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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. 

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

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