This is absolutely true, speaking as someone who has both self-published and also published with a big publisher. Each choice has pros and cons.
In my case, I self-published and sold a book for several years, and then published an updated version with O'Reilly.
I decided to do that because I came to realize people judge self-publish books as less vetted and lower quality.
That may be often true. But in many cases, a self-published book can be much better than those released by a former publisher. I certainly believe it was true in my case.
But in the end, I decided my highest best opportunity was to go with a well-regarded publisher, for the authority that would bring.
And it changed things. People treat me differently now, like they consider me more of an authority. Even though it's essentially the same book; it just has an O'Reilly logo on the cover now.
Whether that should be the case is up for debate...
But it absolutely made people listen more seriously to my message. and I believe it has massively increased the positive impact of that book on the world.
Financially, I think it's been about even. For me it was worth the tradeoff for other reasons, but I don't think that is always the case for every author and every book.
I had written and self-published three books, and in 2024 decided to publish the most successful one with O'Reilly. It went up for sale in December 2024.
The whole experience was wonderful. I had basically none of the problems that this fellow experienced with his publisher, and I am delighted about how it went.
I did some things differently. For one, I had already been selling the book on my own for a few years, and was essentially on the 3rd self-published edition. Because of this, they were able to see what the almost-finished product was.
I told them I would not make massive changes to the book, nor would I contort it to the AI trend (the book barely mentions AI at all), and they never pressured me once.
Their biggest contribution was their team of editors. This book has code on just about every page. I had 3 technical editors go through it, finding many bugs. How many? Let's just say "plenty".
And the feedback from the non-technical editors was, to my surprise, even more valuable. Holy crap, I cannot express to you how much they improved the book. There were several of these folks (I had no idea there were so many different specialties for editors), and all of them were great.
(They also accepted my viewpoint when I disagreed with them, immediately, every time. The final published version of the book was 100% my own words.)
From all of that, I made improvements on what must have been almost every page, and rewrote two chapters from scratch. I also added a new chapter (I volunteered for it, no one at any point pressured me to do that). The result was making a book that IMO is at least twice as good as what I was able to accomplish on my own.
I do not resonate with the article author's comments about compensation. He negotiated a pretty good deal, I think; it's not realistic to get much better than what he did, since the publisher is a business with their own expenses to pay, etc.
I was pretty disciplined about meeting deadlines that we agreed to for certain milestones. That helped my relationship with the publisher, obviously.
All in all, it was a great experience, and I am glad I did it this way.
Reading the article, it sounds like my publisher (oreilly) was better to work with than his, but I think he could have done some things differently also. In the end, though, I agree with him that it was best to walk away in his situation.
Haha good question. No, but I did not ask; I wanted to give them as much freedom as I could bear on aspects of the process I was not too attached to, so I let them pick.
I will say I was very happy with the animal they came up with! If I was not, I would have asked them to change it, and I bet they would have. They showed me a preview version early on, so there would have been plenty of time to do so.
I'm almost certain I know the publisher he's talking about in the blog post, and I can see why it didn't work out. You have to be willing to be open to feedback while also being able to push back on that feedback. You also have to accept that you are committed to certain outcomes.
The publisher he worked with will push you but also make a better book in the end. You have to be willing to do your part.
(Not naming the publisher because I don't want to out myself.)
Yep, linked there for anyone who is curious! Given the topic, I was concerned they might push me to stuff AI into it, but like I said they did not do that at all.
I have spent over $100k of my own money running ads on Meta, over $10k on Linkedin, and also significant amounts on Google (GDN/Youtube/keyword search) and X/Twitter.
My experience:
For most ad campaign types, YES, Meta works far better than any alternative.
In my view, this is because its underlying machine-learning algorithms are better. Not the generative AI mentioned in the article, but the core ML-based learning strategy that every modern ad platform has been based on for over a decade now, allowing it to learn to find buyers for whatever you are selling. Meta is just better at that than anyone else - far better. And has been for years.
Linkedin is quite interesting and can reach audiences no other ad platform can. The problem with LI is that it is tremendously expensive. Think $50-200 per qualified lead, so it only makes sense for very high ticket offers. I've never been able to make LI ads work for lowticket offers (i.e. under $500 gross margin per sale).
I have attempted to run ads on X/twitter several times in the past 5 years, and each time gave up because of how terribly it performed. Literally zero sales from the ad spend, using the exact same ads which worked great on Meta. X is kind of infamous among media buyers for how bad it is. But I haven't tried it in over 8 months, so maybe it has gotten better now. Grok/xAI is quite good, so I am not sure why they haven't made the X ad platform a priority. If they did, I bet they could eat Meta's lunch.
Google is really 3 ad platforms: Youtube, Google Display Network (GDN), and keyword search. These are all radically different in many dimensions; the only thing they have in common is that Google lets you set them all up through the same web interface.
Mostly I run ads selling mid to high-ticket stuff to sophisticated buyers, and I think most of those people have Youtube Premium, which makes YT ad-free. So I haven't tried running ads on Youtube much. My media buyer colleagues who are into it are mostly selling mass-market offers that most people on HN would consider kind of scummy. They tell me it can work well, but requires a lot of ad spend over weeks to start working. In contrast, I can often get a Meta ad campaign profitable within 48 hours.
Keyword search works great, but only for "bottom of funnel" buyers (i.e. people who are actively looking for a solution they can pay for right now). There are only so many of those, so generally you cannot scale up ad spend (and thus absolute profit) very high. In contrast, Meta can create new "top of funnel" buyers, which is a larger audience by many orders of magnitude, which allows you to ramp up some Meta campaigns to a very high level of profitable ad spend.
GDN has been tricky for me. I think it has a lot of potential, but it has a very different model, and so far I have not been able to make it profitable for my offers. It certainly seems easier to set up a successful campaign with Meta.
Short answer to your question: Yes, even with the things the article is justifiably griping about, Meta is just way, way better than any alternative right now.
Thank you wow what a refreshing take. I've also the same about X, it echos my personal experience in that, I can't recall a single time I clicked on an ad intentionally or paid more than a second. They don't even register for me which is a contrast to Youtube/Instagram where I do pay more attention.
Is it possible to start small with Meta and then ramp up? Any principles to adhere to increase probability of success?
> Is it possible to start small with Meta and then ramp up?
It depends. What kind of offer are you selling?
Generally the learning curve is massive, long, stressful and expensive. I lost tens of thousands of dollars before I could consistently make ads which were profitable.
It's not like learning coding. Imagine if every time you saw a stack trace, $250 was deducted from your bank account. Learning media buying is kind of like that.
Another path is to get hired by an ad agency. They will train you and give you a budget to manage; if you lose that budget, the worst that can happen is they'll fire you (rather than losing all your stuff).
But that would be a switch in career path, which I do not think you are asking about.
I would not proceed unless you are willing to invest $50/day for a minimum of 6 months.
There is also the investment in learning, which would require 5-10 hours per week that whole time.
I say this because anything short of that is likely to lose money and accomplish little.
Not trying to gatekeep, so feel free to try it however you like. Maybe it is worth you trying to set up one ad just to see if you like the process enough to continue.
thanks for the heads up i dont think you are gate keeping at all
do you have any recommendation for an alternative? seems like for now i am going to defer the Meta ad experiment , was thinking of targeting TikTok videos
Unfortunately, just changing ad platforms is no magic bullet. Tiktok advertising is no easier to ramp up on, in fact it will probably be more difficult and expensive.
If are worried about the significant expense and high risk of paid ads, which is very reasonable, I recommend you do not do paid ads at all.
I think a better alternative for you is to learn to create organic content, e.g. videos for IG and tiktok, or text posts for platforms like X. And learn to stimulate sales of your app that way.
This also has a long learning curve, but dodges the financial risk of paid ads. Once your organic content is dialed in enough to make consistent profit, you'll be much better positioned to start with ads and be successful.
Media buyer here (among other things), so I feel you. I think it's possible the American FTC might start going after advertisers at some point, because Meta's generated text can in some cases mislead or flat-out lie about what is actually being sold.
The only defense is to have checklists and continually go over running campaigns to make sure everything is configured properly, which as you note is really hard to turn off. Very easy to miss a detail in ad manager's complex UI.
Yeah, as someone who spends a lot of money every month buying Meta ads, I had that thought looking at some of the article's examples.
But in its current form, I think that may happen mostly for very direct-response ads, while creating branding problems that would be expensive for many companies in the long run.
Also, some of the AI-generated creatives and copy that Meta has suggested to me actually misleads or flat-out lies about what is being advertised. Which makes me wonder if the American FTC will go after some companies for running misleading ads at some point, if they are not careful about what suggestions they accept (the ad manager UI currently makes it extremely easy to accidentally approve something you shouldn't).
I'm a software engineer who is also a media buyer, which is the term for someone who purchases and configures advertising campaigns. I have spent over $100k of my own funds on Meta ads the past several years, which makes me moderately experienced. I spend a lot of time in the "ad manager", i.e. the webapp that Meta has for configuring these ads, allocating budget, and so on.
I think the current UX of the ad manager will make Meta the target of a class action lawsuit, and there is nothing they can do to avoid that now.
Why: many aspects of the ad manager UI will activate settings that had previously been disabled. The details vary over time, but right now three specific examples come to mind:
1. Promo codes
2. Site links
3. Related media
I won't explain these here (you can ask a media buyer and/or an llm). But these are features of Meta's ad system that are useful in certain situations, but for many types of ads, it is better to disable them.
The problem: If you disable them, and then edit the ad creative (i.e. change the image or video), in many contexts they are silently re-enabled.
This is not noticeable unless you navigate through the complex web interface to check, and disable them again. I now have a detailed checklist, but before that, I would often find I had activated ads with these accidentally active.
The outcome is to increase the cost of the intended result of the ad campaign. In other words, it makes the ads more expensive.
It has certainly caused many media buyers to spend significantly more than they otherwise would to get the same results from their ad campaigns.
These three specific examples have been happening for many months, maybe all of 2025. If they disabled the auto-enable right now, that is still a potentially massive amount of ad spend which has been wasted by many companies around the world.
That is why I say a class action lawsuit is inevitable at this point. There is simply too much money on the table for that not to happen.
Why did this happen? My best guess is poorly thought out internal incentives. I.e., someone in some layer of management has their compensation tied to the percentage of running ads with site links activated, for example. So that person(s) is forcing the design/engineering teams to implement a UX that inflates those metrics. That is the best explanation I can imagine for what I am seeing.
I recently had to charge back $20k of ads because meta said no, in spite of the fact that a support person went on a webex with me, did a screenshare and saw that their ads dashboard is so totally broken that these mystical ads that ran are nowhere to be found, I mean maybe buried in the pages that would literally fail to load half the content, then producing internal app modals spewing incomprehensible errors, buttons that lead to nothing, and don't get me started on if someone happens to start an ad-hoc campaign in IG directly. LinkedIn are the only platform with a half decent ads manager, X is well built but I trust the results from it near zero.
It's an interesting situation. I think that despite the issues, Meta is the best (and fastest-learning) platform for mass-market purchase conversions. Linkedin has powerful targeting options, but the fact that it's tied to GMT drives me nuts. For LI, typically I use manual bids so I can easily dial down delivery at off times (e.g. if the ad objective is booking a sales call).
All in all, these ad platforms are tremendously complex software systems, and as someone who has been a fulltime software engineer I have a lot of sympathy. But with so much money is on the line, the standards are high.
I agree with you. I think meta is fine if you have a very very clear value prop to a very very clear ICP that is already repeatably converting and is generally b2c in nature. If you are trying to do anything specialized or b2b message testing on meta, I find their algo really expensive, maybe I'm just shitty at targeting or don't use the platform well but hiring a task rabbit to stand outside a conference or event and hand out fliers seems to be cheaper and higher preforming than anything I've gotten out of meta, and I can still do it from my basement.
These platforms are quite complex, but I feel they are more complex than they need to be, using them, they really feel like they were built out of hybrid consulting discovery to enterprise, with a result that doesn't translate down well to SMB.
Having experience inside Metas culture, it is extremely metrics driven, sometimes without regard to side effects of optimizing a primary goal. So if someone was measuring their job performance on optimizing site-links then it’s very likely this could be happening.
A lot of people are also assuming intentional malice here when incompetence/lack-of-care is the main issue.
If people saw how things are done at Meta, you wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of the stuff is functionally broken due to a lack of care from the top level. Your VPs and above just do not give a shit about quality whatsoever. This thing fucking prints money like crazy. Also, preventing loss of revenue and/or customer satisfaction is not a top level priority.
I think people also don’t understand how much bigger companies spend. They absolutely dwarf all the smaller businesses out there and Meta doesn’t have a ton of interest in spending time on customers who are just as likely to go out of business next year as they are to increase their budget a tiny bit.
And the top businesses have a completely different flow. These guys are spending hundreds of millions to billions - not a 100k over several years lol.
No, Meta doesn't get a pass on this one after "Jedi Blue" and faking video viewing metrics. These guys are criminals.
Generally, media buyers/advertisers are clueless when it comes to ad fraud. The big platforms have made a lot of money by abusing this fact. (I have over 15 years of experience in online marketing, on the advertiser, publisher and ad-network side. )
Lack of care is malice, though. Hanlon's razor only applies if they would aspire to do better but lack the awareness/capability, not if they'd happily accept the tradeoff.
A major benefit of a class action, especially for complex cases, is that the costs of prosecuting the lawsuit are spread over many plaintiffs. Pursuing an individual lawsuit in federal court can cost well into six figures, which is not a good bet if your potential recovery as a single plaintiff is in the same range. And that is assuming the large corp you are suing doesn't do the usual tactic of burying you in papers, spurious motions, and every trick in the book to run up your costs in money and time.
Class actions bundle those costs for 'all plaintiffs who are similarly situated' and the judgements are also for all plaintiffs at once, so class actions are where large companies can be properly stung.
This is also why so many companies put clauses in their contracts that you agree to forego any possibility of participating in a class action.
So, if you are subject to a systematic malfeasance by a company, the best route is a class action; they've already got it setup that you'll almost certainly fail trying an individual action, unless you have very deep pockets and close to a decade of free time.
Of course attorneys can take on individual cases on contingency and make viable a case where the plaintiff lacks the spare six-figures of costs to even start the case.
That does NOT mean there is no effect beyond "case valuation".
Attorneys cannot simply take every case on contingency, and when the [potential reward]/[cost] ratio is not sufficient, the attorney must pass, and no suit will be filed.
Class Action literally makes it POSSIBLE
This is especially true where small-dollar harms are being done, but at scale of millions, where ripping off consumers is systematic, or where harms such as pollution affected many.
"This is especially true where small-dollar harms are being done, but at scale of millions, where ripping off consumers is systematic, or where harms such as pollution affected many."
All of these particular things seem exactly like the job of a state AG, or other form of regulator, vs private lawyers.
Political dysfunction aside, of course.
I'd personally rather the state AG and various consumer-friendly regulators of, say, california, have the billions of dollars going to the class action attorneys in that state.
Remember that class actions were not created to enable any of the things you cite. They were judiciary-created as a means of simple judicial efficiency (and requiring all affected plaintiffs to be grouped together). As such, outside of "they were there", it's not obvious why they are a particularly good way to solve the problems you give.
In case you think i'm particularly anti-consumer, i actually think LLC's should not exist and shareholders should be responsible for harms again. Which would likely obviate a lot of the practices class actions were suing over in the first place.
>>seem exactly like the job of a state AG, or other form of regulator, vs private lawyers. ...Political dysfunction aside, of course.
And there's the rub — most regulators and AGs will have some political leaning, and ALL of them have limited resources and will be unable to pursue every case, so many cases with great merit will go un-prosecuted.
For all of warts of class actions, that is an overwhelming benefit — a private class action, or latent threat thereof, can bring pressure where an AG or regulator will choose not to, or just lacks the budget and/or bandwidth to pursue.
And yes, making it easier to 'pierce the corporate veil' and create a stronger direct liability, including jail time, for officers, directors, and shareholders for intentional actions and omissions could do a lot to reduce harm of corporations.
"And there's the rub — most regulators and AGs will have some political leaning, and ALL of them have limited resources and will be unable to pursue every case, so many cases with great merit will go un-prosecuted"
Private litigators also have some political leaning, often as much or more as the AG, but ignoring that for a second, the limited resources part is very fixable.
Additionally, they are accountable to the people that vote for them (directly in some states, indirectly otherwise), ignorant or not, whereas private litigators are not. This is a feature and not a bug.
Instead we are optimizing or deoptimizing (depending on the state and viewpoint) for private litigation.
IE either they cap it or they uncap it, or ....
Also, as a general rule, if you have way too many cases with merit, the problem is probably not resources, but something else.
IE if you have tens of thousands of murders you can't prosecute due to lack of resources, you actually have a bigger, and different problem, than "we don't have the resources to prosecute all these murders". You won't actually get much of anywhere by having the resources to prosecute them all because you won't be solving the bigger, different problem causing you to have tens of thousands of prosecutable murders in the first place.
The same is true of most of these consumer class action cases.
Infinite lawsuits have not caused lots of behavior change, all told.
It is very hard for me to believe that 10x infinite lawsuits will somehow do it.
Not trying to challenge you, and I'd sincerely love to read your response. People said similar things about previous gen-AI tool announcements that proved over time to be overstated. Is there some reason to put more weight in "what people on HN said" in this case, compared to previous situations?
This is where list comprehensions came from! Like we have in modern Python, Haskell and more. SETL was the first language to use comprehensions in its core syntax.
I was happy to see it supports a fairly recent Python3 at all now, like Py3.5 or what is it that ships with most of the expected stuff? Works for me, I'd target something like that for compatibility anyway
In my case, I self-published and sold a book for several years, and then published an updated version with O'Reilly.
I decided to do that because I came to realize people judge self-publish books as less vetted and lower quality.
That may be often true. But in many cases, a self-published book can be much better than those released by a former publisher. I certainly believe it was true in my case.
But in the end, I decided my highest best opportunity was to go with a well-regarded publisher, for the authority that would bring.
And it changed things. People treat me differently now, like they consider me more of an authority. Even though it's essentially the same book; it just has an O'Reilly logo on the cover now.
Whether that should be the case is up for debate...
But it absolutely made people listen more seriously to my message. and I believe it has massively increased the positive impact of that book on the world.
Financially, I think it's been about even. For me it was worth the tradeoff for other reasons, but I don't think that is always the case for every author and every book.