding from donors other than the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Jean-Claude Brizard, a former superintendent of the Chicago school system who is chairman of the board of directors for the Primary School, said the program had sought public funding for its operations so that it wasn’t totally funded by the Zuckerberg family.

“If something is fully reliant on philanthropic funding — or even frankly 50 percent — that is not sustainable long term,” Mr. Brizard said in an interview.

But the school had struggled to make enough demonstrable progress that it could convince public funders, or even additional private backers, to support it, he said.

“I’m the one who advocated that we also put on the table the nuclear option,” he said. “Is it time to disband? Is it time to begin to move the assets away to the community?”

Carson Cook, the Primary School’s senior manager of strategy and advancement, declined to say much in an interview in the school’s central office, located in a strip mall anchored by a Nordstrom Rack a short walk from the campus.

“Yes, we’re going to wind down,” he said. “But there’s a lot of motivation to just make it a great year.”

Asked when the administration learned that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was withdrawing support, Mr. Cook said, “No comment.” And asked whether he thought Mr. Zuckerberg was pulling his money because of the president’s focus on eliminating D.E.I. initiatives, Mr. Cook replied, “I have no comment on that.”

In 2020, the Primary School made several antiracism commitments, including teaching about “identity development, diverse cultures and ideas” and designing ways for students to engage in social justice work, according to its website. It also created a D.E.I. task force that year to ensure the school was living up to its commitments.

Mr. Cook did not allow a journalist to enter the school. Its administrative offices include a sign with a rainbow proclaiming it “a safe space” and a large poster featuring words from Amanda Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb,” which she read at Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration in 2021.

Mr. Brizard emphasized that the closures were not part of a D.E.I. retrenchment by Mr. Zuckerberg. And officials with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pointed to their continued investment of $50 million to support families in the East Palo Alto and San Leandro areas as an example that it remained committed to the same cause.

The wind-down comes more than a decade after another education experiment by Mr. Zuckerberg. In 2010, he contributed $100 million toward revamping public education in Newark, an amount matched by other contributions. That effort benefited charter schools but also frustrated parents, activists and teachers.

Parents in East Palo Alto said on Thursday that they did not know what was behind the school’s closure, but they were frustrated by the announcement. One mother, who asked not to be named because of her immigration status, said the school has been a great fit for her 6-year-old son, who has autism. She said the teachers have given him special attention and ensured that he has not been bullied.

She was especially grateful to Dr. Chan for starting the school and fulfilling her promises to provide a high-quality education to all children. Until this week, anyway.

“Overnight, she gave us a complete reversal that none of us could have imagined,” she said in Spanish. “That’s all we ask with our heart — that she support us and not leave us halfway with our children.”

Ms. Vainikolo and her two sisters send a total of six children to the school. She is pregnant with a baby boy, due in June, and had hoped until the closure announcement to send him to the school along with his siblings and cousins.

“He’s a billionaire,” she said of Mr. Zuckerberg. “Why would he want to close this?”

 

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Posted
9 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Zuckerberg and his wife started a pair of schools for low income minority students.  Now they are closing them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/us/school-closure-zuckerberg-chan.html

 

 

 

 

  Hide contents

The guy in question is Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, who has joined many of his fellow Silicon Valley tech leaders in trying to court President Trump this year. That has included a pullback on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at their companies and philanthropic organizations.

The closure of the Primary School and a sister campus in the East Bay has led families to wonder if the timing was a coincidence. Their schools were established in a different era when tech leaders were pouring resources into racial justice and diversity measures that were intended to reduce societal inequality.

The Primary School was one of the first beneficiaries of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which was founded by Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan 10 years ago and is still run jointly by them as co-chief executives. The initiative gave about $100 million in grants to the school and related groups from 2018 to 2024.

The school started with just preschoolers, but was expected to eventually serve toddlers through eighth graders, adding one grade every year. The 2025-26 school year will be the first time it has offered eighth grade — and the last.

When 35 students complete the eighth grade, the Primary School, as well as the East Bay campus, a newer counterpart in San Leandro, Calif., will shut down. The two sites serve about 550 children.

School leaders and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have said little about the reasons for the closures. The Primary School posted the news on its website Monday after the parent breakfast, but did not state the reasons.

It did say the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will invest $50 million in the affected communities, as well as education savings accounts for the schools’ students and “transition specialists” to help families find new schools. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative directed reporters to the school’s statement.

If the school was an experiment, it did not go smoothly. Parents said that teacher turnover was high, though school officials said retention over the past two years was “good.” The community was saddened in 2023 when Ms. Liu, the school’s co-founder, died.

The program also struggled to attract funding from donors other than the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Jean-Claude Brizard, a former superintendent of the Chicago school system who is chairman of the board of directors for the Primary School, said the program had sought public funding for its operations so that it wasn’t totally funded by the Zuckerberg family.

“If something is fully reliant on philanthropic funding — or even frankly 50 percent — that is not sustainable long term,” Mr. Brizard said in an interview.

But the school had struggled to make enough demonstrable progress that it could convince public funders, or even additional private backers, to support it, he said.

“I’m the one who advocated that we also put on the table the nuclear option,” he said. “Is it time to disband? Is it time to begin to move the assets away to the community?”

Carson Cook, the Primary School’s senior manager of strategy and advancement, declined to say much in an interview in the school’s central office, located in a strip mall anchored by a Nordstrom Rack a short walk from the campus.

“Yes, we’re going to wind down,” he said. “But there’s a lot of motivation to just make it a great year.”

Asked when the administration learned that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was withdrawing support, Mr. Cook said, “No comment.” And asked whether he thought Mr. Zuckerberg was pulling his money because of the president’s focus on eliminating D.E.I. initiatives, Mr. Cook replied, “I have no comment on that.”

In 2020, the Primary School made several antiracism commitments, including teaching about “identity development, diverse cultures and ideas” and designing ways for students to engage in social justice work, according to its website. It also created a D.E.I. task force that year to ensure the school was living up to its commitments.

Mr. Cook did not allow a journalist to enter the school. Its administrative offices include a sign with a rainbow proclaiming it “a safe space” and a large poster featuring words from Amanda Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb,” which she read at Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration in 2021.

Mr. Brizard emphasized that the closures were not part of a D.E.I. retrenchment by Mr. Zuckerberg. And officials with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pointed to their continued investment of $50 million to support families in the East Palo Alto and San Leandro areas as an example that it remained committed to the same cause.

The wind-down comes more than a decade after another education experiment by Mr. Zuckerberg. In 2010, he contributed $100 million toward revamping public education in Newark, an amount matched by other contributions. That effort benefited charter schools but also frustrated parents, activists and teachers.

Parents in East Palo Alto said on Thursday that they did not know what was behind the school’s closure, but they were frustrated by the announcement. One mother, who asked not to be named because of her immigration status, said the school has been a great fit for her 6-year-old son, who has autism. She said the teachers have given him special attention and ensured that he has not been bullied.

She was especially grateful to Dr. Chan for starting the school and fulfilling her promises to provide a high-quality education to all children. Until this week, anyway.

“Overnight, she gave us a complete reversal that none of us could have imagined,” she said in Spanish. “That’s all we ask with our heart — that she support us and not leave us halfway with our children.”

Ms. Vainikolo and her two sisters send a total of six children to the school. She is pregnant with a baby boy, due in June, and had hoped until the closure announcement to send him to the school along with his siblings and cousins.

“He’s a billionaire,” she said of Mr. Zuckerberg. “Why would he want to close this?”

 


image.gif.76dcf0acced37eaffef0a1040f91fa2d.gif

Posted

That's interesting.  They've spent $100 million on this with another $50 million committed.  Which sounds like a lot.  But with his net worth being $150 B that amounts to .08% of his net worth.  Which is like a millionaire spending $800.  

Posted (edited)

It has nothing to do with the money. Just look at who those schools were catered to. And the recent moves/decisions at Facefriend.

Frankly what it really shows is that maybe public education is the answer if private people/groups can just close the doors on a whim. 

Edited by Captain Ron
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