> The Facebook outrage mob reminds me of my slashdot days when everyone referred to Microsoft as Micro$oft.
The fight against old Microsoft is a win-win success story (for now, I'm keeping an eye on all big players and so should everyone else.)
Microsoft is nicer and I think more profitable than ever. They don't call our code or favourite OS cancer anymore but actively support us. My understanding is even a lot of MS employees prefer the new Microsoft.
If we can manage to do the same with Facebook then feel free to come up with a similar stupid name for them. Because right now I think they deserve it as much as old M$ did.
It took Microsoft a top-level executive change (Satya) to fix itself. Facebook shows no signs of an executive change until Mark retires and devotes himself to full time philanthropy so the world doesn’t remember him as evil (who else does that remind you of...)
I feel like this does a disservice to the prior open source efforts that Microsoft slowly went through during the Ballmer era. Sure they were not as impressive but they were the start of it all imho.
>...come up with a similar stupid name for them...
Farcebook? Been guilty of that one for 8 years. Never had an account, so the label is all hearsay ... but what i kept hearing made me afraid to become a Farce of myself ... so i said to myself "stay away". Hard enough to be self-effacing.
i do still hope we will find a way to communicate easily with relevant others without doing violence to our communication methods for the sake of (what is essentially) a random nudnick's business plan and profit model.
Farcebook likes to go around and break as many things as fast as possible. Before them we had serious people and thought oriented to finding compatible methods. They still exist, but all the oxygen in the room is depleted by Farcebook.
Facebork is the other one I've heard, and occasionally use. Problem is that neither really captures a sense of the rapacious amorality of which facebook is, I believe, being accused.
Heh! Ifn i had it to do over i would prolly say FarceBorg. Not only do they encourage their users to make a Farce of themselves but they actively try to assimilate the web, and indeed the internet (the Basics).
To be honest I can't remember a time when the stories on Facebook were good.
I can remember such a time for Google. I can even remember such a time for Microsoft, back when people stayed in line for Windows 95. I was 13 back then and got my first computer.
Sure, investors were pleased with Facebook's rapid growth and people liked it because its UI didn't suck like MySpace. But Facebook has always been morally bankrupt due to its leadership and this has been visible for quite some time.
In our country we have a saying that applies perfectly: a fish rots from the head down ;-)
In 2008 and 2012 FB got praised for being the platform that Obama used to win the elections - I remember multiple articles about it (and someone from the Obama campaign later admitted that they did the same thing that got the CA scandal started). In that period of time there were also multiple newspapers writing that "privacy is dead, and it's a good thing". There was not a lot of discussion about privacy when they bought whatsapp and instagram too, IIRC.
Frankly newspapers really changed idea only after Trump won the elections.
I find somewhat fun that some of the recent news about facebook being evil actually talk a lot about that period (ex: the recent news about the "friendly fraud" class action) and some are the consequences of the (naive, as we a lot of us were at the time - me included!) choices facebook made back them (wanting to be a platform, without really understanding what it meant) before pivoting to the current model (which is AFAIK far more similar to google's).
I think it’s less to due with the direct choices FB has made or even their impact on the election, but that FB’s complete and total lack of awareness of how their actions have impacted the world. It wasn’t Trump winning that did it, it was that Trump won with the assistance of data that Facebook was unable to properly protect.
Facebook has lost the trust of the public in ways that other major tech firms haven’t.
> It wasn’t Trump winning that did it, it was that Trump won with the assistance of data that Facebook was unable to properly protect.
I agree that Facebook is certainly a convenient scapegoat to hide all the other issues that plagued the Clinton campaign (from the DNC scandal, to the unlikeable candidate, through some controversial phrases she said during the campaign itself, and so on). Also it helps newspapers since they have to take no blame for what happened (and do no real analysis on why democrats lost).
I'm pretty convinced that if Clinton had won - even if Clinton had used CA data to do so - there would be far (far) less media coverage about the "evil of Facebook", regardless of the impact of their incompetence in the election. That was the case with Obama already after all.
Part of that is just what happens when you go from small start-up to entrenched big player. I remember when PayPal started. It was so cool and everyone who understood what it was was very enthused about it. Now it's all gripes and complaints.
> I remember when PayPal started. It was so cool and everyone who understood what it was was very enthused about it. Now it's all gripes and complaints.
Not what I see here on HN:
I see complaints from merchants (mostly with legitimate issues it seems) and praise from end users.
I actually used to hate PayPal as an end user because, used relatively infrequently, they'd often block or delay transactions, causing me headaches and wasting my time. They felt like they were actively trying to hinder rather than help commerce. They do seem to have improved in the last couple of years though.
Doesn't it feel weird that there used to be positive facebook stories, but now its all negative 24/7?