That's also what I thought. Instead of using fire extinguishers, FB/Apple/Google are adding more gasoline to the fire.
This is going to radicalize people (especially conspiracy theorists) who now think have actual, indisputable "proof" these companies are there to get them.
This is my main worry. I’m not worried about Parler getting taken down, they have no intrinsic right to have access to these stores hosted by private entities. They can self host, or find someone willing to host them, or implement moderation so they don’t have people calling for the death of senators on their service.
But I am worried this will light a fuse towards further radicalization.
Radicalization because they're too lazy or too dumb or whatever to create their own platform. I'd be mad too if I couldn't harass folks and spread my hate easily.
Twitter now allows me to follow a diverse group of people who promote a different set of norms, value and ideas. It shows me how other people think and I'm exposed to that.
That cross pollination isn't going to happen when every tribe has it's own platforms.
Facebook is probably a bad acquisition channel for many SaaS businesses, especially after this week news on FB managers trashing their own ad targeting [1]. I do a little project where I analyze founder interviews, trying to discover which acquisition channels consistently work for founders [2] and around 90% of founders who mentioned FB as an acquisition channel working for them, also mentioned at least 2-3 more major channels (like AdWords, partnerships, SEO, etc.) [3]
> We opened the floodgates. We shared the project on Twitter and Instagram, posted to HN and wrote a medium post. But, try as we might, no one was signing up.
Later in the post:
> Had we had more funding, we would have taken the time to rewrite our app in $ELITELANG instead. Our startup could have been a unicorn.
Although this is satire, it's something a lot of funded startups do. They think they've solved user acquisition by getting investors money (hey, let's throw a couple thousands at Google/FB Ads, although there are 15+ viable acquisition channels we could try [1]), and spend time on building things in their own bubble.
Also, the launch mention is pretty accurate:
> We launched v2 of our product with a splash.
Wonder if many startups would have better results if flipped the switch and treated product creation as a "launch" (a bunch of big sprints with a deadline) and user acquisition as something they do steadily, over a period of time.
Guys, add a search box where people can enter their site & see "if they quality". If they don't, and enter their site again (and are <1MB), maybe you can add them in a "Recent improvers" list. I think this will motivate even more websites to participate.
I've looked at the themes and it looks like many of them were inspired from MRA (Male Right Activists) community. I think it's an important day to raise awareness of some important issues that men face in today's society, including the high suicide rate (as compared to women), the overall lower life expectancy and so on.
Just curious: What's the difference between Substack and RSS? With RSS, you 'subscribe' -> get blog posts to your news reader. With Substack, you 'subscribe' => get blog posts to your inbox. Of course, they allow you to monetize your posts by adding Stripe etc, but the essence seems to be the same.
Is there a particular logical reason why Facebook required these people to get back to office? Is it related to productivity? Would be curious to hear Facebook's take on this.
Where else can an employee browse filth all day in a secured environment? Free from the eyes of children who may be doing pandemic schooling from home? And indemnified against criminal liability for opening up certain troubling related content by an authoritative, audit ready, third party recorded video feed?
There are just legal requirements around certain types of porn for example. Or videos of illegal activities up to and sometimes even including murder.
Law enforcement authorities only tolerate a certain number of mistakes in this regard. With certain content, they may not tolerate any mistakes. I'm not saying FB is right. In fact, FB probably didn't even make the decision. They outsource. What I am saying is that FB, with the content they want their contractors to moderate, are putting those third parties in highly precarious legal positions. I don't blame those companies for acting to protect themselves if FB is not willing to take on all legal responsibility for things that may go wrong.
>There are just legal requirements around certain types of porn for example. Or videos of illegal activities up to and sometimes even including murder.
If I understand your point, it is law enforcement doesn't allow moderation of these items outside of a certain environment? If so, can you suggest further reading of the laws for this area? I have never heard of them.
My point is not that law enforcement won't allow moderation outside certain environments. It's that law enforcement specifically forbids possession of, or even access to, these materials by anyone. FB likely has some kind of working agreement with law enforcement which allows them to do the business of moderating and reporting. Does that agreement extend to allowing FB contractors to access child porn from home? I'm in no position to say since I'm not privy to the details of the arrangement.
I'm saying as a contractor, as the low man on the totem pole, there is no way I would want any of that content touching my home network without an iron-clad assurance from every level of law enforcement that I would not be prosecuted. An assurance from your local prosecutor probably means nothing to the guys at the US Attorney's office. (And sometimes even vice-versa.) Accessing those materials in a secure environment that is audited and recorded, in direct partnership with every level of law enforcement, avoids issues of that content touching your router altogether.
I can't imagine that any person who understands criminal liability would actually want to do this kind of work from their own home networks.
I'm not sure exactly how this works in tech. I know lawyers who have worked on child abuse cases and they had tight restrictions on the evidence. Only the trial lawyers could request access. No paralegals, no sectaries, no copies. Only select Lawyers, the jury and the judge could view the evidence, and it was all controlled by the Justice Department. (I knew a lawyer who refused to look at the evidence, only the descriptions, because he didn't think he could handle defending him otherwise. He did successfully defend him though).
I suspect for Microsoft, they have some preliminary hashing algos that automatically send known media to a particular people with the same Justice Dept exceptions and controls for chain of custody. Other people may see content of course, but it would likely get flagged and shipped to people who were authorized to deal with it. You don't want a lot of people on that list obviously, but when it's just a few people, they get a constant stream of nightmare fuel.
I imagine they don't even want the fingerprints "getting out". Imagine if you had the fingerprints and the algorithm. This can't possibly be a cryptographic hash (too fragile); it's got to be possible to find "collisions" that have no relationship to the original image, and probably don't even look like images of anything at all.
Imagine the chaos someone could cause.
It'd be like back in 2010ish when somebody encoded a bunch of malware into bitcoin transactions: every bitcoin node running any kind of antivirus software was immediately kicked offline. Many AV programs deleted their owners' copy of bitcoind. It was madness. Forced the bitcoin developers to store the blockchain on-disk xored with a different random number unique to each computer.
I think it is simpler than that even. Imagine the scandal if some content moderator working from home copied over and saved child porn he found during moderation, and perhaps even redistributed it. Doesn’t even have to be child porn - could just be e.g. sexting messages between adults.
Just imagine the fallout for Facebook if a contractor slips up and opens up a laptop on the train or at a coffee shop. It doesn’t have to be malicious, just negligent. And as recent scandals at Amazon and Twitter have shown, employees are as vulnerable to bribery and social engineering as any other human. Even if Facebook is legally covered, the PR risk is too great.
If this were a legal requirement, the actual facebook employees would have been brought back.
They haven't been, just the people contracted by CPL/Accenture to work at FB, which leads me to believe that this is not a legal requirement.
It's presumably that FB said you need to ensure security to the companies, and they decided that the easiest way was to bring everyone back to the office.
Reading between the lines, it looks like these people are employees of contracting agencies to which the content moderation has been outsourced.
If I had to guess, I suspect that the motivation to bring people back to the office comes from content security issues. Not all content flagged for moderators is actually objectionable due to errant or malicious flagging. It's impossible to guarantee that private material will stay secure when it leaves the premises.
I'm on the side of the content moderators here (should be allowed to work from home) but it's not difficult to imagine the headlines criticizing Facebook for allowing private content to be viewed, and potentially shared, by content unsupervised content moderators working at home.
In one comment you said that the contrarian dynamic works on HN threads and to internet comments in general.
I just went and opened 10 random Reddit threads on the front page to read the top comments, and found only 2 where this was true, and 8 where this was totally false, most notably [1].
The main reason for negative comments here on HN (IMO) is a self-fulfilling prophecy. People have learned that usually the #1 comment is a negative one, so you have a bunch of people "competing" to be #1 by trying to nitpick whatever is wrong with the original article (even if there is none) in hope to win the popularity contest.
This is why I've seen some friends recently leave HN (their exact words: "couldn't hand the toxicity"). I hope that you, as a Head of Growth, can actively work to break this cycle.
The gist of the article is: The OP created a tiny project, launched it on Product Hunt/Hacker News, and moved to creating another project. I'm glad he acknowledges the problem with this:
"A Product Hunt launch can easily get you a spike in traffic, but afterwards I really don't know what I'm doing".
Here are some tips to help with this:
1) Explore more "steady" acquisition channels. Yes, PH/HN are "spike-y" channels and they're often not enough to have a business generating sustainable income. Read "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg (I'm also doing some research on this topic [1]).
2) Maybe flip the script and do the opposite? Choose 1 or 2 promising projects, and do "six months of exploring user acquisition". Test SEO, FB/Google Ads, partnerships, affiliates, appstores and so on.
+1 for Traction. I reached out to Gabriel on Twitter about creating an app companion to the book to guide you thru the process. He was supportive and it's on my side project list for December or early next year.
> I’d bet there’s few “micro-bets” that are generating any meaningful amount of money.
That's the whole point of micro-bets. You acknowledge the fact that a small % of them will generate any meaningful $, so you deliberately minimize your losses by making the bets small.
This is going to radicalize people (especially conspiracy theorists) who now think have actual, indisputable "proof" these companies are there to get them.