[HN Gopher] Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
Author : sidcool
Score : 499 points
Date : 2021-10-07 13:52 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| gwenbell wrote:
| <b>BACKPFEIFENGESICHT</b>
|
| http://gwenbell.com/#05wHCn9ruFpXo0aYg/7WP648ANcDtjPy9SBASYe...
| jlokier wrote:
| Forget the negative reputation for a moment.
|
| I just logged into Facebook after a few months not doing so,
| because someone told me via third party to contact them, and
| Facebook was the only method available of the ones we both have.
|
| About half the entries on my Facebook feed are ads of one kind or
| another!
|
| There are some posts from people I know, but because the ads are
| more prominent, larger, in some ways more interesting, posts from
| people I know are somehow harder to see while scrolling through
| the feed.
|
| Why would I want to log in, just to view an endless scroll of
| ads? What's Facebook's business model these days? Surely people
| will have had enough of watching an ad stream at some point, and
| then stop using it?
|
| I keep my account to remain able to communicate with people I
| know from my past lives, and I do like seeing what people want to
| share occasionally. These are "weak bonds" but I enjoy them
| anyway. There's also a couple of memorial pages for people I love
| who passed away some years ago, that are not anywhere else. But
| that means I login about once every few months, or when I find
| out that I should for a specific reason.
|
| The feed page just isn't interesting, so I don't see myself
| logging in again for another few months. I remember the Facebook
| feed as being more people focused, more about personal
| relationships, years ago. _Far_ fewer ads.
| rapsey wrote:
| I mean it gets a lot of bad press and people love talking shit
| about them. Yet their user base is still huge and their revenues.
| How much is all this talk relevant to them?
| rafale wrote:
| Microsoft used to have a worst reputation when they were on the
| top of the world, undisputed ans ruthless. Look at them. A
| darling.
| ferdowsi wrote:
| Microsoft did have a bad reputation, but primarily as a bad
| corporate player. They didn't have a reputation as a company
| that values profit over tearing apart civil societies.
| rafale wrote:
| True. The problems with Microsoft never got politicized to
| this level. But that's perhaps a sign of the times.
| VladimirGolovin wrote:
| Heroin is already way past a reputational point of no return, but
| people are still using it.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| Facebook's MAU count dropping closer to heroin's would be a big
| improvement for everyone's well-being.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Heroin is already way past a reputational point of no
| return, but people are still using it._
|
| The key is only a _fraction_ use it. Facebook 's intake is way
| way more than Heroin's.
| baby wrote:
| It's funny because most people here spend way too much time on
| HN, not FB. And yeah too much HN is detrimental to your mental
| health.
| slingnow wrote:
| Citation needed.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Imagine how much more popular it would be if it wasn't
| banned/feared/frowned upon.
| capableweb wrote:
| Worth noting for the ones who aren't familiar with it: physical
| dependency is different than psychological dependence. Not
| saying one is easier to stop/better than the other, but
| Facebook and heroin have very different effect on people.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > physical dependency is different than psychological
| dependence
|
| I do not disagree. But. Let's see the heavy facebook user at
| hours 18 and 36 of abstinence, and at week 1 and 2 ... The
| psychological rewards have physical side effects with
| physical actions, too.
|
| This is not the same as life threatening DT's, but its also
| real physical effects.
| [deleted]
| andyxor wrote:
| Facebook is awesome, what are they talking about
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| This company will continue running roughshod upon society until
| governments do something about it. They are too big to fail.
| Competitors just get bought up. Unsurprising that boomer media
| can't comprehend this.
| mypastself wrote:
| I can see the adoption of AWS and related services potentially
| making Amazon so indispensable to the world's governments and
| banks that its failure might result in disaster, but I don't
| think any of Facebook's services qualifies.
|
| Unless you're referring to general financial consequences that
| the failure of any successful company might bring, but that
| doesn't really make it "too big to fail".
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| I mentioned it in my post. Facebook has a near-monopoly on
| social media networks. If a new one comes up, they'll just
| buy it. Obvious outlier is Tiktok right now, remains to be
| seen what happens with them though.
| mypastself wrote:
| That still doesn't make it "too big to fail", which is a
| specific phrase referring to organizations whose failure
| might have disastrous financial consequences.
|
| Their recent outage resulted in some monetary losses, but
| it didn't crash the dollar.
| Clubber wrote:
| "boomer media can't comprehend this"
|
| Believing news is on the side of the citizenry is like
| believing HR is on the side of the employee.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| What, and the corporations don't exist first and foremost to
| benefit their customers? Have I been lied to my whole life?
| [deleted]
| Clubber wrote:
| Well over the decades the value proposition has changed. In
| the case of manufacturing, the proposition was you give us
| money, we give you a quality, well built product that will
| last a long time. Also, we would recirculate some of that
| money back to the economy in the form of wages paid to US
| workers.
|
| Now it's you give us money, we'll continue to figure out
| how to make it cheaper and it's ok if the quality slips
| because it's for our benefit of course, and we'll spend all
| our labor overseas.
| throwaway9191aa wrote:
| Is there a non-paywall link that everyone is looking at? Or maybe
| I'm the only one without a subscription to the Economist.
|
| Or is the headline the only reason this is upvoted to #1, and
| people are just assuming what the article says?
| Hamuko wrote:
| https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...
|
| Highly recommend.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Just turn off javascript for https://www.economist.com
| celticninja wrote:
| 12ft.io
| rdxm wrote:
| LOL....nearing!?!?!??!!? seriously????
|
| That boundary was crossed a long, long time ago.
| Bluestein wrote:
| Someday, some, will look back to today from a far and distant,
| and, we'd hope, still extant, future ...
|
| ... and find this to have been an age of digital savagery.-
| gwenbell wrote:
| Was I <a href="http://gwenbell.com/#Xuv6iZzUc+WjDEQFSL7/o6vYH4lhT
| bEpkJ0jkHr... years too early to the party?</a>
| mchanson wrote:
| https://archive.is/BbCGF
| tediousdemise wrote:
| Facebook's reputation doesn't matter in the grand scheme of
| things when they have enormous power and influence to do whatever
| they want completely unregulated.
|
| See also: Monsanto, Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, George Soros.
| melony wrote:
| This is the difference between the _nouveau riche_ and the old
| centers of power. Facebook needs to look towards oil and banking
| if they really want to entrench themselves. Maybe take a leaf
| from Amazon 's book.
| latte wrote:
| Why is Facebook singled out vs. all social media? I feel worse
| after half an hour spent reading Twitter, Reddit or even Hacker
| News than after half an hour spent on Facebook or Instagram.
|
| The amount of hate I see on the first three platforms is much
| higher.
| brentm wrote:
| They are an easy target. FB scandal stories garner a lot of
| public interest and so there is a financial incentive for news
| orgs to dedicate staff to the FB beat. Not enough people care
| about Reddit, HN, etc. Even Twitter comparatively. They also
| don't have the same level of influence.
|
| There are obviously issues that FB amplifies but the heart of
| the problem in my opinion is people. People like information
| that confirms what they already believe, other people are
| greedy and like to take advantage people for personal gain. It
| was easy when FB just had to worry about removing porn and
| gore. Now the line is much grayer. Half of the people think
| some piece of content must be removed ASAP and the other half
| call removing that exact same content censorship.
| fullshark wrote:
| The answer is simple: because FB is seen as a conservative
| propaganda distribution network and the others are not. The
| subreddit that was seen as a conservative propaganda network:
| r/the_donald was successfully eliminated and liberals want to
| do the same to FB.
| bob229 wrote:
| Delete your social media now
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| It's really not anywhere near a reputational point of no return.
| The editors of these media outlets with an axe to grind are
| trying really hard to create that illusion, though.
| [deleted]
| eunos wrote:
| Personally I dont see persistent public outrage that can
| effectively diminish Facebook. The "threat" at the moment is the
| congress passing bill to somewhat stymie Facebook.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Facebook has the money to hire lobbyists. Any bill passed
| through Congress with Facebook as its target will (amazingly,
| surprisingly) serve mostly to entrench and enrich it. Whatever
| limitations are included will be miraculously avoided by
| Facebook and will completely destroy any nascent competitors.
|
| No I don't know how they'll do it. Lobbyists must be craftier
| than the average citizen, because although their actions have
| the same results every time it's always seen as a surprise when
| e.g. a new Federal Communications Act eventually transfers
| billions of dollars to Ma Bell's two daughters.
|
| The only way such a bill could actually fulfill its stated aim
| would be if someone whose interests were diametrically opposed
| to Facebook's commercial success spent more money on lobbyists
| than Facebook could. That simply isn't going to happen.
| eunos wrote:
| One way the lobbyists avoid hammering Facebook is to argue
| that weakening Facebook means strengthening "Chinese"
| competitors, however true it is.
|
| I'm thinking that Chinese tech like TikTok/Bytedance is more
| used to policing content compared to their American
| counterpart. My observation is that TikTok is more prone to
| banning users rather than say FB.
| xyst wrote:
| Haven't used FB as a social media platform in a long time. So I
| understand the decreasing usage by the younger audience. However,
| I think FB should pivot to strictly a marketplace.
|
| My experience of selling items on their marketplace has far
| exceeded my expectations. In comparison to CL, Reddit, or
| Nextdoor, FB Marketplace was a much better experience.
|
| Not sure if it is the elimination of "anonymity", but dealt with
| 0 sketchy people and was able to sell items locally relatively
| fast (list them before going to bed then have 10+ responses
| wanting to buy it at listing price).
| Loughla wrote:
| I would second that. I do not have FB at all, but my spouse
| does. We maintain that account just for marketplace. I've sold
| many items online over the years. CL always ends in a haggle
| where the buyer wants to meet three hours away and pay half the
| list price, whereas Marketplace, I generally get what I asked
| for, under the terms that I've laid out.
| neolefty wrote:
| How much of that success depends on having such a large
| audience already using the platform?
| whitepaint wrote:
| I don't really know much about US politics, but could this recent
| attack on Facebook be a political move and a power grab? Attack
| FB so they block certain groups / certain topics and promote what
| the regulators want? I listened to the whistle-blower's testimony
| and I didn't hear any reasonable solutions (in my opinion at
| least; I am a software developer myself).
|
| Also, it seems there might be some regulations imposed. Doesn't
| Facebook actually want that? More regulations = more difficult to
| implement a new competing service.
| jwond wrote:
| Glenn Greenwald wrote an article arguing that yes, it is a
| power grab.
|
| https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-...
| pixelgeek wrote:
| I think he jumped his own shark a while ago when he left The
| Intercept [1] and has been writing some articles that sound
| reasonable but then veer into BS pretty quickly.
|
| "And that is Facebook's only real political problem: not that
| they are too powerful but that they are not using that power
| to censor enough content from the internet that offends the
| sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and
| their liberal followers, who now control the White House, the
| entire executive branch and both houses of Congress."
|
| This is just fringe, nutty stuff. The media is indeed doing
| what he says they are nut they are doing it because that is
| what they always do when they have a story they want to be a
| part of to try to feed off the popularity.
|
| It is insidious and messed up in almost exactly the reasons
| he mentions but not for the reasons he thinks.
|
| [1] https://theintercept.com
| pessimizer wrote:
| > This is just fringe, nutty stuff.
|
| Why? You have room here to explain.
|
| > The media is indeed doing what he says they are nut they
| are doing it because that is what they always do when they
| have a story they want to be a part of to try to feed off
| the popularity.
|
| Ah, they're doing it because they're doing it. Why didn't
| he think of this?
| pixelgeek wrote:
| @unethical_ban is correct.
|
| > Ah, they're doing it because they're doing it. Why
| didn't he think of this?
|
| No, the media does this so you don't need to come up with
| an ulterior motive to explain it. They see a story and
| they want to get a part of it to get eyeballs on their
| shows/magazines/podcasts.
|
| The difference here is that a Democratic leadership is
| more likely to take an adversarial approach to its
| relations to Facebook and companies like it than a
| Republican leadership would. (Trump being banned from all
| the platforms forms an outlier to this)
|
| Further to that...
|
| Manufacturing Consent [1] in 1988 formed a pretty solid
| argument that what the media does is not support a side
| as much as it supports the status quo. Media moves to
| support whomever is in power. Trump obviously blew the
| hell out of that but you can go back and look at
| critiques of Bush, Reagan, Obama and other presidents to
| see that media will criticize the current leadership but
| (again excluding the Trump outlier) won't take an
| adversarial role too far since it needs to maintain its
| relationship with those in power to continue to get
| content to publish.
|
| This is one of the main reasons why I think right-wing
| leadership made such a big deal of getting the Fairness
| Doctrine repealed under Reagan. It lead to the
| development of media that didn't rely on having a
| symbiotic relationship with whomever was in power and
| could instead push a single doctrine with its
| broadcasting.
|
| Not all Conservatives in the US believe that the repeal
| was a good thing [2] but for the folks like the Koch
| brothers it was a prime focus and it has paid dividends
| to them.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
|
| [2] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/cons
| ervativ...
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I think @pixelgeek means that politicians will always
| bandwagon a story that has momentum in order to maximize
| its utility.
|
| It sounds like they are challenging Greenwald's narrative
| that Democrats are doing this explicitly to silence
| opponents, but that they have good faith issues with the
| willful amplification of disinformation on FB.
| Bhilai wrote:
| Glenn Greenwood in my opinion is not a neutral party here. In
| recent times he clearly has chosen sides.
| quotemstr wrote:
| One fundamental precept of rational thought is that
| arguments speak for themselves. Claims exist independently
| of their speakers. You can't rebut an argument by
| suggesting that the person who made the argument has
| "chosen sides" or has any other characteristic whatsoever.
| You have to address the content of the argument itself. The
| human is irrelevant.
|
| Everyone should read Greenwald's article. He makes a good
| case.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I can't imagine that the people downvoting this comment
| would do so if they saw it in a politically neutral
| context. It's completely uncontroversial in what it said:
| arguments can be evaluated without regard to who is
| making them. This is middle-school citizenship class
| stuff.
|
| We really are blinded by our politics these days.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| You know what, I'm willing to take you up on the offer of
| "eliminate all biased media".
| pessimizer wrote:
| As long as it's me that gets to determine what is
| "biased" and what is not, sign me up. I also have
| thoughts about what is a "real" religion and what isn't,
| if you need more help.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Not an argument.
| detcader wrote:
| I apologize for OP, let's all stick to unbiased, objective
| reporting like the New York "Enhanced Interrogation" Times
| in the future
| detcader wrote:
| You don't even need to read the article, just listen to the
| 10 second clip of Sen. Ed Markey. It's not a covert thing
| djur wrote:
| A lot of people in this thread are casting political attacks on
| Facebook as a Democratic thing, so I'll just point out that
| conservative Republican Senator Josh Hawley has been attacking
| Facebook for years, including proposals to strip them of
| Section 230 protection and to allow people to sue them in
| federal court for "harmful content".
|
| https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-demands-answers-faceboo...
|
| https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6950261/Limiting-Sect...
|
| https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21074054/federal-big-...
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Your very first link is Hawley sending a letter because
| Facebook censored a Hunter Ukraine story.
|
| Republicans are pissed because of the censorship (the big
| ones being lab leak and Hunter Biden's laptop, but there are
| smaller things all the time, 15 days bans for sharing a story
| the narrative doesn't agree with).
|
| There's a good argument to make if FB wants to act like the
| arbiter of truth, the "truth" they choose should be legally
| liable.
|
| Democrats are pissed because FB doesn't go far enough or
| something. They want ALL conservative media off the site.
|
| Democrats want to amplify that censorship, Republicans don't
| want any censorship. Who is on the right side?
| Loughla wrote:
| You're painting with too broad of a brush here, I think. In
| general, saying 'all' about anything tends to make that
| statement false at some point.
|
| It's easy to knock down a straw-man, I guess is my point.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| My point is it's clearly a party issue to censor
| conservatives in the D party. The only issue R's have
| with FB is the censorship itself.
|
| Does that clear things up or do you have any questions?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I've seen enough pro-Marxists posts brigaded off of
| Facebook to know that Republicans have no actual problem
| with Facebook censorship.
|
| Their beef is what Facebook is allowed to censor. They
| don't want to stop the juggernaut; they want to steer it.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| And which Republican representatives are those?
|
| Or are you talking about random people?
|
| I can find you random people of all calibers on both
| sides, that's not the conversation.
|
| This is about politicians in the government coordinating
| a way to censor citizens who practice political dissent.
| jwond wrote:
| The difference from what I see is that Republicans are
| attacking Facebook for censoring too much, while Democrats
| are attacking Facebook for censoring too little.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I think HN needs a thread dedicated to exploring the word
| "censor". If you think it means "any deletion of content"
| then I support some forms of censorship.
|
| If you think it means "the prohibition of the possession of
| thought or the ability to transmit that thought via your
| own mechanisms", then I am against it.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| When content gets deleted or hidden, it inhibits the
| ability to transmit that thought, so I fail to see your
| distinction.
|
| Censorship is censorship. "Good censorship" and "bad
| censorship" is a slippery slope.
|
| The only type of content that should be censored in a
| given jurisdiction is content that is against the law.
|
| What should be against the law is an entirely different
| discussion to be had amongst inhabitants of that
| sovereign jurisdiction.
|
| When multinational corporations impose censorship that
| doesn't align with the laws of a given jurisdiction, it
| is tantamount to imperialism.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Only because of the nature of the censored content;
| Republicans aren't inherently as anti-censorship as the
| libertarian wing would like to hope they are. Social media
| are the fourth-and-a-half estate, and they're flexing their
| muscles for the other party.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| I haven't seen any calls from any Republicans to censor
| any speech. Their base is very adamant about the Bill of
| Rights.
|
| Do you have any examples to back up your statement?
|
| Keep in mind we're talking about silencing political
| dissent, that's pretty fucking major, not a "oh both
| sides do it, that's life" thing.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Marco Rubio just proposed a bill to stop corporations
| from being too "woke"[1]. There are also numerous
| instances of Republican politicians complaining or
| proposing bills about things like athletes kneeling
| during the anthem, burning of the flag, or other forms of
| expressions they deem "un-American". That's not even
| mentioning the Republican obsession with controlling
| "obscenity" on TV and other public media.
|
| [1]
| https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/9/new-
| rub...
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Read it again, it doesn't stop them, it puts them on
| record.
|
| Not comparable to silencing speech of citizens.
|
| Choose a better whataboutism in your defense of
| censorship, not just Marco lol.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I'm not defending anything. I'm responding to your
| statement that Republicans don't want to censor speech.
|
| > I haven't seen any calls from any Republicans to censor
| any speech.
|
| They very clearly do! Even setting aside the Rubio bill,
| you did not respond to either the "you must be
| patriotic"[1][2] or the "obscenity"[3][4] type of
| censorship that Republicans love to pursue.
|
| [1] https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2021/0
| 2/25/te...
|
| [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/02/24/tenn
| essee-g...
|
| [3] https://reason.com/2012/08/28/yes-the-gop-platform-
| is-for-vi...
|
| [4] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/exclusive-u-s-
| represen...
| hunterb123 wrote:
| 1. The big reveal in that article is "No we're not ready
| to do that yet". Legally yes it may be a freedom of
| speech issue because it's at a public university, but who
| wants political stunts at a game. The audience doesn't,
| no real debate is happening. Not the same scale as
| political dissent censorship.
|
| 2. Sorry can't view due to paywall, couldn't find an
| archive
|
| 3. You can be arrested in many liberal towns for public
| indecency. I don't support evangelicals argument against
| pornography using obscenity but it's not exactly a great
| comparison against the censorship of political dissent.
|
| 4. Same point as above.
|
| Note that the main difference of these events are the
| severity and scale. It's many national level Democrats
| coordinating to censor political speech on a private
| platform by creating a fake "whistleblower" vs some
| kneeling at a basketball game or porn laws.
|
| I agree that those few Republicans are wrong, but their
| suggestions aren't the majority in the party and they
| won't get far. Conversely, the Democrat party as a whole
| is currently and successfully crafting a censorship
| campaign.
| zenithd wrote:
| _> but who wants political stunts at a game. The audience
| doesn 't, no real debate is happening. Not the same scale
| as political dissent censorship._
|
| "No one wants to hear the things that the people I
| disagree with say, so laws preventing them from saying
| those things aren't really censorship."
|
| _> not exactly a great comparison against the censorship
| of political dissent._
|
| "The things my opponents say aren't as important as the
| things I want to say, so censoring me is worse than
| censoring them."
|
| _> but their suggestions aren 't the majority in the
| party and they won't get far. Conversely, the Democrat
| party as a whole is currently and successfully crafting a
| censorship campaign._
|
| "My side always loses and the other side is evil and
| always gets their way, so even if there are dark
| instincts on my side we should be worried more about the
| other side."
| hunterb123 wrote:
| > "No one wants to hear the things that the people I
| disagree with say, so laws preventing them from saying
| those things aren't really censorship."
|
| There's a difference between protesting at a town square
| and kneeling at a paid game. Again I don't really support
| what these state senators are doing (though they said
| they WEREN'T going to btw, so what are we talking about?)
|
| > "The things my opponents say aren't as important as the
| things I want to say, so censoring me is worse than
| censoring them."
|
| Being able to jack off to a certain site online vs
| shutting down political dissenters can be compared and I
| can find one more important than the other. That being
| said, I don't support porn laws and it represents a
| minority in the party. Evangelicals have a lot less power
| these days.
|
| > "My side always loses and the other side is evil and
| always gets their way, so even if there are dark
| instincts on my side we should be worried more about the
| other side."
|
| That's not what I said. I said they aren't the majority,
| EVEN IN THEIR OWN PARTY. Yes some evangelical R's do
| cross the line with the puritan crap, that doesn't
| represent the majority nor can it be COMPARED TO SHUTTING
| DOWN POLITICAL DISSENT.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Conversely, the Democrat party as a whole is currently
| and successfully crafting a censorship campaign.
|
| Can you support the claim that Frances Haugen is a "fake
| whistleblower" created as part of a Democrat party
| censorship campaign with evidence?
| hunterb123 wrote:
| They would provide no evidence, sorry, I can only offer
| you common sense.
|
| She's a long time liberal activist and the Democrats had
| this whole shit show ready to go at the same time she
| came out.
|
| There is evidence that they are doing a censorship
| campaign, by their calls for censorship.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I don't think that's enough signal to disambiguate
| "coordinate use of a 'fake whistleblower' against
| Facebook" from simple fortune. Some members of the
| Democratic party want to rein in Facebook and other big-
| tech companies; of that I have no doubt. But "big tech"
| in general has been shedding whistle-blowers for years
| now as individuals find their consciences no longer let
| them play the game... My 'common sense' tells me if it
| weren't Frances Haugen, it'd have been someone else.
| enumjorge wrote:
| > Their base is very adamant about the Bill of Rights.
|
| Bullshit. A lot of their base is adamant about quoting
| the bill of rights when it serves them and looking the
| other way when it doesn't. Highly doubt most of them can
| even list all the amendments of the bill of rights they
| claim to be so passionate about. There's amendments in
| there about due process, yet you'll see the right defend
| cops using excessive force on people they arrest even if
| it ends in death. That's effectively a death sentence
| without a trial.
|
| As far as speech, the right's embrace of "free speech" is
| recent and superficial. It wasn't so long ago that
| conservative groups in this country were trying to ban
| portrayals of gay people on mass media, with the same
| "think of the children" excuse that another comment on
| this thread was complaining about. That has only receded
| because they lost that culture war, but I'm sure they
| would gladly erase LGBT folks from popular culture if
| they could.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Alright, find something recent. We're talking about
| current censorship. No amount of whataboutism will make
| what the Dems are currently doing ok.
|
| As a libertarian in the wing I know full well about the
| past of the evangelicals, doesn't make censorship okay
| does it?
| mbg721 wrote:
| I'm thinking more of the Satanism scares of the 80s.
| Republicans have never really had the mass-media on their
| side post-Watergate (except maybe briefly after 9/11), so
| they can't silence anyone in the "fortifying the
| election" sense.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Its US politics so it means nothing will be done and its just a
| chance for politicians to grandstand in front of an audience
| and pretend to be lecturing the big bad tech company. Its just
| theater.
| dustintrex wrote:
| Stratechery makes a pretty solid argument that the calls for
| regulating "fake news" in general and Facebook in particular is
| a Democratic reaction to getting outfoxed by Trump's use of
| social media in 2016:
|
| https://stratechery.com/2021/facebook-political-problems/
| MadeThisToReply wrote:
| Do you think the Democratic Party will ever admit that they
| lost in 2016 not because of "misinformation" or "fake news"
| or Russian interference or any of the other nefarious
| conspiracy theories they've promulgated, but because they put
| forward a terrible, unlikable candidate whom no-one was
| enthusiastic about and who offered nothing but sanctimony and
| a continuation of the failing status quo? Maybe it's not
| Facebook's fault?
| [deleted]
| dustintrex wrote:
| That's basically what the Stratechery story above argues as
| well, but the key is that makes Facebook a convenient
| whipping boy that both sides can hate.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| It absolutely can be, and I think it is.
|
| The left has blamed the election of Trump on Facebook, chiefly
| for spreading "misinformation".
|
| Facebook should have responded to this charge by asserting they
| are not arbiters of truth, but they happily took up that
| mantle.
|
| But it's not enough, and it never will be. The goal is to
| regulate Facebook into oblivion.
|
| Others may disagree with my assessment of motivation. Plenty
| other "reasons" exist, all revolving around the specter of
| "misinformation". See for yourself, the recent bad press about
| negative impact on children is just the cherry on top.
|
| All of this falls when the standard is personal responsibility.
| You should decide what is trustworthy, or misleading. You
| should decide how much time you (and your children) spend on
| social media.
|
| But the going mantra is that this freedom is "harmful", and
| must be regulated. That's the end game, and your assessment is
| dead on.
| MadeThisToReply wrote:
| > The goal is to regulate Facebook into oblivion.
|
| No, the goal is to regulate Facebook so that the Democratic
| party controls what you are and aren't allowed to see on
| Facebook. It's entirely about power and control and anything
| else is just lies and distortion.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Yes it is and yes they do.
| throwaway20875 wrote:
| It's a political move and power grab.
| newbamboo wrote:
| Facebook is smart enough not to bite the political hands that
| feed it. As long as they pay, they'll continue to play. Their
| political pillars upon which they rest abhor the free market.
| They're quite safe.
| teddyh wrote:
| It bothers me when media reports on somebody's (or a company's)
| reputation, like it's the weather or something. _The media is
| entirely responsible for somebody's reputation._ Grassroots
| rumors or gossip can only have very limited spread, and nobody
| puts much stock in them if the media contradicts them. If the
| media has now decided that Facebook has a bad reputation, _that's
| how it is_ , since the media is the entity defining reputation.
| azangru wrote:
| I used to say that at least Facebook gave us, developers, React.
| (And graphql, I would add.). Its product stinks; but at least its
| open-sourced tools have moved the web forward.
|
| Sure felt like a gust of fresh air circa 2014. But now I am not
| so sure it's a blessing anymore.
| tenaciousDaniel wrote:
| I still have a FB account because my family is on there, and even
| then I check it _maybe_ once a month, if that. It 's just not in
| my life anymore. When I do go on there, I have a hard time
| imagining how anyone could get sucked into it.
|
| Sometimes I feel like FB is a kind of scapegoat for social
| critique. Maybe because it's the largest, but not sure.
|
| Personally, it seems like Twitter is a much more malevolent
| cultural force. The amount of toxicity that arises out of that
| platform is overwhelming, and the addiction factor is much more
| affective. I'm not saying FB doesn't deserve criticism, but I
| wonder why these other platforms don't get the same attention.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > I still have a FB account [...] I have a hard time imagining
| how anyone could get sucked into it.
|
| I drink a glass of beer several times a week, and can't imagine
| how anyone could become addicted to alcohol.
|
| Very sadly, the world does not feel at all constrained by my
| imagination.
| tenaciousDaniel wrote:
| Fair enough, the second half of my comment didn't really
| follow from the first. But I think my point stands about the
| relative attention paid to FB compared to other platforms. I
| don't get it.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > Maybe because it's the largest [...]
|
| This. Same way that Apple gets the headlines when it's
| learned that workers at some electronics factory are being
| horribly mistreated.
|
| (Well...maybe that's stretching it. I've heard several
| times that, for quite a few people, FB basically _is_ the
| web.)
| bhupy wrote:
| > Personally, it seems like Twitter is a much more malevolent
| cultural force
|
| Completely agreed, it's quite impressive that they've managed
| to remain unscathed in all of this. Every single criticism that
| one can level against Facebook applies to Twitter ten times
| over. At least with Facebook's properties, the core use case is
| still keeping in touch with friends and family. Twitter's only
| real use-case is providing a soap box to the most outrage-
| inducing opinions, accuracy or nuance be damned. It's just
| democratized punditry.
| HappySweeney wrote:
| I think 10x is a touch hyperbolic, but I agree otherwise.
| Much like FB, you can avoid the outrage porn by mercilessly
| unfollowing political accounts. Unlike FB, Twitter has an
| option to order things chronologically instead of by how
| outrageous they are.
| hairofadog wrote:
| > _Every single criticism that one can level against Facebook
| applies to Twitter ten times over_
|
| Eh, I disagree. Sure, Facebook and Twitter can both be used
| to spread disinformation, to foment divisiveness, to addict
| their users to low-quality scrolling. Facebook, however,
| allows _secret_ distribution of misinformation at scale, does
| a much better job of censoring at scale (i.e. they censor
| leftist views for users on the right and vice-versa), seems
| much more interested in the elimination of privacy as a
| concept, and seems much more interested in connecting me with
| people I don 't want to connect with.
|
| On twitter I can curate my feed so it's high signal-to-noise
| ratio. On Facebook I have to put up with the nonsensical
| political opinions of people I'm related to, used to go to
| school with, and used to work with. I left my hometown for
| good reasons.
| arvinsim wrote:
| My guess is that vested interests likes Twitter because they
| can use it as a tool to direct the mob. Not so much with FB
| since FB has their own agenda.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I think its simpler than that - journalists get a lot of
| positive reinforcement and attention from twitter, so they
| just like it more.
| iSnow wrote:
| As if FB stock holders or C-suite (or even regular employees,
| come to think about it) do care about reputational damage.
|
| As long as it is a money-printing machine, they will not care one
| bit if they have to heat the headquarters with seal pups.
| leroy_masochist wrote:
| > Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's all-powerful founder, made a
| reasoned statement after this week's wave of anger. He was
| ignored or ridiculed and increasingly looks like a liability.
|
| The article ends with this statement, and I think it's really the
| lede. At this point, Zuck is basically the whipping boy of
| multiple different power factions in the US on both the left and
| right. If Facebook were actually run by its board, it would
| probably be an easy decision to move him into a President or
| Chairman role and get a Dara-type person into the CEO seat. But
| he holds all the cards, so who knows what will happen.
|
| It does seem like Facebook's long-term driver of value is as a
| marketplace platform in developing countries. Shipping Libra and
| announcing a strategy pivot to empowering small business owners
| in LDCs would be a bold move, but it seems like Zuck has never
| wanted to antagonize the US Gov the way that, e.g., Travis has.
|
| It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
| erostrate wrote:
| The articles ends with a suggestion that Mark Zuckerberg should
| be fired from his CEO role, but he controls 58% of the voting
| shares, so I'm not sure who this appeal is directed at.
| dresdenfire wrote:
| Ofcourse, the only right course of action would be for Mark to
| fire himself!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| The biggest component missing from Silicon Valley's discussion of
| Facebook is its pathological lying.
|
| They lied to the FTC [1]. They lied to WhatsApp and the EU [2].
| They created an Oversight Board and then lied to it [3]. (These
| just off the top of my head.)
|
| The culture is perceived to be dishonest from the top down.
| _That_ is why they get bludgeoned more than Twitter, or even Tik
| Tok. _That_ is what its surrogates miss when they say Zuckerberg
| is being scapegoated. There simply isn 't another big tech CEO
| with such a clear, public and recalcitrant record of dishonesty.
|
| [1]
| https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/182_3109_fa...
|
| [2] https://euobserver.com/digital/137953
|
| [3] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/21/the-oversight-board-
| wants-...
| jszymborski wrote:
| I'm on the outside looking in, (and this might be an unpopular
| opinion in this crowd) but that's the reputation of tech in
| Silicon Valley, no?
|
| The mentality is often "we'll be too small to prosecute until
| we're too big". That's how you end up with these seemingly
| superlegal entities like Uber, Google, hell even Crunchyroll.
|
| Theranos was the peak example of how tech companies are
| encouraged to misrepresent fact to both users and investors to
| ensure engagement and investment.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| What happened with Crunchyroll?
| [deleted]
| jonwachob91 wrote:
| It was founded as a platform for streaming pirated anime
| until it got big enough to acquire major VC investments and
| start buying streaming rights.
| enkid wrote:
| Not saying you're right it wrong, bit Theranos seems like a
| counter example to what you are arguing.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I suppose what I meant here was that Theranos was so
| successful at misrepresenting facts to industry and the
| consumer that they were able to reach meteoric heights
| based on absolutely nothing at all. It's in that way that I
| mean that Theranos exemplified dishonesty in SV tech.
|
| Of course, unlike Uber/Google/Crunchy, Theranos was
| breaking the law in the service of a product that not only
| didn't existed, but couldn't. That meant the company had to
| eventually implode, but its entire existence was fueled by
| the same sort of dishonesty SV startups have (fairly or no)
| gained a reputation for.
| rumblerock wrote:
| Luckily in Haugen's senate appearance the subcommittee seemed
| to be in full bipartisan agreement that they had been lied to.
| I'm glad that they are finally starting to sufficiently wrap
| their heads around this issue to start doing something about it
| and holding FB to account.
| p_j_w wrote:
| Add Oculus not requiring a Facebook account to their list of
| fibs.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Every large corporation "lies".
|
| But there are a number of mechanisms. First, large corporation
| are large, which means its impossible to know whats happening
| everywhere. This means you are reliant on your underlings to
| report up to you. At each stage there will be entropy, noise
| and distortion.
|
| Second there is PR, their job is to massage, deflect and sway.
|
| Thirdly there is knowingly mislead in public.
|
| The problem we have here is that there is a massive lens of
| facebook, so _every_ move they make is introspected and
| interpreted. For example the most recent outage. Outages happen
| it wasn't an inside job, and its really cute to imagine that
| facebook are both competent, coordinated, nimble and secretive
| enough to pull something like that and keep it a secret
| (especially as the incident review was out in the open via a
| leaked zoom and google doc.)
|
| Don't interpret this as me advocating for facebook. I'm
| advocating for that same level of criticism being applied to
| the rest of FAANG.
|
| Case in point, Apple tried to roll out a CSAM filter. lots of
| noise about privacy, but very little about how Apple was doing
| it because they are currently aware that they are enabling the
| industrial exploitation of children. We should be _very_ angry
| at this, as it threatens end-to-end encryption.
|
| I get that its fashionable to shit on facebook, but it'd be
| great if we looked at what the others are doing especially when
| they are dabbling in AR.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Every company "lies" but Facebook lies. What OP cited had
| nothing to do with PR or public statements. They are all
| regulatory representations that were later found to be false.
| That's different.
|
| It's pretty rare that companies make known material
| misstatements to regulators. Instead, they figure out what
| they want to do and they do make the least revealing
| statement that isn't a lie.
|
| You mentioned that we should level this criticism at the rest
| of FAANG, but what examples do you have of other FAANG
| companies making obviously false statements in actual legal
| documents? As far as I know, through all of the Apple CSAM
| controversy their statements and their actions (however
| controversial) always matched up. That is not how Facebook
| operates.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > They are all regulatory representations that were later
| found to be false.
|
| Just look at finance, the entire market is based on telling
| mistruths to regulators.
|
| Apple are currently piling industrial amounts of bullshit
| to a number of regulators. The irish, dutch and british tax
| authorities are constantly being fed lies about where
| "sales" happen.
|
| Google have lied to both austrialian and french regulators.
|
| The reason I brought up apple is because they are doing to
| to defuse the fact that they are alone amongst FAANG for
| enabling child abuse.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _Just look at finance, the entire market is based on
| telling mistruths to regulators._
|
| There are of course liars in the finance market, but my
| impression is that most financial companies actually
| follow regulations quite closely (and happily, their
| employees often wrote the regs).
|
| > _Apple are currently piling industrial amounts of
| bullshit to a number of regulators. The irish, dutch and
| british tax authorities are constantly being fed lies
| about where "sales" happen._
|
| I think we are using language differently. My sense is
| that Apple is using a legal fiction to minimize taxes
| through Irish subsidiaries, but that they are (as far as
| I know) quite detailed and truthful about the details of
| that legal fiction. It's quite silly to say Apple Ireland
| is making all the sales in all of Europe, but such an
| arrangement is legal and I suspect quite airtight as far
| as the relevant legal standards go. To me this is "lying"
| - representing the companies actions in a way that's to
| their advantage and is strictly in line with legal
| realities. If you could look at every document inside
| Apple you would probably find no different between their
| public and private opinions on legal specifics of the
| arrangement. Like...Apple Ireland doesn't "make"
| anything, but I'm sure all the money actually flows
| through the company.
|
| Facebook, on the other hand, has repeatedly been found to
| choose to say things to regulators (or psudo-regulators
| like their "oversight board") that are, at the moment
| they say them, directly at odds with internal
| understanding. They aren't accurately describing an
| advantageous legal fiction - they're just making claims
| about things that no one inside the company believes.
| This would be like Apple claiming all money flows through
| Apple Ireland, but checking their bank records shows that
| the company has never received or sent any money.
|
| The difference seems important to me, though I understand
| why someone might disagree.
|
| > _Google have lied to both austrialian and french
| regulators._
|
| I googled around and couldn't find an instance of google
| lying to french regulators (I did not check aus ones).
| Could you point to the instance you're thinking of?
|
| > _The reason I brought up apple is because they are
| doing to to defuse the fact that they are alone amongst
| FAANG for enabling child abuse._
|
| I am not sure I understand what you mean here - I would
| imagine that all of FAANG (aside from netflix probably)
| provide services used by abusers.
| fairity wrote:
| > The culture is perceived to be dishonest from the top down.
| That is why they get bludgeoned more than Twitter, or even Tik
| Tok.
|
| Are you sure? My guess is 95%+ of Facebook critics don't know
| about any of the three instances you linked. In which case,
| it's unlikely to explain why Facebook is being targeted.
|
| Perhaps a better explanation is that Facebook is an order of
| magnitude larger than Twitter.
| [deleted]
| sgregnt wrote:
| Your language seems unpartial and very biased against facebook.
| For example, how does you reference [1] shows they lied to FTC?
| The document cited is the allegations against facebook, was
| this proven in the court? afaik the case was settled.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Nick Clegg is more than facebook's head of PR, he's their
| spirit animal.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| As others have mentioned here in greater detail, Nope. Even in
| the U.S, the vast majority of Facebook's users don't give a
| flying shit about the dirty details. They just want to use the
| messaging and "social" stuff that Insta/FB provide, so long as
| they work for their daily needs. As for much of the rest of the
| world, FB properties are sadly the end all and be all of
| communications and organizing events. Even less reason to care
| about a major scandal or two or dozen.
| Croftengea wrote:
| Yes, most people just don't care. Facebook will be Facebook no
| matter what until there is something new that adds some new
| dimensions to social networking and attracts more investor money.
| People just wanted calls and used Nokias, wanted search and used
| Altavista, wanted messages and used ICQ.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Absolutely not. Media likes to think it can control popular
| narratives like it can turn a dial, but it can't anymore -- due
| in large part to Facebook.
|
| Social media has been under attack from mainstream media for a
| decade, ostensibly due to concerns over social media ranking and
| interest-based advertising, but actually due to social media
| disintermediation information exchange and obviating the role of
| traditional media as gatekeepers.
|
| I can't bring myself to be upset by this development. The social
| problems arising from social media are concerning and demand
| discussion and maybe some kind of fix --- but it remains a _good_
| thing that reporters and editors can no longer unilaterally set
| the agenda for society. Power is only safe when it 's divided and
| diffused.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > The most damaging claim this week gained the least attention.
| Ms Haugen alleges that Facebook has concealed a decline in its
| young American users. She revealed internal projections that a
| drop in teenagers' engagement could lead to an overall decline in
| American users of 45% within the next two years. Investors have
| long faced a lack of open disclosure. Misleading advertisers
| would undermine the source of nearly all the firm's sales, and
| potentially break the law. (The firm denies it.)
|
| The Economist doesn't think damaging society and individuals,
| including spreading and legitimizing massive misinformation, is
| especially significant, but misleading _advertisers_ - now that
| 's serious.
| oceliker wrote:
| To be fair to them, they say it's the "most damaging" claim,
| not the most significant. Misleading advertisers _is_ more
| damaging to Facebook than misleading users, unfortunately.
| [deleted]
| cletus wrote:
| I'll take wishful thinking for $1000, Alex.
|
| To be fair, there are generally two reasons for these kinds of
| predictions:
|
| 1. People in a bubble think something is way more important than
| it is. I hate to say it but user data privacy is in this
| category. Like 1% of people actually care about this. I'm not
| saying that's right but it's true; and
|
| 2. People who make a lot of noise about an issue to make people
| care or to bring about some desired outcome. Think Yelp
| complaining about Google "stealing" their content.
|
| The second can be really harmful too. A good example is articles
| posted about how [high X]% of people have suffered from "sexual
| harassment or assault". To be clear, both of those things are bad
| but they are different levels of bad. Cat-calling on a
| construction site shouldn't be treated equivalently as a violent
| assault.
|
| But people do it to make things seem more alarming than they
| actually are and I think it has the negative effect. These bad
| faith arguments actually turn people off.
|
| It also leads to situations like a 19 year old having sex with a
| 16 year old is on the same sexual offender list as a child
| molestor.
|
| I digress.
|
| The only thing you see here is that the Economist doesn't like
| Facebook. That's it. I mean there's some bad PR for FB recently
| but companies have survived much, much worse for much, much
| longer. And FB will continue to attract talent as long as they
| pay them.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Five years after Zuckerberg was jogging around Beijing, he went
| hoverboard surfing carrying the American flag.
|
| As long the competition is Chinese TikTok or Russian Telegram
| then Facebook (and its associated businesses) will be allowed,
| even subsidized to grow in their dominance.
|
| Yes. There may be regulation that constraints Facebook but you
| can be sure that its competition will be hit harder.
|
| This is the calculation they are making and it is probably
| correct.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| I agree with your geopolitical assessment but I doubt you can
| consistently rely on US legislature to protect the country's
| long term interests. I'd be pleasantly surprised if it does but
| it hasn't demonstrated much ability or interest in countering
| China's industrial influence.
| amyjess wrote:
| The best way to make Facebook clean up its act is to revoke
| Section 230 with no exceptions.
|
| If someone's relative dies to covid because people on Facebook
| convinced them to refuse the vaccine, the whole family should be
| able to sue Facebook for wrongful death. Same if someone dies as
| a result of alternative "medicine" suggested to them by someone
| on Facebook. If someone gets assaulted after people on Facebook
| stir up a harassment campaign against them, Facebook should be
| criminally charged with conspiracy. If people on Facebook
| organize a violent insurrection, Facebook should be criminally
| charged. Make Facebook 100% legally responsible for every single
| piece of content on the platform, and then we'll see some real
| changes made.
| stingrae wrote:
| I think this would force Facebook to shut down. They are
| operating at such a scale that no amount of hiring will give
| them the human moderation required to actually operate.
| amyjess wrote:
| I'm okay with that.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I think this is fine for Facebook. We've long passed the point
| where facebook.com was supposed to work for everyone, it's now
| got some clear demographics that use it, and plenty that don't.
|
| Instagram is the replacement for certain demographics, and is
| well liked by most in its target market. WhatsApp is another
| replacement. FB Messenger is another. Even Oculus is a bet on
| another group.
|
| Facebook-the-company is mostly irrelevant in this discussion as
| the separate brands are strong enough on their own. They can keep
| buying/building new brands to target specific demographics and
| shield them from the positioning (or bad press) of the other
| brands.
|
| I think the only real risk here is that Facebook becomes a place
| that its employees don't want to work at, but I'm not sure
| that'll happen, they can afford to pay enough that enough people
| won't care.
| baby wrote:
| Also, a lot of engineers still consider FB as a good product.
| HN is a bubble.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Facebook is other people. People have killed each other by the
| millions, and now that violence is playing out in the non-
| physical space. We shouldn't be surprised.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| [2014] Microsoft is doomed as it has lost mobile and desktop is
| not relevant any more.
| tonyfader wrote:
| nearing???
|
| long since past time to shut them down.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Facebook has marketshare and utility. Until someone can come
| along and do a better job without all the warts of dealing with
| human beings and their human shortcomings, it will remain the
| leader in the space.
| cblackthornekc wrote:
| To those that care, it is well past that point.
|
| I'm not sure if the remaining people will care even if Facebook
| put a dollar amount on your profile to show you how much money
| they made off of you in the last 7 days.
| dxbydt wrote:
| economist.com...well people running the actual economy don't seem
| to share the sentiment. fb pcr is trending low [1] & ~$400 is
| still the consensus trefis estimate.
| [1]https://www.optionistics.com/put-call-ratio/fb
| wonderwonder wrote:
| The only threat to Facebook is a younger user base moving away
| from them and they have done an excellent job mitigating that via
| Instagram and WhatsApp. Zuck is a lot of things but shortsighted
| is not one of them.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| I don't remember nor didn't use myspace, but how did that come to
| and end? We're there early tell tales like this one?
|
| The collapse for Facebook would probably be very fast once a
| trigger point is reached, they're kind of all or nothing, they
| need large data amounts to have any quality to serve ads, if they
| have less advertisers and data, they won't be able to charge the
| same prides, it's would be a cascade or spiral moving pretty
| fast.
|
| Of course, once it happens, fb might be replaced by something
| even worse, the cynic in me thinks.
| brentm wrote:
| No, people just moved on for a better product (FB, etc).
| busymom0 wrote:
| Regardless of what one may think of Tai Lopez, he did do an
| interview with Myspace Tom where he talks about how Myspace got
| killed by FB: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZA4vPc5SqJ8
| spinchange wrote:
| Has this firm or its leader ever been popularly known or regarded
| for high ethical standards?
| gundmc wrote:
| A fair and well-reasoned article. Fair or not, Facebook's
| reputation means their actions are perceived as negative and
| sinister even when there is good reason for them.
|
| At this point I really think Zuckerberg needs to step away from
| the company and allow them space to try to reclaim public
| perception and goodwill. I don't see another way forward.
| chicob wrote:
| I can't go past the general tone of this article.
|
| The article acknowledges that Facebook made mistakes, and that
| its internal reports prove the company knows the harm it can do
| to vulnerable teenagers. Then these issues are discarded.
| Apparently, Facebook even had some growth after all...
|
| But lying to advertisers? This is deemed as unacceptable, and
| flagged as a possible beginning of the end.
|
| I know this is the Economist, but when it comes to reputational
| points of no return, I think that vulgar remark regarding early
| users' trust did the job.
| Tarucho wrote:
| Everything passes. After some time users will forget this scandal
| and will continue using Facebook as before.
| throwaway20875 wrote:
| This whole circus is about as contrived as it gets, complete with
| the "think of the children" gimmick. The timing, the theatrics,
| the manufactured celebrity of a middle manager at Facebook who is
| doing the "right" kind of whistleblowing that the establishment
| likes.
|
| Facebook's predatory business model isn't unique or new. This is
| about raw power to censor.
| enumjorge wrote:
| This borders on conspiratorial. What "establishment" are you
| talking about? You might as well have said boogey man. I'm
| guessing you mean Democrats, since Republicans have greatly
| benefited from the distribution of propaganda and
| misinformation that social media like Facebook enables. These
| are the same Democrats who barely have a majority in Congress.
| They're struggling to pass legislation because the moment they
| lose even a single senator, they don't have the votes. The
| Republicans, who favor no intervention, are as much
| "establishment" as those who want to reign in FB and still hold
| a lot of power.
|
| > Facebook's predatory business model isn't unique or new.
|
| I don't get this. Nothing to see here because other companies
| are also bad? Someone who worked at the company leaked
| documents showing that Facebook's own research shows they are
| causing harm and we should do nothing because this isn't new? I
| don't understand this logic.
|
| > This is about raw power to censor.
|
| The implication here is that our society's free speech is
| largely dependent on Facebook. Free speech existed before
| social media, why is it that now it can't exist without it? Now
| the health of our democracy is linked to what Facebook, which
| is controlled by a single person, decides to do on the
| platform. That seems pretty unhealthy and something worth
| correcting. Government intervention has its downsides, but what
| else do you suggest?
| mmmpop wrote:
| >> I'm guessing you mean Democrats, since Republicans have
| greatly benefited from the distribution of propaganda and
| misinformation that social media like Facebook enables.
|
| Right, propaganda is only a thing the Right peddles.
| busymom0 wrote:
| They Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power
| to Censor: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-
| media-do-not-...
| dang-guefever wrote:
| Pretty much. This is the next generation version of "This is
| extremely dangerous to our democracy"^1 level of collusion to
| push narratives.
|
| 1 - https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
| mint2 wrote:
| Contrived by who?
|
| Are you saying the middle manager was bribed to leak docs or is
| some plant by "The Shadow Powers"?
|
| Are you saying we shouldn't care about a company targeting
| children with products it knows increase suicidal thoughts in
| substantial numbers of children?
|
| Who is the establishment. Spell it out for me.
|
| How did they orchestrate the Facebook leak? Spell it out.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| I mean, it's a stupid plan. A whistleblower to advocate for
| censorship? Do they think the people are that stupid?
|
| I guess like most things they don't need the majority of public
| on board, just a bit of plausible deniability.
|
| If anyone was really concerned about the algorithms, they'd
| make transparency requirements, not censorship requirements.
|
| If anyone was really concerned about the results of teenagers
| in the study, they'd go after TikTok, where teenagers are and
| where they rank them by looks.
|
| If anyone was really concerned about bad foreign actors on
| social media they'd go after the Taliban and the Ayatollah on
| Twitter.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| The Taliban aren't running disinformation campaigns _on
| Americans_ via Facebook or Twitter.
|
| Like it or not, people care more about a problem that affects
| them. That's like saying "if Americans /really/ cared about
| democracy, they would all be advocating for an invasion of
| Belarus".
| hunterb123 wrote:
| First off, yes they are. Second, the CCP use
| "disinformation" as a reason for censoring too.
|
| Americans aren't orchestrating this, Democrats are.
|
| The Taliban comparison was in relation to the FB Myanmar
| issue the "whistleblower" brought up.
|
| Just as the TikTok comparison was in relation to the girl's
| study.
|
| The point is, the Dems are laser focused on Facebook
| because they want to silence conservatives, not because of
| some virtue to help people.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I completely disagree with your assessment. No one is
| trying to silence people for saying "poor people are
| worth less than me, taxes are inherently evil, non-whites
| are probably illegals, and abortion is murder". I'm using
| the most offensive stereotypes to make the point that no
| one is even trying to ban those ideas.
|
| The concern is the spread of lies known to be generated
| by bad actors, and how to handle it. Does "more truth"
| win against "lies"? Or should we try to limit facebook
| groups and twitter feeds that say Biden lost the election
| against all facts and evidence, when we see millions of
| people believe it just because it feels right to them?
|
| It's not an easy problem, and doesn't seem to have any
| easy solution.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| They are banning dissenting information that looks bad
| for them.
|
| Similar to how CCP bans political dissent, Dems ban any
| stories on Hunter Biden for example.
|
| The Dems also ban things that look bad on China, like the
| lab leak, I suppose because they share some of the same
| goals.
|
| Also the election is perfectly reasonable to question.
| It's fine to question why the bell weathers and many
| other record indicators were broken during the 2020
| election. It's fine to want to audit and make sure
| something is secure, especially after we spent $20
| million and 5 years investigating the 2016 election for
| "Russian interference".
| shadowgovt wrote:
| A simple search for "hunter biden laptop" on Facebook
| immediately kicks up three news articles, dozens of site
| posts, and (in the bubble I can see from my own friends
| list) several dozen posts on the topic from the point of
| view that the laptop was real.
|
| If this is Democratic censorship in action, it's
| incredibly bad at its goals.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| It was censored on all tech platforms at once when the
| story broke so the information wouldn't hit mainstream
| weeks ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
|
| Yes eventually they had to allow it because it was
| blatant censorship, but the damage is done.
| jwond wrote:
| You are correct, so I'm not sure why you are being
| downvoted. Facebook explicitly suppressed the story.
|
| > While I will intentionally not link to the New York
| Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be
| fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking
| partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its
| distribution on our platform.
|
| -- Andy Stone, Facebook Policy Communications Director
|
| https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1316395902479872000
|
| Coincidentally enough, if you check Andy Stone's LinkedIn
| you will see that before he started working at Facebook
| he worked for various organizations associated with the
| Democratic party.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| No one has called for bans of discussions of the lab leak
| theory (or no one mainstream). It was simply obvious that
| early harping about it from Tucker Carlson was a useless
| distraction in the early time of the pandemic, when the
| rest of the world was focusing on how to respond to the
| pandemic instead of beating the shit out of Asians and
| calling Coronavirus "Wuhan flu" to enrage the libs.
|
| No one has "banned" discussion of Hunter Biden. (I just
| saw your reply to someone else saying it was censored
| from facebook; I would be interested in seeing any
| evidence of that). Downvoting isn't censorship. Lack of
| prioritizing coverage by a newspaper could be a concern,
| but that isn't censorship (and boy, do I have some news
| for you if you don't know how Fox does its reporting).
|
| Republicans have barely lifted a finger when in power to
| secure voting systems, or take any interest in voting
| security. You keep on acting like Republicans care about
| election security (or election fairness at all) but they
| don't. They care about disenfranchisement.
|
| There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020,
| as stated by Secretaries of State from multiple states
| Republican-led and Democrat-led. As shown by reviews in
| multiple states that were done for partisan reasons (we
| lost and we don't like Democrats winning).
|
| Voting records might have been broken because political
| polarization is at a high note and we had a hugely
| polarizing president in office.
|
| The investigation into Russian interference was related
| to disinformation campaigns and collusion with members of
| the Trump campaign, NOT voter or election fraud.
|
| It found evidence of that, but the Republican-led house
| did nothing with the information.
| https://wannabewonk.com/summary-of-hypocrisies/
|
| edit2: Ah, yes, you're talking about the discredited
| hitpieces that were released in the weeks before the
| election. Yes, it seems those were throttled, openly and
| transparently, due to them being discredited hitpieces.
| rscoots wrote:
| Actually this messaging has achieved significant impact in
| the past 3 years. They might not have the majority of the
| public on board, but they do have the majority of Dems:
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/18/more-
| americ...
|
| Unfortunately for them it seems to be having the opposite
| affect on Republicans, but not to the same degree.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| They always have the Dems on board. Every little plot they
| do.
|
| Christine Blasey Ford, Eric Ciamarella, it never ends.
| They'll find one person to exploit or pay off
| (respectively) and create a show around them.
|
| Their base will get riled up, the R base will see through
| it but be ignored and dehumanized.
|
| Also, FB is more conservative overall in the US as it
| attracts an older audience. Dems are more likely to be on
| Twitter and other social media.
| tiahura wrote:
| You're right, and that's why the story is boring - nothing is
| going to happen.
|
| Even if a majority could agree on a more heavy-handed approach
| to the tech giants (which it won't), there's been 0 discussion
| of the First Amendment implications of any proposed "solution."
| For anyone who's unsure or confused, the chances of the
| Roberts' Court upholding content restrictions are zip. There
| will NEVER be a law that penalizes FB for promoting LEGAL
| SPEECH.
| h2odragon wrote:
| This isn't the first time we've seen this PR package. Some of
| the architects of the story are the same. I dunno whom one
| writes a check out to, to order this service, but I bet it
| needs a few more digits on it than I could muster.
| LightG wrote:
| LOL .... "nearing".
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| FB has been through so many scandals in the past four years and
| literally nothing seems to materially affect the company. At
| least not their stock. Bloomberg has a nice rundown of the past
| crises and how quickly it rebounded every time:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-06/facebook-...
| h2odragon wrote:
| They still have more fans than syphilis.
|
| If the postal service came up with an ICQ / message board; or
| hell even mastodon servers for Zip codes, they might kill the
| beast.
|
| I'm sure local postmasters would love to add a "online clerk" or
| two to their staff, to deal with the server level local dramas.
| The opportunity to pay for it with "bulk mail" analog advertising
| is obvious too. All guided by the loving hands of a questionably
| responsible quasi-governmental bureaucracy led by shady
| appointees.
| aierou wrote:
| Why is this article dated October 9th? Did they release it early
| to counter a slow news day?
| thebiggerpic wrote:
| A few things:
|
| 0. Whistleblowing is a real shitty strategy for enacting change.
| How about actually fighting for it from the inside first?
|
| 1. "Think of the children", really? Maybe the answer is children
| shouldn't be using the internet unsupervised but that's hardly
| Facebook's problem.
|
| 2. I hate misinformation as much as the next guy, but whether
| people like to believe in stupid shit like the magnetizing effect
| of vaccines is up to them. The fact that they believe in this
| shit is a failure of the educational system and our society in
| general. For better or worse, free speech is the cornerstone of
| American society, and again it's hardly Facebook's problem.
|
| 3. If people resort to Facebook for their daily "news"
| consumption, that speaks more of the abject failure of
| traditional media than it does of Facebook's nefarious motives.
| Maybe fix the tragic decline of journalism in this country before
| trying to single out one Tech organization as the scapegoat du
| jour.
|
| (Throwaway because it's hard to have an opinion these days
| without being judged. I'm a vaccinated immigrant who hates being
| an Independent because that mostly means the two alternatives are
| shitty)
| BallinBige wrote:
| The world would be a better place if that outage were permanent.
| goatlover wrote:
| As long as Twitter and Reddit go down for good as well. But my
| guess is some other companies like Google would rush to fill
| the void and we'd end up with similar social media. All those
| people are just going to move to another platform.
| system16 wrote:
| > Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's all-powerful founder, made a
| reasoned statement after this week's wave of anger.
|
| "Reasoned statement" is not how I would describe his post at all.
| It was nothing more than gaslighting and being deliberately
| obtuse.
| djanogo wrote:
| MSM rallying against FB in coordination. They want piece of that
| ad money.
|
| While tiktok seems to be main app which is ruining children.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Yeah this is the biggest reason they're so interested in the
| "whistleblower" who essentially said nothing we already didn't
| know and had zero data to backup her claims.
|
| MSM wants their dwindling market share back. I don't like
| facebook and I don't use it. However, everyone should be wary
| of the reason there's such a big push by politicians to censor
| it more and why MSM backs this so much.
| revel wrote:
| Not sure if any of you folks have tried asking your friends which
| companies they wouldn't work for, irrespective of the pay, but
| it's interesting. Facebook and Palantir are the 2 recurring names
| whenever I've asked around. That was before the latest 3 or 4
| rounds of scandal. FB has been in this area for years.
| biztos wrote:
| And yet, the one person I know who actually works there is the
| most liberal, Bernie Democrat, socially progressive, perfect-
| family moral beacon of all my San Francisco peeps. Except for
| the part about working for Zuck.
|
| Sample size of one, but I often wonder if I should just imagine
| what half a million bucks a year looks like and extrapolate
| from there. Probably lots of people "wouldn't" work for FB
| except that they already do.
| dolphinhats wrote:
| Good
| hereforphone wrote:
| No it's not. As long as Facebook provides the increasingly obese
| population of the West an outlet for memes, child photos, and
| uniformed political opinions, Facebook will rake in money.
| jjk166 wrote:
| If someone knew how to make not-shitty facebook, they'ed very
| quickly make tens of billions of dollars, achieve fame in the
| public sphere, respect in the technical sphere, and influence in
| the political sphere. Facebook would go the way of myspace and we
| would all rejoice.
|
| The fact that, despite the immense incentive and numerous
| attempts, no one has ever succeeded at making not-shitty facebook
| strongly suggests it is an incredibly difficult thing to do. All
| the criticism in the world means nothing if no one can do better.
| sidpatil wrote:
| Why is the article dated October 9?
| MrRadar wrote:
| That's probably the street date of the physical issue of the
| magazine that will contain this article.
| bryan_w wrote:
| Planned outrage?
| neaden wrote:
| That's when it will come out in print.
| commoner wrote:
| The Economist publishes its print edition on Saturdays, and the
| article is featured in the upcoming issue.
|
| https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/archive
| rmason wrote:
| What's more significant is that both the right and the left (for
| different reasons) are angry at Facebook. In these ultra partisan
| times could we see a rare bipartisan agreement to punish
| Facebook?
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Coordinated media blitzes make me skeptical. It seems pretty
| obvious the newsmedia has an axe to grind with the organization
| that devastated their income and business model.
| akudha wrote:
| lol, who thought Facebook had a lot of reputation, in the recent
| years? It is like smoking or doing drugs - every smoker knows it
| is bad, but they will still smoke and somehow rationalize it too.
| FB users are just addicted to it, and they know they are.
| shoto_io wrote:
| No. That's what people like us and all the main stream media hope
| for.
|
| But: most people I know don't have the slightest clue that Insta
| and WhatsApp belong to the FB group.
|
| And even worse: most of them don't give a shit about the
| reputation of FB. They just want to send messages and share
| pictures through those apps.
| efields wrote:
| This.
|
| 73 yo dad is not quitting Facebook anytime soon. He genuinely
| uses it to find old friends and coworkers and goof around in
| the comments.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| As Harley Davidson has learned, you can't lean on an aging
| population long-term, as they tend to stop aging.
| goatlover wrote:
| Sure, but the internet is global, and a majority of the
| world doesn't live in Europe or the US. Large populations
| are still coming online.
| cageface wrote:
| This isn't necessarily to Facebook's advantage. Everybody
| I know in Asia is all over TikTok now. They're not
| deleting their FB accounts but they spend a lot less time
| there.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| There's a lot of late 20s early 30's that grew up when FB
| was coming up that won't leave anytime soon.
| donatj wrote:
| I mean as a 30 something who knows their evil, that's what I
| use it for too.
|
| I've gone to close my account a bunch of times, but for so
| many old friends it's my only link to them, I could not bring
| myself to do it.
| katbyte wrote:
| I haven't closed my account but I deleted the apps and only
| access it via web, on a computer, and only when I need
| something specific from it. I've logged in maybe 3 times
| all of 2021
| vmception wrote:
| You can recreate your social graph at any time by telling
| it your phone number, or email, or friending the same
| people.
|
| Any app is doing that and will find other friends on that
| app with shared contacts. You can even do it in a future FB
| account.
|
| With that knowledge it is easy for me to delete FB account,
| even if there are active group chats there.
| danso wrote:
| I don't share my phone with the 500+ people in my FB
| network, and vice versa.
| tapoxi wrote:
| This is basically what I did. Downloaded my data, said
| "message me on Signal/iMessage/SMS, here's my phone
| number" and deleted my account.
|
| I haven't missed anything, and friends/family that lost
| my phone number usually reached out to someone else to
| get it. They also don't mind using other platforms to get
| in touch with me.
|
| Surprisingly, my mother formed a Signal group with my
| extended family and that's how we chat now. She's not
| exactly tech savvy, but found it very easy to use.
| donatj wrote:
| I mean there's also 15 years of memories going back to me
| in college. There's sentimental attachment there.
| vmception wrote:
| Then download your data
|
| I always do download + delete
| donatj wrote:
| It's not about the data. The data's the least important
| part. It's about that data's connection to the other
| people. That can't be downloaded.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > don't have the slightest clue that Insta and WhatsApp belong
| to the FB group
|
| When you open the apps the only thing written on the screen,
| besides their name, is "From Facebook", so I doubt that's true.
|
| Most don't give a shit though, you're right about that
| ur-whale wrote:
| > so I doubt that's true.
|
| You're assuming people reading what's on their screen.
|
| News at 11: they don't. They just look at the colors and
| quickly focus on the thing they are used to actually reading
| (like the thread content).
| koonsolo wrote:
| Well, there are others of "us" that realize Facebook is a
| company just like any other company. Switching from Facebook to
| X or Y doesn't realy make any difference. And if you do think
| it makes a difference, you are very naive.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Pardon the very general comment, but it seems that for every
| problem, nowadays people have to say it's hopeless, nobody
| cares, and nobody will do anything.
|
| Someone the other day was mocking to me the idea that
| collective, voluntary, cooperative action could accomplish
| anything. Did they ever use the Internet (in fairness, they
| aren't in IT and may not be aware of FOSS - but Wikipedia?)?
| Every non-profit? The all-volunteer soldiers of the American
| Revolution and of today? All the democracies born of the people
| overthrowing the tyrants? The great reduction of smoking,
| increase in exercise and healthy diet? All the people that are
| wearing masks (~everybody, where I am)? The response to natural
| disasters? Does anyone critically examine these graphite-thin
| arguments?
|
| It's not all or nothing - FB operates in society, and they do
| things and will do things in response to pressure and to avoid
| other problems. They aren't canceling all moderation tomorrow,
| for example.
|
| The public can be persuaded. Why do many spend so much
| advertising on Facebook?
| nradov wrote:
| I am aware that Facebook has done a bunch of bad stuff, and
| that they own Instagram and WhatsApp. I still don't give a
| shit. For all it's faults Facebook is still the most convenient
| way to keep up with friends and family spread around the world,
| and share my underwater photography. If you engage with
| Facebook on your own terms and "hide all from" the news /
| politics / meme pages then it works great. And it's free!
|
| And no, I'm not interested in doing extra work to set up
| Mastodon.
| kreeben wrote:
| >> And it's free!
|
| Free, how? As in freedom/beer/something else?
|
| Money, you know, is not the only currency there is.
| yibg wrote:
| Free in the sense most people use the word free. As in no
| money required.
| ubu7737 wrote:
| I guess you don't care that your use of a free thing
| causes harm to balance out your free use of it?
| baby wrote:
| yes it's free
| svachalek wrote:
| The only people I know who still use Facebook, use it to
| share political memes, fake news, phishing scams, and rants.
| If I hid from all that there'd be nothing left.
| Omnitaus wrote:
| Personally I prefer to upload my photography to my own
| website, where I don't have to worry about Facebook setting
| up a shadow account for every face in my images
| rumblerock wrote:
| So you don't give a shit about how their bad decisions affect
| the broader society we live in?
| Mockapapella wrote:
| This has been my experience too. All Facebook is to them is a
| place where they can keep up with friends and family. That's
| it. The kind of content that mirrors this article's sentiment
| never breaks through the noise.
| svachalek wrote:
| Wow there must be less toxic parts of Facebook. All my
| friends and family post is the "kind of content that mirrors
| this article's sentiment".
| winternett wrote:
| People will eventually abandon FB and WA if you ask me, the
| accelerant to that is their friends leaving and no longer
| logging in over time, and also the authentication eco-system
| slowly disconnecting from the platform.
|
| Like Friendster, ClubHouse, and MySpace, there is a life cycle
| for every app. All the redisign and rebranding can't cure a
| good idea that has festered into a bad idea.
|
| Facebook's tenure has been long indeed, but it's best time has
| likely passed.
|
| Many people also don't realize the tactics that platforms use
| to try to uphold the illusion that they are still active,
| including paying influencers to post, and in even creating
| totally fake accounts. I won't say any names, but this is why
| most sites no longer publish their active user numbers like
| they did when they were growing, because many were caught as
| well back then in overstating their active user numbers.
| m463 wrote:
| I think AOL is doomed too.
|
| (AOL seems to be surviving and generating revenue, I suspect
| generations must disappear to end this)
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Facebook went down for 6 hours and they are back to using it
| the next day without a second of hesitation.
|
| Maybe WhatsApp was affected by some people who, so I've heard,
| rely on it heavily. They may have (smartly) switched to a more
| decentralized platform to handle their critical communications.
|
| So did they shed some edge-case users? Sure. Will it matter in
| the long run? Not at all.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Facebook went down for 6 hours and they are back to using
| it the next day without a second of hesitation._
|
| Why is that relevant at all?
|
| If I have a blackout for six hours, I'm gonna go back to
| using electricity once it's back.
| vmception wrote:
| YoUre aDDIcTeD to ElecTriCity
| Hamuko wrote:
| Guilty as charged.
| [deleted]
| snarf21 wrote:
| Exactly, no one is leaving unless something truly better comes
| along. Oh wait, our failed SEC and FTC let FB buy up the new
| and better things because they knew they couldn't compete. I'm
| assuming the next good thing will get sold to one of the mega
| companies too.
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| While I agree with this in terms of users, I think that their
| reputation does influence how they are treated by regulators,
| law makers, and law enforcement. Being considered a bad actor
| and habitual liar by the government is problematic. I was
| working at Microsoft during the whole "DOJ says Microsoft is a
| monopoly" madness, and I can tell you that it had an impact.
| mchanson wrote:
| Article doesn't disagree with your take:
|
| "The firm risks joining the ranks of corporate untouchables
| like big tobacco. If that idea takes hold, Facebook risks
| losing its young, liberal staff. Even if its ageing customers
| stick with the social network, Facebook has bigger ambitions
| that could be foiled if public opinion continues to curdle."
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| They ain't losing their young, liberal staff as long as
| working there for 10 years means being able to retire at 50.
| The opportunity is too great and the money is too good.
| dogman144 wrote:
| > Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff.
|
| Spot on, and not just young, liberal. Old-ish and privacy
| minded. Mid-aged and right.
|
| Two crowds are critical though:
|
| - this is the talent pool: college campuses. FB's changing
| tone (sponsoring scholarships, sponsoring scholarships for
| non tech -> tech transfers, etc) is evident.
|
| - this is the management pool: mid-30's to 40's, married,
| coastal EMs or PMs, that have to explain at dinner parties
| where they work and why they do it. See: the whistleblower.
| jcadam wrote:
| Hey mid-30's to 40's is young..ish.
| qwerpy wrote:
| That management pool isn't going anywhere. Have a bunch of
| friends who work at FB, mostly immigrants. They don't care
| about the reputation, or don't have the luxury to. No one
| confronts them about why they work there at dinner parties.
| It pays the bills very well and allows them to buy nice
| houses and send their kids to private school.
|
| It's the lack of work/life balance that gets to them, not
| the reputation of the employer.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Exactly. Giving a lot of shits about the reputation of
| your employer is something people who take high pay and
| the lifestyle that comes with it for granted do.
| el_ravager wrote:
| If they came to capitalist America knowing of its
| history, they're probably A-OK with being politically
| abhorrent.
| deltree7 wrote:
| HN delusion about their own self-importance is strong on
| this one.
|
| There are millions of talented Engineers who'd die to work
| for Facebook, Google, Netflix.
|
| Top 0.1%ile of 8,000,000,000 is 8 Million.
|
| Most woke, liberal graduates were protected from
| competition from other countries due to their location
| advantage. Ironically these woke employees are demanding
| remote work, displaying their usual cluelessness about
| unintended consequences.
|
| Like Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, its time for CEOs of tech
| companies to voluntarily kick out these entitled SJWs and
| hire true Capitalists, Libertarians, Indians, & Chinese.
| There are millions of them in this world and they are
| extremely talented and hard-working.
| zenithd wrote:
| _> Top 0.1%ile of 8,000,000,000 is 8 Million._
|
| "All of humanity" a silly denominator.
|
| There are fewer than 30 million software engineers in the
| world [1], so at 0.1% we're talking about 30,000 people
| worldwide. That's... not a lot of people. At all. There
| are _waaaaaay_ more than 30K "we'll pay anything for the
| best" SWE positions in the world.
|
| _> Most woke, liberal graduates were protected from
| competition from other countries due to their location
| advantage._
|
| On the contrary, I think those "liberal graduates"
| understand the US SWE labor market better than you do.
|
| Tech is one of the least protected occupations in the
| United States. Driving up the supply of tech talent has
| been an explicit goal of the United States' immigration
| policy for 30+ years. Unlike medicine or engineering,
| there's no licensing barriers. And outsourcing has been
| an option for decades.
|
| A lot of the labor market disruption you're predicting
| already happened. Stuff that could be effectively
| outsourced to IIT grads was outsourced over a decade ago.
| At this point, I'd bet good money that over the last 10
| years or so automation (aka cloud and devops) was
| responsible for more IT layoffs than outsourcing.
|
| _> Ironically these woke employees are demanding remote
| work, displaying their usual cluelessness about
| unintended consequences._
|
| I thought this would happen as well, but data seems to
| suggest exactly the opposite.
|
| Also, while we're on the topic, outsourcing and skimping
| on engineering compensation obviously works -- just look
| at how IBM has taken over the tech industry while
| domestic firms like the FAANGs have languished ;-)
|
| --
|
| [1] https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-
| software...
| deltree7 wrote:
| Outsourcing option pre-coursera/edx/YouTube/slack/remote-
| infrastructure is vastly different from post-x
|
| An Analytical mind can be productive from 12 to 75; All
| of humanity is a pretty decent proxy for the talent pool.
|
| Fortunately, there are many who are seeing the cancer of
| woke culture and are creating alternative pipelines and
| being very successful at it
| zenithd wrote:
| _> Outsourcing option pre-coursera /edx/YouTube_
|
| The IITs are truly world-class computer science programs.
| Better than most US colleges/universities. To say nothing
| of the fantastic engineers in Canada and Europe that can
| be had for fractions of American labor prices. MOOCs are
| noise.
|
| _> slack /remote-infrastructure_
|
| Slack-like technologies existed during the outsourcing
| wave in the 90s, and high-quality video conferencing
| existed during the wave in the early 2010s.
|
| We've been through this rodeo before.
|
| In college I was warned to major in Accounting instead of
| CS because all the programming jobs would be outsourced.
| Today, I make north of $600K and all of the entry level
| positions at the Big 4 ask for some programming
| knowledge, or at the very least strong SQL/Excel skills.
|
| Again, I've lived through some of these waves. IBM et al.
| tried this twice and lost both times.
|
| _> An Analytical mind can be productive from 12 to 75;
| All of humanity is a pretty decent proxy for the talent
| pool._
|
| I'm... not even going to engage with this.
|
| _> Fortunately, there are many who are seeing the cancer
| of woke culture and are creating alternative pipelines
| and being very successful at it_
|
| I don't really know where this moral panic about woke
| culture in tech is coming from. It's not something I've
| experienced in the workplace. I don't doubt that there
| are microclimates within FAANGS where this is a problem,
| but I've never seen it and at this point have to assume
| it's not as pervasive as the panicked folks seem to
| think.
|
| In meatspace, I've had a number of friends who've
| complained about cancel culture/wokeness. Mostly in our
| small group at church. TBH, if I had to guess based on my
| interactions with those folks at church, all of them are
| struggling in their careers because they are abrasive,
| argumentative, and have a tendency to steamroll
| conversations. That lack of social graces is the sort of
| thing people put up with in church/friend groups but have
| less patience for at work (particularly in non-executive
| roles).
|
| I don't doubt that cancelling is a thing, but my general
| anecdotal experience has been that most people
| complaining about it are wrong about the motivation for
| their firing/non-promotion. For prideful people, it's
| often easier to believe the world hates Christians or
| Conservatives than to own up to the fact that people just
| don't like working with or especially under abrasive
| personalities.
| kreeben wrote:
| >> Capitalists, Libertarians, Indians, & Chinese
|
| What a strangely composed list, full of odd ducks, no?
| dogman144 wrote:
| Very much missed the point with a motivated reading of
| the intent behind what I'm saying. Nicely done!
|
| My comment wasn't directed at 0.1% pile. It's directed at
| mid-tier, good-not-great CS programs that FB is both
| targeting in ways that other FAANGs don't, and also have
| put on heavy marketing programs at. Signal or noise, hard
| to say, but they wouldn't be doing it if the need didn't
| exist .
|
| What matters more is the self-fulfilling prophecy of if
| the PMs/EMs with the cultural sway decide to check out.
| It's incorrect to think these types don't matter due to
| the externalities tied to them, not just their management
| talent (there are a lot of good managers). An example is
| will the future Sheryl Sandbergs work, or not work at FB.
| These dinner table conversations are what starts to
| decide that, and their decision has a material impact on
| the company's future.
| deltree7 wrote:
| once again, you are over-estimating the powerful SJW
| Unioin.
|
| A lot of talented libertarian, conservative people can't
| work at facebook because it's too woke.
|
| May be a Sheryl Sandberg will make way for Peter
| Thiels...and it's a fantastic thing for FB.
|
| At this point too many FBers have to walk on eggshells.
|
| A clean cut of SJWs will make FB a better and more
| powerful company
| echlebek wrote:
| This is one of the lowest quality comments I've ever read
| on this web site, do you work for discount-trolling.ru?
| dogman144 wrote:
| My comment has literally nothing to do with commenting on
| the power of SJWs.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| No, they can't work at Facebook because they aren't as
| talented as they think they are. Part of the libertarian
| / conservative delusion is that the "system" is working
| against them because of what they believe, and that it
| can't possibly be because they aren't making the cut due
| to talent. Profit-oriented, billion dollar companies are
| not discriminating against talent unless they have
| serious personality issues.
| geodel wrote:
| Where will that young liberal staff go work for? I suspect
| once too much of good life perks are not available at FB
| maybe their outlook itself change a bit.
| goatlover wrote:
| Some other tech giant with similar issues that are not
| getting as bad a press at the moment.
| geodel wrote:
| Agreed. What's the point of me being liberal if I can't
| my explain illiberal choices glibly.
| dogman144 wrote:
| They'll go work for the AANG in FAANG. If they're good
| enough to get into FB, they've good enough for the other
| 4+. FB transferred from a "change the world" to a "change
| my finances and make my resume" place several yers ago.
| Several other companies fill in the latter qualification.
|
| Also, and ya I know how this sounds, but if Coinbase keeps
| it up they and similar companies will and are grabbing some
| of the same talent.
| geodel wrote:
| Ah right. All moral quandaries get resolved while working
| for AANG.
| SamBam wrote:
| Well, perhaps just the N, then. But Netflix has always
| been the odd-duck in FAANG.
|
| (And yes, you can point out reasons not to work at
| Netflix, but it seems like a whole nother level than the
| rest of FAANG.)
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > But Netflix has always been the odd-duck in FAANG.
|
| Yeah, mostly cos they make no money ;)
| WJW wrote:
| 1.7 billion in profit on ~7 billion in revenue in the
| first quarter of 2021 counts as "no money" these days?
| goatlover wrote:
| There's been a couple Netflix public outrage instances.
| Like when they split up their pricing plan for streaming
| and DVDs, or the backlash over Cuties. But Netflix is
| still going strong.
| yanderekko wrote:
| >The firm risks joining the ranks of corporate untouchables
| like big tobacco. If that idea takes hold, Facebook risks
| losing its young, liberal staff.
|
| So any institution that's considered repugnant by young
| liberals can now breezily be compared to big tobacco? Should
| the Republican party restructure its platform so that it can
| have snazzier candidate webpages?
|
| Big tobacco is big tobacco because the product is widely seen
| as addictive and harmful, even by its biggest users. The
| nuance needed to argue that Facebook is bad but Twitter and
| Reddit are fine will never have this sort of broad appeal.
| Social media for me but not for thee?
| Omnitaus wrote:
| And if we, on pain of consistency, include YouTube, Reddit,
| Twitter? They suffer from the same algorithmic abuse
| kongin wrote:
| Facebook has gotten worse with its young liberal staff. And I
| don't mean in the dark patterns for more clicks sense, I mean
| in the cpu cycles to do a basic operation.
|
| Maybe it's time for the old crusty developers making $60k on
| embedded systems to take a shot at it.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| As an embedded developer in my 40s+... if you're good at
| it, $60k is chump change.
|
| +Not sure what counts as old and crusty, but...
| teg4n_ wrote:
| It's not like the web has a high entry barrier, how come
| these embedded systems developers turn web developers that
| are so great haven't made anything? Am I missing something?
| Are there secret web apps that are oh so good but just not
| darn popular enough?
| dasil003 wrote:
| I'd say inertia and unawareness of the FAANG salary
| market on the supply-side, and ageism and preference for
| demographic diversity over experiential diversity on the
| demand-side.
| TeaDrunk wrote:
| TBH A range of ages _is_ demographic diversity. No idea
| why it 's forgotten about sometimes.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| I suspect there isn't an even subconscious effort to
| exclude people of age, but that it's a side effect of the
| FAANG interview process. People who have been in the
| industry for decades don't care to learn to do leetcode
| interviews when they can get paid perfectly well
| somewhere either based on connections, or by going
| through interviews more centered around job experience.
| That said, I doubt a person making 60k somewhere would
| have made it in to a FAANG at any point. Making that
| little in the modern tech market shows either a lack of
| skill, a lack of desire to improve one's salary, or a
| need to live and work in a location where there aren't
| many opportunities for employment. There are plenty of
| non-faang places that are desperately hiring for 6 figure
| salaries at this point.
| teg4n_ wrote:
| For some reason I think places like Microsoft have plenty
| of old white highly experienced embedded engineers that
| could work on a web app if they wanted to, I just don't
| think they could do any better.
| breadzeppelin__ wrote:
| To go a bit further MSM's ad revenue is being hollowed out by
| Facebook et al. Why would anyone pay to advertise in Economist
| when they can advertise to "people interested in economics,
| earning over 150k, last thought about cigarettes three weeks
| ago" etc.
|
| Similarly, if you were an advertising exec at pfizer, would you
| choose to pay millions of dollars to advertise your meds to a
| continuously shrinking audience on something like CNN, or would
| you spend significantly less directly targeting "oldsters who
| need meds" on FB or Goog's platforms?
|
| I'm a huge cynic but it seems like most of the critiques of
| social media coming from big / old media are just symptoms of
| having their revenue bled away, not any meaningful calls for
| change for the better
| v77 wrote:
| This has always been pretty clear. But, also effective. Lots
| of congresspeople and MPs still read the NY Times, Guardian,
| etc.. Facebook also has no political 'country', being a big
| company (left wing hate) based in San Francisco with liberal
| views amongst its workers and ownerss. (right wing hate)
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > Why would anyone pay to advertise in Economist when they
| can advertise to "people interested in economics, earning
| over 150k, last thought about cigarettes three weeks ago"
| etc.
|
| Because they don't trust that that data is accurate.
|
| https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.118.
| ..
| initplus wrote:
| I have a couple of friends who are much more politically
| engaged and insightful than myself. But all I see them post
| on facebook are low effort gotcha memes.
|
| Facebook has a problem in that it seems to frown on
| "intelligent" content. Long form journalism, in depth
| analysis, professional content (industry journals, tech blogs
| etc.), none of this content really exists on facebook.
|
| I have friends that read hackernews, we find similar articles
| from hn interesting. But I would never think of sharing one
| on facebook, and I would be surprised if a friend of mine did
| so. For some reason, facebook is just not the place where
| content like this is shared.
|
| This is the advertising proposition of non-facebook media.
| chuniversity wrote:
| Low-effort memes with cheap wit get more likes, which in
| turn bumps your content higher in the feed which in turn
| invites more likes, cascading into dozens or scores of your
| friends liking and validating your post.
|
| Long-form content with more depth gets fewer initial likes,
| resulting in being hidden from most of your ancillary
| friends altogether.
|
| This has behavioral impact on all of its users. Do you want
| to post content that only gets 5 likes versus what gets 50
| likes?
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Similarly, if you were an advertising exec at pfizer, would
| you choose to pay millions of dollars to advertise your meds
| to a continuously shrinking audience on something like CNN,
| or would you spend significantly less directly targeting
| "oldsters who need meds" on FB or Goog's platforms?
|
| You're probably already aware but this _only_ applies in the
| US (and a few other small places like New Zealand).
|
| Direct to consumer drug advertising is fraught with issues
| and therefore banned in most the world.
|
| https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/harvard-health-ad-
| watch-...
| mkr-hn wrote:
| CPC[0] ads, maybe. CPM[0] and CPA[0] probably still benefit
| from ads in publications.
|
| [0] Cost-per-[Click, Mille/thousand, Action]
| paganel wrote:
| Presumably people earning over 150k don't waste that much
| time on an website like FB.
| jdhn wrote:
| >it seems like most of the critiques of social media coming
| from big / old media are just symptoms of having their
| revenue bled away
|
| I feel that so many people blindly hate Facebook that they
| overlook this point. The loudest critics of social media are
| the old vanguards of news who are upset that the new kid on
| the block took their ad money.
| corinroyal wrote:
| "Blindly"
| pm90 wrote:
| Facebook has had an outsize impact on society, they have a
| lot of power. I believe they (and any other agent that has
| that effect on society) are pretty much fair game for the
| press to cover; that's literally their job.
| yanderekko wrote:
| >The loudest critics of social media are the old vanguards
| of news who are upset that the new kid on the block took
| their ad money.
|
| Also activists who are clearly engaging in motivated
| reasoning in arguing that Facebook needs to do more to
| censor conservative opinions.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > conservative opinions
|
| That's an interesting way to say "misinformation".
| pcf wrote:
| Everything in society is between "progressive" and
| "conservative" values. To say that "conservative
| opinions" are simply "misinformation", is very
| misinformed in itself.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Read the whole comment I replied to. There is no one
| trying to just censor conservative opinions, they are
| trying to censor conservative misinformation. I wasn't
| painting all conservative opinions as misinformation, I'm
| was saying the things people want censored is the
| misinformation, not just opinions.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > Also activists who are clearly engaging in motivated
| reasoning in arguing that Facebook needs to do more to
| censor
|
| censor _everything_
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| This doesnt make sense. Which is it? Everyone blindly
| hating FB? Or just old media?
| jancsika wrote:
| > Why would anyone pay to advertise in Economist when they
| can advertise to "people interested in economics, earning
| over 150k, last thought about cigarettes three weeks ago"
| etc.
|
| Isn't the economist subscription-based?
|
| Regardless, I'll bite: Isn't an important reason because
| someone wants to signal to the world that "everyone knows"
| their company is a sexy, category-defining beast?
|
| E.g., there are Coca Cola machines that span both physical
| space (can be found in any region of the country) and time
| (everything from a machine built yesterday to half a century
| ago). When a human notices this their long-term memory
| probably goes, "Oh, Coca Cola has been and must still be one
| of the most important soft drinks," and-- just guessing
| here-- that increases the probability that their impulsive
| choice is for Coke in cases where thirst is involved.
|
| If someone asked the question, "Why would Coca Cola want
| their soft drink ad in a rickety old gas station in an area
| of Northern Georgia that's still associated with the movie
| Deliverance?" they'd be confusing cause and effect.
|
| Same logic applies here. I'd assume that advertising in [old
| media's digital presence] is an effect of an ad campaign that
| seeks to deliver an image of said ubuiquity.
| duckmysick wrote:
| > Isn't The Economist subscription-based?
|
| They have ads in the printed version.
| dcow wrote:
| Also the quality of integrated ads is far higher. I read
| integrated ads occasionally. I never read FB or Google ads.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's fairly standard "brand-building." Ever notice how,
| when a new movie or album is about to drop, you start
| seeing tabloid stories, featuring the stars?
|
| On the one hand, it can be argued that "people are
| interested, because of the movie."
|
| Except the stories usually start long before any "official"
| advertisements appear.
|
| It's about "building buzz," and the American advertising
| industry (they refer to themselves as "communications") is
| the best in the world, for this kind of thing.
|
| The term "dog whistle" is used in a derogatory manner, but
| it's actually a fairly apt metaphor. Dogs won't respond to
| the whistle (which they hear just fine), unless they have
| been trained. "Building buzz" is training, so the paid ads
| will be much more effective. It works very well.
| WJW wrote:
| > is the best in the world, for this kind of thing.
|
| I don't mean to be rude here, but how do you know? How
| could you even know? Did they tell you they're the best,
| by any chance?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Not rude, but I'd be interested in knowing who's better
| at it.
|
| I'm not a fan of the industry. Recognizing that someone
| is good at something, is not the same as approving.
| gorwell wrote:
| The internet hollowed out the legacy media's business model,
| but it's more than that: It also destroyed the ability of the
| ruling class to control the narrative. Now everything they
| say and do is endlessly scrutinized by the internet hive
| mind, which embarrasses them on a daily basis. Nor does it
| forget `weapons of mass destruction`, `mission accomplished`,
| `masks don't work`, `wuhan lab leak hypothesis is a racist
| conspiracy theory`.
|
| "All over the world, elite institutions from governments to
| media to academia are losing their authority and monopoly
| control of information to dynamic amateurs and the broader
| public." --Marc Andreessen
|
| This coordinated attack against facebook is merely the
| mechanism through which they are trying to reassert control
| over the flow of information. It's the justification to
| create a new federal agency with gatekeeping powers over the
| internet:
| https://twitter.com/gillibrandny/status/1445451624005001217
|
| Is there any doubt this agency, The Ministry of Truth let's
| say, would have flagged `Iraq does not have weapons of mass
| destruction` as misinformation in 2003? Or `masks do work` in
| March 2020? We're not far from this as it is. Indeed,
| facebook was removing counter narratives with regard to the
| origin of Covid-19, which it only reversed when it became
| untenable: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-
| ban-covid-...
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Zuckerberg went to Harvard. Sandberg got her BA and MBA
| from Harvard before working for Larry Summers at the World
| Bank and U.S. Treasury. Peter Thiel got his bachelors and
| law degree at Stanford before clerking for a federal judge
| and trading options for Credit Suisse. He had a direct line
| to President Trump and spoke to him often.
|
| To believe that "the ruling class" oppose Facebook because
| people say mean things there, you have to maintain a
| crazily tortured definition of who is and is not in the
| ruling class.
|
| To believe that Facebook, a huge company that recruits
| heavily from the Ivy League and pays huge salaries across
| the board, is not an elite institution, requires willful
| ignorance about what they do and who they work for. Who do
| you think buys most of the ads on Facebook? Dynamic
| amateurs and the broader public?
| splistud wrote:
| The internet (for the last few years) is both a megaphone
| for shouting the narrative of the ruling class, and a
| funnel for collecting information about every other class.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I agree that there's way too much unnecessary vitrol over
| FB on these forums, but let's not pretend like FB is some
| "new, scrappy disruptor" of legacy media institutions
| engaging in a "coordinated attack". Facebook has just
| become the _new_ media power and legacy media is trying to
| reassert itself. I didn't enjoy the stranglehold of legacy
| media on information flow before and I don't enjoy the
| strangle of Facebook now. Just because Facebook is better
| than legacy media (which I'm guessing many will second
| guess here) doesn't mean it's a _good_ alternative.
| gorwell wrote:
| I'd be more than happy if facebook disappeared. They are
| a disaster, no doubt. That's not what's going to happen
| though. Facebook will get exactly what they keep saying
| they want: regulation and oversight. Facebook will be
| just as entrenched as ever and will protect the Official
| Copy of Reality as defined by the ruling class. They are
| already doing that to some degree and just want it to be
| codified.
|
| My concern is for the open internet, for the people, for
| the ability to challenge and dissent, for free speech in
| practical terms.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I agree that the regulation and oversight they seek will
| be a mistake. They'll help create a regulatory regime
| which only Facebook will be in a position to comply with
| and stifle all competition in this space. That is
| definitely a concern I have with all the vitrol I see
| here.
| rumblerock wrote:
| Is oversight of and transparency into recommendation
| algorithms, to make sure they don't overprioritize
| vitriol and sow division, really creating an "Official
| Copy of Reality"? At this point I'd say our reality is
| actively being fractured by the effects of these
| platforms. The solutions suggested by Haugen, whose
| disclosure is driving this broader conversation we're
| having, are related to fundamental algorithmic design
| that feeds addiction and propagates completely false or
| harmful information - which is not exactly content
| moderation by the "powers that be".
| gorwell wrote:
| If it bleeds, it leads. The corporate media has been the
| primary sower of division and spreads plenty of
| misinformation itself.
|
| Polarization and vitriol precedes these platforms.
| Facebook, twitter, reddit, they all make it worse, I
| agree with that. And I would be in favor of requiring
| them to make their algorithms public at the very least.
|
| But we must not give an even more centralized authority
| power over what's considered `harmful` or
| `misinformation`. You have to imagine this tool in the
| hands of your enemy because at some point it will be.
| Taywee wrote:
| > it seems like most of the critiques of social media coming
| from big / old media are just symptoms of having their
| revenue bled away
|
| A large portion of it is people who find advertisement
| inherently distasteful (or, at the least, targeted
| advertisement) and that optimizing everything entirely for
| engagement causes massively negative effects for society and
| individual psychology. Fine-tuning everything for addiction
| and intense emotional reaction is great for advertisement
| revenue, but really bad for people.
|
| I think you might be underestimating how many people are
| actually seriously upset about how they've seen the national
| conversation degrade to a lower level of discourse, and blame
| that on social media (whether they're right or wrong). There
| are clearly people who are upset about modern social media
| that aren't associated with old media.
| rumblerock wrote:
| Agreed, painting this as some kind of power struggle
| ignores the effects on society that affect everyone, not
| just new age tech titans and the establishment.
| nzmsv wrote:
| People interested in economics and earning more than 150k are
| increasingly not on Facebook much, if at all. The Economist
| actually has a much more targeted audience. FB caters to the
| lowest common denominator.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Print ads are still classier than online ads. In the
| Economist, your next-door neighbor isn't "Still eating these
| six foods that will kill you? Here's one weird trick that
| Virginia retirees are using to save money."
| dleslie wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| Consider this: Nestle has a terrible reputation. Absolutely,
| truly awful. Has that meaningfully impacted Nestle's sales?
| Probably not.
| tomhoward wrote:
| That was my reaction too, scoffing as I imagined the headline
| "Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is nearing a repetitional
| point of no return" after the News of the World scandal in 2011
| (or any of countless others).
|
| But the sentence that matters is this one: "Facebook risks
| losing its young, liberal staff".
|
| If Facebook can't attract/keep the best staff (especially
| hackers/devs/engineers), it can't stay at the top.
|
| Even Microsoft of 1998 didn't become as toxic to solid tech
| talent as Facebook risks becoming if they keep this up.
| HeroOfAges wrote:
| I don't think Facebook's "... young, liberal staff" is going
| anywhere. They have experienced the power that comes with
| successfully shifting a global organization's culture,
| mission and product. Unfortunately, there are only so many
| hours in the day, and doing so hasn't given them enough time
| to actually do their jobs. The people that are left don't
| possess the tools to create and build anything of moment
| because that's not what they're good at and frankly, that's
| not why they were hired.
|
| Facebook losing its young, liberal staff could be the best
| thing that has happened to the company in a long time, but
| that's not what's going to happen.
| tomhoward wrote:
| I think the use of the word "liberal" may be leaving an
| opening for misinterpretation. The real worry is that
| _good_ , _talented_ people leave /refrain from applying,
| regardless of ideological outlook or label.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| News Corp passed the point of reputational no return, which
| is why they split themselves up into two separate companies
| in 2013.
| vxNsr wrote:
| > _Even Microsoft of 1998 didn 't become as toxic to solid
| tech talent as Facebook risks becoming if they keep this up._
|
| Idk, I think being the only big tech employer in Seattle at
| the time helped keep them afloat. Telecommuting was still
| nascent at the time and moving is always daunting. Today the
| environment is very different, Facebook is in the heart of
| SV, but even more importantly, now everyone is suddenly
| totally ok with indefinite remote work, so you're no longer
| limited by not wanting to move, the only thing holding you
| back is $$, and at a certain point all the money in the world
| isn't gonna make you fe good about what you're doing.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Agreed. Markets are ruled by majorities not minorities, no
| matter how right or wrong the majority may be. Let's stop
| pretending consumers always act in their best interests or even
| have access to: capacity to analyze (time, priority, interest)
| and knowledge to make good choices. This is all about the will
| and momentum of the mob and this isn't enough to sway a
| critical mass of the mob to exert their influence.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| And even worse: most of them don't give a shit about the
| reputation of {AOL,MySpace,Friendster}. They just want to send
| messages and share pictures through those apps.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _And even worse: most of them don't give a shit about the
| reputation of FB. They just want to send messages and share
| pictures through those apps._
|
| Yes. But those people will die eventually. And younger people
| aren't adopting FB or care about it.
| reeealloc wrote:
| That's surprising, they have no intention of hiding that Insta
| is a FB app. It says Instagram by Facebook when you open it.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Which is probably one of the dumbest decisions they've ever
| made.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| It was a very funny "no, no, no, see, this is a Facebook
| product that's sooooo integrated with our platform and
| totally isn't something you can spin off easily!!" moment.
| baby wrote:
| Well, messaging is going to be interoperable between
| instagram, messenger, and whatsapp.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| The argument being made isn't that people will stop using
| Facebook. It's that Facebook won't be able to hire the talent
| it needs. That's a longer, but more damaging feedback loop,
| assuming you believe it (the counter argument is they will be
| able to pay people enough to hire them anyway).
| yanderekko wrote:
| On the flipside, if Facebook is losing talent because those
| talented workers are demanding that the company degrade its
| products, then having to pay a premium can be partially or
| wholly offset by the positive revenue impact of avoiding this
| sort of activist employee.
| adwww wrote:
| Yeah I dunno, I'd happily take an existing Facebook US salary
| if all the good engineers stopped working there.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Whether facebook has to pay by raising compensation or by
| settling for worse engineers, it's still a premium.
| baby wrote:
| I don't believe it a single bit. They are hiring a bunch of
| engineers right after school, and a lot of engineers still
| believe that FB is a good product because they're using it on
| the daily.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Very anecdotally, but I've found that fresh grads are more
| likely to avoid FB because of the reputational issues vs
| more senior engineers (who might have families to support
| or might cynically believe that all big cos have
| questionable anyway and FB isn't special in that regard)
| metalliqaz wrote:
| My question is... why do people like us continue to work there?
| They know what is going on there more than anyone.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| can you make a purely ideological/ethical case for working at
| google/twitter/amazon/ms/apple over working at fb?
| splistud wrote:
| I'd like to see that. I'd be more interested to see the
| ethical case for working for any startup that is based on
| user's being the product, or takes VC money so that it can
| destroy existing businesses through predatory pricing. Fact
| is, the sub-industry this forum relates to is a breeding
| ground for ethically-challenged business plans.
| dresdenfire wrote:
| Because they see that external perception doesn't match what
| is happening internally.
|
| Interesting thing is we have both left and right aligned that
| FB is bad but if you ask them why they are bad, they would
| not agree on a single thing.
|
| This is why nothing is going to be done and it's all a cycle
| which will keep repeating itself.
| eclipxe wrote:
| Because HackerNews is not real life and FB isn't nearly as
| evil as reading HN would imply.
| ur-whale wrote:
| >why do people like us continue to work there?
|
| Money.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Depends what you mean by "us." If it means any engineer,
| engineers build everything shitty in tech.
|
| If a larger percentage of "us" are repulsed by facebook, it
| just means that they have to pay more. There's always
| hundreds of "us" willing to do anything for anybody; I'm sure
| somebody is helping some Syrian warlord with the spreadsheet
| keeping track of the books for his open air slave market, and
| designing a distributed facial recognition network to track
| the movements and contacts of political dissidents.
|
| i.e. there's no useful "us" except when we're talking about
| craft.
| gkilmain wrote:
| I have a 40 something friend who started working there a few
| years a go. He has a family. He mostly went for stability,
| good pay, good benefits, predictable long term outlook. Not
| working insane hours. He loves it. Actually said he feels
| valued as an engineer.
| sorokod wrote:
| Morally he is ok? No issues looking at the mirror?
| [deleted]
| lkrubner wrote:
| The increasing deluge of articles on the theme "Instagram is
| hurting the mental health of teen girls" has the potential to
| evolve into the kind of widespread moral panic among parents
| that destroyed MySpace back in 2006-2008.
| azta6521 wrote:
| Exactly - and FB itself knows that there is no wave of exits
| following a scandal. They learned that. They can have a
| conversation with one group and know the other group / the
| business is not really touched by any of this.
| [deleted]
| chinathrow wrote:
| > But: most people I know have the slightest clue that Insta
| and WhatsApp belong the FB group
|
| Citation needed.
|
| My loading screen in WhatsApp clearly states "From FACEBOOK".
| dpweb wrote:
| FB, Insta, Whatsapp. They couldn't mess up these businesses if
| they tried.
| tokoaso wrote:
| They dont matter. What matters in a hyper competitive tech
| world, is whether you can sustain a level of quality in hiring.
| There are so many other options for smart people who dont want
| to deal with the drama.
|
| FB has definately taken a reputational hit that will effect
| that quality. Which will effect the solutions they come up
| with. And given the list of issues they have to deal with, they
| will stay in the news for all the wrong things for a long time
| to come.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| You're essentially arguing that your group of acquaintances is
| a bellwether, or at least strongly predictive of national or
| global outcomes for one of the biggest companies in the world.
| I don't know your acquaintances, but in general that seems
| pretty unlikely to me.
|
| The threat to Facebook is not mass consumer hate and
| abandonment. It's that no one likes them enough to stand up for
| them anymore, which empowers the relatively few people who seek
| advantage against them.
|
| A lot of things in politics and policy become possible with
| relatively small shifts in public sentiment.
| baby wrote:
| True, and what we're seeing these days is a play to affect
| public sentiment.
| ravenstine wrote:
| In reality, neither do most people in our group, if you can
| even call it that. Just like all the other times an exodus from
| Facebook was declared, a year later it's as if nothing had
| happened and we come to find out that everyone still uses it to
| some capacity. Not to fault anyone, but all of this has been
| said before. Frankly, if these issues mattered to people, they
| would have left Facebook a long time ago. None of the blown
| "whistles" so far have tooted a message everyone didn't already
| know.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _most of them don't give a shit about the reputation of FB_
|
| This is close to a straw man argument. Nobody claims users will
| abandon Facebook.
|
| The article posits, instead, strengthening headwinds. Headwinds
| in hiring (there is already a double-digit premium Facebook
| must pay for talent). From recurring whistleblowing, and its
| impact on morale and productivity. Headwinds in projects and
| partnerships, like Libre/Diem being dead on arrival because
| Facebook brought it to the table. Senior leadership knowing
| they will, at least once in their career, be hauled in front of
| Congress for a nationally-televised grilling because their
| employer's unpopularity [1] makes it a popular punching bag.
| Headwinds in M&A.
|
| People didn't stop using oil after the Standard Oil break-up.
| Nor Windows after its antitrust brush or cigarettes after the
| tobacco master settlement. The power of those companies was
| simply sharply reduced.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/6/22702798/verge-tech-
| surve...
| isoskeles wrote:
| > This is close to a straw man argument. Nobody claims users
| will abandon Facebook.
|
| I find this comment so strange because the comment you're
| addressing never claimed that anyone else claimed users will
| abandon Facebook. You are actually creating a strawman
| argument here while accusing the other comment of it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Headwinds in hiring (there is already a double-digit premium
| Facebook must pay for talent). From recurring whistleblowing,
| and its impact on morale and productivity.
|
| I wonder if they have interview questions to weed out
| potential candidates that want to work there long enough on
| these ridiculous salaries while they gather juicy tidbits to
| leak later?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| _" While walking along in desert sand, you suddenly look
| down and see a tortoise crawling toward you. You reach down
| and flip it over onto its back. The tortoise lies there,
| its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying
| to turn itself over, but it cannot do so without your help.
| You are not helping. Why?"_
| phone8675309 wrote:
| > Headwinds in hiring (there is already a double-digit
| premium Facebook must pay for talent).
|
| They pay for it on the front end (because they have to
| compete with other FAANGs) and back end (because there is a
| point coming soon where Facebook on a resume will be a
| detriment to a candidate). I will not interview or hire any
| applicant with Facebook on their resume, and I sincerely
| doubt that I'm alone in this regard.
|
| fwiw, this applies not only to Facebook. I also extend this
| policy to anybody who has worked for a military industrial
| complex death machine, any free to play game maker, and any
| social media company.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > there is already a double-digit premium Facebook must pay
| for talent
|
| That's an odd way of putting it. Do Google and Netflix and
| other big tech companies face the same "headwinds"? Their
| compensation is comparable.
|
| Facebook pays a premium because it's drawing from the top of
| the talent pool and is facing competition from other
| companies trying to acquire people with the same level of
| exceptional skill. The idea that FB has to pay extra to
| convince regular people to work at FB because FB has a bad
| reputation is HN fantasy. The world doesn't work that way.
|
| No, Facebook is not a stain on anyone's resume no matter how
| fervently a few very online activist types might want it to
| be. The rest of the industry laughs at the idea.
|
| Anyone saying that he won't fire FB alumni just has a bad
| case of sour grapes and couldn't attract people of that
| caliber anyway.
| mint2 wrote:
| It's not anecdotally false that FB's reputation and
| contribution to society is turning off some workers from
| applying.
|
| My price premium to work at Facebook would be very high and
| I wouldn't feel good about the deal. Sure not everyone
| feels that way but there is talent that they have alienated
| with their long history.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I definitely don't judge an ex-FB applicant for our company
| for being from FB because there's many reasons someone
| would want to work there, so I understand, and I'm not
| willing to play this game of ethics of judging others based
| on their company names (because I think the world is a very
| complicated place).
|
| That said, I wouldn't want to work at FB unless I had a
| significant pay bump, and I'm used to other FAANG offers so
| make of that what you will. I do think FB will start trying
| harder to hire. Moreover, how many young engineers do you
| really think want to work at a company that is constantly
| under threat of litigation? If I were on an H1B, then
| threat of litigation is very real threat of my visa being
| invalidated. People who think FB looks bad on a resume are
| letting their personal beliefs cloud their view of the
| world, but conversely people who believe that a company
| under constant threat of litigation will not have retention
| issues are equally clouded by their personal beliefs.
| int_19h wrote:
| I can't speak for others, but I can tell you that I have
| been contacted by FB recruiters more than once, and turned
| them down every time precisely because of their reputation
| (and made it very clear to them, as well). I would
| certainly consider it a stain on my resume at this point.
| ferdowsi wrote:
| Not sure why you think this. I work for a major
| organization and we have made sure to pay close attention
| to the outcomes of behavioral interviews when we evaluate
| candidates from Facebook, as we do from other organization
| with major reputational/ethical stains. Colleagues I speak
| to are increasingly doing this as well.
| quotemstr wrote:
| So you don't pay attention to behavioral interviews from
| companies you like? What do you think FB alumni would say
| during one of these interviews?
|
| "Yeah, my favorite off-site was that time we ritually
| sacrificed infants to the flaming icon of Moloch. Lots of
| fun and smelled great! Does your company do off-sites?"
|
| Have you ever actually interviewed someone from FB?
|
| Or is all this about just filtering candidates for people
| who match your personal political views about, say, the
| role of advertising in society?
| cbtacy wrote:
| This may be true for entry level jobs, but for senior level
| jobs the "stain on the resume" issue is very real. A friend
| was a recruiter for FB until a few months back and has
| repeatedly stated that over the last 18 months she had an
| increasingly large percentage of targeted senior candidates
| refuse to even take her calls.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Lots of recruiters are having trouble. You haven't
| demonstrated that anti-FB sentiment makes it harder for
| ex-FB people to get hired.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| And generally, sourcers at Big tech are contract
| employees until they get enough talent through the door
| to go full time. So it may be that this person was unable
| to do this, and is putting some of the blame on FB's
| reputation (but it could also be true, I have no inside
| information).
| hirako2000 wrote:
| The same taint would apply after working at Google or
| Apple or even Barclays banks or MIT. Who wants to go
| through a 3 interview process just to find out that great
| candidate simply won't sign until the offer is bumped at
| least 3x
| lordnacho wrote:
| Anecdotal but a fair number of devs I know would be fine
| with those names, not FB. Facebook is both evil and
| trivial by reputation. You can do unimportant work that
| makes the world worse there, so why not compromise and
| work for some firm that's evil but important, or good but
| trivial?
|
| They'd use the interview for practice and free food.
|
| Having said that, I'm not sure you can really tell in the
| stats that FB needs to pay more for similar talent?
|
| Not sure how MIT comes into it though, isn't that a
| university?
| moneywoes wrote:
| Amazon?
| xemdetia wrote:
| I would also suggest as someone on the other end is that
| they have been very aggressive trying to get people
| during the pandemic. The recruiter name changes every few
| months but you get multiple calls and so on, moreso than
| others I've been engaged with.
| gorbachev wrote:
| Seeing exactly the same...recruiter after recruiter from
| FB go through the same dance. I don't know why they keep
| doing this given I never respond.
| AaronM wrote:
| I told the recruiter at the start of the pandemic in no
| uncertain terms that I would never work for facebook or
| any company owned by them, and to not contact me again. I
| haven't received another request since.
| finfinfin wrote:
| I also told a recruiter that FB would be the last company
| I would ever work for - about 3 years ago. They stopped.
| Then about 2-3 months ago they renewed their attempts. I
| am guessing someone I know got hired and gave them my
| contact details again.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| > The power of those companies was simply sharply reduced.
|
| I'd argue the opposite. We got Exxon out of the Standard Oil
| breakup and Microsoft is just as scummy, if not even more
| scummy than ever. AT&T got broken up and several of the Baby
| Bells just ended up all merging together and now we have
| Verizon. Antitrust enforcement has had a net-zero effect at
| best.
| revscat wrote:
| You're not entirely wrong, but one of the effects of the
| AT&T breakup was to allow customers to hook up non-AT&T
| approved devices to their lines. This lead to the
| popularization of things like answering machines and
| modems.
|
| The latter had a pretty big impact.
| splistud wrote:
| While there are problems with the use of fossil fuels, the
| oil industry and what we learned to build from the energy
| and materials it provided changed the world for the better
| - far more so than anything related to computers or the
| internet (and that is a very high bar indeed). You can sit
| here and complain (in a forum that would not exist if it
| wasn't for what you complain about) in relative comfort if
| you like, but several past generations were very happy to
| be able to eat and raise their children. They were happy to
| be able to store their food and heat/light their homes etc,
| etc, etc.
| ghostoftiber wrote:
| > People didn't stop using oil after the Standard Oil break-
| up. Nor Windows after its antitrust brush or cigarettes after
| the tobacco master settlement. The power of those companies
| was simply sharply reduced.
|
| I actually disagree with this. When the company is forcibly
| broken up there's a chance that it's "power" (what?) is
| reduced but if we look at Standard Oil, that quicky is shown
| to be not-what-happened. SO became Esso and Mobil, who became
| ExxonMobil, and ostensibly went right back to doing what it
| did best (owning most of the domestic oil market). Breaking
| up the company doesn't actually change the practices or
| culture of what got the company there in the first place. The
| new companies which are spun off oftentimes don't even know
| how to operate as companies and so they're easy pickings for
| the nucleus of the original company.
|
| How many competitors to Windows popped up after the microsoft
| antitrust suit? Is there a "windows specific browser" to
| compete with Edge or IE which is from a former microsoft
| company?
|
| The same thing for smoking. If we look at smoking as "I light
| something on fire and jam it into my food hole" then yes, the
| numbers look promising according to the CDC website. If you
| look at a Vice article
| (https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xxx83/the-shady-link-
| betwee...), however, all the tobacco companies did was shift
| their business into providing alternatives to cigarettes. But
| they're still made from nicotine. It's just smoking without
| the smoke. That's the other reason why they're pushing so
| hard to regulate vaping - the idea that there's an "open
| source" "anyone can make this" alternative simply cuts out
| their business.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| The same thing happened with AT&T. After the government
| broke them up into the regional "baby bells" in the 80s
| they started eating each other until only one (Southwestern
| Bell) was left standing. At which point it bought the shell
| of the original AT&T corporation and promptly renamed
| itself "AT&T." The AT&T you buy cell phone service from
| today is actually Southwestern Bell.
| andrewla wrote:
| Not entirely true -- Bell Atlantic became Verizon after
| it ate most of the baby bells in the Northeast.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _I actually disagree with this. When the company is
| forcibly broken up there 's a chance that it's "power"
| (what?) is reduced but if we look at Standard Oil, that
| quicky is shown to be not-what-happened. SO became Esso and
| Mobil, who became ExxonMobil, and ostensibly went right
| back to doing what it did best (owning most of the domestic
| oil market). Breaking up the company doesn't actually
| change the practices or culture of what got the company
| there in the first place. The new companies which are spun
| off oftentimes don't even know how to operate as companies
| and so they're easy pickings for the nucleus of the
| original company._"
|
| You realize there is about 88 years between step one and
| step two there?
|
| " _The same thing for smoking. If we look at smoking as "I
| light something on fire and jam it into my food hole" then
| yes, the numbers look promising according to the CDC
| website. If you look at a Vice article
| (https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xxx83/the-shady-link-
| betwee...), however, all the tobacco companies did was
| shift their business into providing alternatives to
| cigarettes. But they're still made from nicotine. It's just
| smoking without the smoke. That's the other reason why
| they're pushing so hard to regulate vaping - the idea that
| there's an "open source" "anyone can make this" alternative
| simply cuts out their business._"
|
| Do the new products cause as much harm as cigarettes?
| triceratops wrote:
| Standard Oil => SO => Esso. Mind blown! I had no idea.
| DemocracyFTW wrote:
| (off to buy domain names efbe.com, effbee.com, ...)
| splistud wrote:
| Yep, and Esso + Humble became Exxon. Other parts turned
| into Mobil, Amoco, Marathon, Unocal and Texaco...
| Tarsul wrote:
| theres a great reportage on ARTE (for German/French
| only?!) about oil history:
| https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/092970-001-A/oel-macht-
| geschic... (only til 20th of Oct)
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I want to see court-mandated open source and federation.
| Doubt it'd ever happen though...
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Something like court-mandated federation is not
| completely out of the question in the EU, given that the
| GDPR requires "data portability" between digital
| services, including "the right to have the personal data
| transmitted directly from one controller to another,
| where technically feasible."[0]
|
| I suspect a big American corporation like Facebook would
| have a hard time persuading an EU court that it wasn't
| technically feasible for it to automatically duplicate
| your Facebook posts onto a competing Fediverse instance
| where you have an account, and the court could even
| decide that the "natural" technological implementation
| would be to broadcast your Facebook posts directly to
| your friends across the Fediverse.
|
| Sadly the language of the GDPR seems to only mandate the
| _export_ of personal data from the site where it is
| stored, and not grant the complementary right to have
| data _imported_. This means Facebook wouldn 't have to
| show you the posts of any of your Fediverse friends, and
| it also wouldn't export your Facebook friends' posts to
| be viewable on your Fediverse account (unless they also
| had a Fediverse account and chose to export those posts
| themselves).
|
| [0] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
| splistud wrote:
| What other private property are you in favor of taking
| from others?
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I'll settle on just enough to have a viable healthy, open
| and free tech ecosystem. My evil regime will even let you
| keep the rest - as long as you play along nicely and
| interoperate and federate!
| b3morales wrote:
| > all the tobacco companies did was shift their business
| into providing alternatives to cigarettes. But they're
| still made from nicotine.
|
| Isn't this okay? Asking genuinely -- I haven't followed
| this one way or the other. But my understanding was that
| the health problems were mostly caused by the smoke. Does
| nicotine itself cause problems when delivered via gum or
| vape or whatever?
|
| Certainly the current ingestion methods make it easier on
| those of us standing around _not_ consuming them, compared
| to clouds of smoke. Which is a plus for me.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Heart disease.
| svachalek wrote:
| Vaping is less bad for you than inhaling the big cloud of
| carcinogens that is cigarette smoke. But even if you
| discount the direct effects of addiction, which is
| horrible, there are plenty of other indications nicotine
| itself is bad for you.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Nicotine is a stimulant, similar to other stimulants such
| as caffeine. The addictiveness in smoking apparently
| comes from (1) high dose absorbed rapidly, and (2)
| combination with other chemicals in tobacco and tobacco
| products.
|
| Nicotine addiction per se (or caffeine addiction) can be
| harmful to people, but the scale of harm is orders of
| magnitude away from the harms of smoking a pack of
| cigarettes a day. In small doses and in moderation,
| nicotine alone (e.g. taken as patch or gum) can be an
| effective medication, is not especially addictive, and
| has relatively mild side effects.
| https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine
|
| Side effects of vaping should be studied more carefully
| (and the contents of vape fluid should be regulated): it
| is dramatically less harmful than smoking but plausibly
| still harmful. A massive quick dose of some stimulant
| (e.g. downing several espresso shots in a row) is not the
| most effective, and breathing stuff other than air is
| generally a bad idea.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| If vaping was pure nicotine its health effects would be
| limited (i.e. much less dangerous than tobacco smoke).
| Unfortunately most vape devices deliver a witches brew of
| nasty chemicals (besides nicotine) added for flavor and
| increased addiction potential just like cigarettes did.
| Many of said chemicals have less well-studied health
| effects than those in tobacco.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Many of said chemicals have less well-studied health
| effects than those in tobacco._ "
|
| This is about the only known-to-be-true statement in that
| paragraph.
|
| Pure nicotine is _dangerous,_ and I see someone else has
| discussed the "witches brew".
| soylentcola wrote:
| Typically they contain nicotine suspension and a small
| percentage of flavorings suspended in glycerin. It's
| basically the food-grade version of a fog machine at a
| night club (works the same way by heating a similar base
| to produce a mist).
|
| I quit smoking years ago by using a vaporizer and quickly
| learned to mix my own liquid in order to lower costs,
| keep track of what was in it, and get lower nicotine than
| what was available in most commercial stuff at the time.
|
| Not claiming it's as healthy as breathing fresh mountain
| air, but it's hardly some innately toxic "witches brew"
| of unknown compounds. Made a huge difference in my health
| and I haven't smoked in 7 or 8 years now. Sadly, despite
| the lengths many reputable producers of vape liquid went
| to regarding ingredients and preparation, many have been
| put out of business by harsher restrictions than those on
| actual smoking tobacco.
| b3morales wrote:
| Good point, thanks.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Microsoft went flat for a decade after their antitrust
| trial. They lost many markets where they had significant
| footholds, struggled to attract and retain top talent, and
| struggled to enter new markets.
|
| They kept making money from Windows, Office, etc. But the
| tech industry exploded in growth around them, leaving them
| behind in many ways (technologically, financially,
| culturally).
| jonny_eh wrote:
| One notable exception was video games. In retrospect the
| success of the Xbox is extremely strange.
| rctec wrote:
| The success of Xbox resulted from what was essentially an
| internal con job. It survived to launch and succeeded
| because the team responsible managed to keep a straight
| face about several important lies about what Xbox would
| be to the rest of the company's leadership and BG
| himself.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > several important lies
|
| Can you please elaborate? I'm pretty familiar with Xbox's
| history but I'm not aware of any lies.
| maxwell wrote:
| Maybe referring to dropping Windows from the original
| Xbox:
|
| https://www.shacknews.com/article/95635/how-the-original-
| xbo...
| WalterBright wrote:
| You'd probably enjoy the book "Renegades of the Empire"
| by Drummond.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Renegades-Empire-Software-
| Revolution-...
| p_j_w wrote:
| >How many competitors to Windows popped up after the
| microsoft antitrust suit? Is there a "windows specific
| browser" to compete with Edge or IE which is from a former
| microsoft company?
|
| I don't think this one really illustrates your point very
| well. There are no former Microsoft companies because
| Microsoft was never broken up. That was actually on the
| agenda until we elected a Republican president who decided
| MS just needed a slap on the wrist. Add this to the "ways
| in which the Bush administration hosed America" pile.
| throwaway00010 wrote:
| I used to work at Facebook and I agree with this. Some
| anecdotal notes on motivation headwinds:
|
| - Talking to more senior friends, both within the company and
| with offers to join-- few people want to join product, and
| those who do would usually rather join Oculus and not one of
| the apps. Lots more interest in infra. Working to raise
| engagement metrics and the news cycle are always factors
| behind this.
|
| - I know plenty of people who just straight up don't like to
| work at Facebook. They "like their job" because they love the
| pay, the people and talking about the perks but dislike their
| projects and dread Mondays. Some are coasting while they can,
| some are figuring out their departure, and others are
| tortured week-to-week blaming themselves for their lack of
| motivation and trying to salvage some productivity.
|
| - To some degree it feels like the more you care about
| something, the harder time you'll have, and the more your
| motivation will be hit. A lot of the battles are uphill
| battles, because a lot of the things people who care want to
| do are not considered impactful (or have negative impact).
|
| Of course, there's plenty of people that don't feel this way
| at Facebook and a lot of pros to working there, but I did
| notice these patterns after working there, especially towards
| the end. Either I was paying more attention or they did seem
| more common than at other places I've worked at before.
| jdhn wrote:
| >there is already a double-digit premium Facebook must pay
| for talent
|
| Really? Are they forced to pay more because people are
| actively avoiding the company, or because they have to pay
| more for top talent due to competitors?
| SamBam wrote:
| I was also interested to know what "double-digit premium"
| actually means in this context. I feel like the order of
| magnitude are confusing to me.
|
| Like, they pay people $10-$99 more, or they pay people
| 10x-99x more?
|
| Neither seems a plausible interpretation of the statement.
|
| Edit: Ok, ok, percentage!
| hirako2000 wrote:
| I understood a double digit premium as percentage. So
| anywhere between 11% to 99% extra just because it's fb.
| Sounds about right, not that this premium only apply to
| fb nor only companies having bad reputation.
| version_five wrote:
| I assumed a 1.zy multiplier vs a 1.0y multiplier (where
| y,z are decimal digits)
|
| Anyway, I'm not convinced that's causal. Doesn't FB have
| a reputation for paying well to get smart people, and
| don't many people aspire to work there so they can get
| paid well?
|
| I personally don't believe I would ever work for facebook
| because of how uninterested / opposed I am to their
| mission. But I don't see any evidence, including lots of
| people I know that went to work for them, that a few
| people like me actually materially impact their ability
| to hire
| svachalek wrote:
| They were always one of the most picky and high paying
| employers out there, but anecdotal reports from friends
| say their offers now are truly stratospheric and even
| other FAANGs don't want to compete on a compensation
| basis.
| dont__panic wrote:
| I'd guess that they mean 10% or more total compensation
| versus comparable positions elsewhere. But I could also
| see this meaning $10k a year or more because 10% TC is
| such an insane number.
|
| In my experience, Facebook's offers _do_ tend to beat
| Google 's by $10k or so. But it's all so random and all
| over the place that it's tough to know if that's a
| consistent number.
| ditonal wrote:
| Yeah it's not even true that FB is paying a premium. A
| thread full of people complaining about misinformation
| happily posting inaccurate information about Facebook.
|
| Go look at levels.fyi. Facebook pays close to market for
| senior engineers (~450k), more or less in line with
| companies like Uber, Robinhood, Twitter, Pinterest,
| LinkedIn, etc. In fact, Facebook doesn't even crack the
| top 5 on levels for senior SWE comp so this idea that
| they have to overpay to recruit is clearly false. If
| anything, if you hang out on Blind, people will pick FB
| over other companies precisely because it's perceived as
| having a stronger engineering brand than those other
| companies.
|
| I think Facebook executive team is full of liars but
| there are also these weird PR games in play. Uber had a
| woman complain about not getting a jacket in her size,
| Google gave Andy Rubin 10 figure bonuses after he
| credibly raped a report, had scandals with Vic
| Gundrota/Kelly Ellis, etc. yet Google is still a
| relatively well perceived company but Uber/TK are
| mysognistic/sexist companies.
|
| Google got caught literally forwarding private user data
| to the government without warrants, nobody cares (except
| Glenn Greenwald I guess).
|
| Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs got caught explicitly and
| literally illegally colluding to suppress wages but
| nobody cares.
|
| Google execs were caught lying multiple times w.r.t them
| building weaponized AI for drones for the DoD in the
| Maven scandal and that largely washed over.
|
| Eric Schmidt sends out email after email to Google
| employees to contribute to his SuperPAC and nobody cares.
| Google builds Dragonfly to censor Chinese political
| opponents and nobody really cares.
|
| Facebook is an unethical company but companies like
| Google have objectively far worse scandalds but don't
| become the media targets. There are weird groupthink/PR
| plays at work here and it plays out even on Hacker News
| where accuracy takes a backseat to narrative building.
| Tarsul wrote:
| the difference is that facebook is even bad for its users
| (and disliked by its users). Google is alright for its
| users (as is, or maybe was, Amazon). I'm talking about
| perception of course, not reality.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| Just want to point out using the word "rape" in such a
| casual and nonspecific way is not okay.
| leobg wrote:
| Double digit percentage was my sense-making
| interpretation.
| dagmx wrote:
| I suspect it was percentage. Which is true, Facebook does
| pay quite a bit more for a lot of roles, and has more
| flexible working opportunities. Note I do NOT work there
| but I do have friends who try and get me to join their
| teams.
| milesward wrote:
| Tens of percentage points more total comp.
| SirHound wrote:
| I'm assuming 10-50k+
| Buraksr wrote:
| I took it to mean double digit percent, but now I am also
| thinking it is confusing wording.
| thecupisblue wrote:
| As far as I've heard, it's 2-4x the average salary on
| some positions. The ethical problems and reputation it
| faces in community increased their churn while reducing
| the available pool of candidates.
| harikb wrote:
| I ready double digit as > 10% higher salary.
| cm2012 wrote:
| yeah FB comps are no higher than Google, and lower than
| Netflix
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > Libre/Diem being dead on arrival because Facebook brought
| it to the table
|
| This was always a terrible idea, and would have died
| regardless of who had proposed it. From the people I talked
| to (i knew some people on the core team) it seemed to be a
| retirement home for FB execs who didn't want to do useful
| work anymore.
|
| (I don't disagree with your overall point, just stating that
| it's not the sole predictor).
| mkr-hn wrote:
| It's been so long since a company reached Facebook's heights
| and fell that a whole generation doesn't know what it looks
| like. AOL was the Facebook of its time: a joke to system
| admins, a default ban on small game servers and IRC channels.
| Meanwhile, most people had no idea anyone had a problem with
| AOL. Like with Facebook, there were people reporting on its
| follies like Observers.net[0], but it mostly went unremarked
| on or unnoticed by most people. Until it changed. AOL is
| _around_ , as Facebook likely will be, but it'll see a
| similar fall, and no one will see it coming.
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110124001004/http://www.nyt
| ime...
|
| Note how similar this is to the reports on what Facebook
| moderators deal with.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'd hesitate to generalize AOL's fall into Facebook's
| future.
|
| AOL's core proposition was being better than the Internet
| (more curated, coherent, and faster). When the web and
| internet exploded in size and scale, AOL's value
| evaporated. The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window
| dressing on this landscape transformation.
|
| And for years (decades? still?) afterwards, people used AOL
| Instant Messager (AIM), because it was the most
| network/platform component of AOL.
|
| So how would that happen to Facebook, and what would it
| look like?
|
| Users would need an order of magnitude superior
| alternative, and most critically, users would need to move
| en mass. Facebook has rightly identified onboarding younger
| cohorts as key to their survival, but I don't see any
| realistic way Facebook dies a natural death in under 40
| years.
| skybrian wrote:
| One possibility is that a Facebook account becomes
| something that most people have but they seldom use, like
| a LinkedIn account.
|
| The news feed could get less interesting, resulting in
| fewer visits.
| chuniversity wrote:
| I think this is already the case and is why FB doesn't
| want to get rid of the offending content, for many users
| this is the only thing still keeping them engaged. Turn
| that off and it's just a stream of advertising, memes,
| and dinner pics.
| beowulfey wrote:
| We are in unknown territory with Facebook, but I have no
| doubt it will fall eventually. The laws of thermodynamics
| hold true for institutions as much as everything else--
| one day Facebook will lose to entropy and it will become
| a fraction of the size it is now.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Microsoft?
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Users would need an order of magnitude superior
| alternative, and most critically, users would
| need to move en mass.
|
| Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever
| had such a powerful network effect as Facebook.
|
| I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of
| my own.
|
| But I still have an FB account. I don't check it very
| often, and I've got notifications turned off. But
| ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to
| dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of
| contacting otherwise.
|
| History tells us that something eventually will replace
| it. But, it's hard to imagine.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has
| ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook._
|
| Facebook's network effect was overwhelmed twice, once by
| instagram and again by whatsapp... shame both those ended
| up squarely in Facebook's court. Remains to be seen how
| much dent can TikTok / Twitch / YouTube / Snap / Azar /
| Telegram can make on to that once-in-a-generation
| trifecta.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _once-in-a-generation_
|
| That's why Facebook is investing in VR. Not because
| they're optimistic about it, or because they want to own
| the space, but because it's the closest horizon that has
| the _potential_ to fundamentally change interaction.
|
| If it does, they have a foot in the door and can flood
| resources into it. If it doesn't, small price to pay for
| hedging an existential threat.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful
| network effect as Facebook.
|
| Email, probably.
| soylentcola wrote:
| But you can switch email hosts or roll your own. With
| some more modern problems (getting marked as spam if
| you're not recognized) aside, you weren't forced to keep
| using your @aol.com or @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com
| accounts in order to communicate with people on those
| services via email.
|
| With Facebook, it doesn't matter how much you dislike the
| company or how good some competitor is. You still can't
| talk with people on Facebook (and often, even view
| content) without being logged into an active Facebook
| account.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose
| access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of
| contacting otherwise.
|
| I don't use FB but I would imagine if I did and I wanted
| to get off it and there were dozens of people I wanted to
| keep in touch with but would lose touch with I would send
| these dozens of people a message a week before, saying "I
| am going to get off facebook, can you send me your email
| / phone number, my number is X, as I would like to
| maintain contact."
|
| Or does FB not allow you to do that?
| wayoutthere wrote:
| > But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose
| access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of
| contacting otherwise.
|
| That used to be a fear of mine, but after deleting my
| account I've found it to be a core feature. It forces me
| to be intentional with my relationships; if I want to
| stay in touch with someone I have to make the effort.
| Otherwise, the relationship is likely more parasocial
| than actively rewarding, and I'm consciously ok focusing
| my energies on the people I currently want in my life to
| the exclusion of those relationships that have slipped
| into parasocial territory.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Being able to passively keep in touch with many of the
| thousands of people I've met in my life is incredibly
| valuable to me.
|
| It feels incredibly sad to just let those relationships
| die because you're focusing your energies on the people
| that are currently around you.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| I think the sad part was realizing those relationships
| had died long ago, and that being friends on Facebook
| just makes it feel like they haven't. It pushes into that
| parasocial territory which IMO is the biggest problem
| with social media: if our need for human connection is
| hunger, parasocial relationships are counterfeit food
| that makes you feel full but contains no calories.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| How do you keep in touch with them on Facebook? What
| makes your post reach them, if most don't check often?
|
| I want Facebook for this purpose but it feels like it's
| really not a blog. At all.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I post things about my life, they post things about
| theirs. We read it and know what's going on.
|
| A friend of mine from high school happened to be in my
| city for a weekend. He posted on Facebook asking if he
| knew anyone there. We went out and had drinks and caught
| up.
|
| I had a bunch of super close friends at a crappy job back
| when I was in college. We all went our separate ways but
| occasionally Facebook reminds one of us of some funny
| photo from the old days. It's triggered a few large group
| chats that have been pretty fun.
|
| Every once in awhile I'll think about an old friend from
| school or a job or wherever and it's nice to just see
| what they're doing without having to go through starting
| a whole conversation. (Although I often will since
| Facebook is a good way to reach out to people.)
| soylentcola wrote:
| That sort of "easy, zero-effort blog for everyone you
| know" was what made it useful. I got tired of using it
| when it got harder to surface that sort of stuff and
| harder to avoid the marketing, link spam, comments-
| section-style arguments, and scammers that flocked to the
| platform as it expanded.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| As someone old enough to remember and have used
| Livejournal, the Facebook experience _is_ very different.
| grvdrm wrote:
| The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that
| made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open."
| It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any
| site/platform mimic the magic of LJ?
| JohnBooty wrote:
| LJ was "peak internet" for me. I had a smallish network
| of friends on there and we read and commented on each
| others' stuff. You could be as personal or as detached
| and anonymous as you wanted.
|
| You didn't have normies and family and stuff on there;
| felt like you could actually express yourself.
|
| Tumblr was its spiritual successor, I guess, in ways. But
| it wasn't the same. People actually wrote things on LJ.
| Maybe it was mostly crap, but it was often thoughtful and
| personal if you had the right friends. It felt like
| nothing was ever created on Tumblr; it was just endless
| pithy comments and jokes about things created elsewhere.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Livejournal, to me, was a fusion of three things: a
| simple HTML editor (aka posts) + a time-sorted view and
| access controls + discoverability through your network.
|
| The things that made it different than Facebook were (1)
| that they didn't screw around with your feed (it was your
| friends' posts, sorted by date), (2) that discoverability
| and networking was user intentional and exploratory
| (pull, rather than suggested / push), & (3) access
| controls were simple, understandable, and obeyed user
| intent.
| amatecha wrote:
| LJ was awesome! I feel like Mastodon is kiiiinda similar
| modern-day equivalent (despite the Twitter-mimicry). Huh,
| now that I say that "out loud", that's interesting - I
| had never thought of it until now. It seems to really
| capture that "share your world but also bring in others
| and socialize as narrowly or broadly as you want", along
| with sharing media and so on.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| Those passive relationships are why I left Facebook. I
| had hundreds of friends, from people I had met once or
| twice to family and close friends of decades - but few of
| them put any effort into the relationships, instead
| relying on Facebook to prompt them to wish well on major
| events or update them on news.
|
| Those relationships you don't want to let go of? They're
| largely worthless.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Worthless in what way? I get happiness knowing about the
| lives of people I have cared about.
|
| An interesting person from 15 years ago doesn't usually
| stop being an interesting person just because I haven't
| talked to them regularly.
| Frondo wrote:
| Not trying to nitpick, and not arguing with the sense of
| sadness you feel -- I sympathize -- but I wouldn't call
| "passively keeping in touch" with thousands of people
| "relationships." It's something, but I'm not sure what,
| it seems like we may not have a good word for "casual
| strangers," the level of familiarity beneath acquaintance
| that we know because we met them once and then know only
| what they post in one social media database or another.
|
| Also, to be honest, I felt the way you did before I
| deleted a twitter account with about 2k following and 10k
| followers. I felt like it was dominating my attention,
| and that made me mad. In a fit of pique I deleted it and
| it's almost funny how quickly I realized I _didn 't_ know
| any of them, and the passive consumption of their social
| media database entries was scratching some kind of itch
| but the same one I get from e.g. binging Star Trek
| series.
|
| Very strange all around.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| but I wouldn't call "passively keeping in touch" with
| thousands of people "relationships." It's something,
| but I'm not sure what, it seems like we may not have a
| good word for "casual strangers,"
|
| Well, strictly speaking... it's a relationship, just a
| very casual kind. They are not intrinsically bad.
|
| The healthiness of it can vary widely. It's a very
| individual thing.
|
| The relevant questions to ask one's self would include:
| overall, is this bringing me happiness? Are my "casual
| relationships" on FB causing me anxiety -- either
| directly, or because of more subtle FOMO, etc? Are they
| taking time away from other things that would make my
| life better, such as more meaningful relationships?
|
| There is a happy path there. I genuinely like seeing that
| so-and-so from high school just had a baby, or whatever.
| "We sat through so many classes together," I think. "She
| was always cool to me. Good for her, she seems happy.
| Cute baby!" I might never really be close to her again,
| but I do like seeing that she's doing well.
|
| I seem to be in the minority though. Maybe FB is like
| cocaine. Seems like some people manage to use it
| occasionally without damaging their bodies or lives. But
| the vast majority of people are worse off for it.
| grvdrm wrote:
| I admire you for saying that you genuinely enjoy/extract
| value from seeing "so-and-so from high school just had a
| baby, or whatever" on Facebook. I'm on the side of the
| others in that I don't feel like I lost anything from
| deleting my FB account (except I can't remember birthdays
| anymore). But it's interesting to hear you say you do.
|
| This particular thread reminded me of another recent
| thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603650 -
| an app to help you form deeper relationships. Do you need
| it? Do we need it? Do these things really help?
|
| It's funny - maybe the perfect compromise is exactly what
| you described. You sometimes want mostly mindless FB
| updates from people you "know" and otherwise converse
| with your core friends and family through in-person
| interactions and other more engaging medium.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Yeah. I mean, it doesn't have to be a contest right? I
| mean, I can't imagine having _only_ deep, soulful
| relationships.
|
| My neighbors are nice! We make small talk. That's fine. I
| like it.
|
| Maybe the unspoken thing here is that it can be a human
| thing to feel you're a part of a community. A safety net
| of sorts. If I have to leave town on short notice for an
| emergency, who's going to feed my cats? I could find that
| person via my FB network. One of them would or would know
| somebody that could. One of them could ping me for the
| same thing. That kind of thing. This
| particular thread reminded me of another recent
| thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603650
| - an app to help you form deeper relationships. Do you
| need it? Do we need it? Do these things really help?
|
| I feel like it could work to some extent, but I would
| feel really weird trying to get a group of friends to go
| in on it? Plus, I don't know. I'd feel like I was always
| trying to put on a show or something.
|
| I feel like real relationships arise from _shared
| experiences._ Doing things together. Playing sports,
| writing code, gaming together, whatever.
|
| I don't think an app about sharing your life can really
| accomplish that.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| That sounds like a healthy place to be -- congrats on
| achieving that.
|
| I've largely achieved that as well, I think. Slightly
| different road traveled, perhaps. I have a larger than
| average extended family: a dozen aunts/uncles and a
| corresponding number of cousins. It's impossible to have
| a close relationship with all of them, but I do enjoy
| keeping up with how they're doing and knowing when big
| life events (and deaths) happen.
|
| So, my day-to-day life has absolutely nothing to do with
| FB. I've got notifications off and I typically feel no
| desire to check it. Instead I'm focused on my much
| smaller number of intentional, meaningful relationships.
| But, from time to time I do enjoy scrolling through FB
| and seeing how so-and-so is doing.
|
| Do you have an extended family you keep in touch with? Do
| you keep up with them through other means, or have you
| just sort of let them fade from your life?
| wayoutthere wrote:
| I have a similar sized extended family, but I've honestly
| let them fade from my life. I'm old enough that the
| weddings and babies era is long behind us and we're
| scattered all over the country. All I care to get I get
| from my mom, which is nice because it gives us something
| to talk about.
|
| I have surrounded myself with chosen family and am always
| meeting new people. I give generously of myself to the
| people in my life because it brings me joy to do so. It's
| a conscious trade off that means I lose touch with some
| people, and I'm ok with that. Most relationships should
| have an expiration date anyway; far too many people just
| go through the motions out of a sense of obligation.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah, I haven't deleted my account, but I don't log in
| anymore (and blocked all FB-related domains on my Pi-
| Hole). I still keep in touch with a lot of people, but
| it's definitely challenging. I've just totally lost
| contact with TONS of people, ones who I'd love to keep
| talking with here and there. I accept the "loss" and do
| what I can to regain contact with people. Drag them
| kicking & screaming to stuff like Signal, Matrix,
| Mastodon, etc. Honestly I focus even harder on these
| alternatives because I think they are more important than
| ever.
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Typical case of spitting against the wind
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Agree. Everyone who is on Facebook has email, and a
| mobile phone. If sending (or answering) an email or a
| text message or making a phone call is too much work,
| what kind of friendship are you really worried about
| maintaining?
| baby wrote:
| I just can't imagine doing this. Facebook is the only way
| to keep in touch with many people around me.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window
| dressing on this landscape transformation.
|
| Were all AOL's mergers dumb? IIRC, they used their sky-
| high stock price to buy Time Warner (among other things),
| and once AOL was no longer the cash cow they turned out
| to own a lot of valuable things.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| As with all mergers, it depends on to whom / for what.
|
| For AOL shareholders, by 2002, between the merger and the
| dotcom bubble bursting, 2002$200 B (so about 2021$5.5 T?)
| had been wiped from AOL's market cap.
|
| So that was, presumably, not good.
| zaphar wrote:
| I actually think in a way one of Facebooks core
| proposition is _being_ the internet for most people which
| is not that far off from AOL. The similarity here is that
| no one knows what is going to render FB obsolete right
| now. Just like no one knew what was going to do the same
| for AOL. AOL lost in part I believe because they were not
| really able to transition from Dialup "internet"
| Provider to Content Aggregator when broadband became a
| thing. The value add just wasn't there.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| It's off-to-the-side of your main point, but AOL Instant
| Messenger shut down in December 2017. Per
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/12/14/67582/aol-
| instan... it was down to 500,000 active users a month the
| summer before it was shut down.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| In a trip down memory lane, https://www.aol.com/ is
| just... a pop news site now? Per Wayback, they shifted
| away from portal around 2010/11.
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| Re: the entrenched social network... It shouldn't be too
| hard to create an alternative service / browser extension
| that will allow people to export their social network?
| Because then the alternative service could be set to
| automatically approve any future connection requests from
| the people previously identified.
|
| I'd sign up for such a social-graph-based service that
| just did individual messaging, group discussions, and
| events (invitations + pictures).
|
| Identity is an issue with social graph export... But on
| the other hand, doesn't the existence of LinkedIn show
| that people are willing to re-create their social graph
| on multiple services?
| gwd wrote:
| > Users would need an order of magnitude superior
| alternative
|
| _Is_ there currently any alternative? All the
| alternatives I 'm aware of ATM are Twitter clones; i.e.,
| meant to be _public_ microblogs, rather than _restricted
| audience_ microblogs.
|
| Recommend me a good alternative and I'll see if I can get
| some of my network to join it. (And don't say "Mastodon"
| unless they've added a FB-like mode where you can
| restrict your posts to a specific set of people.)
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| but that is exactly why fb is getting targeted by media and
| politicians so much. It is more popular with older people
| who also happen to be active voters and news consumers.
| seneca wrote:
| Yep, exactly. The key question is to ask why this stream
| of concerted effort is pointed at taking down Favebook,
| and Twitter is left alone.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Because Twitter isn't as wide as Facebook (in number of
| products), and because its primary features aren't as
| algorithmically tweaked?
| quickthrowman wrote:
| It's quite simple really, journalists use Twitter.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| FB's emphasis on family connections makes it much more...
| potent, and almost cult-like in some ways.
|
| Families stay in touch and plan events on FB. Your mom,
| aunt, and uncle-in-law are rather likely to be on FB, but
| not Twitter. If they _are_ on Twitter, Twitter doesn 't
| hector you to "connect" with them with nearly the same
| fervor as FB.
|
| That has somewhat profound implications. If one ditches
| FB, one loses access to your family to some small or
| large extent.
|
| On the mild end of things you miss out on baby pictures
| and invitations to picnics. On the more distressing side
| of things, unfriending a family member or leaving FB
| altogether may be seen as a rejection of parts or all of
| the family.
|
| Perhaps this doesn't apply to _your_ family, but we can
| agree it applies to many.
|
| The "family" aspect of FB also makes it much more of a
| fertile breeding ground for misinformation relative to
| Twitter. The boomers using FB are (on average) much less
| tech-savvy and don't know how to verify claims. But, as
| your neighbor/uncle/mom/dad/whatever, they are much
| harder to ignore than some Twitter rando.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| To me, this is what makes Twitter (and Instagram and
| anything else aimed at talking to the public) mostly
| useless. I don't want to hear about the day-to-day lives
| of Twitter randos at all or follow celebrity gossip. On
| Facebook, I talk to and organize events with my friends
| and family. My conversations are continuous across
| devices, and they are not mobile-first like texting or
| whatsapp or snapchat or some of the new privacy-oriented
| platforms. I'm not a huge user of the newsfeed but I just
| unfollow anyone who posts irritating content. Back when
| they had auto-playing videos I unfollowed anyone who
| posted a video. Some of my friends apparently unfollowed
| me when I had a scary profile picture lol. But for the
| core usecase it still worked fine, we were still able to
| talk and organize events.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| If these hearings produce regulations fb won't be the
| only one.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Wait, why was AOL a default ban on game servers? Can
| someone elaborate?
| mkr-hn wrote:
| AOL was the Eternal September
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
|
| Some admins of private servers blocked its IPs for the
| same reason IRC mods did. AOL got ordinary people on to
| the internet, so they were a poorer fit for any existing
| community on average.
| theknocker wrote:
| If only we could somehow do that with Reddit now.
| mcguire wrote:
| Once upon a time, cs.utexas.edu ran a well-known email-
| to-news (i.e. NNTP, Usenet) gateway. After some problems,
| AOL's admins asked the person who ran it to block AOL
| email addresses. Yeah, this was years ago.
|
| Some time later, a person who had an AOL email account
| (who some of you might recognize, so I won't name names
| even though I'm dying to) contacted the sysadmins,
| complaining that the email-to-news gateway wasn't
| working. When she learned that AOL addresses were
| blocked, she threw a tantrum, threatened to contact
| various newspapers, complained about UT blocking public
| access to things paid for by public money, and so on. As
| a result, the mail-to-news gateway was shut down.
|
| That's my AOL story.
| politician wrote:
| There used to be tons of hacking tools for AOL, so I
| could see how IRC admins would just default ban
| connections from them to prevent hordes of script kiddies
| from attempting to cause chaos on networks they really
| didn't know anything about.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Everyone keeps leaving Instagram out of the discussion. I
| wonder why?
| moritonal wrote:
| Because it's Facebooks horcrux and no-one wants to admit
| it.
| 0x964 wrote:
| I love this comment
| mkr-hn wrote:
| AOL had lots of well-liked properties, too. The same
| shifts that knocked AOL down also took those down.
| rStar wrote:
| people are over facebook and instagram is flagging also.
| tick tock isn't the end either. who's next?
| eigengrau5150 wrote:
| > And even worse: most of them don't give a shit about the
| reputation of FB.
|
| They don't have to care. They just shouldn't be surprised if I
| refuse to hire them because I was able to find them on
| Facebook/Instagram. Likewise, if they worked for Facebook I
| won't hire them. They're tainted. LOL
| pawelmurias wrote:
| Do you pay better a lot then better then the FAANG companies?
| dresdenfire wrote:
| Wow, you basically doing hate speech for FB engineers on a
| social site and calling FB bad. Pot calling kettle black?
| eigengrau5150 wrote:
| There are no limits to _my_ hypocrisy.
| sebow wrote:
| I think you're kind of deluding yourself if you think MSM wants
| FB to die or lose influence.They're(FB) partly much of the
| reason MSM hasn't straight-out died after they tried catching
| up to more what used to be alternative "news sources".
|
| What the new whistleblower "leaked" isn't something revealing
| at all.And the frightening thing is that what she a argues for
| is even more disturbing: more regulation. This would be fine if
| FB&friends would be definitely declared to not be public
| spheres (which on one hand they're technically not because
| they're private entities, but on the other hand [wrongfully]
| have the public sphere status in law, when it comes to
| information).
|
| What actually is news about FB is the reported 1.5BN hack,
| which nobody talks about besides this "old-news". which is
| mainly either a regurgitated attempt _by_ facebook to somehow
| resurrect their image through this, or the US gov trying to
| gain even more pressure on private companies.Nobody talks about
| the fact that our 'whistleblower' openly donated a lot of money
| to DNC, and a quick research on her stinks of collusion, either
| politically or against against facebook itself.
| abcd8017 wrote:
| Can't agree more and that is the main problem - user's apathy
| for their own privacy.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Not to mention facebook leaders don't care, they already made
| billions by misbehaving without any consequence. Even if the
| story did end there, it's 100% win for them.
|
| This is the lesson of our generation: makes money by delegating
| the consequences to society. Nothing will happen to you. In
| fact, in 20 years, you could buy the service of some PR firm,
| and they will even make you a hero in the eyes of the public
| eventually.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Setting aside whether this is hyperbole or not, not that I
| disagree with the claim generally,
|
| one very real impact of their malfeasance is their reputation
| among _their prospective and existing workforce._
|
| It is not an exaggeration to say that I have never--not in 25
| years in the industry--known or known of or read accounts of
| people who variously quit over their amorality, have turned
| down offers (including at VERY high levels) over it, or
| confronted recruiters with challenges around it (historically
| resulting in cessation of recruiting efforts; hottake: they
| will not be able to do that any longer, because it will winnow
| their pool too aggressively).
|
| I myself harbor acute emnity to them and have been ignoring a
| persistent recruiter for many months over this; and am
| regularly down-voted here for saying what I'm going to say
| again:
|
| If you work for them, quit.
|
| If you do business with them, don't.
|
| There should be consequences for this level of amorality. If
| you think it's the status quo, you're simply factually wrong;
| there is no shortage of other companies, working in related
| domains, who do not feel that damage to the health and
| wellbeing of either their clients or the society in which they
| operate is a natural, inevitable, and excusable cost of doing
| business.
|
| They are not the root cause of, but are massive enabler of,
| forces which pose an existential threat to our democracy.
|
| Their reputation is merely coming into alignment with a truth
| they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars suppressing.
| danans wrote:
| > And even worse: most of them don't give a shit about the
| reputation of FB. They just want to send messages and share
| pictures through those apps.
|
| Group messaging and engagement algorithm amplified social media
| are different things though.
|
| Group messaging like WhatsApp, iMessage, and SMS, and photo
| sharing like Google photos or iPhoto have an inherently limited
| distribution of a given piece of content. It's not that you
| can't do nefarious things using these products, it's just
| harder to scale those.
|
| Engagement amplified social media, as found in varying degrees
| on Facebook, TikTok Instagram, YouTube, etc, have far more
| potential to move society as a whole - for better or for worse.
|
| Therefore it's not unreasonable for people to continue to use
| something like WhatsApp for limited group conversations while
| refusing to use Facebook or similar products due to the
| increased risk of exposure to harmful content.
|
| One is free to despise any product Facebook or any company
| creates just because they are Facebook, but that's a whole
| different discussion.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| I was really surprised when Facebook added their branding to
| the splash screen of those apps. I thought the whole point was
| that no one even knew about it. WhatsApp at least is a little
| different (no in app ads, no infinite scrolling, at least in
| theory encrypted messages). But Instagram is literally just
| another incarnation of the exact same business model as FB with
| slightly different features.
| CursedUrn wrote:
| I presume they made a big push to integrate Whatsapp/IG and
| Facebook (on a technical and branding level) to make it
| harder for anti-trust to break them up later.
| el_ravager wrote:
| If they can't be broken up--and they're too big to fail--
| rolling them up into a utility could be an forgone
| conclusion.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jonahbenton wrote:
| "Reputational point of no return" == is a bank.
|
| Good timing, actually, lets them launch Libra and take on Tether.
| [deleted]
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