> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I can’t understand how Instagram for Kids can succeed. Any parent that knows half of the bad stuff Facebook allegedly does (and how other “for Kids” efforts have utterly failed to protect the children) would never let their kids on such a platform. I would sooner buy a product labeled Crack Cocaine for Kids; it would be safer for them.
So the assumption is that currently, without instagram for kids, kids are not using social media at all and are not exposed to adult content on the internet? Are we living on the same planet?
I dont understand this, instagram for kids is supposed to give parents more control over what kids do on the internet. How could this make things worse?
To me it looks like, blind oposition to insta kids is largely due to irrational hatred towards facebook (partialy because it is cool to hate facebook now, and partially due to political conformism. As both D and R have found reasons why Facebook is bad to them)
If you were to ask me. Kids should be given less and less access of social media apps like these. Social media might have some good positive use cases but for the most part it is problematic and tends to err on the negative side. Recent studies have shown that Instagram has harmful and negative effects on teenagers. What makes you think it is okay to ignore this alarm?
Remember. Kids are using Instagram because a guardian/supervisor has allowed them to.
Instagram for Kids is a cheap attempt by Zuckerberg to groom young minds into assimilating into the sick digital abyss of social media. Not because we want to make safe spaces for kids. Nothing about unrestricted access to Instagram-like apps is safe, let alone positive, for young minds.
AOL also had to deal with the Time Warner merger when they had to be laser focused on the transition to broadband. Without that, billions of people could be using AOL today
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You shared moments of a finite life with them.Thus they are valuable. You read this comments, wasting expensive seconds of your life on it. Thus the relationship to a internet stranger was valuable.
All those connections are paid for in the most expensive currency that is.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
I enjoyed LJ for a few years (my first blog, 2005-2008). Wrote a good deal about startups that I explored as a user in that period (this was the APG era, where APG stands for After Paul Graham, meaning after he wrote his early influential essays about startups and his launching YC - called Startup School at the time, IIRC) and other software topics.
Interestingly, some years later, I mentioned the same point, on my next blog or on Twitter, and then suddenly my old blog became accessible again (it was not, for a while, after the above-linked incident).
What could fb do to enable this kind of experience for those that want it? Not that they would, but I’d really like to have a vision of what they should do.
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?
> 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?
https://dreamwidth.org is a community fork of LJ that has a large and active userbase, is open source, and invests a lot into mentoring users › contributors › maintainers. Dreamwidth is a Google Summer of Code participant, for example.
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.
Whenever I looked at Mastodon, it seemed cool technologically, but I couldn't really imagine anybody outside of the tech crowd using it. Is that an accurate perception?
LJ was cool because you had quite a diverse group using it. Artists, musicians, teenagers, etc.
This was before MySpace siphoned away the youth crowd, fifteen years ago or whenever it was. I wouldn't see them ever coming back to blogging. In fact I don't really see anybody returning to blogging.
(No disrespect meant to blogs. Blogs are awesome. That was a really good era for the internet.)
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?
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.
I log in ocassionaly to see the job ads on a special developers page for my country, but I unfollowed the feeds of all my "friends". I didn't "unfriend" them, I just don't want to see their stupid stuff.
>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."
Facebook socialising is a lot less direct than an email. I see Instagram photos and the like from friends and enjoy it but if they all emailed those photos to me every day I’d feel overwhelmed by the experience. In any case, they wouldn’t do that anyway, because they’re already posting to Instagram because that’s where all their other friends are.
Yeah, I'd do that as well. I've seen others do it.
But people might not see your "hey, leaving FB post." They might not check FB often. Or it just kind of gets buried. etc.
Phone numbers and emails change, though. "Contact rot" happens. So, I don't know. I guess I like to have multiple ways to contact people.
This is all predicated on the fact that FB is absolutely not a distraction to me. I look at it maybe once or twice a month. I have all notifications turned off. So, it is not a drain on my (fragile) attention span.
Maybe most importantly, a lot of the folks I keep up with on FB aren't necessarily people I talk to directly. We would not really be keeping up by email/phone/letter/whatever. Some people see that as evidence that, hey, those are obviously people you don't need in your life. Perhaps that's true for some. For me, I enjoy having acquaintances as well as friends.
> 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.
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.
>Facebook's network effect was overwhelmed twice, once by instagram and again by whatsapp
This doesn't seem accurate, do you have evidence to back up this claim? Instagram had 30 million users and no revenue upon acquisition. Facebook had over a billion, and billions in revenues.
I don't think one can break a scale-free network like that of Facebook by playing the same game as Facebook.
One way to counter a scale-free network is to create adjacent scale-free networks that replaces its competition one part at a time. This is what, I believe, WhatsApp (with messaging) and Instagram (with images) were on the verge of doing.
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.
Arguably, Gmail is currently the email provider with the strongest network effect due to all the ways it ties in to Android and the rest of the Google ecosystem.
Worth noting that Gmail also 'solved' spam, which was the strongest reason to change email addresses/providers.
Those are powerful reasons to stick to Gmail. One is a legitimately good and useful feature; the other is a rather shady attempt at artificial lock-in, IMO.
But neither of those things are network effect.
"Network effect" refers specifically to "the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products."
> "Network effect" refers specifically to "the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products."
Sorry, I skipped a couple of logical steps.
Gmail/Google accounts are a namespace where the identifiers are persistent long-term, thus the ordinary network effect that email has is undiminished, unlike previous email providers where you had to change the account every so often largely to cope with spam. [0][1]
Also, Gmail participates in the associated network effect of every Google service that has one, and there are quite a few, though Google has a bad habit of killing them off.
[0] The idea being that you're trying to reduce the email network's utility for spammers to reach you more than you're reducing it for yourself to be reached by non-spammers, which is like chemo killing the cancer faster than it kills you.
[1] Spam per-se wasn't the only reason, of course. In the Before Times I had to change my address due to a few older relatives repeatedly setting in motion endless Reply-All storms / email chain letters, and of course I also changed ISPs occasionally.
The problem is, that only an engaged user is valuable for a facebook advertiser. What will be the point in putting ads on facebook when most users use it like you do today?
What I think is this, for Facebook to be profitable, it is just a bad thing for your health and quality of life, it's plain and simple.
The only way it can sustain it's growth and profitability would be to find more ways to hijack your mind and your feelings and keep you more "engaged" and addicted, and keep repeating that behavior to more and more people on earth. To become more toxic.
Unless they decide to completely remodel their business, and lose money (never going to happen), it's only going to remain a force for bad in the world. Nothing can change that really because we all know that after spending an hour on Facebook, we feel worse. I don't feel like this after using Google search for an hour (although I know there are negatives too that too).
What's happened is, it's unmasked now, everyone can see that it is bad, studies have shown it's negative effects, now we're just working out what we do with it, how do we get away from it. Do we kill it, ignore it, put warnings on the login page that it' addictive, how do we cure ourselves from Facebook?
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.
Microsoft is an interesting case in that it has lost its influence while growing its market cap. Microsoft is several times as big as it was when PG called it dead 14 years ago[0], but founders today aren't afraid to compete against it or refuse its acquisition offers. Microsoft makes plenty of money, but does not have a great deal of control over what anybody else does.
Microsoft had to make fundamental changes to stop its slide into irrelevance, and the old corporate culture is still trying to reassert itself. There's a battle of cultures happening and it might turn out New Microsoft was a last gasp.
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?
> 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.)
> 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.
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.
What a weird way of looking at it. First, how did you turn 2002's $200B into 2021's $5.5T?
But my point was if it wasn't for the merger, the AOL stockholders would have lost far more in the dotcom bubble bursting. Pointing out they lost a lot in the combined events isn't really a counterargument.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I enjoy Twitter a lot and my feed is 0% randos and celebrities.
It's about 50% friends I know personally and 50%... well, not "celebrities" but like... local personalities, independent musicians, leaders of open source projects, etc. The ones I follow are actually very responsive to replies which is very very cool and useful to me.
I'm not sure where else I could easily and enjoyably aggregate that stuff.
I guess I just don't have a particular desire for that to be integrated into the same system I use to talk to my friends. To me FB is just a replacement for AIM with some conveniences like being able to look people up by name. If I want aggregated tech news I just come here, if I want to know what someone specific like Stallman is up to, I'll go to his site or send him an email.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, a lot of these things describe Google too. Most people don't want to work on ads (the core business). Since it's a bigger company, there are more product roles that aren't ads.
From my personal experience, what you're describing - lack of motivation, people applying only for the exciting (oculus) ventures or infra, and people only being there for colleagues and perks - doesn't sound too different from most large tech companies. Of course, the difference could be in scale, but I see many of those symptoms in the big tech I work at, and we don't even sell our souls to the devil like Facebook does.
Can you talk a bit about how facebook measures impact from their employees? How is it defined? How closely do you think it tracks real impact. How often do people figure out how to game it, and how is it usually gamed? Do you think it is possible to modify the definition of impact such that an ethical component can be added to it?
I'm not GP, but I did work at Facebook until just over a year ago (two teams over ~3.5 years). For practical purposes, impact means measurable change of some metric(s). That can be latency, reliability, number of interviews done (really), efficiency, whatever. In theory non-measurable impacts are valued too, but in practice only if your boss and their peers org-wide who participate in "calibrations" are sympathetic. It's an uphill battle TBH, and not unrelated to why I left.
And yes, everybody games it. At the end of every half there's a flurry of "brag posts" about everyone's impactful projects. Better braggers get better results. Sometimes the metrics and measurements and analyses are pretty obviously suspect, but who wants to be the one to say so and never get positive feedback on their own review from that person or their friends ever again? Again, it comes down to consensus on whether the claimed improvements are real or not.
I was in infra (storage) so I don't know how it might be different in more product-oriented parts of the company. However, when the fundamental philosophy behind measuring and rewarding impact is questionable that sets an upper limit on how good things can be over there.
> 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.
>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.
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).
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.
"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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I never said it wasn't dangerous; I said it was "much less dangerous than tobacco smoke." If you have evidence that inhaling e.g. 1 mg of pure nicotine 10x per day for 20 years is more dangerous than smoking 10 tobacco cigarettes per day for 20 years, please cite it.
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.
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.
Sure the tobacco companies are making money off of selling addictive chemicals to people, which is not a particularly ethical business practice. But "selling addictive chemicals with adverse effects roughly in line with caffeine" is still a big improvement over "selling addictive chemicals that kill people".
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).
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!
>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?
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.
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.
> Uber had a woman complain about not getting a jacket in her size
You have a curiously selective memory if that's what you took away from Fowler's post.
Her manager propositions her for sex on her first day. HR gives the manager a pass because he's a high performer and they claim it's his first offense.
Only it wasn't his first offense, multiple other women reported him for inappropriate behavior in the past.
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.
> Uber had a woman complain about not getting a jacket in her size
That is a wilful and bad faith misrepresentation of the Susan Fowler situation to such a degree that I am skeptical of everything else you've just written.
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
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.
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.
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.
Jeez. Do they offer similar above-market rates for remote work? Would they hire a non-CS/SWE managerial type (still with a STEM education), pushing 40, if I grind some leetcode or something? Pretty sure I've got enough Dark Triad traits (and working for other human-destructive organizations) to tolerate their dystopian shenanigans if it comes with a doubling or trebling of my total comp....
Not sure about that since the whole corona-remote thing makes things a bit weird. But I say definitely try, you literally have nothing to lose and they like the managerial types.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
I say MIT, because of it's tech prestige. I could have said Harvard for lawyers. Would you hire a paralegal coming from a prestiguous school to fill an average position ? Maybe, but for many it's not worth the time trying to catch a fish that won't fit on the boat.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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).
>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?
"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?"
Microsoft flat-lined for over a decade after the antitrust lawsuit. They completely missed mobile and nearly missed cloud. They've had to do a 180 on open source and they've had to offer some tools free of charge for small or independent developers.
Lately they've actually done really well, especially as Google, Amazon, and Facebook have stumbled with privacy and reputation. There was a while though were M$ was the definition of EvilCorp
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
>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.
Maybe I'm behind on the times but I don't think liberals are kept up at night by the idea of someone putting on facebook that the clintons are a race of green skinned aliens.
In actual fact I think, as per usual, the situation is more complicated than that. Some of the censoring may be for fabrications, but the people who decide what is and isn't a fabrication are biased, and therefore leads to opinions at very least being caught up in the mix
But in practice it's taking out things that appear to be true or at least a viable theory. For instance, the reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop, and the lab leak theory.
So be concerned about people calling Clinton a Gila Monster if that's your most pressing concern. But by censoring it, you will also miss out on contrarian reporting that's actually true.
Everything in society is between "progressive" and "conservative" values. To say that "conservative opinions" are simply "misinformation", is very misinformed in itself.
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.
> There is no one trying to just censor conservative opinions
Hm? There are lots and lots of people and companies trying to censor conservative opinions.
I don't know if you've managed to read/consume the whole news spectrum over the last years, but I recommend that you pay regular attention to both progressive/liberal AND conservative outlets. Then you would know better than to say something like this.
I’m talking about Facebook. I’m talking about the conservatives that complain that FB is censoring their posts. Posts that are largely, if not completely, mis/disinformation about a myriad of topics.
Of course there exists people who want the censor conservative voices, full stop. I’m aware those people exist, but that’s clearly not who I’m talking about in this context and I think you know that.
Don't expect others to piece together your puzzles, maybe? If you're talking about something specific, actually say that. We are not telepathic, so it would make life much easier for all of us. Thaaaank you.
> Read the whole comment I replied to. There is no one trying to just censor conservative opinions, they are trying to censor conservative misinformation.
Exactly. There's there a popular bit of spin that tries defend mis/disinformation by confusing it with political opinion.
One of the signs of American decline and weakness is how several bits of blatant mis/disinformation have lodged themselves in the conservative discourse, and the conservatives who have problem with that are too weak to do anything about it.
I'm not saying that couldn't also be true of liberals, but that doesn't and shouldn't mean conservatives are off the hook for their own problems.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, but developers who can get into FB can easily get into Google, Netflix, etc. Compare apples to apples.
As a FAANG engineer from the enterprise world, plenty of enterprise developers would excel here. But they're not willing or able to sufficiently practice the leetcode grind.
> to voluntarily kick out these entitled SJWs
Another way to think of these people are the most talented, highly educated pool and casting them as somehow less capable or more entitled is just pure political spin. (There's people from this pool that are right leaning, but just a lower proportion of them.)
Please define what "woke" and "SJW" means. Whenever I see it being used on HN especially in contexts like this, it's a strawman for "anybody with a political opinion different from mine"
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Netflix have needed external financing to stay in business up till this year. This is very unlike the rest of FAANG (Amazon is similar, but do throw off a lot of free cash).
"Company allowing the spread of nasty election lies" quite literally describes what any media company is doing when they give air time to pretty much any running candidate.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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?
That was my reaction too, scoffing as I imagined the headline "Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is nearing a reputational 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Looks like the parent comment is some sort of "reply" to the title.
Curiousity might lead some to actually look at the article. It is very short.
For those who won't, the tag line is "The problem starts at the top". Perhaps that is a reference to Zuckerberg.
The topic is reputation. The article quickly summarises the recent complaints being made against Facebook.
Then it cuts to the chase.
"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."
This is where FB could potentially run afoul with the SEC.
Its also where FB is continuing to provide material for lawyers representing large instutional investors who want to sue Facebook.
The parent comment, typical of others routinely shared on HN, seems to suggest the only thing that matters is what "most people" think. IOW, whatever is discussed on HN should be ignored because people who do not read HN have no opinion on it. (If they do not read HN, then how would they.)
Here, the Economist suggests otherwise. What matters to the Economist is not what "most people" think. Instead it focuses on what the people who work at Facebook think.
"Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return. Even when it set out plausible responses to Ms Haugen, people no longer wanted to hear. The firm risks joining the ranks of corporate untouchables like big tobacco. If that idea takes hold, Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff."
> the company should look hard at its public face. Mark Zuckerberg [...] increasingly looks like a liability
In sum, TFA suggests that the business may need a better spokesperson. The business model isn't going to vanish, but it is very dependent on perception.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> All the redisign and rebranding can't cure a good idea that has festered into a bad idea.
I think you are speaking from a soft eng perspective. Most people don't actually care about the product features / reputation. It's a social media and that means that the only thing that matter is that other people are on it.
No service currently has the critical mass of user to outshine the FB group, and i think this will be the case for a long time.
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.
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.
While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, the primary alternative social media platform would be TikTok, which is far more questionable in its handling of data than FB Group.
> But: most people I know don’t have the slightest clue that Insta and WhatsApp belong to the FB group.
They would have found out this week when they all went down. Most people know who owns what. They just don't care that much. We know Nestle is terrible but still buy their products because they taste good.
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.
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.
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.
I work in a country where engineers are paid like factory workers.. if FB offered me a job i would be happy to take it even they sold unapproved drugs.
Morally questioning a company with that kind of salary and benefits requires a position of incredible privilege.
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.
Sure all these companies have their share of evil doings, but FB is probably the one that tends to affect people on a much more personal level (resulting in bullying, depression, anxiety, etc)
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.
Exactly. Plenty of engineers work on making military equipment better at killing people too. Some of them are software engineers. Facebook might seem like a moral blackhole to some but they are barely grey or neutral on the world stage of evil empires. An blind and bumbling giant perhaps, but not a purposefully evil one.
Algorithms is where the attention needs to go. The regulation probably needs to target the techniques Facebook and others are using rather than the organisations. It's the same crap as lootboxes in games training people to gamble. Newsfeeds and engagement optimization leads to attention grabbing and rage baiting posts. Just give us back the simple date based feed like Instagram has. Cut the algorithm weighted ordering. That's not everything solved but a lot of the overt manipulation of people is based on that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
I'm from Michigan and lived in the Bay Area for a few years building an app and was just taking about the cultural differences today.
I think there's a tendency in SV startup culture to play up things whereas in Michigan there's almost a tendency to downplay things. So people there seemed to exaggerate how great something was that they did and I would tend to say something wasn't as great as it seemed to be. The stereotypically "I'm crushing it" "it was epic" etc.
I think there are challenges with both. With the overselling of how great something is, I think it can slip into just straight up lying when bad things happen. On the other side, underselling may also fall into lying but often about the good things that are happening.
So I read Zuckerberg's letter and much of his communication as so blatantly overselling that it bleeds into lies, which is illegal to do to some organizations. While many people oversell, I think as someone else mentioned, companies and CEOs are typically quite careful not to go too hard on overselling when in the court of law, and some either don't know how to turn it off or don't care or don't believe they should, or, as I've seen with some friends, don't seem to believe they are even doing it.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> I think we are using language differently. My sense is that Apple is using a legal fiction
That's still lying. its a legal way of avoiding paying tax. We are talking about morals here. Corporations are here to look after themselves. There are no real entities that can bring them to heel, barring public image. Apple are a ruthless company with an excellent and well coordinated legal team. I know because I've been locked out of my own server room because of them.
in the op way up the chain, two of the examples given aren't lying, in the definition that you've written.
> “I am satisfied that Google’s conduct assessed as a whole was misleading or deceptive of, or likely to mislead or deceive, ordinary members within the class identified by the ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission], acting reasonably,” Justice Thomas Thawley said in his judgment.
I'm talking about actively reporting abusers, and abusive content. Apple in 2019 reported 256 cases. 4chan reported 4x that number. 4chan of all places is better at reporting child abuse than apple.
I am not here to defend Facebook. I am here to make sure that all corporations have the same level of scrutiny. This silly "eww facebook stinks, ooooh Apple you're great, even though you've released airtags which are perfect stalking tools" has to stop. I get people respect Apple. but they are on the same spectrum as facebook, an abusive corporation.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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".
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> The main point is "It was simply obvious that early harping about it from Tucker Carlson was a useless distraction in the early time of the pandemic, "
"Simply obvious" - who is to draw the line?
Where do you find the impartial parties to do this job?
Do you trust facebook or other actors to have the power to decide that something is "simply obvious"?
IMHI, the society has worked out the rules: If there is a legitimate concern for imminante violavce safety etc, go to court. If that's not enough to persecute then perhaps free speech outweighs the concerns, as in practice, "simply obvious" is too vague of a definition.
> There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020
There was also no evidence of Russia collusion either, but that didn't stop a very long investigation from the FBI that was being advertised on all news channels.
You are factually incorrect re: Russia for reasons cited in the linked post above.
Re: Hunter, that is new info worth looking. Good thing it's not censored like the OP claims to say.
Some thoughts:
The democratic legislative agenda, and more broadly, the issues facing this country such as a pandemic, job uncertainty, healthcare and infrastructure should be a lot more important than the family drama of the Bidens. Republicans don't have any solutions to income inequality, healthcare access, homelessness or climate. Instead of coming up with a competing idea to the Democratic agenda, the Republicans only stand against ideas, rather than for any.
And, to appease your sensibilities: I would totally support a bill that banned family members of federally elected or appointed officials from serving on the boards of foreign companies.
It appeared now in some press, but NYP twitter account was suspended for even mentioning Hunter's laptop. It was definitely censorship on Twitter and Facebook even against one of the largest media entities in the country.
This is a surprinsingly balanced opinion on this matter:
There is no new info, it was all released before the elections. It's true, the moment was chosen for max damage against Biden, but it was/is a real thing.
It's not about "family drama" at all. That would be stuff like how Hunter had an affair with his dead brother's wife. This is about Hunter using his father's name to make money. It's not unreasonable to believe that using just the name is not that valueble for other parties, it's the influence they buy. And there are some direct hints to that in the emails, while also showing how Biden senior wants to protect his name.
And this goes on today. Hunter is selling art to anonymous buyers for 500k a painting. If this doesn't scream corruption, I don't know what.
I for one don't want such a ban on all businesses. If you do that, then why not ban internal businesses too? How about banning businesses before and after office? It makes little sense IMO. I am just absolutely appalled that the average american does not care even when they see this blatant corruption exposed. The same with Trump hiring his son in law at the WH...why is that acceptable?
I would rather ban trading stocks. That is a time sensitive act, you can easily ban it for the duration of the term. You could put all the owned stocks in a generic fund, say VTI or whatever, and not be able to touch it immediately for day trading.
It's true that in general Republicans want to be against things. After all, they are conservatives, they don't want to change stuff, they want to preserve the current order, that is their philosophy. I don't find it that surprising, and I don't get why people don't get this.
I am more progressive than conservatives, what you would call a socially progressive but lower taxes guy.
Your assessment is a bit off: while Trump was against corona measures, which is mind blowing, cause it was his own government doing them, he was very much for creating jobs. The tax cuts and import tarriffs were both meant to create jobs. The idea was to make it easier to invest in the US, and harder to import stuff, I think that's a pretty clear thing to do if you want more domestic jobs. These are long term measures, but it worked while there was no corona, unemployment was low across the board.
Healthcare is idiotic from both parties, Republicans don't want to spend money for other people (even though it would be cheaper overall to do so) while Democrats want to spend money on as many people as possible, without reducing costs, which make it impossible to cover everyone. Bernie's might be the only option that makes sense, but I haven't looked too much into it, probably because I despise socialists too much.
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.
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?
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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. 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.
> 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."
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think we should tell HN or Facebook they must host content they know to be false and contributory to the decline of the nation.
You have to draw the line somewhere on when speech is defended, and when owners of sites or infrastructure should be legally and morally required to host content they don't support.
My line is at the ISP/DNS level. Let people build their own sites to publish whatever they want, and regulate ISPs and registrars as quasi-public utilities with certain societal obligations.
I don't think that obligation should extend to individual websites.
While you guys are talking about censorship, I just realize how many comments in the thread have been in effect partially "censored" on HN with lighter and lighter font color...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
I understand and am quite sympathetic to his argument, but Greenwald and many other posters here are ignoring the known fact that foreign actors are using Facebook at scale to sow division and misinformation throughout the US and other countries.
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.
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:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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
This would just indicate to me that he's a fraud and all his political posturing is just cheap words compared to the real action of being a part of such a toxic entity. (And no, there's no fighting for reform from within in a place like FB.)
Your statement uses pretty charged language and I don't think you're considering all of the potential scenarios.
The first is that giant companies like Facebook are so vastly giant and you have no idea what he does for them. If he was on the React team at Facebook, would that be acceptable to you? Just like governments, giant companies have good and bad parts.
The second is that you don't know anyone's situation. This employee could really need the money. Sometimes people get caught in situations where they have to support their parents or siblings or cousins. Voting still matters as well as encouraging others to vote. Who gets to decide what the real action is?
Most people in any case don't view themselves as responsible for what decisions are made at the C-level. It would be more helpful to encourage employees to do what they can and blow the whistle if necessary than to demonize them. Most people invested in the stock market are holding some Facebook, probably as part of some index fund. Maybe we should encourage people to invest in privacy rights focused ETFs.
I appreciate your considered and nuanced reply to my fairly stark comment. My position on Facebook is that it is so awful an entity that it is not moral to work in any position in the company. And I don't buy the excuse of working for an immoral company (if you recognise it as such) because you need the money. But I recognise this is a fairly absolutist position.
"There is no ethical consumption under capitalism." You can choose where to draw the line you want. Those who point fingers at other's moral purity only draw attention to their own.
This kind of reputational damage can force companies to pay more to get to talent. Back when I was in advocacy for big tech, I attended a TPP briefing led by Commerce. I sat next to a lobbyist from big tobacco. I guarantee that guy earned a lot more than me. Yet there's no way I would have switched places with him.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I honestly don't see how Facebook is any worse than Google, Amazon, Twitter, etc. Google can destroy a business by changing its algorithm or censoring a result and collects just as much information as Facebook, often vastly more personal. Amazon owns the entire logistics space. Twitter often makes partisan decisions when it comes to censorship and gives voice to propaganda outlets from the likes of the CCP, Taliban, etc. I think a lot of people want Facebook to fail simply because it seems more expendable. I would like to see news traffic numbers when Facebook went down for 7 hours, I bet there were some painful hits on traffic.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The network effect isn't an obstacle since you can be on multiple social networks. Tons of social networks have been successful since facebook. But all of them suffer from the same problems that facebook has.
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.
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:
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.
There is pretty much no such thing as a "reputational point of no return" for organizations. Entire nations can go from "invasive aggressor" to "trading partner" in a matter of decades or even years.
Microsoft went from "Helloween Documents" in 1998 ... oops, pardon the metal-head, "Halloween Documents" ... to running a major business on GNU/Linux, contributing to the kernel, publishing open source, ... Today you're just some nutty old curmudgeon if you make anti-Microsoft remarks around 20-something devs.
The article also conflates Facebook Inc with the facebook.com social site. If facebook.com is losing young Americans, that doesn't mean Facebook Inc is losing them, if they happen to be switching to another site also owned by Facebook Inc.
(Facebook Inc lying to advertisers about the user base sizes and demographics of facebook.com is an issue, no doubt, but the argument being insinuated in the article is that Facebook Inc is losing users to competitors.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Maybe a pithy way to render this article's point is, if you are a young, competent 20-something fresh on the job market and imminently hireable at Facebook (but nowhere else, let's say for the sake of argument), do you:
* Take a job at Facebook (or one of it's properties)?
* Strike it out alone in a startup you found?
If you're more likely to do the latter, despite the higher risk, then Facebook has a big problem. If the best and brightest no longer want to work there, then their time has passed.
I have > 5 friends (young, mostly liberal) who work at Facebook as engineers and I've yet to see them leave or even make mention of the company's negative reputation. I don't think they would consider leaving while their comp remains so competitive. I think it would take a public disaster so damaging that the stock tanks and doesn't recover for months/years for them to consider leaving.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well if they have to pay more to attract talent then their profits will go down. Wall Street hates that. And if the share price falls, the talent they have will flee for better opportunity.
So they're going to go through some things, no? But I agree that so far they have managed to acquire the services most likely to destroy them.
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.
If facebook was to vanish another similar site will just take its place lets not kid ourselves. Were stuck with this monster even though ive not been on facebook in 8 years or had an account that long i still see it mentioned constantly everywhere
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
I don't want to sound like I'm boasting of having a large vocabulary but those words don't strike me as out of the ordinary for the reading level that The Economist targets (generally university/college educated).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
