I hear you – but think of tracking as a form of payment for consuming the product / service / content. You are not paying them – their advertisers are, and ads are more valuable the more tracking and attribution they come with. Data is money, and by blocking their access to data you are affecting their monetization strategy. I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying that's how the business model is set up because that's what consumers demand – paid browsers and media sites are niche or nonexistent.
If I buy an item from a store and get an email receipt with tracking, this gives the vendor a whole bunch of information about me.
If I already paid for the good/service, that’s objectionable.
I don’t buy “identifiable meta-information as payment”. It is fundamentally intrusive.
I feel like this is much more about the results of high school popularity (confidence, self-assuredness, dare I say getting laid?) than the actual implementation of popularity itself
I find it funny that people are already assuming that the "bubble" has popped.
Yeah Zynga and Facebook are doing badly. So what? LinkedIn is killing it. There are other success stories. Maybe the bubble in these two company's valuations has popped, but they were overvalued to begin with, not a big loss for me.
they were overvalued to begin with, not a big loss for me
"for me" is important here. While I fully agree that FB, and (especially) Zynga were both overvalued, the near-constant deterioration of their stock price is very visible - both to Wall St and investors. Perception is king, and it's not just "ours" which matters. What the public sees is the tri-fecta failure of 3 super-hyped tech IPOs (Groupon, Zynga, Facebook).
edited to add : It's also very worth noting that the perception of FB being massively overvalued may very well have been highly confined to "insiders", or those close to tech.
When I speak with my non-tech friends, most of whom are highly educated (law, medicine, etc.), the general reaction to FB's decline is one of surprise. For instance, I often hear that "everyone thought the price would go up!".
Yeah Facebook was the last tech stock that was able to sucker in the "muppets". That's why Morgan Stanley & co jacked the price up as much as possible before running away like bandits
LinkedIn is killing it from a share price perspective, but they still have a P/E of about nine hundred and unless they monetize like CRAZY they're going to stay at that P/E or lose value.
In addition, they've proven that the 'business social network' has value, and thus they're starting to see competition where they didn't before.
Sure, the bubble was mostly in private valuations and not public ones (though I know at least two friends of mine that bought Facebook stock at $40+), but it was still a bubble. Social was highly overvalued.
