How could this be - I was told our corporate overlords are able to do whatever they'd regarding kicking people off their platforms?

Whatever shall we do?

The funny thing about the whole "do bad things and get kicked off" strategy is that every platform has abusers. Since Big Tech can arbitrarily decide the thresholds and circumstances that lead to being kicked off, this effectively means they can kick anyone off for any reason.

Even on here, on Hacker News, if you dig deep enough I guarantee you can find questionable content (albeit probably downvoted) to justify deplatforming if you were tasked with deplatforming this site anyways.

FYI your comment was dead, and I vouched for it. You might be shadowbanned? Not sure, but regardless you might look into it.

I'd love to see some research about this from an unbiased source showing that targeted advertising produces great results in small businesses (<100 employees, or <5M revenue yearly).

It would also be important to know, not if ads can produce great results, but how many companies do they provide great results for? Even better, what percentage of all business that run online ads get a positive return on their investment, and what is the average of that return.

My personal experience is that it is pretty hard to get consistently good performance running campaigns on FB or Google. It requires a lot of learning and a lot of trial and error. On top of that, they constantly push you to spend more by giving you dubious recommendations on how to “improve” your campaigns. Very hard to believe that the average small business is actually capable of running good campaigns and consistently make money from them.

Anecdotal but I’ve always heard from marketing friends that Facebook ads are hands down the best ads and yield many multiples of the cost of the ads

What about all the actual small businesses that have positive ROAS? There are millions of them on Facebook's platform. What kind of other research are you looking for?

Sure I'd love to see something concrete about the "actual small businesses that have positive ROAS." You have any research to cite?

Keep in mind I'm talking about targeted advertising, not advertising in general.

Who makes that distinction?

I'd argue it's impossible to enact any change that would only hurt large businesses and not small/medium sized businesses.

Also, for niche products wouldn't keyword advertising be just as effective?

I guess plenty of people installed Bonzi Buddy too, so this isn’t very surprising.

I wonder what percentage of Robinhood users hold GME - if it's more than 25% I'd say they're finished. If we assume 25% of users hold GME and 80% of GME holders will not return after this fiasco that's extremely significant IMO.

Not to say that they'll cease to exist, but I doubt they'll remain the "#1 trading platform."

According to Motherboard it's more than half.

https://twitter.com/motherboard/status/1354798244455395328

EDIT: This is untrue, please refer to jaywalk's reply.

Although they've left the tweet up, the article it links to says that this is incorrect: "Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that 56 percent of Robinhood users hold GME stock. This is incorrect, based on a misreading of a statistic on Robinhood. Motherboard regrets the error."

Ah, I was unaware, nice catch.

I can say with 99% certainty that they aren't just counting invidual $GME holders, but every one of Robinhood users that holds an ETF (like total US Market) that contains $GME...

So this is really such a bad faith statement from Motherboard, because all of the ETF holders (probably 90% of the "half") can still sell their ETF's and thus their indirect $GME shares...

nothing like being disingenuous to ride the hype train

I think GME is one of the freebie stocks that Robinhood gives out as a referral bonus, so many of those users might just have had one stock incidentally.

Can this really be true? It sounds so implausible that I'm not sure if I can take their tweeted word for it.

From what I understand Robinhood's actions today only impacted derivatives of GME, not trades involving the actual underlying equity (which, I imagine, is what most people actually own).

Nope. They stopped buying of the actual equity. All you could do was sell.

Didn't they want to expand to Europe sometime soon? I guess that is up in the air now after the regulators see this.

Can’t find the link but I think I read earlier today it was much higher than 25%.

half of all americans invested in the market own some GME allegedly

in an etf or fund, maybe

That doesn't make any sense because they still allowed them to sell, realizing a loss. Why not stop buying and selling?

This right here. Only allowing sells appears to be blatantly anti-retail investor, intended to help drive down prices for those with short positions needing to be closed.

Exactly. How are retail investors supposed to benefit if they are forced to wait until the stock they just bought tanks? If anything that's a direct attack at the value of your portfolio.

hide/flag the post and move on

I've been pretty skeptical on the whole game streaming thing until I installed moonlight and tried it out myself on my android device - it works surprisingly well on LAN.

I wonder if it's possible to play a local multiplayer game using this/parsec or moonlight. I'd love to set it up such that I could play something like Unreal Tournment split screen with two different people in two different locations streaming the same game to both devices and using our controllers are separate inputs on the same computer.

Stadia works unbelievably well. If you have any mainstream controller then you can try out Destiny and Bomberman on their free tier.

Why not count inheritance? What’s the point of this exercise?

Because you literally didn't do anything to get it (except, maybe, murder).